The storefront is through ShapeWays[1] and I use ifixit[2] to drive the traffic. It's passively making ~$425/mo with about 10 minutes of work per week on my end. This all happened because my grinder failed and I couldn't get parts.
[1] https://www.shapeways.com/product/NASLAGCCP/breville-bcg800x...
[2] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/BCG800XL+Grinder+Jamming+due+to...
... and on the guide.
> Sandpaper and a file are likely optional. They are only necessary if the 3D printed impeller isn't a perfect fit.
Do you get any "support" queries from people who buy the impeller and then try to fit it, and it's tight (by your own admission a deliberate design choice) and they try to email you or return the impeller? Not trolling, genuinely curious.
Super cool side project.
[Somewhat related: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim... ]
I told the accountant, who I always found watching CNBC in the break room and I suspect still dreamed of being a day-trader, that the best investment I ever made was our company's ESPP (Employee Stock Purchase Plan).
He said, "You know what? Same here."
(Standard disclaimer: max out your 401(k)/IRA contributions, first.)
On the other hand, the implicit question of the post was "what did you create to generate passive income" (it's called "Hacker" News, not "Invester/Banker" News).
My blog post about financial independence: http://mays.co/why-financial-independence/
any hacker can, in the next ten minutes, cause their CPU to do more arithmetic than the arithmetic (explicitly adding 2+5, and so forth, multiplying two numbers in their heads) that every single person has done in the history of humanity. okay, but that's just numbers.
Today we live in a connected world where 2,000,000,000 people can be reached in any eight-hour period of time.
Any hacker can find any niche and make a product that will be the first search result within it (by being the first; making something that doesn't exist; and telling people).
Why save a salary, when you can create a business, create value, and scale to the entire Internet and give people some benefit?
Every hacker should start one or several businesses. While it may not exactly be a moral obligation, this brings humanity forward.
EDIT to clarify: I am disagreeing with the suggestion that hackers should save all or most of their money - (put in my parent comment as "save as much of your salary as you can") -- rather than saving it, they should invest it into their businesses, adwords to grow it, other advertising and business development expenses, hiring, etc.
That said...there are many funds like them, those in particular are 3x leveraged crude oil ETF's. That means if the price of oil rises 1%, UWTI rises 3%. If it falls 1%, DWTI rises 3%. Crude oil as a market has "predictable volatility", that (simply) means that within a given day, the price will rise/fall repeatedly within a sane range(given no extraordinary circumstances). Identify this range, and buy and sell on both sides(short and long) to take advantage of the range. Follow the big money(banks), and you'll be just fine. Never go against the flow, you will (virtually) always lose.
For my Indian friends here (or people interested in investing in the Indian market), I'd suggest http://scripbox.com (no affiliation, just a happy customer).
I started a year ago when I was 25, and am glad I started this early(-ish).
Probably don't do this (use taxable investment accounts) unless you have at least 15% going to your tax-advantaged retirement account(s).
Thanks to a complete lack of material in this niche, the site (http://pengapplicant.ca) gets a decent amount of organic search traffic given the niche size (2k page views per month) and I make about $15/month in Adsense. Recently I was also contacted by someone who sells materials for the application and exam and have become an affiliate for them. It's only been one month, but i've already made one referral which netted me $100. So passive income on this after hosting costs is probably $220-ish and will be more in 2017 hopefully with more affiliate sales. Obviously very small potatoes, but I never set out to make any money for this and it looks like now it will at least cover my yearly professional dues ;)
To be honest, the best part is the messages I get from people saying how I helped them get their license. That's a much nicer feeling than the $.
That said, the PE exam was a breeze for me (took computer engineering exam). I'm slightly horrified that the failure rate is 50%.
I built a bot network that reads tech events - mostly meetups, some conferences and workshops - for a given city from a variety of sources and tweets them. I use machine learning to determine hashtags, time of day to tweet, and new data sources. When I launched Austin - https://twitter.com/ATXTechEvents - in September 2015, I got 900 followers the first month. I suspected it was a fluke so launched Dallas FW and Houston to test. It wasn't a fluke.
