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Ask HN: Are you working on any side projects that make "small/passive" income?

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Re: Ask HN: Are you working on any side projects that make "small/passive" income?

#31

Post by dangero »

zzleeper wrote: post #29
dangero wrote: post #27

Like someone mentioned, I don't want to increase my competition, so I'm not going to get into the details, but I'll say that I started doing consulting after work in 2007 to bootstrap my own project. I had absolutely no business background. In 2008 I spent $7000 that I had made off consulting and 8 months of my free time to build my first project. It was a miserable failure. I've made about $80 off of it, so I'm stil…

Any advice on what changed through time? More focused attempts, better grasp of the demand, or just more productive programming?

I've been programming for a long time, so I don't think it had anything to do with productive programming. In fact, each attempt was less work than the previous.

The thing that I didn't understand is that being successful in business has very little to do with having an original idea. You're much better off just looking at how other people are making money and becoming their competitor or improving upon what they are doing. 99% of successful businesses work this way. This may seem obvious to a lot of people, but I kept spinning my wheels trying to invent something instead of doing market research and building something that I know people need or want.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on any side projects that make "small/passive" income?

#32

Post by wladimir »

My side project involves recognition of captchas; it is a pretty tough one-time time investment to create a recognizer, involving machine learning, image manipulation and statistics, but as payment is on a per-captcha basis, the income after that is passive income. I started with this a few years ago, and after two weeks of obsessive-compulsive hacking, my first dollars started flowing in. All in all it now gets me something like $2000 per month.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on any side projects that make "small/passive" income?

#33

Post by atgm »

getsat wrote: post #22
zzeroparticle wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I've actually been doing manual updates to my personal twitter account after each post with a blurb about the latest article. Each tweet is customized rather than a generic auto-update message. I'm just not sure whether this is the best way of going about it or if I should take your suggestion and completely automate it. Maybe create a separate twitter account and do both?

> Maybe create a separate twitter account and do both? No reason not to. :) I had a few blogs (well, "autoblogs") go from $5-6/day on 400-500 unique visitors to $10-12 after installing and configuring Twitter Tools. A human touch generally results in higher yield than automation with most marketing stuff, though.

> A human touch generally results in higher yield than automation with most marketing stuff, though.

Do you think that's because readers recognize it as being "more human" and are more interested, or because humans are better at making copy than automation, or a combination of the two?

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on any side projects that make "small/passive" income?

#34

Post by tansey »

I have some trading models and financial tools that I license. They're currently generating about $200/month, but I'm expecting that to increase within a year. I'm also working on an iPhone game with two of my roommates right now that I'm hoping will bring in a couple hundred a month, but that's just a dream at the moment.

The tools probably took around 80 hours. The models probably are hard to say because a lot of discovery was done over time; actually implementing them only took a weekend. The iPhone app is probably going to take around 40 hours, but it's as much a learning experience and labor of love as it is an effort to make serious money.

I'm starting to focus on looking for passive income, though. I am entering a PhD program in the Fall, so an extra ~$1000/mo will make a huge difference in standard of living.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on any side projects that make "small/passive" income?

#36

Post by dotBen »

astrofinch wrote: post #14

In case anyone is reading this thread and becoming pessimistic about their chances of achieving passive income, I'd like to note that there is a clear sampling bias: folks that have found profitable niches are less likely to share their projects for fear of attracting competition. I suspect that choosing a good niche is pretty important when it comes to passive-income type projects. It looks like the most profitable…

Similarly, a lot of folks I know dabble in 'adult' orientated side-businesses.

Most people won't be up-front about working in that space publicly.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on any side projects that make "small/passive" income?

#37

Post by edawerd »

As my Android apps started becoming more popular, I started seeing piracy of my apps skyrocket. At the time, Google didn't have their application licensing system in place, so I built my own. With the licensing system in place for my apps, I was also free to distribute and sell my application binary on my own, without fear of it being pirated.

After seeing piracy drop dramatically and talking with other Android developers with the same problems, I decided to build a site around it and sell my system to other developers.

It took me about 2 weeks to build www.androidlicenser.com and I saw my first $40/month subscription within 5 days. It still brings in about $500/month consistently. Google has since come out with their own licensing system, but it suffers from the limitation of it only working for apps purchased through the Android Market which, in a world with many Android Markets, isn't good enough.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on any side projects that make "small/passive" income?

#39

Post by Carl_Platt »

dangero wrote: post #31
zzleeper wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any advice on what changed through time? More focused attempts, better grasp of the demand, or just more productive programming?

I've been programming for a long time, so I don't think it had anything to do with productive programming. In fact, each attempt was less work than the previous. The thing that I didn't understand is that being successful in business has very little to do with having an original idea. You're much better off just looking at how other people are making money and becoming their competitor or improving upon what they are…

Most innovation happens this way. Get some existing idea, develop on it and market/sell it off as a better alternative. Seems simple. If only.
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