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Your best passive income? (2014)

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Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#191

Post by ProblemFactory »

astral303 wrote: post #157
struppi wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, you spent $5 for an app. For a working app! This is a pretty low price. Actually, it's basically nothing. Of course you can't get support and are not entitled to feature requests at such a low price tag!

$5 is not cheap by app store standards. It's a fair price for an app in that class. As to whether you're entitled to support or feature requests, you can make an argument both ways. One could generate some word of mouth by following up on (simple) feature requests. In one of the apps, Fourier, the reviewers say that the horizontal frequency scale is off by a factor of 2 (but the frequency display elsewhere is accurat…

"App Store standards" don't really work for valuable niche software. They can work for games that end up selling 10 million copies, but there's a reason why professional software with few users is usually priced between $500 and $100 000.

$5 is worth 3 minutes of developer time at common hourly contracting prices. If a developer receives and reads an email from a customer, they will probably end up with no profit. If they respond to it, let alone are adding new custom features, they are certainly losing money compared to working for someone else.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#192

Post by knorc »

kirk21 wrote: post #41

1) Selling Elon Musk t-shirts: http://www.zazzle.com/elonmuskspaceman Did not make that much but was great fun. 2) Helping my artistic friends selling their products. If you want to sell designer products, you can sign up here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dmyfzRwBbpcKAyRplHs0i2RMqsC...

I'm a huge fan of Elon Musk, but I must say I don't like the designs very much. I you can't make better designs, you should think of having shirts with quotes like “If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it.”or "I'll put a man on Mars in 10 years. Maybe 20 years worst case. Otherwise I won't be able to go there." (can't find the exact quote!)

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#193

Post by marvin »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #97
marvin wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until housing prices fall 1% before inflation and wipe out your gains for the year.

It's a long position that pays dividends. Why care about volatility?

It's fallaious to not consider the market value of your assets as well as any income streams. In fact, this example is even worse because it also doesn't consider the cost of capital and fluctiations in the income.

For the specific example of buying apartments in Oslo to rent out, sensible analysis will show that this gives a worse risk-adjusted return than other options (e.g. the stock market). But hey, go right ahead. It's not my money ;)

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#194

Post by drewolbrich »

atox wrote: post #58
drewolbrich wrote: post #12

My iOS app that teaches you what a tesseract is and lets you manipulate it in 3D and 4D. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fourth-dimension/id50420... It blows my mind that people still find out about this app and happily buy it every day even though it occupies such a small geeky niche.

Heard about this app when it first launched, such an original idea. Would you feel comfortable telling us the number of sales in 2013?

The Fourth Dimension generated $17,600 during 2012, the year I launched it. The majority of that was driven by reviews the app got.

In 2013 it made $3900, or $325/month, and seems to be holding at that rate of income. The only work I did on the app in 2013 was about two days making it work correctly on iOS 7.

It's not huge money, but it's far more than my expectations, which were on the order of $500 total over the lifetime of the app.

I posted a breakdown of the first three months of reviews here: http://www.fourthdimensionapp.com/first_three_months/

My next app is a two-player Tetris/Scrabble mashup: http://fiascoapp.com/b

My expectations for the word puzzle game are either $300,000, or zero. The wave function has yet to collapse.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#195

Post by cko »

simonhamp wrote: post #161

I run Built With Bootstrap ( http://builtwithbootstrap.com ). It's making 4 figures a month at the moment. It's mostly passive income as I spend no more than a few hours per week actually working on the site. Though I spend considerably more monitoring the stats and feeds etc etc My biggest win with this site is the extremely low cost to run it - something I want to talk about more if anyone's interested. My only rea…

I've visited that site quite a few times and I'm very interested in how you're keeping running costs low.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#196

Post by drewolbrich »

Styn wrote: post #119
drewolbrich wrote: post #12

My iOS app that teaches you what a tesseract is and lets you manipulate it in 3D and 4D. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fourth-dimension/id50420... It blows my mind that people still find out about this app and happily buy it every day even though it occupies such a small geeky niche.

Cool! My mom showed this to me (she's a maths teacher) In fact it was the first app she ever bought! She just loves showing it to all her science colleagues! That really is an awesome app!

I love hearing stories like that, thanks. I never thought it would resonate with so many people.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#197

Post by jayvanguard »

taigeair wrote: post #168

Current passive income for me - blog and niche sites with articles (ads e.g. http://www.flagshipstorelondon.com/ ), e-commerce business (sales), ETFs (investments), and teaching a skill. Flagship stores - I went around taking pictures of the best of the best stores for the top retail brands in London and made a directory. Created page on Blogger. Ecommerce business is my best passive income. It's a physical product I…

> http://www.wellingtonstravel.com

You made that? Beautiful map! You should do those for more cities.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#198

Post by taigeair »

_wp3r wrote: post #189
taigeair wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much time did that take to build and maintain?

It went through a couple iterations, and settled on this one. Technically it only took a couple hours to make, and I spend about 2 hours a month actually providing the service. But, as with any side project I tinker with it a couple times a month.

I guess the articles take some time too. I find blogs and websites aren't that bad. It's physical products that are the worst!!! But also really inherently rewarding :)

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#199

Post by SimHacker »

drewolbrich wrote: post #12

My iOS app that teaches you what a tesseract is and lets you manipulate it in 3D and 4D. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fourth-dimension/id50420... It blows my mind that people still find out about this app and happily buy it every day even though it occupies such a small geeky niche.

I'm really looking forward to your next iOS app, Fiasco -- it looks awesome. I hope you don't get sued for Scrabble kicking Tetris in the face, or by Stanslaw Lem's estate!

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#200

Post by galfarragem »

simonhamp wrote: post #161

I run Built With Bootstrap ( http://builtwithbootstrap.com ). It's making 4 figures a month at the moment. It's mostly passive income as I spend no more than a few hours per week actually working on the site. Though I spend considerably more monitoring the stats and feeds etc etc My biggest win with this site is the extremely low cost to run it - something I want to talk about more if anyone's interested. My only rea…

I use also tumblr platform (very underrated IMHO). If you can adapt your website/blog to it you get a decent free hosting. However if your blog depends on SEO I would not recommend it (unless you develop a custom theme and really know what you are doing).
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