In 2016, I've launched 45 different cities in the US and the network has 100k followers collectively, has its own automated weekly mailing list, and is generating 1.4M+ impressions/month. Revenue is affiliate fees for conferences (we are a media partner for O'Reilly) and workshops and selling the ad blocks in the newsletter. Almost all of that is automated. The revenue is pretty minor right now but growing and I spend 1-2 hours on it a week.
The landing page is here: https://techeventsnetwork.com/ (only some of the cities) and the full list of cities is here: https://twitter.com/TechEventsNet/following
The Tech Events Network tweets most groups either the morning of or night before and five days in advance, so you have a couple chances to notice. Further, occasionally it mentions the meetup group's twitter handle so easy RTing.
(All automated and sometimes I'm surprised about what it's found.)
can you elaborate more this?
But than I found another tab in the utterly shitty admin panel and it hit me like a rock. The numbers on the dashboard were a monthly overview and in fact we earned already hundreds of dollars and downloads in just a few days. I went back to the computer, but together an even better watch face, set it to 1$ again and watched it selling like hotcakes.
However it tried out quite quickly after that. People started to copy stuff and giving it away for free and I never bought the watch myself, I just used the emulator to test my apps. So I took them out of the store at the end because dealing with taxes and sharing the income does not make it worth it if you get support requests like "how can I change the time on my watch", "what do I care, its your shitty watch and Samsung's shitty interface"... So yea. That's my best story about unexpected passive income. Selling stuff fast on a new platform seem to work!
Edit: Found some screens. First one: https://i.imgur.com/TIVsPKO.png Best selling one: https://i.imgur.com/9L8TetO.png
- Rich Dad, Poor Dad got me into the idea of 'passive' income. Nothing is truly passive of course, but it makes me think about what I do
- SourceGuardian. This is encryption software I set up in 2002 as I had a need myself and the nearest product was $6000 at the time. It has generated a great passive income since then. Enough to pay all my bills. 2016 was no different. I work with 2 other people on it, one of whom I've never met (he's in Russia) and it works well
- Competitor Monitor. This used to be a side-project 5 years ago, but it has grown significantly and in the past year we are up by 35% and we have grown our team. Strangely this has now become passive in the sense that I have created a structure and systemised the business (read The Emyth Revisited book) and that has allowed me to step out. I am not more of an investor than a day-to-day contributor
- UKscrap.com. This one died in 2016. The site is still there, but competition and my lack of interest killed it
As I said, nothing is truly passive, but you need to have a passion for whatever you do and I would try to create a 'passive index' for your ideas. How much time will they take to get off the ground, how much to run monthly, what is the product life cycle (if you can work that out!). From when I started there are a HUGE number of resources to help you also. Feel free to ask for help or advice, for what it's worth!
EDIT: I actually met my SourceGuardian partner once in Prague for 2 days. Forgot that when I wrote the above!
since tesla is such a controversial company, lots of people want to own the stock (expecting it to go up) and lots of people want to short sell it (expecting it go down).
if you're a stock holder, certain places (like interactive brokers) will let you lend your stock holdings to people that want to sell it short. you earn a premium on this loan, but its basically risk-free since the brokerage bears the counter-party risk.
because short interest is so high, there was a substantial portion of 2016 where there weren't enough shares available to satisfy short sellers' demand. TSLA became classified as "hard to borrow" and borrowing premiums would be anywhere from 8% to 100+% depending on the day/demand. this is money short sellers pay on top of the cost to purchase the shares (and one more thing to bear on top of the risk of short-selling, but that's another story).
the premium is paid daily, and the brokerage usually takes a chunk of it (often half), so if you had $100k of tesla stock and the premium was 50%, you'd earn (100,000 * 50% * (1/2) / 365) = $68.50 for each day that someone borrowed your shares. the rate fluctuated daily, but this still netted me several thousand dollars of truly passive income, since i was planning to hold the stock either way. this is also a huge income stream for institutional shareholders that are sitting on millions of shares.
