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Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

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Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#191

Post by klawed »

shanecleveland wrote: post #184
klawed wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Unlike most occupations, landlording will bring you into contact with some of the worst people the planet has to offer, under what has to be the worst possible set of circumstances. I suggest rephrasing to >Unlike most occupations, landlording may bring you into... I've had a rental property now for many years. It's in an evolving, urban Boston neighborhood and the property generates ~$1000 more than the mortgage, t…

Nice touch offering the December rent break. I guess it's just like offering incentives to good employees to generate loyalty and keep them around for the longterm. I am sure there is great worth in offering this small incentive to a tenant you want to keep, even if you could be charging more to a new tenant. Aside from the cost and effort of finding a new tenant, knowing that you have a consistent, paying renter tha…

Charging a little less than market value is definitely a winning strategy if you can afford it - a tenant who feels like they're getting a good deal is going to be a better tenant.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#192

Post by xgalvez »

tudorizer wrote: post #137

Good timing with this thread. My attempt is with making iOS games. Trying to mix pleasure and profit. First attempt is http://clumsyandthestars.com/ . Working on a second one now...

Good luck! I'm trying the same thing myself with http://yata.ca. It's more of a party game played with the iOS device, and thought the interactivity with people in the same room would add to the fun. Hope all's well with the second one!

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#193

Post by danneu »

I make (well, past-tense at the moment) almost $2k/month on a vBulletin play-by-post gaming forum I started back in 2007. One single adsense banner below the navbar.

I actually burned out within 6 months of trying to bootstrap the fledgling forum with fake activity, clever backlinks, and entertaining the trickle of registrants.

Burned out enough to take a a break for a while. Came back months later and it was a bustling forum of activity. Apparently I'd just reached that critical mass necessary for the community to be autonomous (able to entertain itself and cajole newbies to stay) before I took that break. Nowadays, I do very little beyond pay the server bill. It's staggering the amount of work volunteers (moderators) will put into maintaining a community and I'm grateful.

Recently had adsense disabled on my website after some automated process decided my website was "mature/adult-themed". The automated email cited a post in our forum's off-topic spammy section where some user copy and pasted the phrase "sexual intercourse" over and over again in Mandarin. Just some non-Mandarin-speaking teenagers being silly for a moment. Now I'm working on getting adsense reactivated.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#194

Post by andrewljohnson »

fendale wrote: post #162
andrewljohnson wrote: post #25

Our highest selling app (a hiking app) makes 15-30K/month, depending on the season. Our other navigation apps don't make quite as much yet, but some are getting there. You can figure out from my profile which it is, but I didn't want to name it in the thread and have this be something that turned up in searches. I wouldn't call it totally passive, but if we ignored it, it wouldn't stop making money. We have consisten…

I followed through your profile, and the hiking app looks very good. Great job! How do you get 'outdoor maps' into the App, ie do you license them or are they available freely somewhere?

We pay for use of some map servers, and use free servers. If you have GIS server skills and soe capital, you can tile and serve the maps yourself... Lots of good free data out there.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#195

Post by andrewljohnson »

peto123 wrote: post #144
andrewljohnson wrote: post #25

Our highest selling app (a hiking app) makes 15-30K/month, depending on the season. Our other navigation apps don't make quite as much yet, but some are getting there. You can figure out from my profile which it is, but I didn't want to name it in the thread and have this be something that turned up in searches. I wouldn't call it totally passive, but if we ignored it, it wouldn't stop making money. We have consisten…

Congratulation, good work! Anyway, the question was about passive income...I suppose you have to do a bit of marketing, user support, thinking about new features, etc...isn't it then just a business?

Perhaps, though it seems like a lot of these responses fall in that category.

I'll say this - I used to work on this app day and night, and now I try and just do the part I enjoy the most, and leave most of it to expert developers and friendly support people. My focus is now on growing the platform, business development, and design work.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#196

Post by wiwillia »

Eliezer wrote: post #142
veb wrote: post #70

I use TeeSpring ( http://www.teespring.com ) to create t-shirts and market them towards people on my Facebook page ( http://www.facebook.com/ModernSherlock ). Generally does very well. Way better than other stuff I've tried, like SEO/Marketing etc. The only problems I have is using a crap design, so it pays to know what the audience really wants before I try selling it to them.

I've considered selling T-Shirts. How much time do they take to create? How much income do you make, for how much effort?

