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Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?
41–50 of 235 posts
Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?
#42pixurwall.com - about 2-3k hits a day generating $20-30 in revenue. Cost 200 bucks to make and has been pretty consistent for over 8 months.
Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?
#43Halloweenbingocards.net will probably hit about $6k this October (BCC will hit maybe $10k). Not bad for $250 paid in like 2009 or so. I did a course on lifecycle emails for SaaS businesses recently. That did pretty well - a few hundred sales.
> I did a course on lifecycle emails for SaaS businesses recently. That did pretty well - a few hundred sales. A more professional-looking video on training.kalzumeus.com would've probably helped your conversion rate quite a bit. And avoiding the use of your internet handle on the site would've kept it from sounding cheesy to those outside the HN community.
The question remains unanswered whether a "more professional" video would not have turned out cheesy.
IMHO success proves Patrick right.
Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?
#44This might not be the kind of answer you're looking for, but the best way to truly passively increase your wealth is to take care of your personal finances (e.g. pay off your student loans, pay off your credit card balance, invest in a lifecycle fund, see if your employer offers a 401(k)) I personally really liked the book I Will Teach You To Be Rich -- it has a poor name but it's dense with incredibly practical advi…
I support the idea of paying off debt. 401k (investment groups) however, is essentially giving your money to a gambler, and having him play your hand. Bet on yourself. Always.
Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?
#45Two 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.
This app is an AWESOME idea. I wonder if there's any other verticals that it could be adapted to. Maybe conferences? Funerals? Religious services?
How about fitness? I do fun-runs and I would KILL to have playlists for warm up, first 1km, middle run, last 500m, victory and warm down.
Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?
#46Two 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.
You're practically giving that app away at $5. Wedding-related businesses are extremely high margin, simply because it's super easy to rip people off when they're really happy (same applies for funerals, except people are too sad to care in that case).
You could probably sell this for 5x as much and still make more money - the bride will want everything to be perfect for the wedding and will be willing to spend whatever it takes.
Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?
#47Airbnb. High value customers and very little overhead on my part. Not totally passive, I guess, but takes up very little time and makes us a decent bit of money on the side.
Could you disclose how much one can make on airbnb? I have a 2 bedroom apartment and sometimes, when I leave on vacation, I would like to rent it out.
Depends on your location. Do an airbnb search in your area to get an idea. I just made up a price for mine, and when I was getting tons of requests for it, raised the prices to slow them to a manageable rate. Living in SF doesn't hurt.
Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?
#48Real 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…
> Ok, not 100% passive, but what is?
A stock index fund. :-) Usually much less yield for your money, though.
Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I did a course on lifecycle emails for SaaS businesses recently. That did pretty well - a few hundred sales. A more professional-looking video on training.kalzumeus.com would've probably helped your conversion rate quite a bit. And avoiding the use of your internet handle on the site would've kept it from sounding cheesy to those outside the HN community.
The question remains unanswered whether a "more professional" video would not have turned out cheesy. IMHO success proves Patrick right.
> The question remains unanswered whether a "more professional" video would not have turned out cheesy.
I don't see how it would have. The whole point of making it more professional would have been to make it less cheesy. If you fail to do that, then you've failed to make it "more professional".
> IMHO success proves Patrick right.
Patrick's success has primarily been in the written word. This is his first foray into selling video-based content, and I think he has quite a bit of work to do on his presentation. Like most nerds, he's quite awkward on camera, but it's nothing that can't be fixed with some elbow grease.
Of course people will cite his Business of Software talk as a counterexample, but that was highly rehearsed (something he mentioned on HN) and consequently felt polished (yet still a little awkward), but the video on training.kalzumeus.com doesn't feel that way. Moreover, having to heavily rehearse every presentation you give does not scale very well when you're creating a series of them to sell online.
Some things that could've been easily improved in the intro video include wearing a proper suit (or at least a collared shirt) instead of a red tracksuit, properly styling his hair, wearing contacts instead of glasses (due to the reflections on them), not wearing an enormous geeky headset, removing the audio "booms" that frequently occur in the video, not being in a 和室 (Japanese-style room) and dropping the super-tacky gimmick with the $100 bill.
Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?
#50Real 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…
> Ok, not 100% passive, but what is? A stock index fund. :-) Usually much less yield for your money, though.
If you want a passive version of real-estate investing, just buy a REIT fund.