Well, unless the brokerage itself goes under, no?
Made $104,000 in revenue since June (turns out the user acquisition stuff actually works), about 87k of which is profit, so we'll say ~$11,000/month part-time. It still makes me a solid $2,000/month now with zero work, and hopefully more once the book is officially published. (It's done and delivered to backers, but won't be on bookshelves and Amazon until after it's typeset.)
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-ultimate-growth-hacki...
I know the marketing will be over-the-top for HN. Just know it sells because the content is really, really good.
If spamming all of twitter in alphabetical order is an example of the growth hacks....
I see the account he used to do most of the spamming has been suspended by Twitter now https://twitter.com/vdignan
I hope the startup didn't fail because it couldn't attract users?
Tell anyone how much you made with your own tipps without proof/proof of your specific case and use it to sell it
Just checked and this year I've made about $13,000 in profit. It's mostly passive — this year I started using a fulfillment company so the majority of my work is sending them orders (and answering questions about the book.)
Hoping to continue the trend next year by launching a book on teaching design for engineers (http://hellowebdesignbook.com).
I also find it satisfying to see that it's apparently quite possible to make (some) money on such projects - keep up the good work! :-)
We started a small online shop about 10 years ago, and it's mostly automated. About 5 minutes/day + one week / year of work.
Before that, I had spent a few years (trying to) run rather big software projects (for me – I was 18 or 19). They had cost me so many sleepless nights that I swore to never again take on customers paying me more than 100 Euro each. Now, if anybody complains, or gets on my nerves, they get their money back and are never heard from again.
My friends joke I'm the living example for an unconditional basic income. They haven't decided on the outcome yet, though.
Interestingly it has been very popular with teams (so selling a set of licenses so a whole team of developers can use the material). I also teach the same material in person (either in-house or in open workshops) so I'm keeping the two in sync. I made some notes about that process on my blog: https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2016/06/03/creating-an-e...
I intend to do a bit more marketing of both the in-person and online training in the new year.
As an independent (not working for a browser vendor) invited expert to the CSS Working Group, training and offering this course is really how I can fund doing that.
It's a price comparison website for top-level domains. Gross on average is $600/month through affiliate sales and data download subscriptions. Requires maybe 10-20 hours of work per month for maintenance and new features.
The most difficult part is tracking registrar affiliate earnings, and then actually getting paid by the registrar. Many require you to manually request a payout once you've reached the minimum payout threshold, others simply ignore your payout requests.
It's a tricky product because the way the app work is not for everyone, at the same time when people use it they normally share it with their friends. So I get good organic traffic. The biggest issue is to explain whats unique about this productivity tool, but seeing the video normally do the job.
It's not able to pay for me not working yet as I live in NY so there are obvious reasons for that being hard.
But it does provide me with a healthy chunk of money. And through feedback from customers I have found a new product in the same area and that will be a SaaS product.
Didn't do any work on marketing really so it is pretty much passive, but I think with a bit of work they could both do a lot better. It's a very seasonal market - we only get customers for about 3 months per year (the 3 months leading up to the exams), so thinking of branching out into other exams that occur during other times of the year so the income is a bit more steady.
They are making some nice money each year, but the trend is quite clear: given same traffic I am making about 50% less each year. Ad revenue is way down (more adblock users, less money per click, CTR is down), but paid premium plans are balancing it a bit.
These projects are still my biggest passive income stream, but they are going to die in few years. Other than that I am owning agriculture land (that I am renting), rental property and portfolio of p2p loans.
Those traditional assets are much more expensive to acquire, but then the yield is much predictable and stable. Still, the tech projects are my best source of income considering the amount of money/time required to create it.
I launched it a few months ago and have a few smaller subscribers with a handful of larger subscribers.
Of course, because of my laziness, I took the passiveness too far and it's now all but impossible to reuse it for another potential client.
It was fun while it lasted.
