Most lucrative: my FAANG job Most satisfying: my investment portfolio of passive index funds
Do you still think index funds like Vanguard Total World is good to invest in now, as you watch stock market slowly losing steam this year?
Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
91–100 of 448 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#92Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
what kind of book?
Details are in my bio, but it's a pop-science book for new parents. It got a big publicity boost when Parents magazine ran excerpts, and a gigantic publicity boost when "The Big Bang Theory" wrote an episode where my book was a central plot element.
Oh I got your book years ago based off of an HN comment. What a fun book. Got it for baby #1 but I'm on baby #3 now :)
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#94Most lucrative: my FAANG job Most satisfying: my investment portfolio of passive index funds
Do you still think index funds like Vanguard Total World is good to invest in now, as you watch stock market slowly losing steam this year?
I do not know, but I am not changing strategy.
This year, just like I did for the past 10, I invested all my paycheck savings into VTI/VXUS despite suffering 6 figures unrealized losses from them. I plan on doing the same next year, and for as long as I am employed/have disposable income. Every spare dollar I find, outside of my emergency fund, gets immediately invested.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#95I have businesses which gave me a taxable income of $4 million. Mostly passive. All of them are tech businesses. Started off with a few foundational ideas I came up with through trial and error over 10 years.
Amazing! Care to elaborate more?
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Absolutely not.
But you literally are, you just said you sell them. You sell magic mushroom spores and kits for growing them
We sell products which are related to all things mushrooms. There’s equipment, supplies you name it. Our grow kits are for growing shiitake, lion’s mane, king oyster or just about any gourmet mushroom which is legal to grow. Our microscopy spores are a product which are strictly sold for microscopy use. We love mushrooms and all things about them. But illegality is a red line, whether immoral or not.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#97I had partnering with a marketing agency for awhile doing implementation of their designs in WordPress. After a few years of clients breaking their sites doing upgrades and other ad-hoc questions/enhancement requests coming via email, I got tired of sending $100-200 invoices, so I started selling "WordPress Maintenance" as a product. It's not fun or sexy, but don't underestimate the number of organizations willing to…
What's your responsibility of things go south and the wordpress gets hacked? Do you have liability insurance or any other protections in place?
Anyone providing professional services should have liability insurance.
Furthermore, unless a service provider has been acting negligently or has given some sort of guarantee like "With my services, your WordPress instance won't be hacked.", they usually can't be held responsible for actions and outcomes that are out of their control.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#98Surprised how few of these answers involve automating revenue, mostly selling continued labor
Currently the best I've made is from iOS apps with little to no server backend, or async server-sync'd offline-first local DBs tolerant of downtime to minimize on-call requirements. I make money through recurring IAP, and offer student etc. discounted rates without any verification to capture more sales. These apps grow organically when I don't put time into them actively.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#99I've had quite a few:
1. Selling domain names. This was when I was in college and somehow traded my way into mid-high five-figure domain names. I turned over $100k in profits in a year, and then 2008 happened and all markets collapsed.
2. Starting a D2C brand. Shipping is automated via a third-party provider. Sourcing is easy since I have a very reliable supplier. All marketing is through word of mouth. I get around 300 orders on Amazon monthly, some 100 on our website, and land the occassional business order that gets me around 2,000 orders extra per year. Not a huge money maker, but pays my mortgage for practically 2-3 hours of work/month.
3. I ran an informational website about music production (I produce as a hobby). Somehow, a few of my articles became popular and I landed a ton of good links. Google loved my website and I was pulling in mid four-figures in affiliate checks every month. That went on for years even when I stopped working on the site.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#100https://www.newaudiotechnology.com/
A shared friend introduced me to someone who claimed to be a struggling Hollywood genius. We were all drinking at some university party. He told us about all the cool shit he would do if only technology wasn't so bad. So I built a tool to solve his issues. To my surprise, he used it on the Expendables 3 blurays. Later, the audio crew for George Lukas' Red Tails praised the tool in an interview. Hollywood guy got grammy nominated. I got paid first for development and then licensing fees. But I mostly like it not for the financials, but because this way my software made it onto a few magazine covers :) I collected all of them.