
Ask HN: What is your best passive income in 2017? - xcoding
Any side internet projects, blogging, web app, Hacks.
======
dangrossman
\- Improvely ([https://www.improvely.com](https://www.improvely.com)) and
W3Counter ([https://www.w3counter.com](https://www.w3counter.com)) are my SaaS
apps and make about $600K ARR. I check the support e-mail twice a day on
weekdays and once a day on weekends. There's typically less than 20 minutes a
day of work. One day a week I block a few hours to hack on new features or
tweak ads or something productive.

\- I have a couple open source projects, and hosted "webmaster tools" type
projects, with one-page websites like
[http://www.daterangepicker.com](http://www.daterangepicker.com) that get ~10K
visits/day, and run one AdSense ad on each page, which brings in a couple
hundred dollars most months.

\- I run a web store where I resell another company's products (with
permission) targeted at a different customer group than their own website. I
advertise it on Google AdWords and Bing Ads on just a handful of keywords.
Fulfillment is automated through the other company, so I haven't touched the
store except to update the design every few years, and it brings in
$500-$1000/month in profit. Sorry, don't want to link to this one, too easy to
copy.

\- Dividends from stocks and high-dividend-yield index funds are totally
passive. But first you have to earn and save the money to invest in them. I
also have some money in REITs, investing in real estate without having to buy
and manage the real estate.

\- I used to run some referral ads on my sites for a merchant account provider
I used 5-10 years ago. A couple businesses signed up through those links and
still use that company for their credit card processing. The commission
agreement was a lifetime residual based on their monthly processing volume...
I'm still getting $100-200 transferred into my bank every month from that
company even though I haven't been referring anyone to them for years.

~~~
rfitz
Extremely impressive list, do you mind me asking how you initially get the
projects off the ground in terms of users / traffic?

Also as a side note, thank you for daterangepicker! I've integrated it into a
couple little things I've built like chrome extensions and absolutely love it.

~~~
dangrossman
* W3Counter: I started "Website Goodies" as a content and tools site for webmasters in the 1990s. It had articles about learning HTML, learning JavaScript, and basically whatever else I myself was learning at the time back then. It also had a tools page, with things like guestbooks and surveys and a website hit counter I hosted. They were initially Perl CGI scripts, then later rewritten in PHP when I learned that. The traffic all came from search engines and organic links. The counter was pretty popular, and I wanted better web stats for my own sites without paying for them -- this was before Google bought Urchin and made Google Analytics out of it, when good web stats still cost money. So I made W3Counter, and linked to it heavily from Website Goodies, which got it off the ground. 100% word of mouth since then, I've never advertised it.

* Improvely got its first customers from Google ads. Because Improvely has a high CLV (customer lifetime value), I could spend a lot on advertising to acquire a customer and still make money from it. So that's what I did. Once I had a couple dozen customers, who were all delighted with the product and the support, word of mouth started taking over. These days 90% of new signups are referrals from an existing/past customer, or referrals from some website that's written an article or review mentioning Improvely. I still run some Google ads but with a limited budget.

* The open source projects get their traffic from Stack Overflow, forums, people searching NPM and other repositories, etc. The Date Range Picker widget got its initial traffic from a "Show HN" post I did here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4408070](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4408070)

I've started other SaaS apps that never worked out. The thing that made them
different from Improvely and W3Counter is that nobody was super excited about
them. Nobody loved those products; they were maybe useful but not the best at
anything and not particularly unique. So the word of mouth referrals never
came, churn was high, and eventually I shut them down and tried something
else.

~~~
zerr
> I've started other SaaS apps that never worked out.

We need more stories and details about such endeavors, but unfortunately most
don't write about it.

Btw, how do you monetize the Date Range Picker?

~~~
dangrossman
> Btw, how do you monetize the Date Range Picker?

