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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?

#421

Post by chatmasta »

ohblahitsme wrote: post #303
jasonkester wrote: post #268

It's been a while since I shared my S3stat [1] numbers. I prefer to talk in vague handwavy terms rather than concrete numbers, but this should give a picture of the trajectory: 6 months: Regularly covering server expenses (which were ~$50-100/month at that point). 18 months: Would have paid for me to live nicely on the beach in Thailand. 30 months: Would cover my rent (and nothing else) at a nice apartment in a major…

I'm curious to know how well your cheap bastard plan ( https://www.s3stat.com/web-stats/cheap-bastard-plan ) has been working out. Has it brought in some customers?

Isn't this almost exactly what Google punished rap genius for doing?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#422

Post by vetler »

artie_effim wrote: post #70
vetler wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you compared this to just putting the money in a high-interest savings account?

a what? do you think it is 1985?

Yeah, maybe it wasn't a great question. I can get 3.5% where I live, though.

Mutual funds may be a much better option, though.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#423

Post by AlexNeoNomad »

mjwhansen wrote: post #369
AlexNeoNomad wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

By the way, how big is your dataset: millions, billions records for the U.S.? Or how many (approximately) records are there for, let's say, Washington city or LA?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#424

Post by chatmasta »

somebodysomeone wrote: post #166

I built an information website (not USA) that now pulls in roughly $8800 a month via adsense. To get to that figure takes about 500k user sessions/month (lots of long tail traffic). Runs on a single medium website instance in Azure, takes about an hour a day in maintenance and monitoring for malicious traffic like scraping that can be a problem for info sites (I've mostly automated this). The initial time outlay was…

> (not USA)

Is the content in English, or a foreign language? Do you get most of your "long tail" referrals from google.com or an international version?

I suspect there are a lot of wide open playing fields for content sites in foreign languages that simply replicate popular US based ones.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#425

Post by chatmasta »

patio11 wrote: post #310

Bingo Card Creator is still plugging along, though both down from previous years and an increasingly small portion of my business. I spend under 20 minutes a month on it on about 2 to 5 issues which make it past T1 support. As for numbers: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month Historically, multiplying by 60% usually gets a good approximation for profits.

Have you written a blog post about your support outsourcing process? I would be interested to see your process.

My first side business was profiting $10k/mo but I ultimately lost it because of neglecting support emails.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#426

Post by MobileAppVault »

sdernley wrote: post #54
cageface wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations! Sad though that even a featured app only pulls in $90/month. My own iPhone photo app, Liquid Lens: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/liquid-lens-real-time-psyche... actually briefly cracked the top 200 photo apps this month and pulls in more than $90 but is still only in the coffee money income bracket. After four years of the indie iOS thing I'm tooling back up to do web dev again.

I have an app that floats around the top 200 in the travel section but it doesn't really bring in much (i'm only using iAD and not charging for the app). I guess the travel section is probably a little easier to crack than some sections though.

I made really bad experience with iAD and other monetizing frameworks. 0,50$/day and >2k impressions. I think iAD works only with iOS games. Can you share a link?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#427

Post by chatmasta »

aroch wrote: post #149
chatmasta wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you leasing your own collocated hardware or are small businesses paying you on retainer as a server admin?

Leasing my own collocated hardware that was originally purchased for a different task but were no longer in use

Nice. So if it's going so well, why don't you just buy some more servers and lease them out as well?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#428

Post by TylerJewell »

firebones wrote: post #410
TylerJewell wrote: post #395

I may have written about this before, so apologies if this is repetitive. In 2010ish, I had gotten fairly sick due to a metal poisoning. The biggest issue was that it was messing with my cognitive abilities and that made me fearful of not being able to work and earn an income at the standard of living I had become accustomed to. I quickly recovered, but became obsessed with finding a way to live - indefinitely - off…

A lot of the efficacy of this depends on when you started. The S&P500 total return last year (2013) was 32.39%. The year before (2012), 16%. [1] The two year annualized: 23.92% which is really near your 24% compounded. Weekly trading sounds like a lot of transaction cost for not much alpha. It sounds like you are doing better this year-to-date, but be careful drawing conclusions on a system when the market is going g…

The strategy performs optimally in markets that are flat to +-5% on a given year. Last year's 32% gain in the S&P 500 was essentially the nightmare year and yielded 6%. 2008 would have been a nightmare year and yielded around the same. The strategy involves selling strangles with European contracts with portfolio margin using algorithms to determine a 95% likelihood of contracts expiring OTM, with a couple dozen adjustment techniques that occur if the 5% scenario plays out.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#429

Post by aroch »

chatmasta wrote: post #427
aroch wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leasing my own collocated hardware that was originally purchased for a different task but were no longer in use

Nice. So if it's going so well, why don't you just buy some more servers and lease them out as well?

Work really doesn't scale linearly with servers with this type of business. I've known my current tenants for quite some time and they aren't "needy" or problem users, which makes my job easier.

I'd also either need to purchase a new cabinet or move into a cage -- which is not really an upfront cost (or the headache of contract negotiations) I want to take on for a hobby business. In either case, I'd have to start running my own switches (and god forbid router) and while I roughly know how to administer both, those are better left until I have more time to devote.

On the flip side, I have toyed with racking up a few 6U blade servers (~50 blades total) and renting those out as unmanaged, 0-support servers. The problem here is its a race to the bottom with blades and I'm no Softlayer or OVH and can't buy these things at hefty discount. I have worked out the math and after the first 3months, if I sell at least 60% of the blades I'll be paid off and the margins are significantly higher than my current servers.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#430

Post by raelmiu »

boaticus wrote: post #416
raelmiu wrote: post #365

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.

Excellent landing page! Love the use of typography! And, the animated gifs make it quickly obvious what your app does and how someone would use it. Best of luck!

Thank you! Worried a bit about if it was clear or not. Thanks!
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