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Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

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421–430 of 441 posts

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#421
post #165
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you break into this industry? I've done random work as a freelancer for a few different adults sites, but I've always felt like running my own was the real "money shot" as far as passive income goes. Can you elaborate on how you got started and how you keep an edge in such a competitive space?

I'm not really into the industry - my main income is coming from working for major brands in the ("mainstream") ad industry. I saw the service of acquaintance of mine and what revenue he's making, so I though I can do better. Generally, in this industry there's massive shortage of talent, ideas and innovation. This is a big opportunity for people who are delivering value in the "mainstream" startup scene and that was…

Can you please provide more detail regarding how innovation is lacking?

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#422

My Linux server tutorial course site http://GREP101.com brings in $700 on a good month and $100 on a bad one. Simply a reflection of the fact that I don't have the necessary things in place to drive consistant traffic to the site - when traffic comes then I get good conversion and a full course, but if not, not. I keep it going mainly because the feedback is very encouraging, (people really do get a buzz out of learn…

Nice site, I work as a Systems and Network Engineer and have been wanting to do something like this for some time. I've had similar things for PHP before that got great feedback but I did it for free.

My main worry is how much content I produce and how to value it. Do you ever get requests for refunds? Have you had anyone unhappy with the course etc? Have you done any marketing at all? Or have you just dropped your link in a few places?

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#424
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am like you. Recently, I was given the advice (by someone who the advice was working for well) to hire a business manager. You do what you are good at (producing content, conducting research, giving workshops & lectures) and they manage the business. You need to be able to trust them, but assuming you can find somebody like that and afford to pay them, it makes a lot of sense. Perhaps there should be an app for tha…

I'd love to! But, the 3 people I've approached about it so far have all failed to work with a single lead. Literally I'll forward them an email asking me to come speak somewhere, and they never communicate with the person or me about the work again. If anyone on HN wants to start a speakers agency for tech/security folk, I'd be first in line to sign up :)

I'm interested in your need - in your example, you have a verified, paid speaking lead and you need someone to line up the work for you, get it billed, maybe find you other leads, what else? I'm not going to promise anything other than to think about your need and see if I can come up with a simple solution (I have an idea in mind). If you'd like to email about it, send me a note - noj AT dimensionsix.com.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#425

Bit late to the boat but: Around $700/mo from a themeforest account. And the more interesting story, about £4.5k/mo from a cleaning business that i bought. I will at some point write the story up, but the TL:DR is: Spotted vastly under valued cleaning business with complete staff. Turnover of previous owner £190k a year. Profit of previous owner £18k. Yup, £18k.... Bought it for £13.5k. Still in the early stages and…

Any tips on finding undervalued small businesses? How did you come across this one?

A day late and I'm not the OP, but a friend of mine did this by talking to a business broker. He found a small technology business that was operated by an old couple that needed to quit.

The couple had been making sensors for a niche industry forever and were still charging prices from 10 years earlier. His first order of business was to contact all the customers and tell them prices were going up.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#426
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice site. Has the income come down due to a reduction in traffic spend or just a loss in rankings due to reduction in freshness metric wrt SEO or any other reason?

My site got slapped by Google Penguin update, lost 90% of its traffic and never really recovered. It's going down steadily now for some time. As for the Google penguin update drop in rankings, it might have been a stale content penalty, or a devaluation of spammy links - I wrote manually lots of articles for supposedly respectable article directories pointing back to the template website to go up in search engine ran…

Would you consider passing it on to someone else, with a view to getting hands off royalties for a time. Or would you just want to sell it and have it clear cut?

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#427
post #154

I've usually read these threads without thinking about my own situation, but suddenly realized, I'm getting checks every month. It's not much, only $100-$250 per month, based on advertisements on my youtube channel, most coming from a 24 part series I made on locks & lockpicking a few years ago, but it's passive to the point that I literally forget about it. Unfortunately I'm the sort who is very uncomfortable asking…

That's a cool idea and I made only 1/3 of that.

Made about $200-$350 every 3months investing no time at all. Last year I started feeling bad, because I didn't do anything and made the menu free. I wanted to sell other stuff, but never had the same motivation to be honest.

I made a menu for a customer, then decided to sell it for $1, but the system didn't allow that (no micropayments). So I just made a dozen additional colors of the menu using Photoshop and sold it for $15 for 2y.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Nobody at Google would have a job if it wasn't for Adsense/Adwords, which hasn't changed since the Goto.com days. It's a fancy click counter script paying everyone's salary. Search = content to sell clicks. You could fire 99% of everyone at Google and they wouldn't lose one penny of profit.

So the App store infrastructure, support, etc just built itself automatically? The entire eco-system would not have been possible without them making it. I've been an App developer for 4 years now and have no qualms with apple taking the 'passive' 30%

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Nobody at Google would have a job if it wasn't for Adsense/Adwords, which hasn't changed since the Goto.com days. It's a fancy click counter script paying everyone's salary. Search = content to sell clicks. You could fire 99% of everyone at Google and they wouldn't lose one penny of profit.

So the App store infrastructure, support, etc just built itself automatically? The entire eco-system would not have been possible without them making it. I've been an App developer for 4 years now and have no qualms with apple taking the 'passive' 30%

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Nobody at Google would have a job if it wasn't for Adsense/Adwords, which hasn't changed since the Goto.com days. It's a fancy click counter script paying everyone's salary. Search = content to sell clicks. You could fire 99% of everyone at Google and they wouldn't lose one penny of profit.

So the App store infrastructure, support, etc just built itself automatically? The entire eco-system would not have been possible without them making it. I've been an App developer for 4 years now and have no qualms with apple taking the 'passive' 30%

I was just talking about Google. Sorry if my comment was vague and off on a weird tangent ;-)
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