How do you fail to make money passively? (Passive Income)

To learn Android development, I created a simple vocabulary learning app, a mash-up of iSpeech, Google voice recognition, and even some Instagram thrown in. There was some interest, despite zero marketing (currently > 20k total installs), and I was approaching $200/month in ad income.

Then Google disabled my Adsense account because of "invalid click activity", which also meant my Admob account was gone, since they're now linked. I moved to a combination of other ad networks, but ad revenue was slashed to a quarter of its former glory. Appeals to Google were fruitless, and to this day I have no idea why exactly I was banned.

For my next app, I'll probably avoid the "free with ads" model.

Instimage.com here.

We haven't "failed" yet. But we're dying slowly. No one cares for Instimage, and there's no money backing it up.

No Investors, no angels, just a bootstrap and no boot.

Reminds me of companies that call themselves "startups" for 10 years...

Shouldn't one start-up then get moving?

Let me get the ball rolling. My first app was called Barcoden. It generated barcodes for science labs. The debt crisis and cuts to schools ensued. Total sales: zero dollars.

We built a SAAS product that would allow merchants to build their own coupon landing page or coupon site. It never got any traction. It was a super niche product and none of us wanted to go around selling it. We spent a year building it and simply lost interest in the product as more time elapsed. We should have taken a step back from the project after a few months and realized that it wasn't worth our time to continue working on it.

http://inspecthq.com/ - clipboard and camera replacement for construction/inspection companies. Had a large (enterprise level) company interested for almost 2 years before we gave up.

I built a tool for visual interpretation of test results against requirements. It was pretty cool and I'm sure large engineering companies would use it if they knew they needed it.

I learned that you should go niche, but find a niche with a problem that customers KNOW they have. Otherwise you have to educate them before even having the chance so closing a sale, which is too expensive.

I'm backing up and making simpler tools for the domain, this one could become an advanced feature for big enterprise.

I have been working on a desktop application--not yet ready--since the Bush administration.