What was your best passive income in 2014? • Hacker News Board

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#71

Post by damian2000 » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:29 PM UTC

neil_s wrote: post #39

instakill wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's cool, but how do you deal with speeding fines?

In India, traffic cops don't usually use tickets, they accept fines or bribes on the spot in a traffic stop.

Same in a lot of south east asia, Indonesia for example. I experienced it as a tourist on a scooter.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#72

Post by eli » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:29 PM UTC

vetler wrote: post #65

dpcx wrote: post #27

Dividends on stocks. I've never had an idea good enough to make an app out of, or build a company around. So instead, I started investing a small amount of my paycheck in to my brokerage account. Buying lots of stock in Dividend Kings[1], I've earned $25 this year, with another $20 through October. It's not a lot, but I'm fully thinking long-term. 1: http://long-term-investments.blogspot.com/2013/02/15-Best-Di...

Have you compared this to just putting the money in a high-interest savings account?

What counts as high-interest these days? Half a percent?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#73

Post by baudehlo » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:29 PM UTC

baudehlo wrote: post #68

I started EmailItIn[1] to allow people to email files to Google Drive, then added DropBox and SkyDrive/OneDrive support. Premium accounts bring in about $200/m right now, and it's steadily rising. Support is low - though it took a while to build the initial technology. I get a lot of traction from realtors and lawyers. I've tried paid advertising but the conversions are too low to make it worth it. Initial goal was "…

I forgot to add - my next project is likely to be re-writing DVDSpanner (an application that automatically distributes and writes files across multiple disks) to support the latest OSX versions. I will be making that a paid app. I was inspired by the recent story about VirtualHostX.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#74

Post by borplk » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:29 PM UTC

martianmartin wrote: post #3

hopefully the idea that i'm working on right now...:)

well what is it?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#75

Post by jawns » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:30 PM UTC

I am the author of two books: "Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform on Your Kid" (http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com), which came out in October, and "Correlated: Surprising Connections Between Seemingly Unrelated Things" (http://www.correlated.org), which came out earlier this month.

One thing I didn't realize when I started pitching the first book was that there would be "passive income" in addition to the book advance and royalties.

For instance, I've had three foreign-rights deals for "Experimenting With Babies," and the only additional work I had to do was put my signature on some paperwork.

And I have Amazon referral links on both websites, pointing to each book on Amazon. Those links generate a monthly average of about $40 in commissions per month, although my monthly high has been as much as $630.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#76

Post by chrisa » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:30 PM UTC

$500/month from "Play Piano HD" iPad app: http://mobilesort.com/play_piano.html I built it two years ago, and have only had to do minor bug fixes to keep it up to date. It stays on the top iPad music charts in at least a couple of countries, so it does ok without any marketing.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#77

Post by fookyong » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:30 PM UTC

$1000 a month on book sales.

I was surprised since I'm a software guy I didn't write the book to make money, I just did it for something to do.

Although my software business makes much more money, I was surprised at how truly "zero maintenance" book sales are. My software I'm constantly fixing, tweaking and improving (which I enjoy). The book is just "out there" and is priced at $30 per copy. I sell > 1 per day.

The book: http://www.growthhackinghandbook.com

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#78

Post by tjtang » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:31 PM UTC

fabiendem wrote: post #24

Not proud of it, but around $500/mo thanks to 3 white label dating websites. Easy money, no maintenance needed for 2 years now... Could make much more with some time invested in it!

Problem with white label sites is that you still need to do a whole lot of marketing on your end. How do you compete with the big sites?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#79

Post by eob » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:32 PM UTC

baudehlo wrote: post #68

I started EmailItIn[1] to allow people to email files to Google Drive, then added DropBox and SkyDrive/OneDrive support. Premium accounts bring in about $200/m right now, and it's steadily rising. Support is low - though it took a while to build the initial technology. I get a lot of traction from realtors and lawyers. I've tried paid advertising but the conversions are too low to make it worth it. Initial goal was "…

Without paid advertising, how do you advertise the service? I've created a micro-service like this in the past, and where I really fell short was getting the right people on the site. AdWord conversions were also too low in my case.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#80

Post by damian2000 » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:33 PM UTC

Yardlink wrote: post #10

ghhutch wrote: post #6

Built an e-commerce site, pro bono, for an acquaintance and get a profit share each pay period. Occasionally I monitor, upgrade, enhance, and fix it up which results in more income. Great Situation!

Take great care to sign contracts for anything significant you expect to get. I did something like this once and after spending a long time enhancing it, suddenly the acquantance decided he didn't need to share the profit anymore.

Although you'd expect being the dev and possibly admin, you hold some control over the other party?