
Your best passive income? (2014) - kirk21
This post gave me the motivation to give it another try: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;business-startup-development-and-more&#x2F;e0937c7f0951<p>Previous years:
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6661536
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4639271
======
dangrossman
Not much has changed since the last thread. Improvely
([https://www.improvely.com](https://www.improvely.com)) is still in the
5-digit monthly RR range and growing, and I do no outbound marketing other
than some PPC ads that don't need much active management. Everything that can
be automated has been automated (onboarding, lifecycle mails, dunning mails
for billing issues, etc), leaving me free to spend all my time on support and
improving the product.

Two things that fit the "passive" mentality that have been picking up steam
recently:

1) I offer an affiliate program with a revenue share commission (upfront bonus
plus 10% of the referred customer's payments for a year). A couple of my best
customers have become my best affiliates, recommending the product on industry
blogs they write for regularly. It doesn't get better than having excited
customers marketing your product for you. In the early days the affiliate
program wasn't doing much at all, now it's a meaningful contributor to
subscriber growth.

2) I've been running Improvely long enough now (just over a year) that some of
the clients are growing their businesses significantly. I've got quite a few
marketing agencies on board, and they're picking up new clients and adding
them to their accounts. As their business grows, and their usage grows, they
upgrade to plans with higher usage limits. Same customer base, higher revenue
per customer. In the beginning, a new customer was worth $30ish per month.
Today that's over $70/m per customer on average.

~~~
christiangenco
Oh wow, this looks like exactly what I've been looking for for my not-so-
passive income project, textbooksplease.com, for tracking conversions.

...any chance of an HN discount? :D

~~~
QuasiAlon
Hi Christian - textbooksplease looks great. nice job! I was wondering: 1 - how
do you monetize? 2 - how does the post-stickers-get-tshirt marketing channel
perform (and how do you know, as it's hard to track..)

cheers!

~~~
christiangenco
Thanks! :D

1\. Affiliate links. Each time someone buys a book through my site, I make ~5%
from the retailer.

2\. You know, not very well, but I think its a cool perk to give to customers
you interact with ("glad I fixed your issue - want some free stickers?"). My
biggest ROI to date is from google adwords, but they're outrageously
expensive, so I'm going to be focusing on natural SEO for this next semester.

------
eo34
A few years ago, I wanted to build an oscilloscope in my pocket, so I went
ahead and did it. Then I wanted a spectrum analyzer, and then an equalizer.

1) oScope — an oscilloscope in your pocket.
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oscope/id344345859?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oscope/id344345859?mt=8)

2) Octave — a real-time audio analyzer.
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/octave-an-rta-for-the-
iphone...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/octave-an-rta-for-the-
iphone/id386083594?mt=8)

3) Fourier — a spectrum analyzer.
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fourier/id386084557?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fourier/id386084557?mt=8)

I built all of these for fun in college, and I've occasionally updated them
afterwards. The only thing I do now is answer a few emails a week. I've since
gone back to grad school, but the yearly income has not changed, and
approaches my stipend (low 5-digit).

What's been really neat is how people have found unexpected ways to use the
apps. Sound engineers for halls and communities use Octave to set up the sound
for concerts. Teachers use oScope to help kids understand how sound is
composed of moving pressure waves of air, and how pitch is the frequency of
these waves. Also, oScope had a tiny cameo in the show Homeland, as a "fancy
science-looking analyzer tool for spying on people" (uncredited,
unfortunately).

~~~
astral303
Here's a perspective from the other side: I purchased Octave and having used
it, and asked for a small feature (single-tap to pause). You told me that you
don't have much time and will work on this feature when you have time. I
understand that, but it's disappointing from the consumer point of view. I
wish I knew that before I dropped $5.

Basically, it sucks to be stuck on the "passive" receiving end of a passive
income project. Though actually, it's Apple's fault for not letting me trial
software.

But I'm glad to hear these projects are working out and wish you continued
luck!

~~~
struppi
Come on, you spent $5 for an app. For a working app! This is a pretty low
price. Actually, it's basically nothing. Of course you can't get support and
are not entitled to feature requests at such a low price tag!

~~~
astral303
$5 is not cheap by app store standards. It's a fair price for an app in that
class.

As to whether you're entitled to support or feature requests, you can make an
argument both ways. One could generate some word of mouth by following up on
(simple) feature requests.

In one of the apps, Fourier, the reviewers say that the horizontal frequency
scale is off by a factor of 2 (but the frequency display elsewhere is
accurate). That's a small thing to fix that hasn't been fixed since Apr 2012.
I think that at a $5 price point, my expectation is that the app is updated
with at least bug fixes of that variety.

~~~
eo34
First, wow, I didn't expect any HN readers to actually know about, much less
have bought, my work! Thanks.

Second, I understand your frustration. I love building things, and sometimes I
wish I could do that full time, but grad school is a 70 hr/wk commitment for
me.

If the app is not useful for you without the missing feature, Apple does allow
returns. I'm not quite sure how it works, but I see a few returns a year on my
reports.

Also, I've open-sourced the hardest part of the app, the audio managing
aspect, as Novocaine (GitHub.com/alexbw/novocaine), and along with the great
package NVDSP, anybody could replicate the basic functionality of my apps with
a few weeks of learning and effort. It'd be great for the audio app ecosystem,
too!

I'm also interested in hiring a part-time developer to help flesh out the top-
requested features, if anybody has ObjC coding experience. That'd make many
more updates possible.

~~~
rgbrgb
I've used novocaine on a hackathon project. Very fun little library, thanks!
It was 10,000 times easier than setting up the audio unit chain, etc. I had
done it the old fashioned way for my first app but there was an incredible
amount of error-prone boilerplate code when all I really wanted was a callback
function to populate output buffers.

This thing also looks pretty cool:
[http://theamazingaudioengine.com/](http://theamazingaudioengine.com/)

------
viach
I've got a job where i do almost nothing. It's my passive income.

~~~
ozh
Do some freelancing during office hours & double the income.

~~~
rplnt
While not doing anything might be immoral, doing something else is most likely
in violation of the contract and the work done would (again, most likely) be
owned by the employer. Along with the income.

~~~
icedchai
You're risk adverse, aren't you?

~~~
normloman
Yeah, what are you, chicken?

I'm not a chicken. You're a turkey!

------
nickfox
I have been working on my Google Map Gps Cell Phone Tracker for several years
now. Recently, I updated the project to include tracking for Android, IOS,
Windows Phone and Java Me/J2ME phones. The project allows you to track a phone
periodically (every 1, 5 or however number of minutes) and display them in
real time on Google maps.

You can also save routes and display them later. I use google adsense on my
website and also on youtube. I have been averaging about $600 per month in
revenue. Now that I have done this update (which took a few months), I suspect
that my adsense income is going to increase dramatically. If you want to learn
more about my project, here is the landing page:

[http://www.websmithing.com/gps-tracker/](http://www.websmithing.com/gps-
tracker/)

I'm 53 now and I've been a software contractor for the past 17 years. Because
of the economy and my age, I was having an increasingly difficult time getting
contracts. It's hard to compete with young programmers who can work a lot
faster than you and at a much cheaper rate. So I decided it was time to step
out on my own. It has been very challenging, a little frightening (ok, a lot
frightening), but I am making slow progress.

Today, I was very happy to find out that my project was nominated for "Project
of the Month" on Sourceforge. It's been downloaded about 8000 times in the
past 4 days and has gotten 24 5-star reviews. If you have an account with
Sourceforge and have the time to look at my project, would you please vote for
me if you feel it's worth it?

[https://sourceforge.net/p/potm/discussion/vote/thread/7d5229...](https://sourceforge.net/p/potm/discussion/vote/thread/7d522915/?limit=25#b8f0)

Thank you. I appreciate the help and let me know if you have any questions.

~~~
mpermar
Congrats on the brave move to launching your own projects.

On a side note, if I were you I would move the project from SourceForge to
github. There is barely anyone using sf.net these days and github social
features might also help your project to get noticed.

~~~
nickfox
Hey, thanks for your comment. I use SF as a distribution channel. I use github
every day and love it:

[https://github.com/nickfox/GpsTracker](https://github.com/nickfox/GpsTracker)

------
drewolbrich
My iOS app that teaches you what a tesseract is and lets you manipulate it in
3D and 4D.

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fourth-
dimension/id50420...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fourth-
dimension/id504201783?mt=8)

It blows my mind that people still find out about this app and happily buy it
every day even though it occupies such a small geeky niche.

~~~
pavlov
The app icon is irresistible.

~~~
drewolbrich
Thanks. It was essentially my son's idea (age 5 at the time), and it was about
a month after I designed the icon that I realized the "third eye" connection,
as in
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_eye](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_eye)
which made me love it even more.

------
simonhamp
I run Built With Bootstrap
([http://builtwithbootstrap.com](http://builtwithbootstrap.com)). It's making
4 figures a month at the moment.

