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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?

#131

Post by famousactress »

nhebb wrote: post #99
danssig wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think an avatar photo business would be a good idea. Think of all the twitter users with resized photos of themselves that are unflattering, cryptic, or just plain bad.

When I travel to SF (where the startup I work for is based), I often end up shooting headshots for folks who have talks to give, or need bio photos, etc. Someone could definitely corner the PA/SF entrepreneur headshot market, without much trouble I think.

The trick with headshots is enough finding people (close to you) willing to pay enough money to make it worthwhile. That usually means actors, authors, or executives.. but I'm sure increasingly wide-eyed young startup kids and software developers make the Bay Area an interesting target.

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

#132

Post by THEM »

dangero wrote: post #31
zzleeper wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any advice on what changed through time? More focused attempts, better grasp of the demand, or just more productive programming?

I've been programming for a long time, so I don't think it had anything to do with productive programming. In fact, each attempt was less work than the previous. The thing that I didn't understand is that being successful in business has very little to do with having an original idea. You're much better off just looking at how other people are making money and becoming their competitor or improving upon what they are…

So I assume that your third attempt based on "becoming their competitor or improving upon" strategy.

If so, how difficult was it (or how long did it take) to get organic traffic/customers through google, etc. Since I would think your competitors were more "established" in the pagerank, seo etc.

Basically, I'm just wondering how hard is it to get traction against entrenched players. Even if your product were superior, you still need to draw traffic to sell and prove it.

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

#133

Post by acangiano »

atgm wrote: post #113
danssig wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> various online communities I'm a part of

Personally, I found out about your book yesterday, after reading your comment about videos without captions in the code school thread.

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

#134

Post by lylejohnson »

tayl0r wrote: post #40

I have a game on the iOS app store. http://itunes.apple.com/app/river-cross-logic-puzzle-game/id... It brings in $100+ per month. I'm pretty happy with it.

For cryin' out loud, I've got to get my act together and learn Mac/iOS development.

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

#135

Post by rphlx »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #128
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…

The coup de grace: I was approached by several of the people who didn't win the auction but were still interested in the site. I ended up selling a few white-label versions of my (very simplistic) software for $1000 each. Note to self, if I ever buy a site on Flippa, make sure to get a con-compete too.

Even if they sign it, I wouldn't expect most sellers there to honor it. When I last looked at flippa many of the sites were obvious clones of each other.

1. Build a template of a simple site

2. Create 10000 instances of it & SEO them one at a time

3. Resell to suckers with too much money.

4. Profit!

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

#136

Post by dangero »

THEM wrote: post #132
dangero wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been programming for a long time, so I don't think it had anything to do with productive programming. In fact, each attempt was less work than the previous. The thing that I didn't understand is that being successful in business has very little to do with having an original idea. You're much better off just looking at how other people are making money and becoming their competitor or improving upon what they are…

So I assume that your third attempt based on "becoming their competitor or improving upon" strategy. If so, how difficult was it (or how long did it take) to get organic traffic/customers through google, etc. Since I would think your competitors were more "established" in the pagerank, seo etc. Basically, I'm just wondering how hard is it to get traction against entrenched players. Even if your product were superior,…

It actually happened immediately. I only have one real competitor, and my product is superior, and I still haven't overtaken them. That's part of what I learned from this. They were making enough that if I just took 5% of their income I could still make a lot of money. Sometimes being #2 is OK.

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

#137

Post by dangero »

apedley wrote: post #117
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…

Yes. This is exactly what I did. Seems to be a common formula.

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

#138

Post by dangero »

mista wrote: post #118
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?

Yes I did outsource. It was a huge website with a lot of bells and whistles (this was my first mistake)... At the time, I was a C++ guy trying to get into the web, so I hired an outsourced designer and then hired a php guy in India to implement it.

What ended up happening by the end is that I fired the php guy for trying to sell my code to another company and then I rewrote most of the site myself since by then I was proficient in php/mysql and the code that was written was so inefficient that google crawling the site was crushing it. Lots of lessons learned in there.

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

#139

Post by dangero »

leftnode wrote: post #78

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.

Just curious, why would you make it free if you could have continued to make money off of it?

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

#140

Post by gadders »

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…

This also reminds me of an old Steve Pavlina Dexterity software article (no link as I think he took them offline).

The gist of the article was that when he moved from writing new games, to marketing his existing ones (and other people's), he actually saw his income increase.

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