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Your best passive income? (2014)

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Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#201

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…

First, wow, I didn't expect any HN readers to actually know about, much less have bought, my work! Thanks.

Second, I understand your frustration. I love building things, and sometimes I wish I could do that full time, but grad school is a 70 hr/wk commitment for me.

If the app is not useful for you without the missing feature, Apple does allow returns. I'm not quite sure how it works, but I see a few returns a year on my reports.

Also, I've open-sourced the hardest part of the app, the audio managing aspect, as Novocaine (GitHub.com/alexbw/novocaine), and along with the great package NVDSP, anybody could replicate the basic functionality of my apps with a few weeks of learning and effort. It'd be great for the audio app ecosystem, too!

I'm also interested in hiring a part-time developer to help flesh out the top-requested features, if anybody has ObjC coding experience. That'd make many more updates possible.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#202

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.

Thanks! I had a business partner who is an architect and she did most of the artwork but we designed it together. It took us 3 years and was kind of a hobby.

Now it's quite time consuming to do VAT tax every 3 months and keep records. BTW physical products are so much more work than anything I did on the web.

I'm hoping to do a world map next though.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#203

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…

Your map is quite cool, were you the one to hand draw it all? It is 100% drawn, no?

I'm just in my 30s and traveled/partied a lot in my 20s so I never put much thought to the long-term or generating income but I have a sweet job now and have been increasing my web/graphic work after hours. Will probably start writing a blog specific to what I do at work to start generating passive income. Most of what I'm reading about being passive isn't actually passive like dumping money into a bank and waiting but requires active work, like you said 5-7 hours a week. Obviously that amount of time is trivial especially considering you're passionate about it.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#204

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…

Hi simonhamp, Congrats on the project! I'd love to hear more about how you're running it for so low cost! Have you open sourced the site? I'd love to also hear your stack. I've managed to keep all my projects (even one exceeding 5 Million+ ) extremely low cost (pretty much the domain name only as well) and always looking for more ideas to save! Feel free to PM me as well!

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#205
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ahe…

Stock market is prone to crashes; also you can't live in your stocks when out of other options.

If you believe in long term economic stability, then go ahead and invest in stocks. We don't. And now we know at least we'll have a place to live.

When economy is stable, realty prices grow; when economy is shaky, realty prices fall but slower than stocks. Stocks are more liquid on the other hand.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#206
post #204

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…

Hi simonhamp, Congrats on the project! I'd love to hear more about how you're running it for so low cost! Have you open sourced the site? I'd love to also hear your stack. I've managed to keep all my projects (even one exceeding 5 Million+ ) extremely low cost (pretty much the domain name only as well) and always looking for more ideas to save! Feel free to PM me as well!

Woops just saw the comment below how its on Tumblr. Should've noticed that earlier. Any other hacks?

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#207
post #138
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to think bigger man. Outsource the outsourcement... Interact with top-level outsourcer once per week... he interacts with low-level outsourcer daily. Profit.

Relevant: "Man reportedly outsources his own job to China, watches cat videos" http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/17/business/la-fi-mo-ma...

That's as timely as awesome

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> http://www.wellingtonstravel.com You made that? Beautiful map! You should do those for more cities.

Thanks! I had a business partner who is an architect and she did most of the artwork but we designed it together. It took us 3 years and was kind of a hobby. Now it's quite time consuming to do VAT tax every 3 months and keep records. BTW physical products are so much more work than anything I did on the web. I'm hoping to do a world map next though.

[deleted]

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#210
Created a PHP ad server 'mySimpleAds' at http://www.clippersoft.net and continue to maintain support it. Brings in some money monthly to help with credit card bills. I get some referals from SO and the like, but also spend $ on Adwords. Last year created a hosted SAAS version at http://mysimpleads.com, but hasn't really taken off.

As always with my products - marketing and getting more people to see them is always a big problem. Once they use them, customers like them - it's getting them to the site to even see them.

I'm in the process of re-writing mySimpleAds and adding in a bunch of stuff, but I don't know if it will still be stuck in neutral and not bring in the folks. I'll also plan to write more products, figuring maybe that will bring people in.

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