It's mostly passive income as I spend no more than a few hours per week
actually working on the site. Though I spend considerably more monitoring the
stats and feeds etc etc

My biggest win with this site is the extremely low cost to run it - something
I want to talk about more if anyone's interested. My only real regular cost is
the domain name! Pretty phenomenal for a site that continues to attract
thousands of visitors per day :) a model I'm proud of and hopefully can
continue!

But of course, all standing on the shoulders of giants! Many thanks has to go
to far more talented people than me... both for the site's foundations and
it's popularity.

~~~
Zaheer
Hi simonhamp, Congrats on the project! I'd love to hear more about how you're
running it for so low cost! Have you open sourced the site? I'd love to also
hear your stack. I've managed to keep all my projects (even one exceeding 5
Million+ ) extremely low cost (pretty much the domain name only as well) and
always looking for more ideas to save! Feel free to PM me as well!

~~~
Zaheer
Woops just saw the comment below how its on Tumblr. Should've noticed that
earlier. Any other hacks?

------
gmays
For me it's still residential real estate.

Between 2010 and 2012 or so I picked up some condos here in San Diego at short
sale for about 1/3 of what their price was a few years earlier. I get about
1.5% of their purchase price every month in rent. At the same time, the
property values have appreciated so the rents are starting to increase as
well.

The longest I've had any of them vacant was about two weeks and that was only
during the time I was replacing carpet, appliances, furnace, painting walls,
fixing stuff, etc.

To make it completely passive I have a property manager (I live in the area,
but I value my time). That along with HOA fees and real estate taxes eat into
my bottom line, but combined it's only about 1/5 of the monthly rent.

These properties allowed me to quit my job, self-fund my company, and I'm
actually putting money away every month. Go figure.

I'm not a real estate expert, but if you have any basic questions feel free to
get in touch (contact info is in my profile). As background, I bought my first
house at 21 and owned 5 homes by the time I was 27 (I'm 29 now). I was in the
military until a few months ago, so I didn't make a whole lot, but I'm pretty
good with money and invested wisely. I didn't grow up with much, so I learned
what not to do with money. I'm also pretty deliberate about how I spend my
money, which is different than being frugal.

~~~
jadc
Very cool. Congratulations!

I am also into residential real estate and was wondering why you chose to go
the cash route especially when rates have been so low. For instance, in the
properties that I am currently in business for, for 20% down I able to fetch a
30% ROI after mortgate + all fees incl. property management, taxes, insurance,
etc... For the same properties, if I would go all cash, my return would be
closer to 11 to 12%. Of course with the mortgage approach, it tends to be a
bit slow (i.e. a mortgage at a time) and longer to scale to the same levels of
in terms of absolute monthly returns since my monthly cash flow is lower in
absolute terms.

Interested in your thoughts.

~~~
gmays
I tried, and I even looked at hard money loans, but at the time I couldn't get
any (even with an 800 credit score and never missing a payment on anything in
my life).

Lenders were hesitant to loan for investment properties, especially in condo
complexes with low owner occupancy rates.

In 2012 I learned that I didn't look hard enough when I a buddy told me he
'had a guy' that he'd get loans from for the same thing for 20-25% down. He
said it was a bit shady and the rate was a bit higher than a conventional
loan, but it did the job.

And to be honest with you, in all of my investment I've never crunched the
numbers to determine exact ROI. I always ballpark it in my head and go with my
gut. I'm sure it's more risky and I'm probably leaving money on the table, but
to me investing was a hobby and that kept (keeps) it fun. I do it because I
love doing it.

Also, it may be holding me back, but I don't like debt. The last three homes I
bought cash, as well as both of our cars. Hell, I'm even self-funding my
business. I find it gives me a lot more freedom albeit a lower return. But to
me it's worth it. For example, sure I could grow my business faster with
funding, but I've been working on it for two years now and still love it. In
fact, I'd do it for free. You can't put a price on that.

~~~
jadc
Thanks a lot for your response. I may shoot you an email since you offered
before. Would be interested in discussing further.

------
erikb
Why does everybody list books, webapps and mobile apps as passive income? I
hope you created them yourself. Then they are not passive income but a
product. Like every product they have a lifetime, then you need a new product.
Therefore you actually have a first or second active business and not a
passive income. "Passive income" is rent for condos you own, or having shares
in your friend's profitable business that yields dividends etc. or did I
completely misunderstand the meaning of that word?

~~~
larrydag
I can assure you as my wife and I are starting into the rental business that
leasing a residence is not passive.

~~~
silvertonia
If you're renting your first couple places, absolutely not. But at some point
you hit a mark where you have a property manager doing all the day-to-day and
a few leasing agents filling vacancies and it becomes as passive as you want
it to be.

~~~
leonroy
In my experience (family business is property rental) I think the point at
which you can afford a property manager is pretty far down the line for most
people.

A cheap property manager or estate agent is generally not worth it - their
main goal being to rent the property as quickly as possible to anyone, rather
than ensuring rental to a good tenant.

Decent property managers cost a fair bit of money and unless you own the
property outright or have a very low mortgage it's tough to afford a good
manager _and_ have a reasonable passive income from the property as well.

------
galfarragem
50€/month with adsense and amazon affiliates. It demands from me 5 minutes
each day (or 4-5 hours each month, so it is not exactly passive...). It's a
niche blog about architectural models:
[http://archimodels.info](http://archimodels.info) that I started as a hobby
to learn about web development. I know that i'm near the bottom in the
hierarchy of passive income but anyway I'm leaving my 2 cents.

Tips:

\- I agree with cdaven. Good content is better than SEO, but you only take the
fruits 1-2 years later. Use your expertise. It is much easier/faster/more
rewarding if you blog about something you are an expert.

\- Adsense is ugly but is the fastest way to monetise a blog. I was making
15€/month before adsense and now I have slightly less traffic. Text ads or
images ads? If you have an text intensive blog go for image ads and for an
image intensive blog go for text ads.

------
vrikis
I know this isn't entirely passive, but I occasionally rent my spare room on
AirBnB. I'm quite clear that it's a basic room and if they use the kitchen
etc. they need to clean up after themselves - this isn't a hotel I'm
running... So there's basically no work to do other than cleaning the
bedsheets, which I do as part of cleaning my bedsheets anyway... I do this for
a maximum of 1week/month, which gets me roughly £4000/year and since it's tax
exempt in Scotland (under lodger laws), it's the easiest money I've ever made.

~~~
illegalsmile
Sounds like it's treating you well but have you had problems or do you price
it so you generally price-out those that might less than savory characters?

~~~
vrikis
I live in a city that lacks hotels and doesn't have any tourism, so the only
people contacting me are people who work in our local industry (offshore oil
production), and just need a place to stay while they are doing training, etc.
I've never had any problems, and like I said that has kept work for me really
low.

In terms of pricing, I just priced it by what I thought was fair. I do refuse
people though, since like I said I wouldn't host for more than a week or so
per month (I don't want this turning into a job, but it's the easiest money
anyone can make if they have a spare room).

~~~
GordonS
I'm guess that's Aberdeen then?

~~~
vrikis
Correct!

------
zrail
My book "Mastering Modern Payments: Using Stripe with Rails" continues to sell
well, in the $2k range per month. It's not exactly passive, though, as I write
blog posts and develop other related content in the same theme.

[https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-
payments](https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments)

~~~
jbrooksuk
Ever thought about rewriting parts of the book to work with other languages,
as a separate product?

~~~
zrail
Yep. Language and payment processor variants are something that I've thought
about a lot and will probably start working on at some point.

Edit: autocorrect correction

~~~
noir_lord
PHP would be a natural fit (Symfony2 or Laravel 4 (I'd vote for Laravel 4 as
that is a rapidly growing market that is still relatively "poor" in learning
material).

Also if you did happen to do it for Laravel 4, I'd buy it ;).

~~~
zrail
Wow, I just took a look at the docs for Laravel. I had no idea it was that
sophisticated. Thanks for the tip, I'll look into it some more.

~~~
noir_lord
It's a truly excellent framework that pulls in the best in breed from the
others but then puts a layer over the top that allows you to get things done
(in a well engineered and testable manner).

The framework creator (Taylor Otwell) has an excellent book on leanpub and
there is an _amazing_ video guide site (laracasts.com) which is better than I
have seen for _anything_ (check out the free vids for an idea of quality).

------
driverdan
I'm currently earning around $45-60 a day mining cryptocurrencies with a
little over $5000 in hardware. Once setup it's completely passive.

Edit: ROI could be improved a bit on this too since I intentionally bought
hardware that was good to experiment with rather than optimizing ROI.

~~~
mikeyouse
Is that net of energy costs?

~~~
driverdan
Energy costs about $6 a day.

------
r4pha
I'm making negative 15 USD/month hosting two side projects:

[http://srctree.net](http://srctree.net) \- A pastebin with version control
[http://blocksim.net](http://blocksim.net) \- A poor man's online simulink-
like thingy

I am aware that there is a _lot_ of room for improvement in both services, but
the fact that nobody uses it at all is not very motivational.