You can go further and buy government bonds directly, through the Tesouro Direto system. Those indexed by the SELIC rate (which is sort of related to the CDI) are currently around 13.5% per year, before administration fees and taxes (in fact, the boring funds I mentioned above mostly invest in these SELIC-indexed government bonds).
This will change when (and if) rates get lower, but so far, investing in these funds or bonds is the simplest (and one of the best) way to have passive income.
A high interest rate is a signal that lenders are wary of lending money to the borrower because of an increased risk of default/inflation. That's fine as long as you are aware of this, but don't think you're getting a "better deal" than someone investing in a boring 1% German government bond. That 12.5% you're getting in addition represents the increased risk that the Brazilian government might default on their debts or the currency might inflate enough to negate the advantage.
It also doesn't look like it's going to get better, just worse - so as far as I can discern the best course of action is just to spend it before it becomes completely valueless. To stay ahead of inflation here I'd have to have a 10% yield at least - official CPI figures grievously underreport it, as the baskets of goods they use don't account for the shrink ray.
Released this week. Came unnoticed on HN but somehow got featured on PH. 1200+ downloads of free version and a few sales.
Not sure if that'll change. In that case, the best of 2016 will be one of the plugins for Sketch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319286.
https://github.com/ImageOptim/ImageOptim
Also are you going to support and fix the frequent bugs that png optimizers run into with esoteric color space/alpha combinations beyond the best effort...?
May I ask what percentage of sales did you get?
I'm going to launch my product soon, and I'd like to know what I can expect.
I'm now considering doing this again in 2017. Hopefully interest rates will remain as low as they have been in order to lock-in an attractive mortgage.
Brexit, Trump, EU sentiment, China trying to deal with their own problems, they're all pointing to the same way: devalued currencies. Where they start, rising interest start to follow.
I'd also be wary of assuming commercial real estate was a lock-in. I've heard horror stories.
I'm glad it's working for you right now, I'm just saying: make sure you tread carefully and have done your research before you start gearing up.
What was your downpayment? Asking because I tried to do the same thing earlier this year. Thought I was clever, did the math on how much I can rent out an apt on AirBnB, and what the mortgage would be on 30 year fixed, and my calcs said I need to put only 5% down to break-even. Then I contact lender and turns out, for Investment properties, they require minimum of 25% to 35% cash as downpayment. They said this was to hedge their risks against a borrower who would bail easily if an investment property goes south.
Any way around this? i.e. around not having to put 25% down on investment RE?
Hope to have it really pickup once done and turn profitable
My friend has made about $650 off of his AMD investment so far though and is thinking of moving all of it into Micron.
The next guy wasn't good and eventually didn't want to actively manage the account. I kept looking until this year when I found fractalgo, which is used by large institutional investors to trade through science without emotion and second-guessing.
Downside is you needed to be a qualified investor.
I called up the owner curious about how the fractal tech worked and found out he was setting up a service for everyone, not just the big guys.
After some research I moved my IRAs left over from previous 401Ks to a custodian that can do directed investments + broker and let the automated system go.
Couldn't be happier. No humans required once set up, and it keeps growing like a weed while I sleep.
Do your own research for what works for you and seek it out. You will find it, eventually.
Since doing so well, they just opened a fund using the same technology.
It shines when you search for something that you want the best version of, without caring about the details; i.e., let the masses determine the quality for you. It weights results based on ratings, review volume, and some other stuff, segmenting the results by price range.
Helps me answer the question "I want the best phone mount for my bike, but I don't want to spend more than $20" without fiddling with Amazon's search parameters and then scanning the page.
Makes ~$100/month off of affiliate links.
As someone who's experiencing the drop in revenue firsthand, what are you thinking of doing to address that? Shift platforms to PC/Steam? Change the designs of future games to reflect current trends, etc.?
I was considering I might just make games using a simple cross-platform tool like Love2D, keep the designs of the games small but addictive, single player only, no levels but can be played endlessly to failure (i.e. Tetris or 2048), either make them free with a simple consumable or a dollar, and distribute them on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.
