Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is your best passive income in 2017?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 43 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income in 2017?

#21

Post by dangrossman »

rfitz wrote: post #18
dangrossman wrote: post #14

- Improvely ( https://www.improvely.com ) and W3Counter ( https://www.w3counter.com ) are my SaaS apps and make about $600K ARR. I check the support e-mail twice a day on weekdays and once a day on weekends. There's typically less than 20 minutes a day of work. One day a week I block a few hours to hack on new features or tweak ads or something productive. - I have a couple open source projects, and hosted "webmaster…

Extremely impressive list, do you mind me asking how you initially get the projects off the ground in terms of users / traffic? Also as a side note, thank you for daterangepicker! I've integrated it into a couple little things I've built like chrome extensions and absolutely love it.

* W3Counter: I started "Website Goodies" as a content and tools site for webmasters in the 1990s. It had articles about learning HTML, learning JavaScript, and basically whatever else I myself was learning at the time back then. It also had a tools page, with things like guestbooks and surveys and a website hit counter I hosted. They were initially Perl CGI scripts, then later rewritten in PHP when I learned that. The traffic all came from search engines and organic links. The counter was pretty popular, and I wanted better web stats for my own sites without paying for them -- this was before Google bought Urchin and made Google Analytics out of it, when good web stats still cost money. So I made W3Counter, and linked to it heavily from Website Goodies, which got it off the ground. 100% word of mouth since then, I've never advertised it.

* Improvely got its first customers from Google ads. Because Improvely has a high CLV (customer lifetime value), I could spend a lot on advertising to acquire a customer and still make money from it. So that's what I did. Once I had a couple dozen customers, who were all delighted with the product and the support, word of mouth started taking over. These days 90% of new signups are referrals from an existing/past customer, or referrals from some website that's written an article or review mentioning Improvely. I still run some Google ads but with a limited budget.

* The open source projects get their traffic from Stack Overflow, forums, people searching NPM and other repositories, etc. The Date Range Picker widget got its initial traffic from a "Show HN" post I did here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4408070

I've started other SaaS apps that never worked out. The thing that made them different from Improvely and W3Counter is that nobody was super excited about them. Nobody loved those products; they were maybe useful but not the best at anything and not particularly unique. So the word of mouth referrals never came, churn was high, and eventually I shut them down and tried something else.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income in 2017?

#23

Post by ejanus »

dangrossman wrote: post #14

- Improvely ( https://www.improvely.com ) and W3Counter ( https://www.w3counter.com ) are my SaaS apps and make about $600K ARR. I check the support e-mail twice a day on weekdays and once a day on weekends. There's typically less than 20 minutes a day of work. One day a week I block a few hours to hack on new features or tweak ads or something productive. - I have a couple open source projects, and hosted "webmaster…

I am unemployed, I won't mind doing your low tech shores . I have an online shop but I made less than 90USD.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income in 2017?

#24

Post by kylebenzle »

Dash (https://www.dash.org/). Currently return is just over 10% ROI per Master Node (just a full node Bitcoin client running on a server for a few $$ a year). Aside from the 100%+ increase in the currency since I bought it, running five Master Nodes nets about $10,000 a year of passive income.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income in 2017?

#25

Post by replies_to_alls »

kylebenzle wrote: post #24

Dash ( https://www.dash.org/ ). Currently return is just over 10% ROI per Master Node (just a full node Bitcoin client running on a server for a few $$ a year). Aside from the 100%+ increase in the currency since I bought it, running five Master Nodes nets about $10,000 a year of passive income.

That is really more of a speculative bet than passive income.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income in 2017?

#26

Post by kylebenzle »

t0mbstone wrote: post #2

Unfortunately, all of the best moneymakers probably won't get shared, because the people don't want competitors. I don't have any real passive income, myself, but one of my buddies has a pretty sweet setup. He wrote a bunch of trading bots that would automatically perform arbitrage between all of the bitcoin exchanges. He wrote a variety of bots with different strategies, and then he would lease them out to people an…

Sorry, I'm going to have a hard time believing this without more detail. How can you arbitrage across countries? There are many people in the Bitcoin space that bring this up all the time because they see the big price differences between US, China, India... but the only way to profit off this is to deposit cash in one county, withdraw it in another currency, then convert back your your national one.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income in 2017?

#27

Post by shanecleveland »

I have an ad-supported informational site that provides some healthcare data, which is updated annually. I have found that some refresh occurs with Google search rankings for data like this. We are still only talking about hundreds of dollars each month with my offering, but I believe this annual cycle has helped my site compete with some of the longer-standing competition. I've noticed a similar trend with a seasonal sports site I have. There seems to be a window of opportunity each year if you are able to craft your SEO to take advantage of search spikes specific to the season/year.

And these are truly passive in the sense that the hard work of building the site is done, and I only have to do a quick updated once each year and then sit back and rake in ... hundreds!

Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income in 2017?

#28

Post by MrLeap »

et-al wrote: post #20
jwong_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CLM?

Stock: https://www.google.com/finance?q=clm http://finance.yahoo.com/news/cornerstone-funds-announce-con... Supposedly has an 18% yield, which is pretty darn good. What's the catch?

I have no idea. From what I've made on the dividend + buying it and selling it, it could go to zero and I'd still have made money on it. Admittedly I bought it without much due diligence. Just wanted something to park my savings in for a while and some stock screener shenanigans led me to it. Robinhood has really made it easy for me to make silly decisions. Oh well, lucked out on this one.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income in 2017?

#29

Post by MrLeap »

notadoc wrote: post #17
MrLeap wrote: post #5

CLM. The dividend has paid my water, fiber and half my electricity every month while I've been out of work. Pretty nice!

Did you pick exclusively for the hefty dividend? Not sure how sustainable that will be, expensive to own too.

I wrote a stock screener when I graduated from college years ago. It's an ensemble of technical analysis, moonbat garbage and horseshit. I ran it looking for a mixture of absurd dividends and lowish beta. CLM's just what I settled on.

Can you elaborate on `expensive to own`? The taxes are a little onerous, but maybe you mean something beyond that.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best passive income in 2017?

#30

Post by iDemonix »

dangrossman wrote: post #14

- Improvely ( https://www.improvely.com ) and W3Counter ( https://www.w3counter.com ) are my SaaS apps and make about $600K ARR. I check the support e-mail twice a day on weekdays and once a day on weekends. There's typically less than 20 minutes a day of work. One day a week I block a few hours to hack on new features or tweak ads or something productive. - I have a couple open source projects, and hosted "webmaster…

I'm very envious of what you've achieved, I actually wanted to start a SaaS doing almost the same as what w3counter does, but I figured because products like yours that the market wasn't worth attempting.
Post reply on HN