Ask HN: Passive Income Suggestions 2016

That is really interesting. I think definitely find myself doing this as well. It's easy to justify both personally and professionally. Thanks for bringing that up.

Last year, I wrote a guide to help junior devs get their first jobs, targeted mostly at developer bootcamp grads: https://kokev.in/hired-fast

It sold decently in 2015, and later that year I shifted sales focus to bootcamps and schools as opposed to individual students. The response has been great and earlier this year I've set up a few recurring deals for batch purchases. It's not life-changing money by any means, but it's great to see my content helping people at "scale" ;).

What sort of traffic numbers do you get, and how do they discover you? This is the sort of thing that I believe can be easily duplicated. Not copied, but translated to different ideas.

Generating traffic can be difficult, so the subject, plus actually useful content, is important.

Historically people have made money on Lending Club, and lost it in Vegas. I'll stick with Lending Club.

I've been running https://briefmetrics.com/ for almost 3 years now (email reports of your Google Analytics).

It has been going back and forth between 100% running itself and investing a couple months of effort into it. I discovered I really don't enjoy marketing/promotion, so it has languished for sure. It's up to a bit over $1,000/mo right now which I'm fairly happy about but I feel it could easily be x2-x5 of that with some sales effort commitment.

I'll write down some lessons I learned in hopes that I'll take my own advice in the future:

1) Avoid big-effort partnerships.

Briefmetrics was a partner in an app store launch for one of the biggest domain registrars. This required integrating with their single-signon and payment system and coordinating with their team in India and altogether what looked like a week of work turned into ~3 months of hell. A year later, all this effort yielded approximately 0 customers. The target audience fit was not very good (new domains is the worst time to get analytics reports) and the sunk cost of effort kept me going far longer than it should have.

I finally pulled the plug last month and I sleep much better. (Even pulling the plug took weeks longer than it should have, ugh. Never again.)

2) Commit effort to marketing/sales.

This is definitely advice I need to take for myself. I launched a bunch of new features to upsell existing customers (mobile reports, ecommerce, etc) but none of this is advertised anywhere for new customers. In fact, I've had a professionally-done redesign mockup sitting in my Dropbox for over a year now that I'm yet to implement. I have a half-dozen related blog post ideas I need to write about, audiences to target.

I'm seeing a lot of similar issues with other people here, "I built this but they didn't come." I feel you.

3) Seriously, do marketing/sales.

I built Briefmetrics because it's something I needed and my friends needed. I instantly had a set of initial paying customers, but organic growth from a small seed of users is slooooooow.

Meanwhile I see great salespeople grow to tons of customers on what amounts to a product cobbled together in a few hours. This totally makes sense to me, and we all need to respect it more.

I'm allocating a couple of weeks on the calendar to just focus on this. If you built something you're proud of, you owe it to the world to do a better job promoting it.