I don't expect to make a ton of money for most of them but I hope I'll get lucky with one of them and it becomes a hit. I have about 3 past web games to port and update that could work.
Does this seem feasible? What would you do differently?
p2p lending is hit or miss for me: 3-10%
Index funds pull in the rest.
I've also moved temporarily to a very cheap COL country so that I can focus on some more side projects to pull in extra sources of income before I return to the work force.
My only new product this year was a 6 weeks video course [1] in productivity, it makes around $5000 every time I fill a class.
1. http://timeblock.com TimeBlock course
adjusts monocle
I have more ideas but I'll stop there. Good luck with your project!
I published my tutorial on writing webapps with Go without a framework,
http://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook
There isn't much income because I want the book to be free, I'm writing another tutorial migrating the same app taught in the book to use VueJS library.
Friendly correction: peace of mind, not piece of mind =)
Fast-forward a few years and I finally built out https://kernl.us as a learning project (Mongo, Node.js, Angular). It's mostly passive income now, pulling in ~$450 per month.
Later, company rules changed and I stopped actively promoting it, but second level referrals still are generating 5-10k year with doing absolutely nothing of work.
Once the website was setup, maintenance workload was pretty minimal (the occasional BugSnag report), so I guess that counts as passive.
In the past 8-10 months, it made about $5k+ through sales as well as partnerships with a couple online bootcamps. Not too shabby as I spent almost no time marketing it. Plus it was fun to write since I'm passionate about the topic and I've received some awesome feedback (of the "you actually changed my life"-sort). That was more than worth the hundreds of hours I spent writing it, the small bit of money aside.
If you build something with the main interest of making money out of it, the state (and most probably your employer) will treat it as a business and want you to run a business for that or will likely forbid to do it. But if you build something because you need it for yourself and are running it more like a hobby but make profits from it, there´s something called "Liebhaberei". This special status mainly has tax implications (you can´t get refunds on losses from your Liebhaberei because it´s not qualified as a business, tax-wise...) but I´ve had friends which got their side projects "approved" by their employers because they did not look like real businesses and were run on this Liebhaberei status.
So if you like miniature railways and build a niche site around it, which will give you beer money (or a bit more), the tax people most probably won´t have any problems with that. You should avoid doing things that look like you are running a business (having a shop, selling stuff), but most of them probably won´t even notice affiliate links or understand what that does.
This can also help you with your employer. "Boss, I have this site about my miniature railways and now it´s making 50 bucks a month, is that a problem?"
Or you go the right way. Be honest and say that you´d like to do something for fun but there could be money involved and you just wanted to make sure that´s okay for everybody. I found employers to be unexpectedly tolerant when you´re honest.
I agreed to automated billing with him and he pays per user. I also build API's so he can hire other developers to do stuff with the data and add features.
I myself haven't touched the code for years, but the growth of the database means an extra monthly $1250-ish comes in. Which is nice.
Note: I'm also looking for a partner in this if anyone has any experience let me know.
In 2016 i've relaunched https://www.interssl.com/en/ but when i'm being honest there are just too many support incidents. So i just can't call it passive income anymore - even if that was the initial idea.
The margin of sales without support basically just covers the cost for the orders that require heavy support. Remaining income is basically blown for advertising and maintaining the site.
My conclusions:
a) think twice about potential time killers - even if the core business model per se is passive, it might turn out to be time intensive ...
b) i'd rather not go into reselling something anymore but rather sell my own product, gives me more financial headroom.
my 2 cents.
It's a domain name idea generator. You feed it a keyword and it translates it into 30+ languages and shows you .com's that are not being used. Trying now to get more eyeballs across it. Fun though!
Edit: are you doing a lookup of the raw version instead of the cleaned one?
Only have made like $20 off Adsense, but I've got a lot more work to try and get this tool into passive mode:
* working on selecting a date range
* style up the site a bit more
* maybe have users so you can save searches etc
I get very valuable data that the travel industry would probably consider great leads, but I'm just figuring out what to do with it all.