~~~
tybro0103
Same here for me with [http://timebot.io/](http://timebot.io/) I just have no
clue how to go about getting customers.

~~~
thekevan
Your "try it now" link doesn't go straight into trying it. I have to either
pay money or share to FB. It may seem fine to you, but that's a redirect in
the customer's mind. That was enough to stop me from trying it--even though I
am struggling to get a freelance practice started and need hour tracking and
invoicing help. You haven't shown me anything and are asking me to part with
my money or my privacy just to see whether your products sucks or not.

Freelancers are going to be really used to trying tech for free before buying.
They are a good market for freemium or even ad supported.

Not sure about this one but to be honest I was distracted by that robot
cartoon character. I'm not even sure what he has in his mouth. It's just weird
and makes me think you are 17. Hope that wasn't harsh, I would wager there's
an emotional attachment to that robot, you or someone close is a great artist.
Ditch the emotion and get something more product specific.

~~~
tybro0103
You're absolutely right. Thanks for checking it out.

As for the robot, I was going for something cute, like MailChimp. It was
picture I took of a friend's painting. Awesome painting, but didn't translate
well to a pro icon. Do you think a robot could work if I got a pro version
done at Logo Tournament?

I do plan to make it easy to try it for free. Also make it much cheaper... say
a flat $5/mnth or something.

I actually abandoned it over a year ago once I launched and realized there are
41394 invoicing apps and I don't know how to market.

------
starik36
A stupid app, called That's Not Funny, that I wrote in 2008 or so to teach
myself Android programming (when v1 came out) continues to make around $40 a
month from ads.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vbrad.andr...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vbrad.android.notfunny&hl=en)

I wrote it, released it, then to my surprise, it got a pretty massive amount
of downloads. Over the years, I've updated it to new versions of the OS, but
very minimal work.

Not a lot of money, but it wasn't a whole lot of effort either. It covers the
internet bill.

~~~
hanspeide
For comparison: I made an app called Joke Effects
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ctrlplusz....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ctrlplusz.jokeeffects)),
in early 2011. The free version has around 70 000 downloads, and has made me
about 25$ - in total.

Paid version (0.99$) has sold about 200 copies.

~~~
starik36
That's a pretty nice app. I think with these simple apps you have to be at the
right time in the right place. When I wrote That's Not Funny, there was only
one Android phone on the market (HTC G1) and the App Store was fairly tiny. So
the app made a bigger splash.

------
cdaven
I have a quite simple web site with some calculators for taxes and stuff, that
I originally built in 2007. The Google AdSense and affiliate income has grown
from about $1000 per year to almost $1000 per month.

It is "passive" in the sense that I respond to the occasional e-mail (once a
month), update the data once a year, and add another calculator when I feel
like it.

A few years back, I was in the same position with another (online casual
gaming) website, that I sold for 2.5x the yearly revenue. Looking back, I
should probably have kept that site as well.

Pro tip: quality content beats SEO in the long run. Be the tortoise.

~~~
TeeWEE
Can you tell me which site it is?

~~~
cdaven
Sure, but the site is in Swedish: [http://rakna.net](http://rakna.net)

~~~
lucaspiller
Any reason why you haven't done an English version?

~~~
freehunter
It looks like it has some Sweden-specific stuff, and adding in English-
speaking countries would require knowledge of their tax systems. I suppose you
could do an English version for English-speaking people living in Sweden who
don't speak Swedish, but it would likely be a tiny niche market.

------
taigeair
Current passive income for me - blog and niche sites with articles (ads e.g.
[http://www.flagshipstorelondon.com/](http://www.flagshipstorelondon.com/)),
e-commerce business (sales), ETFs (investments), and teaching a skill.

Flagship stores - I went around taking pictures of the best of the best stores
for the top retail brands in London and made a directory. Created page on
Blogger.

Ecommerce business is my best passive income. It's a physical product I really
wanted so I made it. It's a map of London but made in the historic style.
[http://www.wellingtonstravel.com](http://www.wellingtonstravel.com)

I still need to spend time on it because I am customer service, legal,
accounting, finance, marketing, IT, R&D, and operations. I have outsourced
manufacturing and fulfillment to someone I found on
[https://sortedlocal.com/](https://sortedlocal.com/) and Amazon's FBA. It's
great because it's more money and something I'm passionate about but it
definitely takes 5-7 hours a week.

The teaching one is interesting in particular because it leverages your
strengths, improves your communication, and is probably something you really
enjoy since you took the time to get good at it (i.e. sailing, swimming,
kettlebell workouts, or even English). I wrote a post about teaching English
([http://www.taigeair.com/websites-to-help-you-teach-
english-o...](http://www.taigeair.com/websites-to-help-you-teach-english-
online/)) for people who complained they couldn't find a job so did nothing
all day, but they could be teaching a special skill which is what I did when I
became unemployed. I learned code, created a few websites, interviewed, and
taught swimming.

And rental income is good but definitely, not very passive...

Lastly, I'm developing a really cool website for helping people sleep which I
can see being profitable.

 __I 'd like to hear how much time you spent or are spending on these side
projects. Also I heard babies are a time and money sink. So I'd be interested
in hearing about people doing side projects/passive income with kids.

~~~
jayvanguard
> [http://www.wellingtonstravel.com](http://www.wellingtonstravel.com)

You made that? Beautiful map! You should do those for more cities.

~~~
taigeair
Thanks! I had a business partner who is an architect and she did most of the
artwork but we designed it together. It took us 3 years and was kind of a
hobby.

Now it's quite time consuming to do VAT tax every 3 months and keep records.
BTW physical products are so much more work than anything I did on the web.

I'm hoping to do a world map next though.

~~~
Haegin
Firstly that is a very nice map. Do you have any plans to do any other cities
or is it a one and done kind of project?

Secondly, (and this is a shameless plug, sorry) if you're finding keeping up
with VAT a pain and you're a small business take a look at FreeAgent
([https://freeagent.com/harry](https://freeagent.com/harry) \- the referral
code will get you 10% off). I work for them and it sounds like it might be of
use.

~~~
taigeair
So it's vintage 2012 (like a wine), we might do another vintage in 2015 or
2016. I'd like to do other cities but I don't have so much time right now.

Thanks for the link. I tried some software before but no matter what you use,
you still have to do manually keep the records. Given that, I'll just deal
with the paper work until it generates enough money to pay for someone to do
it.

------
joliss
My free-to-play Solitaire web app, at
[http://www.solitr.com/](http://www.solitr.com/).

It's making a bit over $1,000 in monthly ad revenue. Traffic is at ~3k
dailies.

I did this as a weekend project 2 years ago, and at some point migrated my
blog to it to pick up DomainRank. Other than that I've mostly left it alone.

~~~
nicholas73
Hey joliss, I'd like to ask how you pick up your traffic? I've got a similar
project as yours, and it has the same problem - it's a remake of a popular
game with lots of high ranking webapps on Google. None of the SEO and social
media did the trick for me. I even built a plug-in widget. So far a handful of
links send most of my traffic, and I don't get in a month what you get in a
day.

My project is: [http://sudokuisland.com](http://sudokuisland.com)

How would you go about it? Thanks.

~~~
joliss
I'm getting organic search traffic for niche keywords, like 'free solitaire
online'. [http://sudokuisland.com](http://sudokuisland.com) seems to have a
decent amount of keywords already, but perhaps you can think of more. Organic
search is probably the only way to get traffic at the scale you need for an
ad-monetized game.

My plan is to improve the PageRank and DomainRank, and eventually to make the
product better (since Google presumably picks up on that through bounce rates,
time on site, sharing). So that'd be the general strategy I recommend.

Another metric you can optimize is the number of times a first-time visitor
returns, because it acts as a multiplier on your traffic. Say you get 100
organic first-time visitors per day, if each visitor returns 5 times, you'll
have 600 total visits per day.

------
TeeWEE
I created the app 3dweapons for Android about 2 1/2 years ago.
([http://www.3dweapons.net](http://www.3dweapons.net)) The free version was
downloaded >1.7 million times. The paid version around 8k times.

I added adds from multiple sources (mopub, admob etc) and in app purchases.

For the paid app: In the top months (2 years ago) I made around 800 euro. But
it dropped to 90 euro per month currently. For in app purchases: I am making
30 euro per month currently. For ads: Making about 200 euro per month
currently.

~~~
probablyfiction
Do you have a way to tell how many of your paid installs are legitimate?

~~~
TeeWEE
You are referring to the pirated versions of my app? Actually i dont have hard
figures.

Initially I was not aware of pirated versions. I even had my app translated to
chinese because I thought it would be a huge market. But after I did that, i
noticed Google Play is not active there, and all paid apps are free in
china.... Pirated versions.

I tried to prevent pirated versions of my app by performing code obfuscation,
but probably it was still easy to crack.

