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.
Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
61–70 of 713 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#62[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#63I wrote an ebook that helps Junior Developers get jobs - it's primarily targeted at bootcamp grads: https://kokev.in/hired-fast
In the past 8-10 months, it made about $5k+ through sales as well as partnerships with a couple online bootcamps. Not too shabby as I spent almost no time marketing it. Plus it was fun to write since I'm passionate about the topic and I've received some awesome feedback (of the "you actually changed my life"-sort). That was more than worth the hundreds of hours I spent writing it, the small bit of money aside.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you be willing to sell the code powering the website itself?
It's built using my other product Perch Runway, using our Shop add-on :) took me about half a day to put together as Shop deals with membership stuff by default. https://grabaperch.com https://shop.perchcms.com
Awesome, thank you, will look into it!
I am currently putting together an online course and I am still undecided on the easiest method of delivery.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#652 (count 'em) dollars a month. For letting two people who don't want to run an instance of my OSS program themselves tap into my personal instance.
One. Two. I counted them.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#66Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#67I have a website with ads on it. Or actually a few, but one that mostly pays for my life right now.
I'd be really interested in learning from you about what you did with this site and the less successful ones.
What i did? Well when i have a idea that i think somebody else could like too i throw it into a website, then throw it out there and see what people think. Sometimes i get valuable feedback and can improve, sometimes it is good as it is.
The only "secret" other than user generated content (what makes it actually passive) for me is to never stop trying. I have like 50 in use domains right now, many which i did not extend because they did not pay for themself after a year.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#68Optimage – a visually lossless image optimization tool http://getoptimage.com Released this week. Came unnoticed on HN but somehow got featured on PH. 1200+ downloads of free version and a few sales. Not sure if that'll change. In that case, the best of 2016 will be one of the plugins for Sketch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319286 .
How is it different from ImageOptim? https://github.com/ImageOptim/ImageOptim Also are you going to support and fix the frequent bugs that png optimizers run into with esoteric color space/alpha combinations beyond the best effort...?
Sorry for copypasting, I get this question a lot.
Optimage can do automatic lossy (visually lossless) optimizations on JPEGs and PNGs. It means you don't have to manually tune JPEG quality for each image and can get some PNGs quantized to 256 colors if visual differences are negligible.
It uses a modified quality metric based on Contrast Sensitivity Function (CSF) and contrast masking of DCT coefficients for JPEGs, and a custom one for color-quantized PNGs (major difference is sensitivity to noticeable gradients).
Optimage has a lot of tweaks to compression algorithms to squeeze some more bytes (Pareto principle here). But much more bytes are saved by exhaustively trying all possible image data representations, e.g. fast brute forcing of PNG delta filters, dirty alpha, palette sorting.
There's a good PNG test corpus at http://css-ig.net/images/png-test-corpus/png-test-corpus-201.... Optimage – 276 058 bytes, ImageOptim – 297 561 bytes. But this is just a lossless test.
> Also are you going to support and fix the frequent bugs that png optimizers run into with esoteric color space/alpha combinations beyond the best effort...?
At some stage, yes. Right now I'm focused on things like losslessly rotating JPEGs according to Orientation meta in Exif, adding CMYK to RGB convertion when Convert to sRGB is ON, supporting container formats like ICO and ICNS, more tweaks to compressors for performance and smaller output, GUI improvements, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#69Helpmanual.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
That's nifty and cute. How do you go about promoting and building traffic for this kind of site?
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#70I co-wrote a book on user acquisition and co-created an accompanying video course to climb out of debt left over from a failed startup. Made $104,000 in revenue since June (turns out the user acquisition stuff actually works), about 87k of which is profit, so we'll say ~$11,000/month part-time. It still makes me a solid $2,000/month now with zero work, and hopefully more once the book is officially published. (It's d…
Vincent Dignan, one of the worst twitter spammer I've ever blocked (more than once since he likes/liked to ignore complaints, open a new account and do it again...to the same people!).
If spamming all of twitter in alphabetical order is an example of the growth hacks....
I see the account he used to do most of the spamming has been suspended by Twitter now https://twitter.com/vdignan