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Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

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51–60 of 180 posts

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#51
One way is to write ebooks and sell them on Amazon. If you write things that don't get dated, there is no further work on your part, Amazon just deposits money in your account.

It's highly unlikely you'd make $1000/mo on a single ebook, but if you write several, the trickle from each adds up.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#52
I hate to be the cynic (lies), but there's no such thing as a "passive income". The moment you put your service online you'll have active maintenance and support, even if you don't charge for it.

The other problem is that if you solve a problem well, it's actually extremely hard to avoid the business scaling. Once the revenue goes past 1k/month, it'll carry on going, and few people can bring themselves to remove purchase links.

I know that's essentially what you're asking, but my answer would be no, it's unlikely that you can find a model that fits exactly the criteria you have.

I notice many people posting ideas, rather than low-maintenance ideas.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#53
post #40

If you have 1 - 2 hours per day and you're willing to learn anything, learn to write and build an audience. An audience is a more valuable asset than a product. Once you have an audience you can launch anything you want.

totally agree with this. learning how to market is underrated big time. i'm taking this route now by writing first, building an audience and then see how i can launch things later on

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#54

I hate to be the cynic (lies), but there's no such thing as a "passive income". The moment you put your service online you'll have active maintenance and support, even if you don't charge for it. The other problem is that if you solve a problem well, it's actually extremely hard to avoid the business scaling. Once the revenue goes past 1k/month, it'll carry on going, and few people can bring themselves to remove purc…

You'll have maintenance and support especially if you don't charge for that.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#55
Two ideas.

1. I desperately want to be able to send a link to somebody and have them be able to book a N-minute meeting on my calendar (CalDav) without any further interaction. I have spent probably several hours trying out products, all of which suck. I currently spend $30/month on a tool that really doesn't even work.

2. The enterprise IM (CampFire, HipChat, etc.) is pretty well done at this point, but the "group chat for the somewhat public" space isn't. If I am supporting an open-source project the only game in town is IRC, which is hard to use for people who need support. If I want to have a permanent chatroom with 15 software developers that I know socially and allow people to drop in, there's no system for that.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#56

Here is a problem that I would pay a subscription for a great solution to: Cron as a service. Sometimes when you set up a simple codestack on Heroku or Parse or similar, it would be great to be able to specify a web hook that should be called repeatedly just to run maintenance code, summarize scores, clean up logs etc. If you have root access you can set up cron but this is not always the case, and I think it would b…

I use one of these for various side tasks, because I got sick of having to run cron jobs for servers that I might switch between or kill off, and I run a lot of cron jobs. I also like the idea of offloading the cron hits to an independent service, so my servers focus strictly on more important tasks.

http://cronless.com

It's the first one I found that I liked and was reliable. It's very modestly priced as well.

I wouldn't suggest this for passive income however, as cron is a very low cost, value added type product. It's difficult to charge much for it stand-alone. You'd want to bundle a suite of services, like ping / uptime, cron, etc etc. into one.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#57

Here is a problem that I would pay a subscription for a great solution to: Cron as a service. Sometimes when you set up a simple codestack on Heroku or Parse or similar, it would be great to be able to specify a web hook that should be called repeatedly just to run maintenance code, summarize scores, clean up logs etc. If you have root access you can set up cron but this is not always the case, and I think it would b…

> Reliability is key, your service needs to never ever fail.

Then that sounds like it need a serious full time commitment. The OP seems to be looking for a specific category of ideas that require minimal maintenance, rather than any ideas.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#58

I've also been thinking of the exact same thing myself, something which will generate enough profit to pay off bills, buy something nice and invest a little in growing the idea. Recently I've been working on https://www.emlipo.com which was scrutinized by HN for essentially being "little code nobody would pay for". So I've not really wanted to work on that now. Still, there will be something out there I'm sure. By th…

I missed your show HN thread, sorry. But for what it's worth I think your service looks cool. Your pricing looks too low to me - perhaps a sign of your lack of confidence in the idea - I think you could do with some higher-volume packages too.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#59

Cut your spending so you have a few hundred extra per month. Invest it in SPY (an index stock for the S&P 500). Over time, you'll build up passive income. One reasonable way to cut spending is to sell your car if you have financed it, and buy a car you can afford to pay cash for. Financing is a huge drain on your cash.

That really depends on the overall situation. Financing a car that you could afford in cash might well be less risky than having too little cash on hand for emergencies.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#60

Two ideas. 1. I desperately want to be able to send a link to somebody and have them be able to book a N-minute meeting on my calendar (CalDav) without any further interaction. I have spent probably several hours trying out products, all of which suck. I currently spend $30/month on a tool that really doesn't even work. 2. The enterprise IM (CampFire, HipChat, etc.) is pretty well done at this point, but the "group c…

I believe HipChat has this concept of 'Guest Access'. Won't that be helpful, just curious.
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