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Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

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Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#131

Post by euroclydon »

patio11 wrote: post #129
euroclydon wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that Bingo Card Creator is very amenable to organic SEO. Not only that, but the process of SEO actually expands the product offering at the same time. That's the beauty of it. Creating a new bingo card is as simple as pasting a bunch of related words into a form and maybe a description paragraph, but now you have a new page full of words (hello Google) and you've increased the real value of the prod…

I think it would be challenging to duplicate Patrick's extremely low-cost and synergistic SEO strategy with a SAAS offering that was not so text-centric. Many people have reported to me that variations on it have worked out quite well for them. I mean, yes, you might spend 10X or 100X what BCC does on content creation (~$3k over 8 years), but that's very justifiable for a lot of SaaS businesses. Other people report t…

I might have more precisely said: I imagined myself to be creating a BCC clone of sorts with www.makecupcakewrappers.com but found that trying your style of SEO/Content-Creation often resulted in ugly repetitive pages, where creating genuinely new content is expensive and labor intensive due to the graphical nature of the product.

But I didn't quite realize that going in. That's why I point out how elegantly conducive your product is to Scaleable Content Creation.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#132

Post by patio11 »

kp27 wrote: post #126
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…

2 Q's: 1. "Find or create one proprietary data source" Any other examples & how do you monetize on this? 2. "you want passive options but more active options, like selling consulting, are things that might well fit" You're doing a great job at it looking at your year in review, but don't you need an established name with years of blog/material to get these sorts of rates? Thank you!

1a) "Hey data.gov, what information do you have available?"

http://catalog.data.gov/dataset?groups=consumer9350

The very first data set is health insurance estimates broken down by zip code. There's a super-lucrative market for you, but that one might be a bit competitive for you trying to crack it in 2013. Let's see, scroll down a few results...

ftp://ftp.cfda.gov/datagov/programs-full-datagov.csv

That's a full listing of government programs which are designed to give people money. You could transform that opaque, disorganized CSV file into an easier-to-consume .org site to educate people on how to apply for government grants, right? And you could run ads on that site, right? (I think it is likely that the type of ads you'll get on that specific site would be scummy as heck, but there's another 75,000 CSV files listed on data.gov, so do a bit more searching and find a better one.)

1b) Assuming you have picked good questions to answer, you monetize by connecting people who have demonstrable interest in spending money to people they can spend that money with. That could be directly with you, if you have a product which answers their needs. It could be with other folks, via selling leads. It could just be with Big Daddy G, by putting AdSense on the site, bankrolled by people who have the business model that you haven't implemented yet.

2) I actually wound down the consulting business. Long story, but short version is that I want to focus more on my own stuff. Having years of material and successes I could point to certainly helped me land gigs, but way back in the day, the only thing I had going for me was that BCC appeared to work and I could explain why. If you hypothetically had a successful side project, that can probably be parlayed into "I could do something like this for you, where it will be substantially more effective because it will take advantage of the X, Y, and Z advantages your business has that mine didn't."

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#133

Post by autoreverse »

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…

My weekend project from 2009 does this: http://www.crondroid.com/

One free daily cron, others paid on request (please use the contact form).

500 subscriber crons per day. We use it for in-house and client projects so have an interest in reliability ;-)

Accounts/dashboard/self-service will be added if/when needed (currently email does the trick).

All comments appreciated.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#134

Post by trusche »

bulatb wrote: post #107
jbrooksuk wrote: post #46

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…

That semicolon (;) in your footer should be a colon (:). [0] [0] http://i.imgur.com/VHYGbSd.png

Same in the tagline, or better yet, just remove it there. Interesting idea and nice site.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#135

Post by tmzt »

euroclydon wrote: post #131
patio11 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be challenging to duplicate Patrick's extremely low-cost and synergistic SEO strategy with a SAAS offering that was not so text-centric. Many people have reported to me that variations on it have worked out quite well for them. I mean, yes, you might spend 10X or 100X what BCC does on content creation (~$3k over 8 years), but that's very justifiable for a lot of SaaS businesses. Other people report t…

I might have more precisely said: I imagined myself to be creating a BCC clone of sorts with www.makecupcakewrappers.com but found that trying your style of SEO/Content-Creation often resulted in ugly repetitive pages, where creating genuinely new content is expensive and labor intensive due to the graphical nature of the product. But I didn't quite realize that going in. That's why I point out how elegantly conduciv…

If you are using words in your cupcake wrappers, maybe find some way to make them searchable text (SVG for instance). Also something like theme groups (birthday, Halloween, etc.) might help. Also magnetic text as an alternative to a word cloud.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#136

Post by tmzt »

ctek wrote: post #21

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 competiti…

If you've got it working well, there are (smallish) hosting companies that might be interested in white labeling it, assuming it can support templating as well.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#138

Post by jacknews »

wilfra wrote: post #73
greghinch wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having spent some time in Vietnam, and spoken with residents (expats and natives), I would not invest my money there. Or most SEA countries. Too many tales of foreigners getting screwed with little to no recourse.

That's quite a sweeping (and inaccurate) generalization. I have no experience banking in Vietnam but what he said certainly applies to both China and Thailand, if you stick to the largest banks (ICBC and Construction Bank in China are both probably safer than any US bank - Bangkok Bank, Bank of Ayudhya (owned by GE) and Siam Commercial are all rock solid in Thailand - along with HSBC in both countries). Singapore and…

It may be sweeping but it's certainly not inaccurate. Try Cambodia for example. People lost their deposits not that long ago. Not much in the way of government safeguards, certainly not for foreigners. Indeed, the government are the biggest crooks, and I don't mean that in the weak "Banksters" sense that applies to western govt, I mean a good percentage are ex warlords and gansters, lead by same.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#139

Post by Sealy »

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…

To answer a few questions:

I actually ran 2 different bots with a few variations of each (for different brokers).

My first bot was an arbitrage bot running on different markets, USD, GBP and AUD. There is still huge opportunity to make money using arbitrage as I've not seen many people do it well. The trouble comes from transferring the funds between brokers, there is often a cost incurred that you must consider and price into any profit equation. @skarmklart, yes the payoff compared to the trading volume is small, but it is low risk and almost guaranteed profit.

I ran the arb bots for a few months and made around $15,000 after which I decided to step it up a level. (I started with $100)

Trading and investments always consist of a balance between risk and return. The risk for arbitrage is very low, and so the return is also low (but consistent). The return for technical analysis trading is much greater but the risks are also larger.

My second bot was programmed to take advantage of technical analysis. I realised that in the bitcoin world it is actually much simpler than people lead you to believe. I set up a database to capture price feeds, then used some free technical analysis tools to produce buy and sell signals automatically. I then plugged the signal feed into my trading api (which I wrote from my original bot) to execute my orders.

Here's some useful links: http://ta-lib.org

Books: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator gives you an insight into trading psychology

Market Wizards (there are 3 books in this series): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_Wizards

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#140

Post by martinkallstrom »

rmc wrote: post #109
davidjgraph wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

100% uptime is impossible. Remember you can get 99% uptime (2 nines) if you're down for 4 days in a year.

"Never ever" is at least two nines.. perhaps three. 4 days of consecutive downtime would probably hurt a Cron as a service-service a lot in terms of user happiness.
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