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

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#91

Post by chatmasta » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:38 PM UTC

gtheme wrote: post #30

My passive income, Ghost Theme marketplace http://www.gtheme.io/ Revenue around 100 USD per month. Running for half year need more marketing for better revenue. Ghost blog is the next big thing in blogging space.

Nice. Staying ahead of the curve like this is the right move. That's gonna pay off when 10x as many people are using Ghost and your site is already ranked at the top of the search results.

Similarly, if you're building a content site, the time to do it is right when the hype around your topic gets started. Think upcoming movie releases, video games, elections, etc. Build out the content around the hype, then when the time comes you're at the top and nobody's gonna knock you off. I know quite a few people banking some serious coin from this strategy alone.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#92

Post by MobileAppVault » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:38 PM UTC

gaeappthrowaway wrote: post #86

I have an AppEngine app that brings in $7k/mo with very little work, with about $2k/mo in server costs. Roughly 50 users paying between $30/mo and $500/mo There's about 10 minutes of support work per day, but besides corporate customers occasionally needing some phone salesmanship and some manual tweaking, everything else is automated.

Sounds good! Congratulations! Can you share a link?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#93

Post by bru » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:39 PM UTC

gaeappthrowaway wrote: post #86

I have an AppEngine app that brings in $7k/mo with very little work, with about $2k/mo in server costs. Roughly 50 users paying between $30/mo and $500/mo There's about 10 minutes of support work per day, but besides corporate customers occasionally needing some phone salesmanship and some manual tweaking, everything else is automated.

Nice. Link, details?

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#94

Post by timjahn » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:39 PM UTC

gaeappthrowaway wrote: post #86

I have an AppEngine app that brings in $7k/mo with very little work, with about $2k/mo in server costs. Roughly 50 users paying between $30/mo and $500/mo There's about 10 minutes of support work per day, but besides corporate customers occasionally needing some phone salesmanship and some manual tweaking, everything else is automated.

Can you talk more about what the app is and what it does? Curious.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#95

Post by christiangenco » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:40 PM UTC

baudehlo wrote: post #68

I started EmailItIn[1] to allow people to email files to Google Drive, then added DropBox and SkyDrive/OneDrive support. Premium accounts bring in about $200/m right now, and it's steadily rising. Support is low - though it took a while to build the initial technology. I get a lot of traction from realtors and lawyers. I've tried paid advertising but the conversions are too low to make it worth it. Initial goal was "…

What do you charge for premium accounts? I can't find pricing on your site.

I've had a similar service, http://dbinbox.com/, slowly growing with entirely free plans for the last ~year and a half up to ~25k users and am about to add premium plans.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#96

Post by Cthulhu_ » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:40 PM UTC

About $30 a month off of AdWords for a fansite I run; it covers about 2/3rds (if that) of the server costs, so I'm content with that. I could earn more if I placed more ads, better ads, worked actively on the site / promoted it, but it's a fansite, and I think it'd be unfair for the people that actually spend obsessive hours writing content for it - if I were to make big money off of it, or would sell it (it's probably worth a few thousand due to content + google rankings), I'd have a massive headache and drama trying to distribute said money.

Effort is relatively low, a few weeks of on and off work to get it online, styling, moving servers a couple of times, etc. I need to move servers again I think, or at least upgrade all the software, it's kinda wonky for some people at times.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#97

Post by rokhayakebe » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:40 PM UTC

easyname wrote: post #13

I had a motorcycle which I had bought for 126K INR. I was not using it much except to commute from home to office. I was going to sell the bike, then suddenly this idea clicked. It took few hours to make and host indiarider.com(people can take the bike on rent). Its been two months now, I have made 15K till now, 7K last week.

Excellent. Scale it if possible. If you can automate the process for others looking to rent, I think the opportunity is huge.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#98

Post by snoonan » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:40 PM UTC

between $3000- and $18,000+/mo in online courses. The latter being more active in terms of sales, promotion, offers. It's not sustainable since customers are not responsive to this kind of thing each and every month.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#99

Post by cageface » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:42 PM UTC

MobileAppVault wrote: post #84

cageface wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was hoping that the free version + IAP would generate significantly more revenue than the paid version, since I've read so many articles claiming that freemium is the future of the app store. So far this hasn't been true though. Currently IAP revenue from the free version tends to be about 1/3 the revenue of the paid version even though free app downloads outnumber paid by at least 10 to 1 on most days. It does see…

Thanks for sharing your knowledge :) I think... IAP are good because you can show your potential customers how good your app is.

I really wish Apple would just implement a trial period like Google's Play Store. I understand that people don't want to pay for an app without trying it but trying to solve this problem with IAP just pushes this responsibility onto developers and results in a more confusing and inconsistent experience for users.

Re: What was your best passive income in 2014?

#100

Post by thumbtackthief » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:42 PM UTC

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…

I bought your book for my scientist lady-friend! It's awesome! Nice work!