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What was your best passive income in 2014?

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Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#431

I build small web apps, like http://blankpage.io/ Since the last thread on this I've cut my costs from $200 a month to about $5 a month, but it took months to rewrite the backend to do that. So still losing more than I'm making.

Excellent landing page! Love the use of typography! And, the animated gifs make it quickly obvious what your app does and how someone would use it. Best of luck!

Fixed it up a bit btw, love any feedback.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#432

In my best month, I did $3.3K in AdSense. No idea is stupid if you can monetize it. To explore projects outside of clients’ demands, we began a Labs initiative in March 2012. Think of it as a palate cleanser between client work. It's resulted in about ten completed projects. The formula is pretty simple. Find a problem, build a website to solve it. If it can be done in an afternoon, we don't even think about it. We j…

> Then we tried making a RainyCafe iOS app that we planned to sell for $1. Apple rejected it because they found that our Rainy Cafe app provides "a very limited amount of content and a very limited set of features" specifically because it "only contains two ambient noises."

It's a shame. I'd pay up to about 2 dollars for the app as it is now, up to 5 if it had:

- copy hinting at how I'm going to make much more money with this app thanks to increased productivity compared to working from home in silence and saved coffee/transportation money;

- copy bragging about all the binaural recording techniques and smart processing you used to achieve exceptional realism and deep immersion, hours of café recordings without discernible repetitions, etc.;

- actually those techniques implemented;

- higher customizability (pick rain/storm, ambient audio image characteristics).

There's http://www.coffitivity.com/, but frankly their sound plain sucks compared to yours. Their “Morning Murmur” has hissing recording noise all over it and unrealistic rubbish instead of stereo image. They do have an iOS app, but I wouldn't have it for free.

I realize their hiss may result from actually higher quality audio (though they still need to filter it out), but in this case even audio quality is of questionable matter. In a real café I can put my headphones on in order to reduce distraction, but in this case I can't, so the recording has to be pre-processed (certain frequencies subdued) or allowing to pick from a number of processing presets.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#433

My side project is www.stealengine.com It yields about $50 a month, I'm just happy it pays for itself and requires little maintenance. During Black Friday(November) it made $400, other months are a lot slower. I have not done any marketing and my friends like to use it so its fun.

This is great. Do you aggregate a lot of deal site or are you monitoring prices?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#434
Last year I made a wine cataloging app for iOS based personal gripes that I had with all the others out there. I just wanted something incredibly simple, and all the others were ugly and complicated.

I was inspired by the 7 minute workout app posted here, and set aside 8 hours to build the whole thing. All told I ended up spending about 40 hours on it and haven't really touched it since.

I started selling it at $.99, but sales were slow and I wasn't really making anything at all off it. So I raised the price 5x to $4.99 and sales didn't really change much. Now it brings me in about $50-150 / month that I use as extra cash toward paying off my student loans.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#435

Last year I made a wine cataloging app for iOS based personal gripes that I had with all the others out there. I just wanted something incredibly simple, and all the others were ugly and complicated. I was inspired by the 7 minute workout app posted here, and set aside 8 hours to build the whole thing. All told I ended up spending about 40 hours on it and haven't really touched it since. I started selling it at $.99,…

Do you mind sharing a link to your app? I'm a wine aficionado. :-)

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#436
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have someone managing the rental or do you do that?

We have our unit listed on VRBO, but my wife and I handle the inquires and renting ourselves. Most condo buildings will run your unit for you if you prefer. They will take care of everything for you (bookings, cleanings, furnishings, etc), but you make much less. Also, you just get a percentage of what the building makes as a whole, so those rooms are really incentivized to be as nice. We wanted our place to be nice…

How has your experience been with VRBO? Any reason that has prompted you not to use AirBnb?

Edit to ask: do you mind sharing which island/area, your rental is in? 90% occupancy rate sounds pretty amazing.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#437

I keep meaning to write up complete figures but I launched my self-published ebook The Profitable Side Project Handbook in January http://rachelandrew.co.uk/books/the-profitable-side-project Sales from that are well over 10K USD at this point. A lot of that was over the launch week, I've not had a huge amount of time to devote to marketing it over the last couple of months as our main business (which was a side proje…

Great work. For writing books do you use any book editor software of just MS Word ? I am in the process of writing a book and couldn't find a good editor/software. Thanks

Scrivener is what all the pros rave about. But if you wan't to check out another option, keep an eye on my sideproject http://blankpage.io :)

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#439
post #435

Last year I made a wine cataloging app for iOS based personal gripes that I had with all the others out there. I just wanted something incredibly simple, and all the others were ugly and complicated. I was inspired by the 7 minute workout app posted here, and set aside 8 hours to build the whole thing. All told I ended up spending about 40 hours on it and haven't really touched it since. I started selling it at $.99,…

Do you mind sharing a link to your app? I'm a wine aficionado. :-)

Sure. Here you go:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vino/id666479302

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#440

Improvely ( https://www.improvely.com ) has more than doubled in customers and revenue since the last post, when it had recently broken 5-figure MRR. It could easily support salaries for a small staff at this point, but I still run it myself from home. I try to push out a set of new features every 1-2 months, and have to answer an e-mail on occasion to help out a new user, but otherwise it's very hands-off as a busin…

Nice! How do you market Improvely? Or which channels do you use to attract new users?
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