Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 180 posts

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#111

Post by skarmklart »

guy_c wrote: post #108
patio11 wrote: post #71

Some options: 1) Do you have freelancing or other experience which has exposed you to multiple people with similar problems? For example, have you implemented the same "$()#% authentication system for a web application 20 times? Package up that one little piece of the puzzle into a scalable way to teach people to do it without needing to have you or someone similarly skilled on their team. Common form factors include…

As an aside to (2). You might not even need to go as far as creating and marketing a full SaaS. I know small businesses that are paying $100-$1000/month for small little services or manually doing tasks at similar costs. Automate/replace their stuff with some bespoke code and share the savings.

The trick is to find them and get them to talk candidly, though.

Example: not everyone wants to admit they have problems in their business, so you have to approach the conversation from an indirect angle.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#112

Post by dangero »

Pick an app on the iPhone that is currently selling well and you feel you could build, then make a competing app. It's boring, but it works and it's a good confidence builder. A lot of the advice in this thread is to build some cool new tech, but I'm gonna say that's a bad idea because it's very risky to do that. Sounds like you're trying to find a reliable way to make money. Also, online offerings will need constant babysitting to make sure the site is up etc. iPhone apps on the other hand can be fully self contained with just little updates for new iOS versions and phones needed.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#113

Post by skarmklart »

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…

Was it arbitrage or trading with some risk involved? For the former, there is this: https://github.com/maxme/bitcoin-arbitrage

I've tried it, and even extended it to support a certain Swedish exchange, but it seems to me the pay off is small and the unreliability of the exchanges means it's not true arbitrage.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#114

Post by josscrowcroft »

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…

I use Pingdom's 1-minute monitoring for this, which is included on the Free plan. No joke, it hits up my pseudo-cron Task Processing route which fires up and reschedules all tasks needing doing, and it never fails. And it provides uptime and failure reports on my scheduled tasks!

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#115

Post by skarmklart »

patio11 wrote: post #87
aaron695 wrote: post #27

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.

Consider it the creative application of computer code to systemic weaknesses in the global economy, with a clearly defined success function which is fairly difficult to fudge. That might help explain some of the attraction. (There's also the "If you only know W-2 employees, then making money by a legitimate means other than a day job feels like cheating", and for some reason a lot of hackers like winning by rules exp…

For me, it doesn't feel like cheating. The way I see it, the normal way to earn money (ie employment) is the inefficient/underpaid way.

It's not cheating if you're merely getting your fair share :)

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#116

Post by thenomad »

skarmklart wrote: post #110
patio11 wrote: post #71

Some options: 1) Do you have freelancing or other experience which has exposed you to multiple people with similar problems? For example, have you implemented the same "$()#% authentication system for a web application 20 times? Package up that one little piece of the puzzle into a scalable way to teach people to do it without needing to have you or someone similarly skilled on their team. Common form factors include…

Shameless plug: I'm compiling methods for finding those SaaS patterns: http://howtofindsaasideas.com/ (If you're a HNer, respond to the signup email and I'll give you an extra discount once it comes out.)

Given your market, it may be of interest to know that anyone with a NoScript plugin who goes to your site (on FF, anyway) sees a blank page until they enable Javascript.

That's likely to cost you a few sales - particularly since you're in the "make money online" space, people tend to be a little hesitant to enable foreign code.

I've signed up, btw.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#117

Post by josscrowcroft »

davidjgraph wrote: post #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 purc…

Totally agree - in my experience, passive income is anything but passive. It's more involved than most 'real jobs' I've worked.

Have you tried negotiating tax forms, outsourcing (ha) customer support, maintaining a partially hacked-together codebase, or even having legal documents written that cost an entire month's salary?

There are a great many unsexy things that need doing when you run your own business, which regular jobs shield you from (my next 8 weeks' task list is currently averaging 300 items) - that's the trade-off. And then there's the 12-hour days you'll put in for months, while setting it up...

PS: it's so worth it.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#118

Post by thenomad »

dangero wrote: post #112

Pick an app on the iPhone that is currently selling well and you feel you could build, then make a competing app. It's boring, but it works and it's a good confidence builder. A lot of the advice in this thread is to build some cool new tech, but I'm gonna say that's a bad idea because it's very risky to do that. Sounds like you're trying to find a reliable way to make money. Also, online offerings will need constant…

YES.

New = risky. Risky = bad if you're just looking for income.

One of the biggest lightbulb moments I ever had in online business was when I realised that if I saw a whole bunch of competitors in a given niche, that meant there was definitely profit to be made there.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#119

Post by thenomad »

davidjgraph wrote: post #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 purc…

Sell an information product. They don't really have to have either maintainance or support.

I have an ebook out there that I haven't touched for about 2 years. I check the email address associated with it about once every three months. It's still selling.

However, you are absolutely right - maintainance and support can turn a passive product into something Not Passive At All. It's something to watch out for very carefully if you genuinely want passive income.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#120

Post by score »

I recently bought a Blackberry because of its built in encryption features. It's a great phone but is missing two popular apps: Evernote and Audible.

If you made an app to substitute for either one and charged a few bucks for it, you'll make passive revenues for a long time. Not only that, you'll be loved by crackberry users the world over.

Seriously, how many business types subscribe to Audible and to Evernote? And people are looking for more secure communications. It's an incredible opportunity.

Post reply on HN