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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?

#71

Post by yeahsure »

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…

I built (literally) a couple of these a few years ago while learning about SEO and never did anything else with them. At their best, they were making something like $300 per month (combined). With the last Google algo update the rankings are pretty much screwed and these sites now make something like $20/mo.

I also know some people with hundreds or thousands of these kind of sites and I can assure you they're not happy.

Building a business that depends on Google's algo to be profitable doesn't make any sense to me.

EDIT: When I say it doesn't make sense to me I'm talking about side-projects where the goal is passive income. If you're going at it full-swing and plan on pivoting as required then it can absolutely be a genuine business model.

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

#72

Post by franze »

a few years ago (well, the weekend after my second son was born and i thought: hey, i need more money) i created http://www.facesaerch.com/, basically an alternative interface to googles image search with face filter turned on. the initial version took me 2 days (my son slept the most of the time anyways).

i did some basic SEO stuff (i.e. alt tags for images, a sitemap XML, an auto expanding index) and got some coverage for it on various sites (lifehacker, ...) which was quite easy because everybody loves searching for themselves.

the site is still hosted on a 1 EUR webspace / month and during its best time it had about 54.000 visits a day.

as for the business case: on a site with only images, people click on (google) ads. don't know why, they just do it. so the money was good.

google was ok for it for quite some time (hey, they even covered it on a google code showcase blog) but well i kept pushing the boundaries so i got a penalty (again and again).

now i got about 5000 visits a day from baidu and bing, but it's hard to grow these traffic sources (well that's true for bing, for baidu its mostly the language barrier). it was fun while it lasted, now i just don't care anymore. i keep it around (even though some people would like to buy it) as i might transform it into a real product sometime.

so what the bottom line: building a (SEO) sideproject for passive income is possible, but don't bet on it that it will last forever. oh yeah, maybe also: images + ads = awesome conversion

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

#73

Post by wladimir »

forkrulassail wrote: post #43
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.

I don't have public a site up for the project. But we could get in touch through mail, my mail is miathan.6gmail.com .

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

#74

Post by wladimir »

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #59
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...

Nope, they are not spammers, the captchas are not for creating accounts; it has another use. But obviously I cannot go into details about my customers here.

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

#75

Post by perlgeek »

swah wrote: post #58

Are those running on your name or do you guys created a company?

I've registered a business without creating a full scale company (which limits maximal income, but I'm far from that limit anyway). Don't know if that's a German oddity, or available everywhere.

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

#76

Post by wiradikusuma »

taphangum wrote: post #68
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?

if you don't mind, can you drop your email in http://www.lelanggokil.com/do/feedback

it'll be automatically forwarded to me. please ignore the language (it's Bahasa). my website is i18n ready, but i'm just too lazy to make English version (only less than 20% Indonesians speak English).

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

#78

Post by leftnode »

Yes, I launched a piece of software to build your own social network. It took several days to make my first dollar, and I made $1300 in revenue and about $1000 in profit for the first month.

http://blog.leftnode.com/entry/first-month-kwolla-sales-repo...

Then I made my code free.

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

#79

Post by JoachimSchipper »

wladimir wrote: post #74
JoachimSchipper wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nope, they are not spammers, the captchas are not for creating accounts; it has another use. But obviously I cannot go into details about my customers here.

Fair enough, good luck!

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

#80

Post by perlgeek »

allenbrunson wrote: post #53

i wrote an iOS card game that makes me about 300 bucks a month. i do almost no maintenance on it anymore. it would probably do a whole lot better if it had any kind of marketing behind it, but it's not really in my nature.

> it would probably do a whole lot better if it had any kind of marketing behind it, but it's not really in my nature.

I've read quite some remarks like that here and in other places, and I've said it about some pages of mine too.

Maybe it would be a good idea to build a marketplace where developers and marketing people can get together, and share the additional profit that the additional marketing generates.

If anybody wants to take up that idea, I'd be happy to be your first customer. Currently I'm just working on other projects (see another reply from me in this thread, for example), so I won't do it myself any time soon.

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