Ask HN: Your best passive income sources? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#91

Post by ericdykstra » Thu, Oct 11, 2012, 5:51 AM UTC

Not 100% passive, but fantasy sports has been a nice side income for me this year. I used to play a lot for almost nothing, but then found daily fantasy games (pick a new team every game day, play against other people) and have made a decent return on my investment.

I play on fanduel.com almost exclusively. If you have any questions or want some help getting started, send me an email (in profile). My referral link if you're so inclined: http://www.fanduel.com/?invitedby=yudarvish&cnl=da

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#92

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 11, 2012, 5:51 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#93

Post by seanlinehan » Thu, Oct 11, 2012, 5:52 AM UTC

I was making a few thousand dollars a month from a coupon site. The Panda update completely knocked me out of the rankings for the past 4 months, but I've been slowly climbing back up on my top keywords. It was literally no work whatsoever - I wrote a script to aggregate coupons automagically and outsourced SEO. Turns out the latter wound up killing me. (If you're an SEO master, please reach out to me on Twitter) :)

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#94

Post by wikwocket » Thu, Oct 11, 2012, 5:53 AM UTC

hiddenfeatures wrote: post #43

w1ntermute wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

> IMHO success proves Patrick right.

Actually, A/B tests prove him right. Or occasionally wrong! But that's the point of such testing.

He mentioned he has an A/B test going between video/no-video. I imagine that, if the video version wins, he could consider testing 2 different videos (time and expense permitting).

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#95

Post by cgag » Thu, Oct 11, 2012, 5:55 AM UTC

robryan wrote: post #35

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.

I think it'd be pretty hard to argue otherwise.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#96

Post by nlh » Thu, Oct 11, 2012, 5:55 AM UTC

hkhanna wrote: post #73

aantix wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Excellent explanation - thank you for the write-up!

Now if only we could find those muni bonds that pay 8% ;)

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#97

Post by ashray » Thu, Oct 11, 2012, 5:57 AM UTC

I started a site 13 years ago and it is one of the largest sites in it's niche right now. Very very popular. I do work on it many hours a week (can range from 0 to 100 hours/week) but I don't really have to. I just love working on it, adding new features, etc. I would definitely call the work passive or hobbyist - even though sometimes I'm up till 4 in the morning working on X new feature.

Income is in the early 5 digits per month range (USD). Traffic dropped a bit from August to September so I've been working more on it lately :)

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#98

Post by statictype » Thu, Oct 11, 2012, 6:06 AM UTC

mcantor wrote: post #13

I sell posters of a vim cheat sheet I designed (see my profile for link). I ship my inventory to a 3rd-party fulfillment provider who plugs in to Shopify with a custom app, so all I have to do is re-print when the inventory runs out and handle the occasional customer service problem. Digital downloads are a total freebie.

Neat. I've thought of doing things like this before. Do you mind sharing how many figures you make on this? How do you handle the actual printing? Is that also outsourced?

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#99

Post by pan69 » Thu, Oct 11, 2012, 6:07 AM UTC

sprobertson wrote: post #33

pan69 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I understand that. But if you spend 80 hours per week on it, is it still "passive" or do you simply have two jobs?

To me the idea of "passive" income is that you might spend a certain amount upfront but after that initial push it doesn't require a lot of attention, i.e. passive.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#100

Post by suresk » Thu, Oct 11, 2012, 6:08 AM UTC

nja wrote: post #86

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.

That's pretty cool, actually. I would never have thought of selling an app for that, as most everybody I know uses Advanced REST Client ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/advanced-rest-clie... ). It must be really neat to know people are choosing to pay you for your product over using a similar free app.

Thanks.

The browser-based ones have improved quite a bit recently. I use Advanced REST Client whenever I'm on a Windows machine - it is quite good.

There are a few features that my tool has that make it worth a few bucks for some people, I think, most notably being able to save requests and share them with other members of your team. I've heard from a few folks who have them checked into source control as part of manual testing scripts (there are some interesting opportunities to automate this kind of testing, too, but I haven't had time to focus on it).

And I'm releasing a feature soon that will let you paste in cURL commands and turn them into requests, which is handy when you're working with a webservice that has examples of requests given in the form of cURL commands (which is a lot of them).

Even if you're competing against free apps that match and even exceed what you can offer in some areas (which is frankly going to be more and more common), you can still find little features that might be fairly simple but add a ton of value for a certain subset of people.