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Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

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Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#71

Post by w1ntermute »

kaptain wrote: post #53
w1ntermute wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whate…

People are willing to pay a lot for wedding-related /services/. A lot of people that want to save money on a wedding would buy this because they DON'T want to pay for a wedding planner who will ensure that the music is 100% perfect. If you price this at $25, you'll lose that group of people that were looking to save money, (you could argue that at $25 it's still cheaper than a wedding planner). Not every bride is foo…

> you could argue that at $25 it's still cheaper than a wedding planner

That's exactly my point, when your competition isn't even anywhere in the neighborhood, you might as well raise your prices. A bride-to-be isn't going to see a $25 wedding DJ app as being expensive; she's going to see it as being 1/10th of what an actual wedding DJ would cause. You said people are only willing to pay for wedding-related services - well, this is replacing a wedding-related service, and you have to consider the competition when determining pricing.

And I don't think it's only wedding-related services that cost a lot. There are plenty of purchases associated with weddings (clothing, food, etc.) that are way overpriced.

> Not every bride is foolish enough to think that everything will be perfect.

They don't all have to be that foolish, there just has to be a big enough group of them that you have a solid customer base. In this situation, I think that's definitely the case.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#72

Post by rjurney »

pyre wrote: post #65
rjurney wrote: post #27

In California, selling cannibas to a co-op you belong to as a patient could be a nice supplemental income. An Aerogrow makes it easy, and with six legal plants, you can grow at least 1.5 pounds every 90 days. I think it works out that you can make $10-15k/year for not much work. And no, my wife would not let me do this :)

> I think it works out that you can make $10-15k/year > for not much work. Gross or net revenue? I would imagine that the electricity bills would be not insignificant.

Net, I think. The LED bulbs aren't so inefficient. But there is an up front cost of about $250 per Aerogrow. It's the tallest/biggest unit you need.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#73

Post by hkhanna »

aantix wrote: post #38
vjz wrote: post #34

Tax-free municipal bonds

Care to expand on this?

State and municipality bonds are sort of like U.S. Treasury bonds, except they're issued by a state or local government. They pay a fixed interest rate, but your interest is usually tax-free.

Of course, they pay a lower interest rate than taxable bonds. Thus, the only reason these tax-free bonds would be better than taxable bonds is if you are in a high enough marginal tax bracket to compensate for the difference in interest between these tax-free bonds and taxable bonds.

An example should make this all clear. Assume you have a marginal tax rate of 40%. (You earn a lot of money.) If you invest $100,000 in a typical taxable bond that pays 10%, each year you will get $10,000. But subtract out the 40% tax, and you are left with only $6,000 after-tax.

Compare this with what would happen if you invested that same $100,000 in a tax-free state bond. This bond only pays 8%, being tax-free and all. Each year you get $8,000. But you pay no tax, so you are in fact better off than if you had bought the taxable bonds!

Now, lets change your marginal tax bracket to 10%--you don't earn much money, so your marginal rate is low. You invest that same $100,000 in the taxable bond that pays 10%, you will get $10,000 pre-tax but only pay your marginal rate, 10%, on that sum, so you are left with $9,000.

With the tax-free state bond at 8%, you only get $8,000, though you don't pay any tax on it. So at your low marginal rate, you would have been better off buying the taxable bond.

My point is, tax-free bonds are probably only useful if you earn a lot of income each year to put you in a high marginal rate.

Source: I'm a law student and we learned about tax-exempt state/municipal bonds today in Tax!

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#74

Post by gamelodge »

bdunn wrote: post #15
ww520 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks great. How do you market your webapp?

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.

delivering awesome, awesome support would require lots and lots of time/effort != passive

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#75

Post by tylermauthe »

patio11 wrote: post #12

Halloweenbingocards.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.

How are you monetizing Halloweenbingocards.net ??

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#76

Post by brianwillis »

rjurney wrote: post #27

In California, selling cannibas to a co-op you belong to as a patient could be a nice supplemental income. An Aerogrow makes it easy, and with six legal plants, you can grow at least 1.5 pounds every 90 days. I think it works out that you can make $10-15k/year for not much work. And no, my wife would not let me do this :)

I think you win the prize for the most creative idea in this thread.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#77

Post by krickle »

suresk wrote: post #58

I really like building developer tools and kind of miss doing it full time. I built a tool for testing/playing with REST services last year and sell it on the OS X app store: http://www.uresk.net/httpclient/ I'm not getting rich off it, but it usually brings in a few hundred bucks per month and I like hearing from fellow developers who benefit from using it.

Did you do any market testing to see if there was a need, or was this scratching your own itch?

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#78

Post by apike »

w1ntermute wrote: post #46
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.

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 whate…

Intuitively, I'd agree. When we release the upcoming major version (iPad support, advanced queueing, etc) I'd like to try $10.

On the other hand, after 1.5 years at $5 we've been trying $2, and revenue has been consistently higher since the change. I suspect this is because it drove us into findable range in the "Top Paid Music" chart, but with no analytics it's frustratingly hard to prove.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#79

Post by w1ntermute »

apike wrote: post #78
w1ntermute wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whate…

Intuitively, I'd agree. When we release the upcoming major version (iPad support, advanced queueing, etc) I'd like to try $10. On the other hand, after 1.5 years at $5 we've been trying $2, and revenue has been consistently higher since the change. I suspect this is because it drove us into findable range in the "Top Paid Music" chart, but with no analytics it's frustratingly hard to prove.

> I suspect this is because it drove us into findable range in the "Top Paid Music" chart, but with no analytics it's frustratingly hard to prove.

This is something I hadn't fully considered. One of the biggest expenses in running a wedding-related business is advertising. Unlike other purchases, wedding-related stuff is only purchased once in a lifetime (well, twice or thrice these days in America, but you get the idea).

Thus, brides and grooms rely on the opinions and advice of friends - word-of-mouth promotion is key. But ultimately, heavy advertising is the only way to reliably get information about your product out to the general public. And the App Store is a great form of free advertising (well, not counting the cut Apple takes), especially if you make it into one of the "Top" lists.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#80

Post by apike »

AVTizzle wrote: post #37
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…

Thanks! Icons are huge on the App Store, an excellent one is a must have.

We've done some experimenting with marketing, but couldn't figure out any strategy that could convert a bride or groom for $3.50 (the amount we net after Apple's cut). We tried and abandoned Google ads, Facebook ads, and advertising on wedding blogs. Virtually all app-marketing services focus on free apps, and most of them are grey hat in some way.

For a general-purpose app (like our upcoming Party Monster, a more general music app) you don't need to be targeted, but for a wedding app you need to target engaged people, which is expensive!

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