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

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

#61

Post by danssig » Wed, Mar 23, 2011, 10:03 AM UTC

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'd like to hear more about this. I've been thinking of getting more into photography myself. It seems like wedding photography is a bad idea as it's way overdone. I was thinking architecture or portrait photography. What did you all end up doing?

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

#62

Post by danssig » Wed, Mar 23, 2011, 10:05 AM UTC

atgm wrote: post #8

I published an ebook ( http://www.branchrock.com ) and it's been selling. Since I'll never run out of stock and it's priced as an impulse buy, I expect that it'll continue to earn passively. I got my first dollar on the first day I started selling. I plan to continue writing books, both non-fiction and fiction, and I expect that they'll all help bring in passive income.

How do you advertise? This sounds like a great idea but I'd be interested what your strategy is to get eyes on the books, since this can often be so much effort as to not be a passive income anymore.

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

#63

Post by kschua » Wed, Mar 23, 2011, 10:06 AM UTC

Yup. A call filtering application with the ability to filter off unimportant calls from family and friends and allow urgent calls from these people through.

Took about 2 weeks to get the first sale. Now it is selling at a rate of 1 copy a day

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

#64

Post by joelg87 » Wed, Mar 23, 2011, 10:07 AM UTC

My most recent venture started out as a side project and is now becoming my main focus. It is a simple Twitter App which makes it easy to share more on Twitter whilst annoying your followers less (by helping you to avoid tweeting 5 links in a row within minutes).

It took 7 weeks for me to take it from idea to launching the MVP (during most of the build period I had people using the service).

I had my first paying customer 4 days after launch. It has now been running for just under 4 months and I am making $315/mo, though that number is rising almost every day (it is a freemium service with a free plan and paid plans priced $5/mo and $30/mo).

I am likely to reach ramen profitability within a few months and will focus fully on it.

I blogged about how I took it from idea to first paying customer, which may be of interest - http://blog.bufferapp.com/post/3328167762/idea-to-paying-cus...

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

#65

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 23, 2011, 10:14 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#66

Post by perlgeek » Wed, Mar 23, 2011, 10:14 AM UTC

I have an old project (http://sudokugarden.de/) where I built a website about Sudoku back at University when I was bored. I consider it feature complete, and have stopped to actively promote or develop it for two or three years now. I still make 1.5k to 2k per year in advertising (mostly CEO text links - adsense prices in that segement are too low to be profitable, and I don't want to bother the visitors too much. People who sign in for free don't see any adds). I made my first dollars a few month after the launch, when my adsense account finally reached the threshold for the first payment.

I'm now working on a project where I want to collect semantic relations between books (sequels, prequels, translations into other languages etc.). It's not launched yet, so no income so far. It will have affiliate links to book stores. See https://github.com/moritz/quelology if you are interested in details.

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

#67

Post by lurchpop » Wed, Mar 23, 2011, 10:16 AM UTC

mcdowall wrote: post #56

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 b…

you could do better. i have an identical business with exactly 23 sites that averages about $900/mo and rising.

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

#68

Post by taphangum » Wed, Mar 23, 2011, 10:23 AM UTC

wiradikusuma wrote: post #51

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…

What's your email address?

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

#69

Post by mcdowall » Wed, Mar 23, 2011, 10:32 AM UTC

lurchpop wrote: post #67

mcdowall wrote: post #56

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 b…

you could do better. i have an identical business with exactly 23 sites that averages about $900/mo and rising.

I am acutely aware of how well some people can do but I just didn't have the time to do more back linking / articles, so for me I was more than happy with the return.

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

#70

Post by zrgiu » Wed, Mar 23, 2011, 10:35 AM UTC

MortenK wrote: post #57

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.

so basically, you're a pimp