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

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#261

Post by Silhouette » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:25 PM UTC

berberich wrote: post #158

Someone1234 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No disrespect meant to PawelDecowski at all (his CC number validator looks awesome, I'd use it) but he couldn't monetize it even if they he wished to -- too much competition in that space. Nobody is going to even pay $1 when they can just go on GitHub and find several similar libraries which do somewhat similar things. I think £55 a year is best case scenario. At least it likely covers web-hosting costs.

You can absolutely charge money for this if you solve a painful problem for businesses: http://creditcardjs.com

But you're still up against freely available libraries that let a web developer build similar functionality, as as jquery.payment from the folks at Stripe:

https://github.com/stripe/jquery.payment

While it's not a completely like-for-like comparison, I suspect it will be tough to justify $299 per single web site for many businesses that might use these tools in the first place. Personally, I'd want solid data about conversion rates to back up the marketing on the creditcard.js website before I'd consider spending real money on anything like this.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#262

Post by erikb » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:29 PM UTC

bengarvey wrote: post #67

About $50-$100/month on http://kidsdungeonadventure.com a role playing game for pre-school age kids.

It should have a youtube video of some kind.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#263

Post by delinka » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:31 PM UTC

m-i-l wrote: post #258

Where I live (or have lived). Aim to get other people to pay for my mortgages. Started out by renting out a spare room, then moved and rented out the whole property, then moved again and rented out both properties. When I started out the rent was around GBP300 per month and the mortgage peaked at GBP450 per month (interest rates were unusually high at the time), and now (after many years) two lots of rental income to…

I've always thought that living my entire life "having others pay for mine" would be ideal. Rent out property, the margin pays for my own residence. Operate restaurants, the margins provide (at a minimum) my own meals. Get into the car rental business, it provides my transportation as needed...

Can't quite get myself to bootstrap this idea...

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#264

Post by xemoka » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:31 PM UTC

jain_chirag04 wrote: post #236

vilius wrote: post #34

$5k per month for 18 months in a row. Made a portfolio website for my girlfriend. Got positive feedback, refactored into Wordpress theme and published on ThemeForest. Not 100% passive as I spend 3-4 hours per week for answering support emails. ThemeForest is a perfect place for passive income if you are a website developer. At first it challenges your skills as you need to create the concept, design it and code it. T…

You should try pluginbag.com which offers much more than ThemeForest.

Except how could anyone tell? It wants you to sign up before anything? Or at least that's what it looks like, I'm not punching an e-mail address into a form just to see what's behind door number 1 when there's no information for a shopper and very little for a seller.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#265

Post by vilius » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:31 PM UTC

cpursley wrote: post #108

vilius wrote: post #34

$5k per month for 18 months in a row. Made a portfolio website for my girlfriend. Got positive feedback, refactored into Wordpress theme and published on ThemeForest. Not 100% passive as I spend 3-4 hours per week for answering support emails. ThemeForest is a perfect place for passive income if you are a website developer. At first it challenges your skills as you need to create the concept, design it and code it. T…

Interesting - you've basically accomplished the 4-hour workweek : ) I've been considering doing the same thing with some of my sites. Do you have any tips on refactoring something we've designed and selling it on a theme marketplace? Are there specific site features that sell better than others and/or are requested a lot? Do themes with wordpress/php included sell better than ones without? I'm very curious - thanks!

Except that I have a full time job, so I end up at 44-hour workweek. Not that I do not enjoy it :-)

If you look at other themes on TF you will notice how many features they have. Building your first theme with the same amount of features would be very time consuming. I went with "Getting Real" approach and focused on doing the fundamentals right. At the time I launched there were no customisable fonts, colors or sidebars (something that most of other themes had). But it still sold well, because people liked the way it showcased their portfolios.

Do a Wordpress theme. It sells much better than HTML only and selling price is 4 times higher.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#266

Post by mrfusion » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:32 PM UTC

rk0567 wrote: post #198

mrfusion wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you've contacted the builder communities on reddit? there's a build a pc one, and a build me a pc, something like that.

No. I tried once but didn't get any response. I submitted there and received some feedback though.

I know on build me a pc (forget exact URL), they have a standardized format they paste in. I wonder if you outputted that format, maybe they would take it up?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#267

Post by polimux » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:34 PM UTC

corobo wrote: post #217

polimux wrote: post #184

About 500€ a month with automated soccer bets. It's 100% passive but it' still a gamble. So it coud be over in a day with some bad luck ...

Any chance of going into detail on this one for the curious? Automated in what way, putting bets on low odds results? Through an API? If anything I'm interested more in how it works than how I can do it myself!

I have some bots placing bets for me 24/7 on betfair. They provide a nice API for that (https://developer.betfair.com/default/api-s-and-services/spo...).

The bots written in JS running on a node.js server. The strategy (bet pattern) I use is actually pretty simple. But it's not betting on low odds only, tryed that and failed :)

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#268

Post by jasonkester » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:34 PM UTC

It's been a while since I shared my S3stat [1] numbers. I prefer to talk in vague handwavy terms rather than concrete numbers, but this should give a picture of the trajectory:

6 months: Regularly covering server expenses (which were ~$50-100/month at that point).

18 months: Would have paid for me to live nicely on the beach in Thailand.

30 months: Would cover my rent (and nothing else) at a nice apartment in a major city.

40 months: Passed the monthly take-home pay from my first (non-software) Engineering job out of college.

60 months: About what I'd have been making had I stuck with that first job out of college for 10 years.

80 months: Roughly a Senior Dev salary anywhere but the Bay Area.

As I noted a few years back for the first version of this list, this is for a SaaS subscription product that I built with the explicit goal of having a low-level income stream that I didn't have to put much time into. Early on, there were periods where I worked 80 hours or more per month to get the infrastructure ticking away to my satisfaction. These days, it requires maybe six hours of my attention each month.

This year, though, I've been back to full speed (meaning high single digit hours per week) building out and releasing a bunch of new features.

[1] https://www.s3stat.com/

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#269

Post by smileysteve » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:36 PM UTC

th1agofm wrote: post #110

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...

I advise you don't focus too much in dividends but spread it in emerging markets, gold and others. In the short term it looks like a bad idea, because you could have more income coming from your dividends, but when a crisis or something hits, it's worth it.

Gold is a store of value, it's not very likely to beat inflation.

A dividend stock is likely to beat inflation, (but not with as much growth as a growth stock.) Theoretically, if you're only using the dividends, it's just as good in downturns (as long as it's not GE/GM/BAC with huge non core financing arms).

My risk adverse holding is a major, regulated, electricity provider. If it goes out of business, it's likely that I also don't have electricity.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#270

Post by anonu » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 3:36 PM UTC

Wrote a basic strategy to sell call spreads and put spreads on various index ETFs. I only sell near-dated stuff 50% returns on your capital. Not exactly "passive" - but with enough tweaks to the strategy you can get this to run with fairly minimal input time.