Edit - and fill out these graphs: http://www.averageweather.io/monthly/boston/ma/12/
* If I type Manhattan, NY, automatically show me a map w/ overlay of weather in Manhattan and surrounding areas. Maybe default to today, but also forward cursor to calendar.
* Or maybe automatically show bar chart of Manhattan for 1 week starting today. If they select a day automatically show +-3 days.
* or allow a date range to be selected or even just Month of December
* you need exposure, I've never heard of this before
edit: Oh ok, you've already done some of these, good.
1 more: move the C/F selector to upper right and make it a sticky value per visitor
Also, "Bangkok Thailand" asks me to pick a town/city.
What is the question the user actually wants to know? Should I pack a raincoat? Should I pack a dress coat for nights? Do I need an umbrella, or just a coat with a hood, etc...
Could I compare multiple areas in one chart?
Unrelated. How could I search for the least hot areas of Florida? Or find really windy areas of Florida?
$10... For the whole year. App sales aren't the golden goose everyone things they are.
The web-based version is like a demo, it's free to use but saving and importing is disabled. I'm selling a downloadable desktop app version which has the restrictions removed.
I'm thinking of making it completely free and maybe selling ad-space on there instead.
Here is a link to the course: https://www.udemy.com/user-experience-design-the-accelerated...
In addition to that project, I also launched an online store for design patent artwork. To do this, I downloaded images of patents from the US Patent Office Database, paid a virtual assistant $1/hour to clean them and standardize the proportions, then using a Photoshop Action applied in Batch, I generated all of the images. After getting all of the images, I built an online store and integrated with printing and fulfillment service using Woocommerce and a Restful API - so when orders are placed, it triggers the artwork to be printed, and shipped, automatically. I now make about $300/month from that project and spend about 10 minutes/week managing it.
Here is a link to that website: www.PatentArtStore.com
Anyone have any suggestions for my next project?
To date, I've made $6.31 from that blog post alone. Someday, I'll get over $100, so adsense will pay out.
I've also got an online multiplayer boggle game that has made me low 3 digits per month since about 2008, http://serpentinegame.com, mostly ad revenue but also paid memberships.
[1]http://www.lulu.com/shop/darren-jones/the-complete-guide-to-...
I sold a domain I had intended to develop this year to a FB founder for $12,000 and another for $7,500. After researching I found there are few places to buy really good startup domains so I made brandfountain to passively fund my startup(s)!
That being said, it's mostly 2 designs out of ~35 that sells anything at all.
I'm sure there's some potential in there, but it's kind of hit and miss.
Built with Qt. 14-day trial on Gumroad[0]. Also available on Mac App Store[1].
MAS version has made me 40$/month. Gumroad version is better (lets you try it and lets you use same license key on all 3 platforms). However, I have sold only one license on Gumroad! I guess the MAS has better discoverability.
[0] https://gumroad.com/l/ADWm/tasktopus [1] https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/tasktopus/id1039688985
[1] http://amzn.to/2hcfuB7 - Work Less to Live Your Dreams
None of them have made a lot of money, but one is still generating a small amount. Guess which. Hint: Income is not proportional with the shinyness of the technology stack
$20k from a website I built a couple years ago (searchable product catalog with Amazon affiliate links).
However, this involves 20 or 30 year contracts to buy power from you after you have made the initial investment to purchase /rent land and install the panels.
Wish there were a way to securitize those deals & allow us to trade them like bonds.
I reach the adsense threshold about once every year, so it's ~70 euro/year. Sad, but I don't spend a lot of time maintaining it.
Income is step one. Investment of that income is step two.
A "salary" is income that is bound to time worked.
"Passive income" is income that is not bound to time worked.
The key difference between passive income vs investing, is what is being invested. With passive income like salary _time_ is the investment, not money. That's why it's income.
All the comments discussing saving and investment strategies are rather missing the point of the question.
Too many are rentier activity, costing everyone more in the long run. Appropriating wealth rather than creating it.
Hacker news seems to embrace this culture. Surely the antithesis of the early days of computing and the origin of hacker culture.