------
marban
If you're looking for some dropshipping insights (which the OP's link
suggests), here's a nice story: [http://www.ecommercefuel.com/selling-an-
ecommerce-store/](http://www.ecommercefuel.com/selling-an-ecommerce-store/)

~~~
_delirium
That one's interesting, but leans more towards the "part-time small business"
side than the "passive" side imo. Manning a phone line 4 hours/day M-F in
particular makes it at least a part-time job, since you can't do that and also
be traveling, holding another job, or studying full-time.

------
tarball
At first I started with a Blogspot with a bunch of cat gifs and a couple of
Google ads. Once I earned enough money to buy a domain name for this project,
I bought [http://catgifpage.com](http://catgifpage.com) and designed a cheap-
but-fun interface for the visitors I targeted.

As I am more a “dog” person, I decided one year (and about 1000€) later to
open [http://doggifpage.com](http://doggifpage.com). It increased a bit my
incomes but not so much. As you may know, the Internet loves cats, cats and
cats! In 2013, I earned almost 4000€ for about 10 fun hours of gif gathering!

I have some plans for 2014 but I want to keep this project fun and certainly
not time-consuming.

~~~
hrnnnnnn
You got the copyright holders' permission to use those gifs, I take it?

~~~
bpierre
I’m genuinely interested: do you have any example of a GIF/LOL website which
owns the rights on the published content?

~~~
hrnnnnnn
No. I just think it's unethical to make money from someone else's work without
compensating them.

"But everyone else is doing it" is the kind of reasoning small children use.

~~~
bpierre
That was not my reasoning, I thought you had some examples in mind.

I think the only solution to respect the copyright for this kind of content
(amateur content with no identified author) would be to stop publishing it:
you can’t sue Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter etc.

Just to be sure: are we talking about the original authors, or the websites
who add their watermarks on it?

------
kirk21
1) Selling Elon Musk t-shirts:
[http://www.zazzle.com/elonmuskspaceman](http://www.zazzle.com/elonmuskspaceman)
Did not make that much but was great fun.

2) Helping my artistic friends selling their products. If you want to sell
designer products, you can sign up here:
[https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dmyfzRwBbpcKAyRplHs0i2RMqsC...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dmyfzRwBbpcKAyRplHs0i2RMqsCykRdZ7oJnBvZh2ZA/viewform)

~~~
knorc
I'm a huge fan of Elon Musk, but I must say I don't like the designs very
much. I you can't make better designs, you should think of having shirts with
quotes like “If something is important enough, even if the odds are against
you, you should still do it.”or "I'll put a man on Mars in 10 years. Maybe 20
years worst case. Otherwise I won't be able to go there." (can't find the
exact quote!)

~~~
kirk21
Thanks for the tip. Just added some t-shirts with quotes. The goal is to
create more designs in the coming weeks.

~~~
knorc
Haha I love the "I would like to die on Mars. Just not on Impact" I didn't
know that one!

------
sirbrad
I created and sold Stickonspy ([http://stickonspy.com](http://stickonspy.com))
just after mid last year. The initial month I launched it did pretty well as
the NSA news was still a pretty big deal. All in all it's made me < £1k but
it's been great fun to build and ship a product from scratch. I've shipped to
around 12 countries too which is cool. I also spent no money on marketing.

I'd say my time - which was evenings after work - investment was around 3-4
days initially and then fulfilling orders is simply writing a customers
address and posting the stickers - which if the demand was bigger I'd probably
outsource.

It's been great. I've learnt a shit tonne & the conversations it started has
given me an idea for a similar product which I'll be focusing on very soon!

~~~
yitchelle
Great idea. Just wondering that if you didn't spend any money on marketing,
how did you get the word out, SEO?

~~~
sirbrad
I started out by merely tweeting a link to the site and asking my friends to
do the same. I did publish HN but it got took down pretty sharpish.

My main win was cold-emailing tech blogs. I got featured on BoingBoing -
[http://boingboing.net/2013/08/12/stickonspy-sticker-
reminder...](http://boingboing.net/2013/08/12/stickonspy-sticker-
reminder-t.html) \- through emailing and also managed to sell directly to Cory
;).

------
knorc
A website promoting ebooks about seduction :
[http://www.ebookseduction.com/](http://www.ebookseduction.com/) (in french,
english version coming soon) It's not a big business but it is good pocket
money considering it takes me few hours of work per month.

~~~
ingm4r
that can also be read as ebook seduction.

------
NateG
I created a web game called Pit of War
([http://www.pitofwar.com](http://www.pitofwar.com)) about three years ago and
it has been generating enough monthly income to pay all my bills and affords
me the ability to travel and live anywhere I like. It isn't completely passive
but that is because I choose to add new features and updates. It is a niche
game but the Internet is a big place with lots of people. :) Books like The
Long Tail and The Curve have taught me that you don't need to have the #1
product in an industry to make a good living.

~~~
seestheday
How do monetize? Selling in game items? Advertising?

~~~
NateG
The game has two currencies. Hard currency (Trophies) that are mainly bought
with real money and soft currency (Gold) which are found in game. It is a
fairly standard practice for those familiar with Free-2-Play (F2P) games. It
was difficult to balance things so paying players and free players could
compete on level footing but after three years I feel I've found a nice
balance and if judging from player feedback the majority also feels the same.

The game's forum uses advertising but the income is negligible, maybe around
$10 per month. This is likely due to the fact that it is the same eyeballs
looking at the ads and it is not a high traffic forum.

------
sgribley
I'm going to toss this out there - I've considered building an affiliate site
in the porn space. I've looked at a couple API's and it looks easy. However, I
have never built anything in this space - I just hear that there's money to be
made so have been tempted. Let the flogging begin!

~~~
liamgooding
Was easy money around 2002-2004. You'd get like 200:1 conversion of an OK
paysite with either a 35% lifetime revshare of sometimes random promotions
(usually to kickstart a new site) would offer $250 upfront PPS. Niche sites
(gay, extreme fetish) would convert TGP traffic as good as 75:1 and honestly
were the best place to be (to many fanboy affiliates saturating the market
with mainstream "teen amateur" sites).

2005-2008, TGP's totally died to Tubes. And Tubes generally killed the value
in hosted galleries (a key marketing tool for affiliates alongside TGPs). Last
I heard of old contacts, they'd either tried to move up the food chain intro
production (which mostly moved to eastern europe), moved into niche tube
sites, or sold up (as I did) and went into mainstream web. Actually, probably
the most money I made was from sale of site network and domain portfolio.

~~~
sgribley
I'm considering creating chatroom site. Not my own chatrooms but using API of
others. Seems like those may still be in vogue. Have you had any luck with
them? I'm certain I can create a site in an evening, then I just need to see
how to drive traffic to it.

~~~
liamgooding
Most guys used to say don't bother making a paysite (same applies for
camsites) until you can drive 10,000 a day to it from your own network. Paid
seeding traffic is just too expensive.

So general roadmap was usually build up a network of very niche TGP sites
(later, Tube sites) and only push around to your own network (so no external
crap or popups) until you get a soid audience of bookmarkers (daily returners)
and once you're confident you can start producing 10,000+ outclicks a day,
THEN add your own paid stuff on top.

Trying to push payments really early just makes people hit the close tab...
adult is all about getting bookmarkers

Basically, the "retention" in the Pirate Metrics funnel. Facebook didn't want
to put on ads until they'd build years of loyalty and bookmarkers. Once you're
totally bought into the service, (one hopes) that you wont mind the new paid
ads that start appearing.

------
nader
Income is often called passive but essentially there is always something you
need to do, monitor, improve or change in order to keep cash flow steady. If
you don't, your income will decrease over time until reaching zero. It is
surely easier to maintain "passive income" than to start from scratch.

~~~
mattgibson
I understand 'passive' to mean 'charging more than once for the same piece of
work'.

------
aoakenfo
I make $0.70 cents (1 sale) every month from my iOS puzzle game:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simpl/id672601351?ls=1&mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simpl/id672601351?ls=1&mt=8)

In a few months I'll be able to buy myself a coffee! =)

~~~
icefox
You should go to a coffee shop, and buy people a coffee in trade for looking
at your entry in itunes, see what they think and if they can describe what the
game does. You probably want to re-word the description as I am only guessing
at how it works and I still don't know. A trailer on youtube wouldn't hurt
either, though the name makes it hard to search for...

------
cerberusss
Bought the app Sleep Cycle Calculator from its previous owner. Completely
redid the interface for iOS 7, and I'm now finishing up a version with a
custom UIView.

I paid a designer to completely redo the interface, but then iOS 7 happened.
Lost a lot of customers with the transition, because I had to throw away the
new design and start again.

[http://appstore.com/sleepcyclecalculatorwakinguprefreshed](http://appstore.com/sleepcyclecalculatorwakinguprefreshed)

~~~
jbrooksuk
Where do you buy these kind of apps from?

~~~
cerberusss
Bought mine on Apptopia. As far as I can see, it's the (only?) most reliable
and most solid market place.

------
earlz
My first source of passive income came this year. It's an app for rooting (and
then fixing some problems on) a modem used for
U-Verse([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.earlz.nvg5...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.earlz.nvg510fixer)).
I've only made a handful of $100 bills with it, but the extra income is
welcome.

