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Your best passive income? (2014)

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Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#321

Post by mmayberry »

jbrooksuk wrote: post #293
mmayberry wrote: post #274

I own/operate a luxury resale business that specializes in high end womens fashion, art, cars, and collectibles. My only time expense is picking up the items... everything else I have automated. On a good month I can clear $10K+ and on a bad month $2-3K. I do all this without any advertising and the primary selling point of my business is thats its discreet and anonymous.

How does this work? Are you scraping other sites, then ordering them to yourself or something?

nope. its all based on repeat and referral. My first customer wanted to sell a pair of $1200 shoes but didn't know how so I put them on eBay for her. That one pair turned into two which then became her entire closet. She then referred me to a friend who did the same and thats been the foundation of my business ever since. 100% repeat and referral. I avoid unsolicited inquires as much as possible because they typically arent worth the headache. I even fire customers that make my business hard using the 80/20 theory.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#323

Post by iluvmylife »

I made a super simple paid Android app with a list of interesting Physics Puzzles (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boredominn...). Took a month to make and now it is completely passive. Brings in some spare change with zero maintenance (~$50/month).

I built this in 2011 to learn app development (its a webapp built using PhoneGap). Took about a month of evening/weekend work to push out, and most of that time was consumed by collecting and creating interesting puzzles. It was featured on Google Play's Top Paid Educational Games leaderboard for a while, and that contributed to a spike in income. That apart, I haven't done/don't know of any viable means to promote it.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#324

Post by mephju »

I spent more than some time to create a Shopify admin app for Android, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shopify.ad.... It's up and running and generates already some money each month (60$ - 100$). Zero marketing, just Google Play. I wanted the app to be so much better than it is right now but unfortunately Shopify will release their own Android app soon which will render my app useless. It's quite devastating. So I consider this endeavor a failure. Now I am on the lookout for a new project idea. I think I will stay in the ecommerce realm since I like it very much and think it's easier to make money with merchants than with ordinary consumers. In case anyone would like to team up, my email is in my profile ;)

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#325

Post by elliottkember »

snide wrote: post #257
elliottkember wrote: post #221

Running Hammer for Mac (hammerformac.com), our web-development OSX app. On a good day we might hit $100+ profit (after Apple's cut). Some days we don't get anything. It's rewarding to know that people are using it.

Hammer is a nice, well designed product, kudos to you and congrats on it. I was actually surprised it doesn't net you a larger income. Do you think you guys are missing on marketing, or that you're hitting a niche that's too small (frontend osx owning developers that can code, but not enough to set up small dev environments)? I'll admit that I'm mostly a frotnend dev / designer myself, but since I have enough ability…

Hey, that's a really nice comment! Thank you so much for your feedback.

I'd love to make more on Hammer. We make okay money on Hammer and don't have to work on it too much. I think there's a few reasons we don't make more. For one, I don't know that there's big money in developer tools, especially given the vast number of free tools as you've said. We are planning a few extra pay-monthly features which might be really nice, mainly new features for hammr.co. Recurring subscriptions are a better long-term model.

We're also integrating with our hosting platform Forge (getforge.com) which you might've seen. Super-fast static hosting. That's the hosting provider we use for the Hammer and Anvil sites.

> hammer seems to aim at a skill curve just lower than myself

A lot of people feel this way. I personally think Hammer's great no matter what skill level you are. We're trying to keep it zero-configuration; a very simple, consistent tool. Not too many clever tags to remember, and less support and maintenance on our end.

> My guess might be that their might be more in the Windows world, though that could be a prejudice.

A Hammer gem sure would be nice! ;)

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#326

Post by yitchelle »

sirbrad wrote: post #31

I created and sold Stickonspy ( http://stickonspy.com ) just after mid last year. The initial month I launched it did pretty well as the NSA news was still a pretty big deal. All in all it's made me I'd say my time - which was evenings after work - investment was around 3-4 days initially and then fulfilling orders is simply writing a customers address and posting the stickers - which if the demand was bigger I'd pro…

Great idea. Just wondering that if you didn't spend any money on marketing, how did you get the word out, SEO?

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#327

Post by graham1776 »

gmays wrote: post #319

For me it's still residential real estate. Between 2010 and 2012 or so I picked up some condos here in San Diego at short sale for about 1/3 of what their price was a few years earlier. I get about 1.5% of their purchase price every month in rent. At the same time, the property values have appreciated so the rents are starting to increase as well. The longest I've had any of them vacant was about two weeks and that w…

Where did you get your equity? Do have debt on any of them? I want to follow this plan too, but don't have the equity for down payments...

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#328

Post by tybro0103 »

thekevan wrote: post #298
tybro0103 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here for me with http://timebot.io/ I just have no clue how to go about getting customers.

Your "try it now" link doesn't go straight into trying it. I have to either pay money or share to FB. It may seem fine to you, but that's a redirect in the customer's mind. That was enough to stop me from trying it--even though I am struggling to get a freelance practice started and need hour tracking and invoicing help. You haven't shown me anything and are asking me to part with my money or my privacy just to see w…

You're absolutely right. Thanks for checking it out.

As for the robot, I was going for something cute, like MailChimp. It was picture I took of a friend's painting. Awesome painting, but didn't translate well to a pro icon. Do you think a robot could work if I got a pro version done at Logo Tournament?

I do plan to make it easy to try it for free. Also make it much cheaper... say a flat $5/mnth or something.

I actually abandoned it over a year ago once I launched and realized there are 41394 invoicing apps and I don't know how to market.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#329

Post by r4pha »

vjoel wrote: post #305
r4pha wrote: post #219

I'm making negative 15 USD/month hosting two side projects: http://srctree.net - A pastebin with version control http://blocksim.net - A poor man's online simulink-like thingy I am aware that there is a _lot_ of room for improvement in both services, but the fact that nobody uses it at all is not very motivational.

Enjoyed playing with blocksim. Have you considered aiming for a different market than matlab/simulink? One thing that simulink cannot do well is dynamic, reconfigurable networks of components (for example, UAVs or autonomous vehicles, but also game sprites). For this purpose, some smart people (not me) at UC Berkeley developed a language called SHIFT and applied it to platoons of automated cars and trucks back in the…

Thanks. It sounds very interesting. From the little I've seen, seems like it could be used to simulate systems in a "smart cities" context. I will detinitely take a closer look.

Re: Your best passive income? (2014)

#330

Post by Jack000 »

driverdan wrote: post #231

I'm currently earning around $45-60 a day mining cryptocurrencies with a little over $5000 in hardware. Once setup it's completely passive. Edit: ROI could be improved a bit on this too since I intentionally bought hardware that was good to experiment with rather than optimizing ROI.

how long would that be sustainable for, given the periodic difficulty increase in the various cryptocurrencies?
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