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Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

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Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#21

Post by ctek »

I created a simple SaaS app, https://www.pageblox.com/ that makes $300 dollars a month. I think that in a year or slightly more it could break a thousand a month if I market aggressively. I think I was able to pull it off by targeting a very specific problem and its accompanying keyword phrase: "css layout generator". Over-simplifying, the steps are: 1. find a problem that people and have and its niche, low competition keyword that get about 5000-8000 searches a month 2. build a web based app that solves that problem 3. grow your traffic 4. a/b test and iterate

Marketing is by far the hardest part!

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#22

Post by cglee »

1. Identify a very niche pain for businesses. 2. Make phone calls every day to the people making buying decisions for that pain. Try to close the deal, even without a product. 3. Start building after your first deal closes. 4. As you build, keep calling and closing. 5. Script out common support issues as you encounter them, and offload to VA.

My previous startup generates many times more passive income than $1k/mo, and I did it the "hard" way by building the product first, then try to sell to customers. Also, don’t underestimate support costs.

Finally, keep in mind that you'll probably have to start an actual business in order to open a business bank account to collect money, and you'll have all the fees and legal obligations that goes along with owning a business, so your $1k/mo can easily turn into $500/mo after all that jazz.

Edit: I'll also add to stay away from targeting consumers directly, and instead go after businesses. Much easier to charge $199/mo to a real estate broker than $9/mo to Joe Consumer. The former won't blink an eye for a truly useful service, whereas you'll get overwhelmed with support issues on the latter.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#24

Post by jasonkester »

mynameishere wrote: post #11

If there was some method of turning a skill into passive income with any reliability, people would replicate the idea again and again and so get 1,000,000/month eventually. You're asking for the impossible.

False.

Imagine you had a magic formula to create businesses that make $5,000/month and only take up 10 hours/week of your time. Wave that wand once and you have a $60k salary and a thoroughly leisure class lifestyle. Wave it twice and you're living quite nicely without really breaking a sweat. Most of us stopped there.

Notice that every time you use your magic formula, you take away another chunk of your free time. By the time you've done it four times, you've got a full time job.

That's the reason most of us are smart enough not to build $1,000,000/month worth of micro businesses. If that's the sort of money you'd prefer to make, you'll need to find another way to get it. But don't knock the magic formula. It works really well. You'd be doing yourself a disservice to believe otherwise.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#25

Post by Sealy »

I made a lot of passive income by coding trading bots for bitcoin.

Its a steep learning curve but if you are willing to learn, it can be very profitable.

Like you, I can code confidently so during my morning commute I would read books about trading and economics. In the evening I would play with bits of code interfacing with broker API's. Within 3 months I had a working bot that automatically traded away as I slept and went about my day job (passive enough for you?).

Fast forward 6 months with a couple of hours coding a week refining my algorithms, my bots earned me more than double what I made in my day job that whole year.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#26

Post by hkmurakami »

do any kind of freelance/consulting work then invest the process into high dividend stocks and eventually shift to bonds as interest rates rise in the next few years. you can find quite a few large cap, stable companies on the cheap that yield on the order of 5%. take into account the lower tax rates on dividends and your real income rate becomes higher.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#27

Post by aaron695 »

I never get why these vague I want money posts get to the front page, how is this hacking? Wanting more money, for little work? That's status quo.

Anyway stop wasting your life on stuff would be my tip.

Or

Learn to cook well(healthy and tasty) over a few months, it'll save you money and health costs. Great tax free not wasting money passive habit to pick up.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#28

Post by chipsy »

Find a very boring problem that you can automate into a product that needs minimal support.

By "very boring" I mean: necessary for a certain line of business and not well addressed by current competitors and not inherently interesting to work on and full of ugly gotchas and corner cases.

In general, solutions to these problems will be very profitable because they represent untapped markets. The only difficulties are: finding a problem sufficiently boring, and how much of it you can tolerate before it crushes your soul.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#30

Post by jacquesm »

Passive income isn't. Lots of little projects may look like passive income but almost all of them (not saying it can't be done but I just have not seen any) have some kind of overhead.

It may be better to search for something that can be started small but that you can eventually scale.

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