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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?

#41

Post by getsat »

atgm wrote: post #33
getsat wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Probably more of a combination of the two. Automated posts are pretty obvious, even to the less technically inclined. Lots of people will use something like "spyntax" (stuff like "This is {awesome|cool}, {take a look|check it out}!") to generate reusable copy, but it still generally feels fake. That's about the extent of human touch most people will give things if their goal is complete automation.

If you're writing posts/excerpts/replies manually, it's way more authentic and believable. Language is obviously super important in marketing (especially online), and it's one area where computers still have lots of improvement to make.

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

#42

Post by nigelsampson »

I have a small WP7 application I submitted around launch, I'd done Silverlight development before so it was pretty easy to jump in. I built it over about six weeks of occasional evenings and started selling pretty much immediately. I've released my downloads and sales figures for the first three months.

The App: http://compiledexperience.com/windows-phone-7/to-do

The Numbers: http://compiledexperience.com/blog/posts/a-windows-phone-7-a...

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

#43

Post by forkrulassail »

wladimir wrote: post #32

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 s…

Link me, I would like to become a customer.

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

#44

Post by phirephly »

SeoxyS wrote: post #17
phirephly wrote: post #10

I was surprised that just putting an adsense unit on the side of my personal blog (4k hits/month) manages to generate $25/month. It's a highly technical blog, mainly documenting my personal electronics projects, but covers pretty much anything I want it to, which rather limits my readership. Having a more cohesive, single subject would certainly raise the glass ceiling on readership.

I don't know about you, but I don't think $25/mo is worth cheapening my blog by plastering tasteless ads on it. I'd have to be pulling significant income from it before I would even consider putting ads on my blog.

http://kennethfinnegan.blogspot.com/

Text ads, top banner and bottom of right bar. $300 a year; as a college student, yeah, that's worth it.

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

#45

Post by revorad »

il wrote: post #5

A couple years ago I created a small international proxy service. The service was targeted at advertisers who wanted to advertise in other countries but didn't have an easy way to see international ads or landing pages from competitors(most landing pages in this niche were geotargeted and would redirect based on your IP). It probably took less than 10-15 hours to hack together in PHP. I didn't have a freemium model o…

So you sold the original site on Flippa and then also sold essentially the same code again to other people? Wasn't that against the terms of sale to the Flippa buyer?

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

#46

Post by intended »

famousactress wrote: post #18

Not typical HN fare, but the wife and I started a business together that has (almost) nothing to do with the interwebs. It's a photography business.. We started it about 3+ years ago, and in most senses it's done quite well. She's been able to quit her day-job. It's what HN folks would call a 'lifestyle' business, I guess. You know, cause we're not rich . I have to say, it's pretty rad. Software startups don't have a…

I agree! I work at a finance startup (sadly no equity) and went from learning accounts from scratch, to financial models to handling Biz Dev, sales, hiring, corp communication, and on and on. Its great fun!

S/W startups definitely don't have a monopoly on it, plus other types of startups make you face very different sets of problems than the ones generally/commonly discussed on HN.

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

#47

Post by il »

revorad wrote: post #45
il wrote: post #5

A couple years ago I created a small international proxy service. The service was targeted at advertisers who wanted to advertise in other countries but didn't have an easy way to see international ads or landing pages from competitors(most landing pages in this niche were geotargeted and would redirect based on your IP). It probably took less than 10-15 hours to hack together in PHP. I didn't have a freemium model o…

So you sold the original site on Flippa and then also sold essentially the same code again to other people? Wasn't that against the terms of sale to the Flippa buyer?

No, the buyer didn't mind. He was buying the site more for the revenue/traction rather than te technology. It's actually very common to create a script and sell both developed sites based on it as well as the script itself.

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

#48

Post by wenbert »

i have a lyrics site that earns 100usd every year thru adsense. it runs on zendframework(tried others but zf wins by a huge margin in caching on shared hosting). the income has paid for my blog, domain names, my brothers site, and a couple of beers.

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

#49

Post by revorad »

il wrote: post #47
revorad wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you sold the original site on Flippa and then also sold essentially the same code again to other people? Wasn't that against the terms of sale to the Flippa buyer?

No, the buyer didn't mind. He was buying the site more for the revenue/traction rather than te technology. It's actually very common to create a script and sell both developed sites based on it as well as the script itself.

That's great. Good work on finding an opportunity and acting fast on it.
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