What was your best passive income in 2014? • Hacker News Board

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#361

Post by malchow » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 5:57 PM UTC

dusing wrote: post #249

My business partner and I started Snow in Seconds ( http://snowinseconds.com ) on the side, 6 years ago. It is a powder thats been around for decades (used in diapers) but when you get it at just the right grain size it looks, and feels like snow when water is added. We found a good source, designed a professional looking brand, made a TV spot (kinda), bought some search ads, and boom, predictable income. Sales are o…

If you're willing to give us a range, what's your COGS on the snow?

Great animated GIF on the home page!

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#362

Post by danielweber » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:05 PM UTC

aestra wrote: post #321

mjwhansen wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to screen out bad tenants is to offer zero deposit for high credit score applicants. Several large apartment buildings in my city (DC) do this, and the buildings are full of professionals.

It is totally legal to refuse to rent to people with low credit scores, so that's an option too. Just keep the standard consistent no matter who your applicant is and have a standard criteria to keep everything both fair and legal. You probably can also charge a larger than average security deposit to weed out the people with cashflow problems. Most states have a cap on amount of security deposit collected, I know he…

You probably know this, but for the sake of anyone else reading, your home state probably offers a brochure on how to be a landlord, including what rights you must enforce. It's essential if you ever get a bad tenant. Plus, find a real estate lawyer to go over your lease and whom you can go to in trouble comes up.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#363

Post by jawns » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:05 PM UTC

kehers wrote: post #327

jawns wrote: post #75

I am the author of two books: "Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform on Your Kid" ( http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com ), which came out in October, and "Correlated: Surprising Connections Between Seemingly Unrelated Things" ( http://www.correlated.org ), which came out earlier this month. One thing I didn't realize when I started pitching the first book was that there would be "p…

Did you do any "marketing" or publicize the books in anyway? Tips for anyone planning to write a book?

A couple of tips:

If you're hoping to get your book in bookstores, get an agent and work with a traditional publisher. Actually, I think going the traditional book-deal route is normally a better bet than self-publishing, unless you expect the vast majority of your sales will be digital and you have a large pre-order list that gives you an assurance of a larger paycheck than any advance you're offered.

Of course, authors must always be their book's best marketer, but having a publicist takes a load off your plate. In my case, the publisher's in-house publicist handled pitching media outlets so I didn't have to.

If you're going to spend money to publicize your book, spend it on pitching media outlets. A single mention in a well-read magazine or newspaper can give you a real bump in sales.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#364

Post by rachelandrew » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:08 PM UTC

kehers wrote: post #331

rachelandrew wrote: post #55

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…

How did you market it at launch? Tips?

Pre-announced and got people to sign up to my mailing list in return they got chapter 1 and the table of contents early. I write a weekly email about side projects and building products so a lot of my early traffic came from that. We did exactly the same thing when we launched Perch, and that launch day paid back in sales everything we had spent on the product to get it to launch (not our time but actual cash outlay).

You need to be building an audience for your book long before you actually launch it if you want to have a decent launch. Nathan Barry writes some good stuff about this, check out his book Authority: http://nathanbarry.com/authority/

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#365

Post by raelmiu » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:08 PM UTC

I build small web apps, like http://blankpage.io/ Since the last thread on this I've cut my costs from $200 a month to about $5 a month, but it took months to rewrite the backend to do that. So still losing more than I'm making.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#366

Post by fiatjaf » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:09 PM UTC

gavinballard wrote: post #41

I make about $200/m in affiliate revenue from Shopify ( http://www.shopify.com/?ref=disco ) <= Yes, that's an affiliate link.

From where do you get your affiliates?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#367

Post by pond_lilly » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:11 PM UTC

ryanfelton wrote: post #285

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…

Is it based on Divi template?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#368

Post by fiatjaf » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:13 PM UTC

frownie wrote: post #104

I build a small ERP (closed source so far)... 3 customers at 100€ / month => 300 €/month, paid in various ways...

I'm doing something like this.

Where did you get customers?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#369

Post by mjwhansen » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:16 PM UTC

AlexNeoNomad wrote: post #298

mjwhansen wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We've built our own dataset, largely based on the US Census Bureau's TIGER/Line data which we've converted into a useable format. This is why we are US-only -- most countries don't provide such data, and if they do they charge an arm and a leg for it (ex., the UK).

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#370

Post by stevenwilkin » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:17 PM UTC

The last few years I've been building up a portfolio of dividend paying shares. In the previous 12 months dividend payouts have totalled GBP 2488.31. There has also been some capital growth.

The portfolio is inside a SIPP (self-invested pension) and the funds funnelled into it have been the profits from my contracting business which would have been liable to higher-rate income tax here in the UK.

Keeping money from the taxman which then makes me more money is great, shame I can't access any of it until 2040 ;)