The AdSense ad on the documentation website

It gets quite a bit of traffic --
[https://www.w3counter.com/stats/90840/dashboard](https://www.w3counter.com/stats/90840/dashboard)

~~~
zerr
Interesting. I was thinking most people from the target audience (tech) would
have ad blockers installed. I can't imagine being a more or less tech-savvy
and not using an ad blocker.

~~~
dangrossman
The most popular ad blockers also block W3Counter's tracking script, so those
110K monthly views it counted are just the people not running a blocker. Who
knows how many more people visited but weren't counted.

~~~
zerr
> Who knows how many more people visited but weren't counted.

Yes, although this is irrelevant regarding monetization (with adsense).

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mdorazio
I have to be honest here. Posts like this kind of confuse me - you're
basically asking people to either share their secret sauce so others can copy
it, or to provide vague descriptions that won't help overly much building your
own passive income.

Anyway, I'll get this started even though it's not what you're probably
looking for: my best passive income is rental properties. I purchased a small
house in Florida that is now renting for all costs + a few hundred a month,
and will be adding a second property in a few months. It's about as low-
maintenance as a SaaS side business and required basically zero marketing to
get a "user".

~~~
iDemonix
Not all passive income is 'secret sauce'. People write eBooks or offer paid
services based on their skill set and so on - and often the HN exposure helps
get them known, and is interesting to see for us readers.

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t0mbstone
Unfortunately, all of the best moneymakers probably won't get shared, because
the people don't want competitors.

I don't have any real passive income, myself, but one of my buddies has a
pretty sweet setup.

He wrote a bunch of trading bots that would automatically perform arbitrage
between all of the bitcoin exchanges. He wrote a variety of bots with
different strategies, and then he would lease them out to people and take a
cut of the profits (in addition to doing his own arbitrage trading with his
extra money). From the sound of it, he was making some serious cash (like
thousands of dollars a day).

~~~
kylebenzle
Sorry, I'm going to have a hard time believing this without more detail. How
can you arbitrage across countries? There are many people in the Bitcoin space
that bring this up all the time because they see the big price differences
between US, China, India... but the only way to profit off this is to deposit
cash in one county, withdraw it in another currency, then convert back your
your national one.

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madamelic
Getting fired from my job. ;) Got 1 month severance and a job the same week.

By far the best passive income so far this year.

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rockdiesel
[http://www.ferryschedules.co](http://www.ferryschedules.co)

As someone who commutes via ferry, I got sick of checking the official
schedule of my ferry because it's not mobile friendly and was slow. Then I
noticed more of the official schedule sites are typically in pdf, slow, not
optimized for mobile devices or all of the above. So I've been slowly putting
some of the schedules on this site over the past week. While not fully
passive, the schedules will only have to be updated a couple of times per year
since they change fairly infrequently.

It is just monetized via Google Adsense right now, but already paid for itself
with a couple of ad clicks and when all said and done it should be some decent
beer money every month.

Next steps are to learn how to automate the monitoring of the official
schedule sites, so I can automate the updating of my site to match the
official schedules. That would make it more passive.

~~~
mc42
A cursory Google search suggests you could use a package like poppler to
convert the pdf to raw text, and then in theory use regex to create data your
server could use and serve.

If the pdfs are published as scans like so many municipalities do, then OCR is
the only way to go.

Either way, good luck and decently nice design.

~~~
rockdiesel
I really appreciate you taking a look as well as providing your feedback.

Regarding the design, I just wanted to get something out the door quickly with
a suitable look out of the box, so I decided to use MaterializeCSS
([http://materializecss.com/](http://materializecss.com/)). It's getting the
job done so far, but I may revisit the design after I get all the content up.

And I'll look into poppler. Thank you for the recommendation.

~~~
iDemonix
If the timetables aren't particularly easy to read or parse, OCR is going to
be potentially wrong so you're going to have to check it, so you might as well
do it manually whilst there's no clean technical way of doing it (maybe
contact the companies if you get big numbers and ask about an arrangement?).
You could setup a script, on a VPS if you're doing it that way, that checks
the PDF daily, and if the file changes it notifies you - that'd be fairly
trivial to setup.

