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What was your best passive income in 2014?

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Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can absolutely charge money for this if you solve a painful problem for businesses: http://creditcardjs.com

But you're still up against freely available libraries that let a web developer build similar functionality, as as jquery.payment from the folks at Stripe: https://github.com/stripe/jquery.payment While it's not a completely like-for-like comparison, I suspect it will be tough to justify $299 per single web site for many businesses that might use these tools in the first place. Personally, I'd want solid data about c…

Some companies value the support you may need over initial cost.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#292
post #28

"Administrating" a few servers that are rented out (ie, running apt-get every week and fixing the occasional symlink the tenants break). -$2000/m in power/space/bandwidth in costs +$4000/m in fees Banking a little under ~$1700 after I account for taxes for what amounts to an hour of effort a month.

I do like the idea of being a remote system administrator, but the trust issues seem to scare people away. (Though I realize you're doing more than that if you're renting out physical boxes too.)

You'd be surprised how trusting people are, I'm explicit that nothing of great personal value or import should ever be stored unencrypted on these since at the end of the day I hold the keys to the proverbial castle. Quite a few of my customers are people I know from BBSs I used to and still do frequent. One even hosts a few BBS servers.

On the whole, I could probably net in the 11-15K range per month if I expanded but that requires a lot more work and I'm not sure the money justifies it. At the moment its a (usually) enjoyable hobby that helps me keep current in sysadm-land and make some money at the same time

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#293

I keep meaning to write up complete figures but I launched my self-published ebook The Profitable Side Project Handbook in January http://rachelandrew.co.uk/books/the-profitable-side-project Sales from that are well over 10K USD at this point. A lot of that was over the launch week, I've not had a huge amount of time to devote to marketing it over the last couple of months as our main business (which was a side proje…

Great work. For writing books do you use any book editor software of just MS Word ? I am in the process of writing a book and couldn't find a good editor/software. Thanks

I highly recommend a LaTeX typesetting pipeline for producing the print version your book.

The fonts and page layout make for high quality books.

Using pandoc you can convert pretty much any modern markup language to .tex (I don't recommend .tex as the source format, as it might be difficult to get used to if you don't have experience with it + it is not trivial to produce .html/.epub from .tex sources.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#294

Here are the all time sales figures for http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com They've been pretty bad the last few months. I think it's because the server was overloaded and response times were getting really bad. It was running on a GoDaddy $70/mo VPS with IIS, SqlServer. But that server was also hosting an Umbraco site and a WordPress blog. The PHP process was taking up 99% CPU nearly all the time. Now I have it runni…

Ah! I remember this site. I thought the idea was neat. I heard on a podcast there's a niche for wedding handkerchiefs actually. Maybe look into that. Cupcakes have gotten popular at weddings.

This is why I'm not an entrepreneur. I could have never, even in my wildest dreams, imagined there would be a market for cupcake wrappers or wedding handkerchiefs (whatever they are).

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#295

I built an niche e-commerce marketplace called http://doleaf.com . Independent Nurseries and Garden Centers (the sellers) sign up and can instantly upload their items for sale directly to customers expanding their sales region of their niche products from just their neighbored to the entire USA. Since its niche customers who are looking for specific items customers find the site fairly easy through search. The site i…

Great to see via Google Analytics there there are 6 active users from Hacker News viewing the site right!! Hopefully the Google Analytics E-Commerce Sales Report will show several sales attributed to users coming from Hacker News ;-)

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#296

Here are the all time sales figures for http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com They've been pretty bad the last few months. I think it's because the server was overloaded and response times were getting really bad. It was running on a GoDaddy $70/mo VPS with IIS, SqlServer. But that server was also hosting an Umbraco site and a WordPress blog. The PHP process was taking up 99% CPU nearly all the time. Now I have it runni…

I looked at your site briefly. Great idea, similar to patio11's Bingo Card Creator site. Are you doing any A/B testing at all? I think you should be able to ramp up your sales by being more active managers of the site, instead of it being something passive. But even patio11 didn't want to manage bingo cards forever. Also, the number of template available seems very low. From your home page, if you add up the numbers…

Thanks for the tips! There are actually 41 canned designs http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com/Wrapper and users do share some of their custom designs which can then be edited by other users.

But, it's been on my to-do list for over a year to build a wizard on top of the custom designer with a step 1) choose a design, step 2) upload photo, step 3) enter text, type of experience.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have targeted some very specific jobs which are usually known as "sexy". I am not proud of it because I don't think it's very ethic, I can't imagine putting this on my resume and technically the challenge is nonexistent (a simple html page with some css, few hours of marketing) Though the service is real and people don't pay for nothing, at least it's legal...

What's unethical about this?

Okay ethic is not the right word. I just think that these are just 3 more website in the p0rn/dating/drugs Internet landscape, and technically very easy to do. I don't regret it, it's free money and other friends have tried the dating/porn market. One of mine was making 30k/mo via porn ads, another never made any money. It's just that I would now prefer to come up with a project which I am proud of, which can be of any help to someone, that I could talk about without wondering if the person in front of me thinks it's creepy... Soon soon :)

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't people just make a request to google maps? Why do they you use your service instead? In what sense is it better (if it is)?

Great question! There are a couple reasons people use Geocodio over or in addition to the major providers, like Google: * Google's free tier is 2,500 a day. But if you need more than that, you have to sign a yearly contract ($10,000+). Our pricing is 2,500 free a day with additional lookups at $.001 each. * We don't place any restrictions on our geocodes. The major providers often a lot of restrictions on how you use…

Thanks, more clear now. So where does your service perform a search (fetch data from)? Does it use Google itself? Is it just mediator between an end user and google maps which gives the end user more freedom than google maps does?
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