The amount of work I've actually had to do was really quite little. I had to
do initial development, and then fix some bugs. Then, it just sat there and
brought in $5-20 a day. Eventually AT&T patched the original exploit I used
for root access so I had to do research and development to find a new one and
implement it, which took about 2 weeks or so. And since then, it's just been
sitting there bringing in bits of money. I plan on adding some often requested
features over the next month though

Also, I provided the app only for convenience. The information on how to root
the modem for free is published freely on my blog, I just provide the app
because I know that the steps required are too complicated for many people

------
runn1ng
It will sound banal, but Bitcoins I bought year-and-something ago.

~~~
kintamanimatt
That's not strictly speaking passive income, but capital gains.

~~~
etherael
That depends, he might be day trading with a bot, that's (largely) passive.

~~~
kintamanimatt
That would indeed be passive income but OP appears to have bought the coins a
year ago and has kept them as a speculative investment. Seeing as the wheel of
fortune has landed on Tuesday, OP has made a capital gain! :-)

~~~
etherael
I mined a bunch of coins two years ago but now I mine scrypt altcoins which
turn a better profit with GPUs than btc. I also run day trading bots which
trade with my cryptocurrency portfolio in general, including bitcoin,
litecoin, ad et al.

So at least one person is definitely getting passive income this way, and I'm
almost sure I'm not alone.

~~~
gknoy
Please forgive my ignorance, but how do alternative coins work? Who uses them?
I've only recently noticed Bitcoins being relatively widely usable, so how
does the process work with alternative mineable coins? Do you convert them to
dollars at some point or just mine and trade them for good/services?

~~~
etherael
Altcoins are just another blockchain that uses the basic bitcoin idea of proof
of work or stake to validate a distributed ledger, there are dozens to
hundreds of them by now and they're all effectively just different distributed
ledgers with some modified rules (total coins, rewards per block, demurrage,
things of this nature) that are traded on cryptocurrency exchanges like
cryptsy with bitcoin.

Because they're liquid with bitcoin they're effectively liquid with all the
other currencies in the world, including each other. So you can do things like
gauge the profitability of a given altcoin with code and switch your mining
based on the current highest daily return, and you can do things like run
trade bots that trade into and out of bitcoin and that altcoin depending on
various market indicators etc to get the best return on top of that base
return, and last of all you can do the same trading strategies with bitcoin
and fiat currencies themselves, so it becomes a three layered freelance
trading strategy.

To summarise;

* Miners pull down altcoins with raw GPU horsepower.

* Bots trade between the altcoins and bitcoin on market indicators that work best.

* Other bots trade between bitcoins and fiat on market indicators that work best.

I used to just be a coder working for employers directly but this makes me
accountable to nobody but the effectiveness of my algorithms. I'm still open
to the freelancing side and looking at other opportunities because it is
largely passive, but it's the first opportunity I've ever had where I become
completely unaccountable to other human beings, and I must admit that has a
lot of attraction to me.

I'm a global roaming digital nomad and have been for the past five years or
so, but I have always had to worry about being contactable by my clients and
timezone shifts and things of this nature, now that doesn't matter so much as
I don't even need to talk to anyone at all if I don't want to. After finally
achieving absolute complete communication disconnection with the entire rest
of humanity though I am starting to feel the slightest inkling of what I have
constantly heard other people talking about with feeling something missing in
not being in the office and interacting with others all the time.

It's a crazy world, and I'm a crazy person.

~~~
nick_urban
Wow, your post became very interesting to me in the last two paragraphs. Have
you considered joining organizations that do make demands on you (and hence
keep you connected to society), but not for financial reasons? Social clubs
would work, but I would expect more meaning would be found in community
service, religious organizations, artistic projects, etc.

~~~
etherael
The thing about human contact for me is that I can do with very little of it,
that it takes this magnitude of isolation for me to even identify with the
idea that people might actually _want_ to socialise with other people is
emblematic of that.

Every two or three months I attend a local meetup, or try to arrange contact
with some of my old friends that travel frequently enough that our paths
nearly overlap, that's basically enough for me I think. Perhaps that will
change in the future but for now it's certainly the case.

------
mmayberry
I own/operate a luxury resale business that specializes in high end womens
fashion, art, cars, and collectibles. My only time expense is picking up the
items... everything else I have automated. On a good month I can clear $10K+
and on a bad month $2-3K. I do all this without any advertising and the
primary selling point of my business is thats its discreet and anonymous.

~~~
jbrooksuk
How does this work? Are you scraping other sites, then ordering them to
yourself or something?

~~~
mmayberry
nope. its all based on repeat and referral. My first customer wanted to sell a
pair of $1200 shoes but didn't know how so I put them on eBay for her. That
one pair turned into two which then became her entire closet. She then
referred me to a friend who did the same and thats been the foundation of my
business ever since. 100% repeat and referral. I avoid unsolicited inquires as
much as possible because they typically arent worth the headache. I even fire
customers that make my business hard using the 80/20 theory.

------
quaffapint
Created a PHP ad server 'mySimpleAds' at
[http://www.clippersoft.net](http://www.clippersoft.net) and continue to
maintain support it. Brings in some money monthly to help with credit card
bills. I get some referals from SO and the like, but also spend $ on Adwords.
Last year created a hosted SAAS version at
[http://mysimpleads.com](http://mysimpleads.com), but hasn't really taken off.

As always with my products - marketing and getting more people to see them is
always a big problem. Once they use them, customers like them - it's getting
them to the site to even see them.

I'm in the process of re-writing mySimpleAds and adding in a bunch of stuff,
but I don't know if it will still be stuck in neutral and not bring in the
folks. I'll also plan to write more products, figuring maybe that will bring
people in.

------
nkuttler
Oh well, it's hardly an income but I created a rhyming dictionary years ago
where one adsense container pays for all my personal hosting bills.
[http://rhymebox.com/](http://rhymebox.com/)
[http://rhymebox.de/](http://rhymebox.de/)

~~~
3pt14159
I've used this a bunch of times for my sick raps! Thanks :)

~~~
nkuttler
Great :-)

------
scotty79
Few bitcoin Antminers. They are paying as much as I'll be earning at my new
job I'm starting with the beginning of the February. I basically cloned myself
in terms of income by buying them. They should pay for themselves in 3-4
months. I'm not sure if that's passive income or capital gain though.

~~~
odonnellryan
How many do you own?

~~~
scotty79
Currently 5. They should have decent output even after they paid for
themselves.

------
iluvmylife
I made a super simple paid Android app with a list of interesting Physics
Puzzles
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boredominn...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boredominnovations.physicspuzzles)).
Took a month to make and now it is completely passive. Brings in some spare
change with zero maintenance (~$50/month).

I built this in 2011 to learn app development (its a webapp built using
PhoneGap). Took about a month of evening/weekend work to push out, and most of
that time was consumed by collecting and creating interesting puzzles. It was
featured on Google Play's Top Paid Educational Games leaderboard for a while,
and that contributed to a spike in income. That apart, I haven't done/don't
know of any viable means to promote it.

------
frankydp
I have been running a simple career site for Marines for the last 2 years, and
have now slowly grown to capture about half the Marine Corps monthly. It
slowly drags in $400 a month and has been creeping up to the 5k mailing list
mark. I work on it about a day a month, if that.

~~~
taigeair
Link?

~~~
frankydp
[http://www.killfoot.com](http://www.killfoot.com)

Also what kind of map-making are you working on in the travel space?

~~~
taigeair
How much time did that take to build and maintain?

~~~
frankydp
It went through a couple iterations, and settled on this one. Technically it
only took a couple hours to make, and I spend about 2 hours a month actually
providing the service. But, as with any side project I tinker with it a couple
times a month.

~~~
taigeair
I guess the articles take some time too. I find blogs and websites aren't that
bad. It's physical products that are the worst!!! But also really inherently
rewarding :)

------
rajeevk
My first Android app: Scratchpad
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.avabodh.sc...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.avabodh.scratchpad)

I made it to learn Android development. It took me total of 5 days: 2 days to
learn basic android stuff then next two days to develop this app and on last
day creating dev account and publishing on Android store.

After publishing I forgot the password of signing key I used, so I never
updated this app except for a description change. Initially there was almost
no revenue but it increased over the time as the download count increased.
After two year(of publishing), it is giving me around $70/per month through
ads (admob).

------
easy_rider
I have great expectations of my DogeCoins!

------
rk0567
$100+/mo (through adsense and affiliate programs) from
[http://assembleyourpc.net](http://assembleyourpc.net) \- a simple tool for
assembling pc online. I spend 1-2 hours per month on some tweaks/updates.

------
heumn
My app and side project "lolipop". An "instagram for gifs and funny
images"-niche app. 100k + downloads.

Gotten hugely popular in Norway. Released a revamped iOS 7 version to the US
last week (?). Things are going slow over there. Not even reached 1000
downloads.

Traffic always spike during 23:00 - 03:00 when kids should be sleeping... 99%
of users lurk and browse reddit/9gag/imgur some contribute (no account needed
for browsing).

Link for the lazy: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lolipop-funny-images-
gifs/id...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lolipop-funny-images-
gifs/id523423502?mt=8)

~~~
jbrooksuk
How does this generate income?

~~~
heumn
Users get a "pro account", much like the Twitter Verified badge (called
lolipop AWESOME) for a week if they "Download a free app". Those pays
everything from 20 cent to couple of bucks per download.

App runs barely any hosting cost, and this generates a nice little passive
income. I have an admin panel to turn on more ads, but as of now I would
rather grow with as little intrusive ads as possible. When, and if I turn on
more intrusive ads, users can purchase a "pro badge" to get rid of ads.
(turned off now).

Best side effect is that I have gotten a LOT better at obj-c development since
I started playing with it, and now run a small mobile development company that
actually pays the bills. Learn while you play :)

~~~
jbrooksuk
This is awesome! I'm teaching myself Obj-c now and would like one day to take
it further. Glad to hear that it's working out for you :)

~~~
heumn
Best of luck :) If you have any questions, be sure to ask. I started with the
Stanford videos on iTunes u. High quality stuff!

------
elliottkember
Running Hammer for Mac (hammerformac.com), our web-development OSX app. On a
good day we might hit $100+ profit (after Apple's cut). Some days we don't get
anything. It's rewarding to know that people are using it.

