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Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

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Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#141

Post by apdinin »

Since you're a developer, you already have the most important asset, which is the ability to basically create anything (web services related, obviously). From there, it's "just" a matter of finding something to build that other people will value and then telling as many people as possible about it.

The best way to figure out what to build is by thinking about what YOU would find useful, and then build that. Don't get too big with the idea, though. Just analyze your day-to-day routine and ask yourself what kind of little piece of software would make your day 1%-5% less annoying.

For example, I'm a developer but also a startup founder. I've wasted entire days doing repetitive email follow-ups to investors, partners, customers, etc., which means I wasn't committing code. So I put aside a weekend and built a system to automate my email follow-ups. After it worked well for me, I showed it to some colleagues, they started using it, too, and before I knew it, I had a nice little SaaS app going. With another weekend of work, I added a frontend and billing system, and I launched it as https://autopest.com.

(I'm including the link at the suggestion of some of the other folks in this thread, and also to show how it matches well with their advice -- target B2B, build a SaaS app, keep it simple, rely on quick solutions like Bootstrap and Stripe, etc.)

Step two is getting people to it. Best way I found for that is social media -- especially Twitter. It only takes me 15 minutes a day to be "active" on Twitter, I can easily target BizDev people and GrowthHackers (my target audience), and slowly but surely, they start signing up. It's been a few months and I'm on pace to hit your $500/mo target in the next 30 days.

Best of all, because I built something that I REALLY WANTED, even if no one ever pays me another penny, I'll still come out ahead because the thing I built works really well for me.

Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#142

Post by graeme »

michaelmior wrote: post #136
thenomad wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with this. Generally, completely passive income is massively harder and more time intensive to generate than minimal-time-investment income (which is what Patrick suggests above). I have both completely passive and minimal-time-investment income sources, and the passive ones have been MUCH harder and longer work per dollar over the last few years. Focus on optimising your $/hr (and your hr/month) r…

I'm genuinely curious how "passive income" is defined if it takes significantly more time.

You invest time up front, then reap the rewards. Residual income may be a better term for what most people call passive income.

Most of my income is residual, and I love it, but there was a big hump to get over at the start.

Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#143

Post by zeynalov »

I started a youtube channel 2 year ago. Just for my personal use. When I want to show someone something, to be able to upload it, if it's not on youtube yet. So I invested 10 minutes per month to upload some videos that I think interesting to share. After a year I saw that to0 many people watch my videos. So I activated ads on my channel. My last video was a year ago I think. And Google still sends me 200-300$ monthly. I've invested only 2-3 hours totally on channel.

Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#144

Post by AJ007 »

#1 This is way easier, and can last longer, if the business involves user retention.

#2 Study other micro-businesses carefully.

#3 Apply an existing model to a brand new area or technology.

Personally I think the passive income concept is crap. It is real but is a concept that people who don't want to work hard eat up so is used in business opportunity marketing heavily.

There are things that can produce revenue for a long period of time after your initial upfront investment where you work really hard for a while for free or at a great loss (investing money in assets vs just your own time.) However, the nature of traffic flows online & technology mean if you use the revenue for personal consumption rather than re-investing it in the business one day a few years from now you will wake up no better off than the day you started. In some circumstances where the individual increases their standard of living or takes on debt, they will end up much worse off.

Not speculation, I have watched this happen to friends.

As a programmer your best opportunities are most likely writing tools and code that can be resold multiple times. Huge chunks of redundant work is done by freelance developers.

Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#145

Post by faramarz »

simonhamp wrote: post #62

I run Built With Bootstrap ( http://builtwithbootstrap.com ) that brings close to $2,000 on average each month in "mostly passive" income. How? Here are a few things that have helped: 1) I got lucky - I jumped on something early and got picked up quickly and rode on the back of a giant gorilla as it kept getting higher and higher - right place, right time 2) I keep costs low - I use Tumblr (free) and cheap, pluggable…

Very cool. FYI, the Advertise page on your site is entirely blanked out when AdBlock is on.

I had to turn it off to see anything.

Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#146

Post by seanle »

mjnaus wrote: post #34
rtpg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of things have you made on there? Are there things people are looking for?

Mostly PHP applications so far. An yeah, these are products people are searching for (I assume so since they're selling pretty well)

Would you mind linking me to some of them?

Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#147

Post by danneu »

revorad wrote: post #104

There is a strange obsession here on HN with passive income. Yet I haven't seen any good examples of passive income, which were built without significant effort or time. Income is anything but passive. Here's a better way to look at it: You want to earn $500/month? As a good Ruby developer, you can earn that much in two days doing contract work. And no, it doesn't matter if you're based in Bangalore, you could be bas…

I own a forum that makes me $1500/month. I haven't logged in for 6 months. All the effort was done in 2007.

Contract work, like 9-to-5 employment, is the opposite of what people have in mind when they say "passive income". The goal of passive income isn't to get something for nothing. It's to create something that generates income that isn't linked 1:1 with your time.

Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#148

Post by superuser2 »

neil_s wrote: post #101
Red_Tarsius wrote: post #12

I'd give a read to Start Small, Stay Small (www.startupbook.net) and other startup literature. Study Paul Graham's essays (www.paulgraham.com). Random ideas: - Start something like skoshbox.com, but with Indian goodies. You may not realize it, but foreign countries crave Indian tastes and flavors. I would probably pay for a monthly delivery of Indian spices and sweets. - Start a podcast on a passion of yours. Offer f…

The Indian goodies subscription service might be a great startup idea (a la Graze, Pact Coffee, Dollar Shave Club...), but its hardly a passive income? Its a high involvement logistics business with a small technology involvement.

You can outsource logistics to Amazon. The support burden might be high, though.

Re: Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?

#149

Post by teach »

zo1 wrote: post #76
namenotrequired wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business to Business; so when you sell your product/service to other companies instead of to individuals (which would be B2C; business to consumer).

Ah, I see... Thanks for the info!

In the future you can avoid downvotes by searching rather than asking HN for the answer to an easily google-able question.
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