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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?

#111

Post by ovi256 »

luke_s wrote: post #13

I run a e-commerce website, selling tools for grafting produced by a company my wifes family own: http://www.grafting-tool.com/magento/index.php/ I started by buying a few samples to sell on e-bay to see if there was a market. So I guess you could say I started making money right away. The problem with trying to replicate my business, is finding the right product to sell. I was lucky that I saw they had this item, an…

There was an Eastern European dude that used to submit his monthly sales reports to HN. He made quite a bit of money from stock photography. The catch ? Most of his stock photos were not still life, but people in different life settings - this must be the kind that sells the best. I'm sure it helped that his young blond girlfriend was a frequent subject :)

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

#112

Post by roel_v »

fuckall wrote: post #38

I help run a hotdog stand in NYC with my uncle in the summer on the weekends for fun and (ridiculous) profit.

Isn't the permit/city licence insanely expensive? Is it still profitable after that?

On a similar note, I was looking at the difference in fruit prices between 'whole' fruits and sliced portions in super markets the other day and started daydreaming about selling portions of pineapple on warm summer days, much like an ice cream stand but with pineapple. I think the markup is similar to hotdogs - can you share how many customers you serve in a typical hour?

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

#113

Post by atgm »

danssig wrote: post #62
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.

Word-of-mouth, Facebook page, Twitter, various online communities I'm a part of. Part of the challenge is being "always on" and believing in my product (my book) and passing that belief on to other people. The way to look at it, I think, is that every person I don't mention it to ends up being a potentially lost sale.

I'm also looking into advertising on Something Awful. I'm exploring Facebook ads, but I'm not sure how good they would be. Google Adsense would be nice, but I was banned from the Adsense/Adwords service some time ago for some reason and Google has been especially unhelpful about responding to anything about any of their services.

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

#114

Post by chopsueyar »

dotBen wrote: post #36
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.

I assume this is affiliate marketing and not content creation?

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

#115

Post by hemalk »

I made a website that finds where to buy tracks from DJ tracklists. Had to wait a couple of months for it's first £1 as I had no efficient way to drive traffic to is (the CPA from PPC was way too steep). It makes a few quid a month and pays for itself. Funnily enough it generates affiliate commission from Amazon, and that pays for the hosting on EC2...

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

#116

Post by damoncali »

I have two side project sites that make about $500/month, mostly from LinkWorth links, but some from AdSense was well.

LinkWorth is nice because you an make decent money without any traffic. You need to have the right niche, a modicum of pagerank, and it helps to pay the small fee to promote your site. It also takes a long time to sell the links. My first one took 3 weeks.

But the last few months have seen a decline. Perhaps people aren't buying links as much any more.

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

#117

Post by apedley »

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…

I have had a very similar experience.

First 1 I spent 12 months developing and only generated a few hundred dollars.

Few more in between all not generating much interest.

One took a few weeks of dev time and a bit coming out of it, still big potential there so I will pursue it, it just involves getting out to more businesses.

The most recent one built in a day to test the waters. Lots of positive feedback, 1 more day to polish the site (ie. make it look pretty) and now a large company is getting on board and lots of small businesses jumping in. (2 days work total) Obviously I have a lot more days of dev to keep expanding it.

I think the actual thing you learn is don't reinvent the wheel, just do something better than everyone else. And second start VERY simple, then build. Otherwise the app is too complex to get a quick and rapid user base who will then spend the time to use your app more.

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

#118

Post by mista »

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…

What type of costs added up to $7k for your first attempt? Did you use outsource'd talent?

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

#119

Post by seunosewa »

acangiano wrote: post #90
middus wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are the blogs creating passive income? I guess you're spending quite some time creating/editing content, don't you?

The majority of my blog income is from existing content. If I stop posting for a month or so, as I have in the past, about 90% of the revenue will still be there. I'm currently posting about one post per week for each blog, and this relaxed pace is enough to increase the revenue of my blogs. If I stopped blogging altogether, it would probably take years before my revenue figures would be hugely impacted. That's passi…

10% is a huge impact if you depend on the money. And you're likely to lose 10% every month if you stopped blogging, not just the first month.

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

#120

Post by akozlik »

perlgeek wrote: post #80
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 anyb…

Isn't that similar to a basic affiliate program, but maybe on the micro transaction scale?
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