~~~
snide
Hammer is a nice, well designed product, kudos to you and congrats on it. I
was actually surprised it doesn't net you a larger income.

Do you think you guys are missing on marketing, or that you're hitting a niche
that's too small (frontend osx owning developers that can code, but not enough
to set up small dev environments)? I'll admit that I'm mostly a frotnend dev /
designer myself, but since I have enough ability to set up things like git,
bower and grunt myself hammer seems to aim at a skill curve just lower than
myself. That said I bet I'm underestimating the amount of people that still
use php includes for simple static sites. My guess might be that their might
be more in the Windows world, though that could be a prejudice.

Good luck on your work and continue building cool software!

~~~
elliottkember
Hey, that's a really nice comment! Thank you so much for your feedback.

I'd love to make more on Hammer. We make okay money on Hammer and don't have
to work on it too much. I think there's a few reasons we don't make more. For
one, I don't know that there's big money in developer tools, especially given
the vast number of free tools as you've said. We are planning a few extra pay-
monthly features which might be really nice, mainly new features for hammr.co.
Recurring subscriptions are a better long-term model.

We're also integrating with our hosting platform Forge (getforge.com) which
you might've seen. Super-fast static hosting. That's the hosting provider we
use for the Hammer and Anvil sites.

> hammer seems to aim at a skill curve just lower than myself

A lot of people feel this way. I personally think Hammer's great no matter
what skill level you are. We're trying to keep it zero-configuration; a very
simple, consistent tool. Not too many clever tags to remember, and less
support and maintenance on our end.

> My guess might be that their might be more in the Windows world, though that
> could be a prejudice.

A Hammer gem sure would be nice! ;)

------
vcherubini
I wrote a book titled "Expert PHP Deployments" on how to deploy any PHP
application using Vagrant, Capistrano, and Phing.

[http://growingsoftware.org/expert-php-
deployments/](http://growingsoftware.org/expert-php-deployments/)

It hasn't made me rich, but it usually sells about a copy a day. I love that
it's entirely passive. I wrote it, published it, and it just sits there on my
website making money.

It's also been a good way to build a list of people who would be interested in
other things I make.

PS. Use coupon code "hn" for $2 off if you're interested.

------
parax
I wrote a sci-fi short novel that received a good feedback (surprisingly not
at Amazon, where nobody has reviewed it). It's placed at the iBookstore and
the Kindle store, and it sells some units from time to time:

[http://www.amazon.com/value-memories-Carlos-Paramio-Danta-
eb...](http://www.amazon.com/value-memories-Carlos-Paramio-Danta-
ebook/dp/B009SHVSZ2)

[https://itunes.apple.com/en/book/the-value-of-
memories/id573...](https://itunes.apple.com/en/book/the-value-of-
memories/id573698565?mt=11)

~~~
mattmaroon
Are you just doing the 35% rate on Amazon since you're below $2.99?

~~~
parax
I don't have many options there :) And the iBookstore retains 30%.

------
sovok
A silly project for playing with Unicode (sıɥʇ ǝʞıl) and ASCII Art. About 900
visits per day, 10€ per month income. Almost pays for the server.

[http://lunicode.com](http://lunicode.com)

------
ZanderEarth32
I've got an iOS app that I'm lucky if I get a sale or two a day. It was really
more of a project to teach myself how to build iOS apps and be an
accompaniment to an ebook my GF wrote that sells fairly well. I guess
technically it hasn't 'made' any money since we're still in the red when
factoring in the cost of the icon design, Apple dev account, etc.

I'm currently working on an app that is aimed at kids that should encourage
them to write more and be creative. Hoping to get more traction with that.

------
yummyfajitas
I make some passive income off affiliate link blogs. Not a lot, varies widely
per month.

I've been making extra cash lately by running bandit algorithms to optimize
the click through rate, basically choosing the optimal call to action. I've
got a wordpress plugin which does that automatically which I've just made
public:

[http://bayesianwitch.com/wordpress/index.html](http://bayesianwitch.com/wordpress/index.html)

------
xsNzgw8
[http://pressbulgaria.com](http://pressbulgaria.com) \- it is a SaaS for
sending press release to the media. This tool gives the citizens a lot of
power to ring the alarm on certain problems. Also my customers use it as
channel for promoting books, exhibition, events, etc

We have a tor hidden service for anonymous submissions. We offer free service
for whistleblowers, that want to stay anonymous (and can't pay us).

~~~
dotemacs
Great idea!

What percentage are paid users versus free anonymous submissions? How long
have you been in business? What are you profits like? Thanks

------
elbear
At the end of 2013 I launched
[http://www.comedylib.com/](http://www.comedylib.com/). It's a site with
curated Youtube videos of comedians, comedy shows and comedy movies.

I built this out of my passion for comedy and because I wanted to have only
comedy videos in one place and not the mix that Youtube offers. It's not
making any money yet, but I haven't put much effort into promoting it so far.

~~~
maheshs
How you make money out of it?

~~~
elbear
I'm not making any yet, but so far the potential revenue sources are Amazon
affiliates and potentially advertising.

------
weavie
I wrote a trading simulator app for iOS. It's not a huge earner, but does give
me some pocket money. It's not exactly passive either since I still develop on
it, but I would probably be doing it anyway - the fact people buy it is just a
bonus.

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spoof-trader-trading-
simulat...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spoof-trader-trading-
simulator/id560758114?mt=8)

------
yozhik
[http://www.dicerealm.com](http://www.dicerealm.com) makes me minus $5 per
month, but it was mostly an experiment to validate some of the advice from
Start Small Stay Small ([http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-
Launching-...](http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching-
ebook/dp/B003YH9MMI)), which is a fantastic book.

------
podviaznikov
My gf did couple of CSS animations(icons, js components etc) over the years.
Then we published them to Envato marketplace and got some monthly income
around 100USD per month. See link (referral):
[http://themeforest.net/item/animated-404-or-maintainance-
pag...](http://themeforest.net/item/animated-404-or-maintainance-
page/5957991?ref=aleksandrovamaryna)

------
qzervaas
I made this PHP library about 5 years ago:

[http://zervaas.biz/escapianet/](http://zervaas.biz/escapianet/)

Probably make 2-3 sales/yr which is always a nice surprise. It comes up first
when you Google "escapianet php"

I also wrote a PHP book in 2007. I still get royalty cheques, although they've
almost approached 0 - the last quarter was about $30 ;)

Most of my income now is from app sales.

------
namigop
I started wcfstorm ([http://www.wcfstorm.com](http://www.wcfstorm.com)) about
4 years ago. I started out with just 1 product and has now added 2 more. The
income is pretty nice. It usually exceeds my monthly salary. I love it when
some stackoverflow users recommend it to others when a question gets posted
about WCF testing.

~~~
ryanlitalien
Great product! I used it a ton when I was .NET programming. I used wcfstorm to
load test our API to show response time degradation.

------
dejv
I had created [http://notationtraining.com](http://notationtraining.com) in
2010 when I was learning how to play piano. I did update this project few
times, but otherwise it is completely on its own. It makes only about 300
USD/month but I am quite happy with it as I am not doing anything to promote
it or anything else.

~~~
swah
Wow, very good job. Did you think much about SEO when you set it up?

~~~
dejv
Not really, I create first version in about 5 hours and only marketing I did
was to post it into Chrome web store and I was really surprised that people
actually using it few days later

------
jenno
I have a few things going on.

1\. Income from ~5 non-fiction Kindle books for sale on Amazon. Around $100 a
month, though at one point when I was more heavily marketing them it went up
to $900-$1000. Would be great to spend more time on this and automate a system
where I have a couple of assistants doing this for me around the clock
(marketing and book creation).

2\. Income from a single Youtube video which links to a simple blog (about
solar power) with Adsense ads. I get about 50 cents to a dollar a day from
this.

3\. I used to work for a jewelry firm doing SEO, going into their office on
weekdays. Had to quit later, so I asked if I could do the work from home and
send a work log each week. They pay me $300 per week for simple social media
and blog posts. I pay a girl in Pakistan (who has good English skills) $70 per
week to do the work for me. She's very good and I'm thankful to have her. They
have no clue.

Feel free to PM me if you'd like to speak about these things / wanna
brainstorm.

