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Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

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Re: Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

#11

Post by julius »

olivierduval wrote: post #3

- "invest $1K in inventory" => no, start with orders THEN buy what's ordered... - "Justin Beiber case" => warning: you can't use people (or pictures or cartoon or...) images like that... and the rights can be pretty high - "$1 cases for ~$10" => didn't you forget taxes, delivery, lost,... business is not: sell $10 - buy $1 = profit $9 Well... I think you should take a look at the business side

In this case you need to buy inventory first. Buying from China means shipping takes weeks. And you need to get some samples shipped first, to choose your manufacturer.

Your customers will not want to wait for their phone case for 8 weeks. Shipping phone cases one-by-one from China is obviously out of the question as well.

You also need to buy the Justin Bieber rights, before taking orders.

Also do not forget to setup with a fulfillment partner. You do not want to send out 1000 packages yourself.

Having $9 per case to work with is not too bad. Depending on the costs of the shipping (china+fulfillment) and licence, the numbers might still work out.

But I am not too sure on the advertisement side of things. A customer might be too expensive.

Re: Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

#12

Post by joss82 »

PlzSnow wrote: post #8

I'm a bit horrified at the naivety of this post. I think the best thing you can do is just try it, with the presumption it will fail. Then learn the lessons why it didn't work and try and try again. At some point you will realise that the notion there's a "sure-fire way to $5K" is completely absurd. Some random notes on your idea anyway: - No-one buys from independent websites, only Amazon, eBay, etsy etc - You will…

OP: Keep all this in mind and change your idea a bit, you have the will the do it, and that's already putting you above 99% of all people.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

#13

Post by onion2k »

Isn't this what the whole entrepreneurial spirit is about?

No.

"Entrepreneurial spirit" is abut identifying a problem that people have and providing a solution it, and then building a sustainable business around that solution. It's not just cobbling together something so you can cash in.

Even though the case market is saturated, with targeted ads I'm thinking it would be possible.

The first thing you should do is research the cost of those adverts. Highly targeted adverts are valuable, and consequently they're expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if an ad targeting young women with an interest in Justin Beiber on Facebook will cost upwards of $2 each time someone clicks, so you'll be needing a to get upwards of a 20% conversion ratio just to cover the $10 you're planning to charge, and that's before any other costs. That's not a sustainable business.

Re: Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

#14

Post by will_pseudonym »

-please put up an email address in your profile if you want people to contact you. And trust me--if you're starting a business, email just became your new best friend.

-read everything @patio11 has ever written. Use your brain and research ability to understand his wisdom. Ignore this advice at your own peril.

-start high end markets first. Better margins, better customers.

-think about what products suck! Talk to affluent friends, ask them that question. If you don't have affluent friends, go make them. Your life and this endeavor will be amazing if you do. Trust me on this. Just make sure they're good people. If you can't tell the difference, that's your side job. Learn how to tell the difference.

-bite your tongue. I'm serious, literally bite it. Listen to what ppl are telling you--it could be your next product! Biting your tongue is like a phones mute button. You should be using both to become a much better listener. I started an interruption/swearing jar with my fiancé to break myself of those habits faster. It's tough but super rewarding.

-learn sales. Frank bettger (how I raised myself from failure to success in selling). Dale Carnegie (how to win friends and influence people).

-improve yourself. Sleep 8-9 hours. If you use an alarm clock you're doing life wrong :D, diet (quality and quantity. Whole > processed * 1000. no sugar.) exercise. Move fast, lift heavy things. Sign up for Charlie Hoehn's anti anxiety course. Assuming you're a guy, check out The Mating Grounds and Helping Joe. They'll help you improve your life immeasurably. Sign up for talk therapy. If strapped for cash, group therapy is very effective and inexpensive.

-pay attention to the world around you. The problems to solve will present themselves.

-Don't force anything. It'll hurt to get the round peg into the square hole, and you might lose a finger in the process. NB: Your finger is your happiness.

-cut out negative people, but don't create a Hooli yes-man echo chamber.

-watch randy Pausch - the last lecture. And Randy Pausch - time management.

-email if you need help! I'm an extremely generous person.

Re: Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

#15

Post by johnorourke »

Business is hard. Anything of value takes effort and time. Read "The Lean Startup" and "The 4 hour work week". And whatever you do, don't build a website - a website is not a business. Start with eBay, then try something like Shopify once things get better, and spend your money testing ideas and assumptions.

Re: Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

#16

Post by socialist_coder »

The reason you are getting down voted is because of the wording in your title. "Sure-fire" invokes bullshit get rich quick schemes, the opposite of what the "entrepreneurial spirit" is about.

If there was a sure fire way to generate $5k profit monthly, everyone would do it, and then it would not be profitable anymore. That's just basic market equilibrium.

If you really just want some ideas, don't use the "sure-fire" language.

Re: Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

#18

Post by Silhouette »

Generating $5K/month in revenues is a respectable achievement for a new business. It's more traction than many new businesses will ever achieve, and of course most new businesses will fail.

If you're talking about spending $5K/month in costs to run your business, and then presumably on top of that the value of the time that you and your friends are putting in, then you need way more than $5K/month in revenues to make a significant profit.

If it was that easy, everyone would be doing it. Unfortunately, as others have said, a lot of the assumptions implicit in your post are wildly unrealistic.

Re: Ask HN: What is a way of making residual income with $5K a month?

#20

Post by buro9 »

Go to a local dentist, look at how they do things like X-Rays.

What you will find is that they pay GBP 20k+ for an X-Ray machine that connects via USB Dongle to an old Windows machine... really old.

You'll also find that all of their equipment is old copies of Windows, in dusty long-unsupported equipment.

Sell a service, that virtualises all of this and that you manage. Charge them GBP 250 per month for it, on top of any capital expenditure up to GBP 3k for the host server (probably on-site as a Dentist shouldn't go down when an internet connection goes down).

Now go round the other dentists in the area and repeat until you have 20 dentists on-board.

You now have GBP 5k per month in residual income, for hardware that will take minimal effort to support, and for images of Windows taken from existing machines that are now backed-up.

The lesson here: You're probably looking for some complex and advanced solution that you can automate to great fortune!... but actually there's a lot of money just begging to be given to people who solve the simplest stuff in fields where the computing skill is very very low but the expectations of computing and value from it is very high.

Your profit exists in that space. No-one is doing the simple stuff in those fields.

Other ideas: Beauty/Hair Salon booking systems that work inside the hairdresser and whose web and automated phone system actually works too (Twilio + Google Apps (for Calendar and Google Contacts) + a website will do this with medium effort - it's a small integration project).

The other lesson here: It's not doing stuff that is hard, but selling it.

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