Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#311

Post by finspin » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 4:31 PM UTC

limedaring wrote: post #206

I wrote Hello Web App and Hello Web App: Intermediate Concepts ( http://hellowebapp.com , they're learn-to-build-a-web-app books using Django) and self-published both in 2015. Just checked and this year I've made about $13,000 in profit. It's mostly passive — this year I started using a fulfillment company so the majority of my work is sending them orders (and answering questions about the book.) Hoping to continue t…

Congratulations! How did you promote the books? What would you say was your most effective promotion channel?

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#312

Post by gottebp » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 4:34 PM UTC

Breville coffee grinders are impossible to get internal parts for. I designed a 3D printed upgrade for the main wear-part in their BCG800XL SmartGrinder.

The storefront is through ShapeWays[1] and I use ifixit[2] to drive the traffic. It's passively making ~$425/mo with about 10 minutes of work per week on my end. This all happened because my grinder failed and I couldn't get parts.

[1] https://www.shapeways.com/product/NASLAGCCP/breville-bcg800x...

[2] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/BCG800XL+Grinder+Jamming+due+to...

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#313

Post by djaychela » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 4:39 PM UTC

I've written a book on using Cubase with a general grounding in music, recording and music technology [1]. Income has been very patchy, and never what I'd hoped for at any point. Best month has been around £450, but that's only happened a couple of times (I don't know why, either, unfortunately), usually it's more like £40. Made about £2000 in total, so definitely not something to retire on. Unsure as to whether it's the market for the book, the quality of the book (I hope not and don't think so given the positive feedback I have had from those who have bought it), or a total lack of marketing that's at fault. Not entirely passive as I've had to update it for each revision of the software that has come along, which takes around a week's full time work.

[1]http://www.lulu.com/shop/darren-jones/the-complete-guide-to-...

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#314

Post by at612 » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 4:40 PM UTC

durkie wrote: post #294

i own a decent amount of tesla stock and 2016 was a great year for lending it out. since tesla is such a controversial company, lots of people want to own the stock (expecting it to go up) and lots of people want to short sell it (expecting it go down). if you're a stock holder, certain places (like interactive brokers) will let you lend your stock holdings to people that want to sell it short. you earn a premium on…

> if you're a stock holder, certain places (like interactive brokers)

Any specific examples?

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#315

Post by eevilspock » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 4:41 PM UTC

This post is what's wrong with Capitalism. Rent seeking. The Matthew Effect. Making money by making money.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#316

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 4:41 PM UTC

stevenmays wrote: post #310

jrheard wrote: post #13

Young hackers who have a surplus of income and have funds to spare that aren't being channeled toward debt / family / donations, heed me: save as much of your salary as you can, and put it in boring investments (index funds / etc), probably through vanguard.com (no affiliation, I just use them and have heard nothing but good things from people I trust). You can pretty easily set up your job's direct-deposit system so…

I put 25k into my investments this year, and I made 40k in unrealized gains, following the above strategy. It works folks. My blog post about financial independence: http://mays.co/why-financial-independence/

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#317

Post by discreditable » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 4:42 PM UTC

I wrote a guide on how to get around my local ISP's requirement to use their crappy modem/router combo and recommended a verified-working router with an Amazon affiliate link. Since Jan 1. I've pulled in $160. Very nice since I host at nearlyfreespeech.net and the site has cost less than $1 in hosting this year, and $10 for the domain.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#318

Post by beefhash » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 4:43 PM UTC

yeahdef wrote: post #264

http://dollarfuckyou.com/ I've made about 300$ :/

> G-rated Version: $DU

The link there is dead.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#319

Post by durkie » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 4:44 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #303

durkie wrote: post #294

i own a decent amount of tesla stock and 2016 was a great year for lending it out. since tesla is such a controversial company, lots of people want to own the stock (expecting it to go up) and lots of people want to short sell it (expecting it go down). if you're a stock holder, certain places (like interactive brokers) will let you lend your stock holdings to people that want to sell it short. you earn a premium on…

its basically risk-free since the brokerage bears the counter-party risk. Well, unless the brokerage itself goes under, no?

Yes, but I would think that's always a risk.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#320

Post by jonaf » Sun, Dec 11, 2016, 4:45 PM UTC

scolvin wrote: post #61

Helpmanual.io is my first attempt at passive income. Launched 6 weeks ago and traffic is building nicely. There's still a fair bit to do but the delight of sites like this is you can make improvements when you want. Shame that ad income is less than it used to be but we'll see how it gets on. https://helpmanual.io

One idea where you can distinguish you're in addition to being just better: add commentary/disqus and have some sort of system that aggregated and ranks comments (like stack overflow answers) on each man page. I find that man pages always have all the info I need, except it's often buried or there are surprises, but others' knowledge/experience can really save you from common pitfalls not in the man pages. Just having s crowd-sourced highlighter function of sorts would give you a unique offering among the competing options. You could also augment the see also section. And for marketing, you could have a blog and write about the top BSD tools based on activity, searches, etc, or up-and-comers. You could feature community commentary (like how to best use a tool) and build in some kind of point/reward system.

I have more ideas but I'll stop there. Good luck with your project!