~~~
TaffeyLewis
Pretty cool list, and all three look like things you could expand your
earnings on with some moderate extra work. Just out of curiosity, What
subjects do your non fiction books cover?

------
jbrooksuk
Nothing as of yet. I used to receive donations from my blog and some Windows
programs I've written: [http://www.softpedia.com/developer/James-
Brooks-12392.html](http://www.softpedia.com/developer/James-Brooks-12392.html)
but that seems to have dried up. I probably generated £100~ from all
donations.

I'm now working on several iOS ([http://james.brooks.so/contare-my-first-ios-
app/](http://james.brooks.so/contare-my-first-ios-app/)) applications (paid)
however I do intend to offer free versions with iAds.

I've also got an Android app on the Play Store that's made me a few quid;
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jbrooksuk....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jbrooksuk.xcrate&hl=en)

Apart from my iOS applications now, I intend to develop some SaaS apps that I
can use to generate some more income.

------
qeorge
Making $2-300/month off Android apps (AdMob). Despite best efforts, this is
dominated by a soundboard app. Not what I expected, but we'll take it!

Internet yellow pages, www.ablocal.com, doing quite well. Can't disclose
metrics, but it makes more than you probably would guess.

Domain sales - again can't disclose specifics, but in the $xx,xxx range this
year from domains. Not a huge portfolio, but some good ones.

And we just launched Gold Plugins (last Friday), a membership club for our
premium WordPress plugins. Hoping it will become a good vehicle, although we
do pride ourselves on awesome support, so not that passive. Previously, we
were selling these plugins separately, for about $1k/month. No stats on the
membership system yet.

Gold Plugins: [http://goldplugins.com/](http://goldplugins.com/)

I have some others, but nothing that's making enough money to be interesting!
I'll add more if I think of them; we have a bunch of random properties.

------
kelu124
I've had www.rickshawart.org for a now.. two years. Not making a lot of money,
still a no-loss project, and a ethical, profit-sharing one =)

The structure is a tad special in that we have no fixed costs (apart from the
hosting part).

Any feedback of course is appreciated - that's really niche, and we're
wondering how to move forward when our product is that special.

~~~
kachhalimbu
This is really cool idea. Kudos to you.

~~~
kelu124
Thanks !

------
mephju
I spent more than some time to create a Shopify admin app for Android,
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shopify.ad...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shopify.admin).
It's up and running and generates already some money each month (60$ - 100$).
Zero marketing, just Google Play. I wanted the app to be so much better than
it is right now but unfortunately Shopify will release their own Android app
soon which will render my app useless. It's quite devastating. So I consider
this endeavor a failure. Now I am on the lookout for a new project idea. I
think I will stay in the ecommerce realm since I like it very much and think
it's easier to make money with merchants than with ordinary consumers. In case
anyone would like to team up, my email is in my profile ;)

------
acconrad
I bring in 5-7k a year DJing and personal training. They're technically "work"
but I'm literally getting paid to live out my hobbies I already do for myself,
which to me is passive income. I would, however, like to turn a programming
side project into something that's passive income.

~~~
stevekemp
Ditto for me.

I shoot hookers for money, photographically. The kind of mid/high-end ladies
that have their own sites and galleries.

They're a hard market to get into, but frequently one girl will know another
five or ten, and personal recommendations go a long way.

Those girls, and retired people who want pictures of their cats/dogs are the
only consistent group of people who seem willing to pay for
portraits/photographs.

------
vuzum
Let's see. There's a few somewhat passive channels for us.

We just launched our product Blogvio
([http://www.blogvio.com](http://www.blogvio.com)) which is yet break even.
Right now we're only partnering with platforms to white label our Editor and
widgets, but we'll soon release a pricing plan for all users of the website.

Our 2008 marketplace Flabell
([http://www.flabell.com](http://www.flabell.com)) (flash products... I know)
is still going strong, although we too think Flash is dead. People still buy
those components, so we still provide support for them. We stopped advertising
though a few years back. :-)

Same goes for our Flash Components on ActiveDen, these still sell a couple of
hundreds every month. So it's still passive income after 6yrs+. :)

------
ivanyv
12 years ago I started a vertical social network for schools. We tried to
hustle and visited schools one by one to sign them up. It crashed. Hard. Over
time it evolved into a simple school directory, and after 3 years or so, it
started making consistently about $300/month on AdSense. Revenue continued to
rise (slowly), and now somedays it breaks $200/day. In the last 10 years I've
spent like a week at most on the site.

Weren't it for years of stupid decisions (and a family, the one best decision
ever though), I could almost live comfortably off of that.

Motivated by breaking $100/day a few months ago and now $200, I'm using it as
a sort of template to launch other sites. By this time next year I might
actually break $10,000/month and then finally relax :)

~~~
ericthegoodking
How do you bring traffic to your site?

~~~
ivanyv
At first I did lots of SEO, good page titles, meta tags, links from other
sites. It brought modest traffic. Since then I haven't done much but the
traffic keeps growing.

Part of the explanation is that is has a pretty long tail.

~~~
ericthegoodking
Interesting, is your product like a "yellow books" for schools?

------
than
The Random Amazon Product Generator brings in enough for a small book purchase
every few weeks. It's still mostly for my own amusement.
([http://thanland.com/projects/random-
amazon/](http://thanland.com/projects/random-amazon/))

~~~
yitchelle
great idea. How did you go about marketing this?

------
dpiers
I made 10.35 BTC from mining dogecoins for the last month.

~~~
MasterScrat
That's impressive... What was the hardware cost?

~~~
dpiers
I am using my gaming PC that I built years ago and a $1079/mo dual hexacore
dual Tesla M2090 server from Softlayer.

Fortunately I have a $1k/mo Softlayer credit, so my hardware costs were
approximately $79. My rent includes electricity, so my electricity costs were
$0.

~~~
kirk21
Don't people abuse the 'electricity is in the rent' fact? Or is it a (shared)
tragedy of the commons problem?

------
someotheridiot
Rebrickable ([http://rebrickable.com](http://rebrickable.com)) shows you what
you can build with your existing LEGO collection, including hundreds of fan
contributed designs. Not truly passive as I work on it every day.

------
napolux
I have 2 iOS apps that are selling something like 5 copies per day each.

One is an iOS text clipboard manager (with iCloud sync)
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/copycopy-clipboard-
manager/i...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/copycopy-clipboard-
manager/id725292832)

The other one, for the lazy students in the italian market, is a database you
can use also offline of recaps from books you study in school, with in app
purchases.. [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iriassunti-riassunti-di-
ital...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iriassunti-riassunti-di-
italiano/id574956492)

They are both in the 4/5 star ratings

------
Judson
I may have posted about this before, but
[http://askjud.com](http://askjud.com), a simple trick that you can play on
your friends makes around $300/mo.

Its hosted on github, and costs $8/yr for the domain name.

~~~
ElongatedTowel
How does something like this make so much money? If a friend send me the link
I would demand reparations.

------
AJay17
Not much to mine, but they seem to be doing pretty well.

[http://www.thingsunder15.com](http://www.thingsunder15.com) and
[http://www.myfancysauce.com](http://www.myfancysauce.com)

~~~
tokhi
How they earn money? by advertisements?

------
mhoad
Just in the middle of getting this up (was a way of teaching myself Rails)
that works as an Affiliate style site for gadgets and cool gift ideas.
[http://fmhgifts.com/](http://fmhgifts.com/)

~~~
atmosx
I like the design and the idea is smart, but are you planning to monetize
this?

~~~
mhoad
Only makes money via Amazon affiliate links which aren't a horrible gig if you
get even semi decent traffic.

------
smartician
Earning low three figures with my Android apps[1]. Haven't touched them since
August, so I guess that counts as passive income. It's even still building
momemtum[2], so maybe if I had spent some money on marketing it would have
grown faster?

[1]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Smartician](https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Smartician)

[2] [https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-
prn1/t1/15...](https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-
prn1/t1/1545771_10151836107067014_2000335479_n.jpg)

------
LaurentGh
I'll try to start an ecommerce for France, following the other ones who
specialize themselves in just one kind of well made product, like socks
(www.archiduchesse.com), or underpants (www.leslipfrancais.fr). Coming soon ;)

~~~
kelu124
Excellent, I had heard about leslipfrancais, but not the socks one =)

------
johnydepp
An IOS game I made 1 year back.. :) [https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/royal-
cribbage-lite/id591048...](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/royal-cribbage-
lite/id591048477?mt=8)

~~~
jbrooksuk
Are you offering IAP?

~~~
johnydepp
No! Thats the funny part.. I am putting only IAds..

