Ask HN: Best Passive Income Method?

But, my experience: I made a really niche eBook, about Web scraping with Java: https://www.javawebscrapinghandbook.com

Writing the book was the easy part, I've been doing scraping for years. The most challenging part was ... marketing of course!

I wrote 6/7 blog posts about this subject. In each blog post, there is a paragraph that talks about the book. I shared those blog post to my mailing list and on Reddit/HN (I didn't get any upvotes on HN...).

Now I have ~10 000 visits a month on the blog, 80% comes from search engines. Out of these 10k visits, about 200 visit the book sales page, and I sell 10-15 copies a month for ~ $400-$500.

It is not that passive because I have to fight to stay on the first 3 links for terms like "java web scraping" so this mean regularly upgrading my content etc. If I don't do this, my rank will slowly decrease on SERP and the sales too.

I was 24 when I wrote the book, I'm not even a native English speaker, you can do it :)

If you go this way, test your idea by blogging around a subject, and you will quickly see if people are interested by this subject or not.

Good luck!

  1) Learn how to interview for top tier companies in your free time. 
  2) Interview at those companies. 
  3) Work at those companies really hard, make $300k/yr. 
  4) Work for 10 years, save 200k/yr. 
  5) Invest in ? 
  6) You've now achieved purely passive income on a $2million principle. 

I'll share my own experience here, which is: compared to SaaS products, games are easily 100x more work for 100x less guarantees of income. Maybe it has the potential of going viral and earning you 100x more income, but still does not make up for the risk.

Of course this is just my personal experience on the topic. If income were my main motivator, I'd focus on SaaS instead of games.

Good luck!

- Use a savings account that is completely disconnected from your checking account bank. Bonus if you find a high yield savings like Synchrony for instance (2.25%)

- Use a method for separating what you spend from what you pay monthly on mostly predictable billing amounts (bills that end up being the same each month). I have 2 checking accounts, one for spending and one for billing. I use schwab banking. The main banks like WF and others all charge fees. Fees that could be used for other things like gas or other small monthly expenses.

- Automate everything (savings, bills, spending)

- Apply financial minimalism where possible. Minimize unnecessary spending, increase spending on things you actually like, set goals associated with this and fearsetting for things that you know you probably shouldn't be spending money on. (Perceived net quality of life should improve)

- Take advantage of automated investment portfolio offerings (or do the research yourself and invest).

Here's a simple example (this probably won't make any money, but it is good for illustrative purposes). If you look at an egg carton, there is a sell by date on there, but it doesn't list the date that the eggs were laid. Well it does, but not directly. There is a number on it which is the day number of the year (1 - 365), that represents when the eggs were laid.

So come up with an app, called "fresheggs", that just converts this number to a date, and will tell you how many days old these eggs are. Add location info to the app, and put in ads at the bottom that are coupons for the store you are in. You get paid when a user clicks on and uses that coupon.

Maybe you can build things that you yourself want to use but struggle to find. At the very least they'll help you, but there's a good chance you'll build an audience and maybe a base of customers if you build in public.

For SaaS, having a product that you can put on third-party marketplace, e.g. Shopify apps, GitHub apps, etc. might be your best shot at reducing ongoing work since the marketplace itself will do some of the marketing for you. You still have to do lots of work though.

Mobile or web based game will likely take a lot of work and return very little.

Aggregating useful content and selling access to it is one relatively quick way to go. E.g. there are bunch of people who have just aggregated contact info of press or VCs and then sold access to it. This will take a fair bit of work to aggregate all the info but it's still relatively quick (certainly compared to SaaS) and probably won't require much ongoing customer support given how simple the end product would be.

Ultimately if you are determined to find something which is "passive" you are more likely then not going to fail. By all means think about how you can compress the time and effort required and reduce the amount of ongoing labour by you, but starting from "I want passive income" isn't going to work.

Stick to SaaS, go into a field that's completely unsexy and solve a problem. It's still insanely difficult, but your odds might be slightly better than winning the lottery.

At my day job, I put in 40 hours of work and then get paid in full for those 40 hours shortly afterward.

In contrast, as an author of science-themed gift books, I invest a lot of time up front to research and write the books and a moderate amount of time to market them. And then the books have the potential to bring in recurring income over some indeterminate time horizon.

In one sense, getting royalty checks every six months for a book I wrote years ago feels passive.

On the other hand, if you have the choice between getting paid in full right away or getting paid over the course of many years, wouldn't you rather get paid quicker?

Ask lottery winners. Most choose the immediate lump-sum payment, even if the 30-year annuity is considerably larger.

So if you're looking for passive-income opportunities, please remember to take into account opportunity cost. Could you be doing something that gets you paid in full right away?

I will say that it's a crowded space and eventually your income will peter out unless you spend big on advertising. But if you say, crank out one novel per year, you could potentially achieve economies of scale and generate a sizable (salary-replacing) income stream.

A successful saas is a lot of work and not passive at all.

Good luck! It's lots of fun either way :)

In other words, more like Stripe and less like Angry Birds.

For an ebook on a technical topic: it may be pretty difficult to write something so compelling that enough people will be willing to pay money for it. You'll be competing against what people can find free with Google, on stackexchange, etc.

And mobile or web games: there are so many of them out there, do you really think you can stand out from the crowd? I bet the proportion that actually make a worthwhile amount of money is pretty small.

Seems like it's about the closest to true passive income as you can get as I don't do or even really think about either.

VTSAX, reinvest the dividends.

SaaS lets you leverage other skills and domain knowledge you already possess.