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thrwawy42
Most of my income currently comes from:

1) ~45% - Two hand-selected ads on a major developer website. These were
individual deals with the companies placing the ad.

2) ~5% - Ad network ads on two websites.

3) ~45% - Rental income from my house on AirBnB.

I wish I could say that these were clever projects or startups, but I haven't
yet found a "traditional" software side project that makes money. I have one
that's been running for a little over a year, although I haven't figured out
how I want to actually charge for it. People are just using it on a free tier
right now.

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kylebenzle
Dash ([https://www.dash.org/](https://www.dash.org/)). Currently return is
just over 10% ROI per Master Node (just a full node Bitcoin client running on
a server for a few $$ a year). Aside from the 100%+ increase in the currency
since I bought it, running five Master Nodes nets about $10,000 a year of
passive income.

~~~
replies_to_alls
That is really more of a speculative bet than passive income.

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MrLeap
CLM. The dividend has paid my water, fiber and half my electricity every month
while I've been out of work. Pretty nice!

~~~
notadoc
Did you pick exclusively for the hefty dividend? Not sure how sustainable that
will be, expensive to own too.

~~~
MrLeap
I wrote a stock screener when I graduated from college years ago. It's an
ensemble of technical analysis, moonbat garbage and horseshit. I ran it
looking for a mixture of absurd dividends and lowish beta. CLM's just what I
settled on.

Can you elaborate on `expensive to own`? The taxes are a little onerous, but
maybe you mean something beyond that.

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shanecleveland
I have an ad-supported informational site that provides some healthcare data,
which is updated annually. I have found that some refresh occurs with Google
search rankings for data like this. We are still only talking about hundreds
of dollars each month with my offering, but I believe this annual cycle has
helped my site compete with some of the longer-standing competition. I've
noticed a similar trend with a seasonal sports site I have. There seems to be
a window of opportunity each year if you are able to craft your SEO to take
advantage of search spikes specific to the season/year.

And these are truly passive in the sense that the hard work of building the
site is done, and I only have to do a quick updated once each year and then
sit back and rake in ... hundreds!

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notadoc
Should active projects really considered passive income?

I'd consider passive something that requires virtually no involvement: stocks,
bonds, real estate, etc

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faet
YTD by revenue:

Stock > Job > Books > Affiliate Websites

Stocks are auto-invested each month.

Job is not passive.

Books were written a while ago. Some by me most by others. Probably a couple
hours a week evaluating how they're doing. Sometimes I'll do sales, etc. Less
passive as I'm trying to grow their revenue.

Affiliate websites are all 100% passive at this point. I automatically
generate content for them. Maybe an hour or two updating the VPS/WP.

~~~
dflock
By stocks, do you mean an index fund, or individual stocks, or some
combination of the two?

~~~
faet
Mostly Index funds as well as some individual stocks (TSLA, BRK.B, AAPL).

~5k is auto invested in an index/mo.

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vladdanilov
After 3 months the visually lossless image optimization tool Optimage
([http://getoptimage.com](http://getoptimage.com)) I'm developing in my free
time has started to bring ~200$/month. Hoping to resolve the last performance
issues and launch a server edition.

~~~
t0mbstone
If you can give me a proper linux-based command line client for optimizing
images, I'd buy it.

~~~
vladdanilov
I'll let you know. There's a newsletter for major updates, or you can ping me
via email (in profile).

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DrNuke
Hopefully a brand new blog talking about my half-baked and fully-baked
projects from past and future, in that cultivating a more public profile for
my not-so-many years to come.

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jcslzr
I can buy a coffee at the end of the month with
[http://www.learn-2-type.com](http://www.learn-2-type.com)

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LostWanderer
-Woodworking -Teaching older people on how to use Feature phones/Smart phones

