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Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

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Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#31

Post by andrewljohnson »

EGreg wrote: post #28
andrewljohnson wrote: post #25

Our highest selling app (a hiking app) makes 15-30K/month, depending on the season. Our other navigation apps don't make quite as much yet, but some are getting there. You can figure out from my profile which it is, but I didn't want to name it in the thread and have this be something that turned up in searches. I wouldn't call it totally passive, but if we ignored it, it wouldn't stop making money. We have consisten…

Is it a paid app or a free one?

Paid, the price has been between .99 - 24.99, and now sells for 9.99. The premium add-on will be 19.99/year.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#33

Post by sprobertson »

pan69 wrote: post #20
bdunn wrote: post #6

Planscope ( https://planscope.io ) - predictable, more-growth-than-churn SaaS revenue Compared to my book, which fizzles out when I'm not actively marketing it, building a B2B subscription product is the best, most turnkey income source I've ever had.

Looks great. But is this passive income? It looks like you've invested a lot to get this off the ground, correct? How much time do you spend on this, let's say per week?

Passive income generally means that hours spent don't directly translate to dollars. All passive income solutions (that I know of) require some initial investment. Maybe "time-scalable income" would be a better term?

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#35

Post by robryan »

Matsta wrote: post #8

Facebook was definitely my biggest earner until they decided to crack down on everything at the end of last year and basically screwed everyone over. It's the same deal for SEO, used to be a easy way to promote Adsense, CPA offers and what not, but the penguin change just makes it harder and harder to rank for keywords. 2012 has been definitely a slow year for Internet marketing, the worst I've faced since I started…

You could argue that this stuff being harder is actually a good thing for the end user. The stuff that is still around is likely offering more value.

Coming from someone who has done a fair bit of CPA/ Adsense stuff in the past myself.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#36

Post by bdunn »

shmageggy wrote: post #19
bdunn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Content marketing mostly, and over delivering awesome, awesome support that gets customers to refer others. You can also do really well by just optimizing the hell out of the visitors/expired trials you already have. SO MUCH EASIER than attracting more eyeballs.

Doesn't all of the above take this out of the realm of "passive"? Or are you able to magically get all of that done in such a short time that you consider it negligible?

I spend about 2 hours a week total, so right - it's not totally passive... But I'm at the point now where I could outsource first tier support and maybe get away with no weekly involvement.

But I want more growth, so I'm still actively working on promoting Planscope.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#37

Post by AVTizzle »

apike wrote: post #18

Two years ago, when we started Steamclock, we spent our first two months building a niche iPhone app. We've done point releases but not added much, yet today it pays our rent. http://www.steamclocksw.com/weddingdj/ We haven't done any serious research or marketing for it. We simply focused down and built the highest quality app we could build, and it worked.

Awesome icon.

>>We haven't done any serious research or marketing for it.

It could be a personal taste question, but why not any marketing? With enough traction to be paying rent based solely off word-of-mouth and organic, you certainly seem to be creating value for people. There are easy/free/cheap ways to market apps, definitely at least some amount of money being left on the table.

Congrats either way, good stuff :)

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#40

Post by nostromo »

Real estate. (Ok, not 100% passive, but what is?) You can buy a duplex for not much more than a single family house in many US cities and, thanks to the low interest rates for an owner-occupied mortgage, rent out half and live for free.

Unlike tech, you will not have a giant windfall with real estate; but also unlike tech, it's very easy to price your product, find customers, and figure out what your cashflow will be for years to come.

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