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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?

#51

Post by wiradikusuma »

I'm developing a penny auction website for local market http://www.lelanggokil.com/. The auctions are not even started yet and I'm already getting money (albeit small). But I'm still at loss since the marketing cost (FB Ad and AdWords) outweigh the profit (I spent about $40/day for the last 2 weeks).

The website actually acts as a proof of concept as I plan to white-label it (that's why the stuff being auctioned are not expensive). But if the PoC works, I will focus on it.

My problems so far: - Credit card and PayPal are very rare, I must rely on manual work (user banks in, I check my bank account balance, I approve/reject) - Negative sentiment against penny auction - Customer support (manual work)

To be honest, this is my first non-consulting real personal project (that is, a product, spends money, gets money). So even if this project fails, I still learn from it and reuse a lot of its software parts.

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

#54

Post by _b8r0 »

I used to have a site that was set up for pancake day, stuff to do on pancake day, about a couple of hundred different pancake recipes and so on. Every year I'd make about £200 in advertising revenue, which would pay for the hosting for other projects, some general shenanigans and (of course) my pancake day. My plan was to do something similar for other temporally-targeted holidays but valentines day was extremely competitive and easter was too big. In the end I swapped the site for a friend's laptop.

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

#55

Post by thetrumanshow »

geuis wrote: post #9

I've had an application running in Second Life for the last 5-6 years to facilitate people making machinima. I haven't changed the price since it launched, at around $6 USD. When it first launched (also when SL was much more popular), I was selling several hundred dollars a month. I still pull in $30-$50 a month on it, but I don't do much to promote it anymore. Linden Lab has really fucked up over the years and the q…

I also did a stint in SecondLife, trying to build web-enabled in-world products and/or build web services that would take Linden dollars for payment. Probably made $600 in revenue.

It was my Artix Phase.

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

#56

Post by mcdowall »

About a year ago I built a number of micro niche sites aimed specifically at generating adwords income for high ppc terms. They weren't especially pretty but they were a good exercise and more than paid for themselves.

At the point I sold them (22 sites) they were generating about $190 a month in adsense revenue, all this from me buying 'keyword in domain' urls, having a relatively good eye for writing seo copy and building some inbound links.

I sold the lot on flippa for just over $1k, so I suppose it made me about ~$300/mo for a year. I know of some individuals who have over 1,000 domains running (across some of the most random niches you would just laugh at!) so I think it's a pretty decent passive business for them.

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

#57

Post by MortenK »

Not entirely sure this fits the bill, but I've leased out one of my former lead developer to a client, when our consulting business got rammed. He's is offshore, and the client is in Europe. Right now I do individual consultancy, and then get a form of passive income from leasing the developer out. I make around 700 USD a month, with effort limited to sending out the invoice.

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

#59

Post by JoachimSchipper »

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…

Are your customers spammers? I'm having some trouble thinking of a legitimate use for this service...

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

#60

Post by gjm11 »

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…

What fraction of your customers are anything other than spammers?
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