~~~
jbrooksuk
Nice! That's worked out well for you - congrats! :)

------
gearoidoc
Hipster CEO - a tech startup sim. 6.5k downloads at $2.99 in the past 3
months.

www.hipsterCEO.com

~~~
liamgooding
Awesome I'm glad you're making OK money for this. Bought it and thought it was
fun to have a laugh at myself for a bit and the stereotypes in the industry.
Went through a phase of constantly crashing though but seems OK now

~~~
gearoidoc
Thanks, dude. Yeah I was (pretty obviously) learning as I went on the iOS
front so I encountered a lot of newbie bugs. I'm still working away on it
though so hope to provide you with good value for money!

------
alain34
[https://www.bankaccountchecker.com](https://www.bankaccountchecker.com)
enable the validation of UK bank account (web app and API). It is not making
loads of money but I get enough traffic to pay for summer holiday. I often get
request for the logic behind the API. the sort code file is also selling well.
I have created another saas service at
[http://www.conceptuel.co.uk/burnDown/](http://www.conceptuel.co.uk/burnDown/)
but there is not enough demand to make it a profitable passive income.

------
firstplanthendo
Somewhat different area, but earns me around $300 a month- Churning credit
cards for rewards. So called “award/travel hacking”. 2 new credit cards per
calendar quarter, conservatively estimate each signup bonus is worth $600 (if
you know how to redeem them, usually that means for travel).

Have to live in the U.S. and have good credit to do it, but I’ve been at it
for a few years now and haven’t paid for airfares or barely any lodging costs
on almost all my travel. Working on an online class that teaches how to do it,
looking to sell that for some “real” passive income.

~~~
Qworg
Doesn't this destroy your good credit? I've always wanted to do this, but that
worry always crops up.

------
davidpaulkrug
I recently started a jobs site that makes about 10 dollars a day in affiliate
revenue and adsense. Rolling out a network of them.

[http://phjobs.org](http://phjobs.org)

------
jesalg
Not nearly as successful as some of the other guys here but I have couple of
avenues for passive income:

1) I make a few bucks a month off my reddit client:
[http://www.ruddl.com](http://www.ruddl.com) \- I pay $0 for hosting on Heroku
so I'm more or less net positive.

2) I also make a few bucks off my blog in tips:
[http://jes.al/blog/](http://jes.al/blog/)

I'm working on ideas for a SaaS product or even a book to add to that list.

------
rmc
Made some custom maps based on OpenStreetMap designed for reading on the
Kindle. Have made about ~€100 so far, but there's a lot more I could do.

[http://www.kindle-maps.com/](http://www.kindle-maps.com/)

The books themselves: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/s?_encoding=UTF8&search-
alias=digita...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/s?_encoding=UTF8&search-
alias=digital-text&field-author=Rory%20McCann)

------
peacemaker
I make about $400 a month quite passively by selling software with Envato.
Just the occasional comment and email which takes 5 - 10 minutes a day at
most. I also sell a beginners book on creating and selling WordPress plugins
which only sells one or two a week.

I have a bunch of cool stuff out there but my biggest weakness is marketing. I
can never seem to drive enough targeted traffic to my projects.

~~~
pcharles
where can we find the book?

~~~
peacemaker
It's here: [http://creatingplugins.com/book](http://creatingplugins.com/book)

Like I said, it's mainly for beginners but I'm working on another one (using
LeanPub they're awesome!) which will be much more in-depth.

------
xiphias
Bitcoin :-)

~~~
goldenkey
Facebook Stock. Now do you realize how stupid you sound?

~~~
phlo
He may be _mining_ Bitcoin. If you're able to _issue_ Facebook stock, let's
talk :)

~~~
drdaeman
Is mining Bitcoin still proficient (except for ASIC makers, huh)?

~~~
paps
Mining scrypt coins is proficient. I make $400/month with 2 machines I built 6
months ago.

~~~
gremlinsinc
$400 a month for 2 machines? You should be making a lot more... I just got
started a month ago as a hobby, using MiddleCoin pool which converts/paysout
in Bitcoin, --w/ 1 high-end gfx card(7950), I'm earning 200/month. I just
reinvested 700 to start building out my rig, which will have 5x R9 270's and a
hashrate of 2250 per machine. I currently make .0125 per khs per day. So this
one machine will be worth $28/day.

I do wish I'd held onto my dogecoins though, I would've made a LOT more if I
hadn't kept pumping/dumping.

------
donniefitz2
I spent 10 minutes creating this coffee mug and I've made about $80 selling
them over the past year on Zazzle. I plan to add more soon.
[http://www.zazzle.com/go_away_im_coding_coffee_mug-168224001...](http://www.zazzle.com/go_away_im_coding_coffee_mug-168224001705050233)

------
bernatfp
At the moment I only have a source of passive income, which is through mining
Litecoin with a couple miners I have.

------
kirk21
Connecting product designers and entrepreneurs. Not really passive since we
review the products and contact the designers.

Link: [http://www.scscale.com/post/74753106293/new-business-
ideas](http://www.scscale.com/post/74753106293/new-business-ideas)

------
nonsens3
I have just released [http://selfstream.io](http://selfstream.io) \- a
platform for event organizers to host and live stream their events. Right now
making a negative $25 for hosting, without counting a small ad campaign on
Google Adwords.

~~~
simonhamp
Is that site built with Bootstrap? ;)

~~~
nonsens3
Yes, it is a theme from
[https://wrapbootstrap.com/](https://wrapbootstrap.com/), which I modified
beyond recognition ;)

------
harvestmoon
I wrote a book on adult ADHD. I published it 3.5 years ago, and it brought in
$75 last month.

It used to bring in more, but some people wrote very negative reviews which
were upvoted, so its sales dropped.

I don't feel too bad because many people who read it say it is unusually
helpful and accessible.

~~~
asnark
Sounds interesting. Link to book?

~~~
harvestmoon
Sure! [http://www.amazon.com/Adult-ADHD-What-Need-Know-
ebook/dp/B00...](http://www.amazon.com/Adult-ADHD-What-Need-Know-
ebook/dp/B003NX7KYK/)

------
tempestn
SearchTempest.com got to the point where it was my main gig about 5 years ago,
although it's since leveled off. Like anything, you end up being pretty active
if you want to continue making that "passive" income. :)

~~~
Zaheer
I've used this on multiple occasions! Awesome site! Do you mind revealing how
much it was generating?

~~~
tempestn
I'd rather not get into specifics, but between SearchTempest and AutoTempest,
we've bootstrapped up to a team of four. My goal isn't really to get huge or
make a pile of money though; mostly just want to keep it going and being as
useful as possible, while keeping up with the times. (We really need to get
the sites working better on mobile devices; getting ready to release a fully
responsive AutoTempest soon...)

------
jophde
I make about $300-$500 a month on my Android app Valet.
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.valetapp](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.valetapp)

------
easymovet
[http://PrimalPal.net](http://PrimalPal.net)

5 $digits/mo

~~~
relaxman
Looks great !!!

------
blakerson
The Music Virtual University ([http://www.musivu.co](http://www.musivu.co))
does four-figure sales+RR monthly, a year after starting and just working
nights/weekends.

------
mokkol
Im currently building a client proposal service specially for designers:
[http://nusii.com](http://nusii.com)

Not getting much passive income yet but I hope 2014 will be our year :-)

~~~
northband
Cool app - good luck mokkol - that's my approach - micro business apps.

------
delpino73
I run a couple of language learning sites. Doesn't make me rich but pays the
rent. :)

[https://www.antosch-and-lin.com/](https://www.antosch-and-lin.com/)

------
yasith
I have an Android app that's use to find local bus times for my area. It makes
around 150$ per month after optimizing AbMob ads. It generated around 50$ per
month at first.

------
meerita
Reading all the comments made me think the only passive income I ever had was
my blog. Trough my blog I've got all the consulting opportunities and made
quite a lot.

------
rms
[http://getkratom.com](http://getkratom.com) still, but as it has grown
passive income has become a solid 20 hour a week grind.

------
ankit70
I make around $200/month from my crappy articles at
[http://ankitkumar.in](http://ankitkumar.in) and affiliate marketing.

~~~
LeVertGarcon
I see affiliate marketing mentioned often in the comments. I don't know
anything about getting started - do you have an easy way for me to get started
other than just Googling it?

------
leoplct
I made -20$/month hosting

[http://uk.zapping.io](http://uk.zapping.io)

------
foxhop
most of the comments relate more to residual income not passive income. I
think passive income is mostly a fallacy and the only thing that comes to mind
is saving accounts and bonds.

------
0800899g
Your best passive income

------
guard-of-terra
Owning a flat in Moscow and renting it out? Easily 1000$/mo. You can live in
Thailand on that money.

~~~
zcam
Or worse like where I live (Switzerland), people rent flats, then subrent them
for a lot more and go live in Thailand (or somewhere else). And then we all
complain because the prices for (renting or buying) flats is insane here.

~~~
drdaeman
Don't know about EU laws, but in Russia every apartment rent agreement I've
seen (which is statistically insignificant amount, maybe 4-5 agreements) had
explicitly prohibited reselling/subrenting.

~~~
sergiotapia
Same in Bolivia. You're even explicitly disallowed to rent rooms out to people
unless you notify the owner. I agree with it to, if I were to own an apartment
and rent it out, I wouldn't want any random person to live in my home.

------
burning
anyone?

