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Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

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Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#61

Post by PedroCandeias »

reinhardt wrote: post #47

There are several replies that start with "find a problem". How do you find problems small enough for a single developer to tackle but not trivial enough for having people willing to pay for a solution?

I would suggest leaving your comfort zone.

Developers like myself have a tendency to reinvent the wheel, as in, solve problems like online team chat over and over again. Because that's what we know first hand and are comfortable with.

The webapp for online marketeers I'm currently building, with feedback from a friend in the industry, caters to a bit of a niche but I'll probably have far greater success with it because that niche is quite underserved. I would never had thought of that particular idea had I not wondered off outside my comfort zone and talked to people in other areas.

I don't expect my project to become a passive income stream. It'll take work. But maybe the same method can be applied to find a problem which has a trivial, low-maintenance solution.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#62

Post by tpsc »

hayksaakian wrote: post #9

If you have any kind of social media following, you could exploit it with affiliate links. Someone posted a good article about finding niches in the app store recently. Something simple that satisfies an unmet need could earn decent ad money.

http://www.trevormckendrick.com/how-to-choose-a-profitable-n...

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#63

Post by adventured »

WalterBright wrote: post #49

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.

This isn't a good strategy. First of all the timing factor alone can hammer your principle (particularly with stocks sitting at all time highs).

If you have a skill that is valuable, you're far better off leveraging into that, for the returns are massive by comparison to the puny returns in stock indices. If you can earn just 10% every year in stocks, you're a wizard that should be working on Wall Street earning millions.

It's radically easier to invest $100 into hosting ($10 or $20 / month at digital ocean), build a service, and make $1,000 a month (a huge return on the invested capital) - than to earn a mere 10% per year in stocks.

$1,000 / month = $12,000 per year. To put together $12k per year from stocks, at a 10% return (which is a great return per year historically), you'd need $120,000 in capital to begin with.

Scenario 1) you need $120k in cash to put to work in stocks to yield just $1,000 per month average in new capital, assuming a great historical return (and assuming you don't get demolished by a market down turn). And if you're riding dividends, you're going to be hard pressed to consistently yield 10% every year even from the best dividend investments (such as public trusts, real estate vehicles etc).

Scenario 2) invest $20 per month into a hosting account at digital ocean and build a service that yields $1k per month in income.

#1 is silly compared to #2

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#65

Post by vacri »

contingencies wrote: post #5

Work someplace. Live frugally. Don't spend the money. Leave it in term deposits or other low risk, relatively high yield (ie. at least above inflation) locations. Rinse and repeat. (Recently, I heard that Vietnam offers solid rates on term deposits in foreign currencies.)

I went to Vietnam nearly two years ago, and the inflation rate at the time was 22%. I'm not a financial guy, but inherently that doesn't sound low-risk.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#66

Post by PedroCandeias »

drewcrawford wrote: post #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 c…

1. Just out of curiosity, could you please share what that tool is?

2. Like iffyuva said, I believe HipChat has that option. As does Campfire. The thing is maybe those groups aren't willing to pay for such a solution?

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#67

Post by ploureiro »

Sealy wrote: post #25

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 a…

Can you recommend any specific books? (on trading) Cheers

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#68

Post by nichols »

Have you tried getting reincarnated as a rich guy?

Alternately, you could create your own crypto-currency and get chumps to bid it up.

Buy some oregano and try to sell it as marijuana.

If all else fails, you could try doing some actual work.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#69

Post by mmahemoff »

martinkallstrom wrote: post #42

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…

This could be nice for small apps. The problem with higher-scale apps is you want to handle requests as quick as possible - they should be well under a second. And under typical server configurations, it will time out altogether after maybe 30-60 seconds.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#70

Post by sneak »

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.

Uhh, it's called a tech startup. Just because most of them fail doesn't mean it's asking the impossible. This very site exists because even a tiny positive hitrate is sufficient for significant positive return.

Everything from AdWords to Uber is just "people replicating the idea" into $1M+/month.

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