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Maybe you can build things that you yourself want to use but struggle to find. At the very least they'll help you, but there's a good chance you'll build an audience and maybe a base of customers if you build in public.
For SaaS, having a product that you can put on third-party marketplace, e.g. Shopify apps, GitHub apps, etc. might be your best shot at reducing ongoing work since the marketplace itself will do some of the marketing for you. You still have to do lots of work though.
Mobile or web based game will likely take a lot of work and return very little.
Aggregating useful content and selling access to it is one relatively quick way to go. E.g. there are bunch of people who have just aggregated contact info of press or VCs and then sold access to it. This will take a fair bit of work to aggregate all the info but it's still relatively quick (certainly compared to SaaS) and probably won't require much ongoing customer support given how simple the end product would be.
Ultimately if you are determined to find something which is "passive" you are more likely then not going to fail. By all means think about how you can compress the time and effort required and reduce the amount of ongoing labour by you, but starting from "I want passive income" isn't going to work.
You won't get anyone to tell you exactly how to make money. Anyone suggesting it probably hasn't actually done it and the ones that have don't want you competing in their niche.
SP 500 ETF
VTSAX covers the entire market and has really low costs.
An ebook will likely be much closer to passive income than a SaaS product. Neither are passive though - if you want to have a consistent stream of income you will have to continue doing work. And you will certainly have to do a fair amount of work to get it off the ground (this includes marketing and/or sales, not just making). For SaaS, having a product that you can put on third-party marketplace, e.g. Shopify apps,…
But, my experience: I made a really niche eBook, about Web scraping with Java: https://www.javawebscrapinghandbook.com
Writing the book was the easy part, I've been doing scraping for years. The most challenging part was ... marketing of course!
I wrote 6/7 blog posts about this subject. In each blog post, there is a paragraph that talks about the book. I shared those blog post to my mailing list and on Reddit/HN (I didn't get any upvotes on HN...).
Now I have ~10 000 visits a month on the blog, 80% comes from search engines. Out of these 10k visits, about 200 visit the book sales page, and I sell 10-15 copies a month for ~ $400-$500.
It is not that passive because I have to fight to stay on the first 3 links for terms like "java web scraping" so this mean regularly upgrading my content etc. If I don't do this, my rank will slowly decrease on SERP and the sales too.
I was 24 when I wrote the book, I'm not even a native English speaker, you can do it :)
If you go this way, test your idea by blogging around a subject, and you will quickly see if people are interested by this subject or not.
Good luck!
> web based game I'll share my own experience here, which is: compared to SaaS products, games are easily 100x more work for 100x less guarantees of income. Maybe it has the potential of going viral and earning you 100x more income, but still does not make up for the risk. Of course this is just my personal experience on the topic. If income were my main motivator, I'd focus on SaaS instead of games. Good luck!
Sure, all else being equal this may be true. But as with most things, it depends on quality & implementation of the idea. If the OP has a solid game idea that they're even a little passionate about, that may count for a lot more than grasping for a niche SaaS product that might have an audience. Although if the SaaS projecy were itself to go viral, there's probably a much larger upside than viral indie game.
And what makes you think that someone just learning Python and asking for ideas for passive gigs will hit either of those?
Invest in startups as a technical advisor. This has 2 effects: you will grow your network, and you will help the ecosystem. Those two, only my opinion, compound better than whatever financial instruments you can think of.
How on earth can a person who is learning Python became the technical advisor for a startup? Genuinely interested.