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Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

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Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#161

Post by Tichy »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #147
Tichy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you are looking for a MS Excel spreadsheet which has ever been mailed by Bob to Cindy" That's how I (unenthusiastically) described my job as a Java developer in the first decade of the 21st century. Not sure if by now all Excel sheets have been "consolidated". In any case mobile apps seem to be the current wave.

Not sure if by now all Excel sheets have been "consolidated". Pardon me while I wipe tears from my eyes. Not only are there plenty of spreadsheets still wandering about, but I wouldn't be surprised if many decade-old Java applications have reverted to spreadsheets, formally or under the table. ("Officially we have this website, but since the website guy left the company John actually tracks the definitive list of rec…

Not making a case against Excel, more against J2EE consulting really...

Although I admit I have no idea how it could be possible to create a bug free Excel sheet. It's funny that people avoid programming like the plague but somehow manage to produce Excel sheets, which seems to be a million times harder.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#162

Post by webbie »

euroclydon wrote: post #128
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…

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…

User generated content is one way to grow content footprint at scale, you just have to invest in seed content and then moderation. My site (also in education space) http://www.TestDesigner.com has about 150K pages indexed in Google with 90% of the content coming from users.

SEO is not just about content though. Huge part of Patrick's success comes from link building via his very popular blog and his personal brand, this is the part that I think is harder to replicate.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#163

Post by [deleted] »

cageface wrote: post #89
wilfra wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've been living in Vietnam for more than two years now and there is no way I would put any significant amount of money in a Vietnamese bank. Interest rates have already fallen to under 10%. What's worse - just about everybody I've talked to that understands the Vietnamese economy thinks that the banks here are headed for a serious insolvency crisis. A number of expats here that had planned on living comfortably off…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#164

Post by kehers »

captainbenises wrote: post #125
scw wrote: post #78

A service I'd pay for: Mailing list management that doesn't suck, and isn't Google Groups. Something that can be backed up, and has a web interface. Mailman is still king in this niche, and I'm not entirely sure why.

This is a good idea, surely someone has already made a good mailing list tool?

There is basecamp's breeze. For some reasons, it's shutting down August though. basecamp.com/breeze

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#165

Post by [deleted] »

sneak wrote: post #70
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.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#167

Post by nnoitra »

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…

How do you even learn that?

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#168

Post by honzzz »

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…

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

That sounds interesting but do you think it's doable for someone without a business degree or something like that? I mean... I am fascinated by everything that's related to bitcoin but I never felt like I could do anything about that because the learning curve is just too steep. I studied sociology so I have some statistical data analysis background but I always felt that competing with guys who major in Economics would be like hobby cyclist trying to beat pros at Tour de France.

Could you please share some more info about your previous experience with trading, your educational background and anything that you think is important? It would be tremendously interesting to me.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#169

Post by helen842000 »

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…

Hey, I couldn't find your previous emlipo submission, I was going to post feedback there. It looks useful! I have a few blogs and getting spam addresses is a pain!

It took me a while to understand at first. I think the key word that's missing from your tag line is 'address' as it currently says 'verifies that an e-mail exists'

I immediately thought that was referring to searching for a specific e-mail message in an inbox.

I think the name would stick in mind better if the gmail envelope letter M was removed to make the name easier to read. I read it the first few times as Emplio not EmLIPO. It's only when I saw it written outside of the logo I realised.

I tested the demo but it didn't work (maybe too many requests have been going through it?) I tried on mobile Safari and IE 10. Both times I typed in an address, hit the button and the page just refreshed with no result. EDIT: Just seen your comment re: the demo being offline.

The navigation links at the top are very pale and tough to see (that maybe just browser related)

This could easily bring in some decent income for you. I think you just need to target it towards it's main benefit - reducing spam. The word spam isn't used on your home page at all.

HNers may have said it's 'little code' - if it's so simple then why doesn't it already exist? When something like that is packaged as a service with good documentation it's valuable. Perhaps you should increase prices. You may want to consider a forum manager / blogger level with a simplified integration process and instead of throttling on a per hour basis, could they have X number of api requests available pcm. Most people know the signup numbers to their site but can't control how they are spaced out. Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#170

Post by tocomment »

smartician wrote: post #152
gfodor wrote: post #15

Save $200k and buy a 33% leveraged muni bond closed end fund, which are currently yielding approx 6% tax free at a 10% discount due to the recent bond selloff. Disclaimer: if interest rates rise you will be unable to reclaim your principal but, generally speaking, this income stream should be pretty safe for the foreseeable future. And of course, $1000 a month today is not going to be as much in the future if inflati…

That was my strategy for the past years, except the muni bonds are just one egg in the basket. I also hold business development companies, REITs, a high dividend stock ETF, corporate junk bonds (US and international). Right now I'm earning around $1,200 per month from $200k principal.

What REITs do you like? What are the most pressing risks you see with REITs right now?
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