Hey Eliezer, it takes 10-14 days after the end of the campaign for the printed tees to arrive on buyers doorsteps, and you control your margin! We take a flat margin per tee, which is included in the base price quoted on www.teespring.com/design. If you've got any Q's, feel free to shoot me an email @ walker@teespring.com

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#197

Post by Vivtek »

lucian1900 wrote: post #147
Vivtek wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A word of caution: unless you have the personal skills to deal with tenants, do not make the mistake of thinking that real estate is passive income. Like any earning occupation, landlording takes attention to detail, the ability not to procrastinate, and people skills. Unlike most occupations, landlording will bring you into contact with some of the worst people the planet has to offer, under what has to be the worst…

On the other hand, interacting with landlords as a tenant has already made me lose my faith in humanity. For how much any landlord I've rented from has cared, it was pretty much passive income for them.

I'm not arguing. I've been on both sides, and both sides suck.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#198

Post by Vivtek »

curiouscats wrote: post #111
Vivtek wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A word of caution: unless you have the personal skills to deal with tenants, do not make the mistake of thinking that real estate is passive income. Like any earning occupation, landlording takes attention to detail, the ability not to procrastinate, and people skills. Unlike most occupations, landlording will bring you into contact with some of the worst people the planet has to offer, under what has to be the worst…

Or pay someone else to manage the property for you. They are not cheap but with the super low interest rates now (along with house purchase and rental markets) you can likely find some workable solutions this way. It isn't passive, but with a property manager it is much closer to passive.

Yeah, I thought that, too. My property managers were even worse than my tenants, and I went through a couple of services that had been recommended to me by people I trusted.

I actually had a year and a half with zero income from a house. None.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#199

Post by mcantor »

statictype wrote: post #98
mcantor wrote: post #13

I sell posters of a vim cheat sheet I designed (see my profile for link). I ship my inventory to a 3rd-party fulfillment provider who plugs in to Shopify with a custom app, so all I have to do is re-print when the inventory runs out and handle the occasional customer service problem. Digital downloads are a total freebie.

Neat. I've thought of doing things like this before. Do you mind sharing how many figures you make on this? How do you handle the actual printing? Is that also outsourced?

I lucked out with this project; it began as a Kickstarter which got incredibly overfunded:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/maxcantor/beautiful-vim-...

It hit the front page of "Featured Technology" projects and lived there for almost the entire funding run.

I used UPrinting for the printing, who I'm quite happy with. It cost less than a thousand dollars to do the initial run of 500 posters.

Initially, my approach to shipping was to buy 500 poster tubes from Uline (no relation to UPrinting) and ship them myself. This was an unmitigated disaster; a cataclysm; a miserable shit-show of Brobdingnagian proportions. There is simply not sufficient support for the "hobbyist shipper"; USPS doesn't know what to do with you, UPS and Fedex charge too much (especially for international shipping), and the label-printing tools are across-the-board some of the worst software I've ever worked with. After months of Kafkaesque hijinks with USPS, I gave up and shipped my inventory to Fulfillrite, a third-party fulfillment provider. Thank God for those guys.

I haven't run the numbers to determine my exact profit & loss, but I make more than just beer money. I don't know if I'll ever sell enough to come even close to what the Kickstarter originally made, but the web store has been bringing in around $750/mo in revenue, which translates to something in the range of $350 - $500 of profit.

I tend to make money to the extent that more eyeballs hit the site. Last month, someone mentioned the poster in passing in the comment of a blog I'd never heard of, and I made $300 in six hours. I have no idea how to advertise, though, so that kind of thing is usually just lucky happenstance for me.

I'll probably do another couple of poster projects (bash, emacs, etc.); if they are even nearly as successful as this one, I might eventually be able to live exclusively off the profits! An exciting prospect, but one that is quite far off.

Feel free to drop me a line if you have any other questions. I really ought to condense this stuff into a blog post some time.

Re: Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

#200

Post by veb »

Eliezer wrote: post #142
veb wrote: post #70

I use TeeSpring ( http://www.teespring.com ) to create t-shirts and market them towards people on my Facebook page ( http://www.facebook.com/ModernSherlock ). Generally does very well. Way better than other stuff I've tried, like SEO/Marketing etc. The only problems I have is using a crap design, so it pays to know what the audience really wants before I try selling it to them.

I've considered selling T-Shirts. How much time do they take to create? How much income do you make, for how much effort?

My last design took about 5 minutes, and it took maybe 20minutes in total "advertising" and I got back... two months salary. (software dev, in NZ)
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