
Ask HN: What passive income attempts have lost you money? - rthomas6
I want failure stories. Passive income is a popular topic around here, and I&#x27;ve never heard people talk about what crashed and burned for them. What are things that you&#x27;ve set up and spent time on that have failed to even achieve beer money levels of income?
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jargonster
Bought some website on Flippa for $1,500. Lost $1,500. Didn't do enough due
diligence and the expected ROI was too good to be true (3 months instead of
usually 10-12 months on this platform). The previous owner was making money
from it but parts of the mechanism to make the business work turned out to be
unethical.

I shut it down and it's a good lesson learnt: only spend time or money in a
business you understand, and preferably that you build yourself. Since then
I'm focusing on my startup (instaroid.sg) which is not passive at all but
brings revenue on IP I own.

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josephschmoe
Tip Calculator. I made one that was better in every respect than the one at
the top of the app store by a lot.

I didn't realize that just because I could make a better app doesn't mean
people would be able to find it. Search is based on popularity - and
popularity for tip calculators is usually based on how high up you are on
search. This creates a feedback loop - and I didn't have a good way to push
myself into that #1 slot even for a short while.

If I had to do it over again, I would focus first on finding a way to get to
that #1 spot for a week, and then I could cruise on the traction.

There's also the point that no one really _needs_ a Tip Calculator. Make
something that once someone tries, they can't live without.

~~~
ssanders82
"better in every respect than the one at the top of the app store by a lot" \-
I am curious about this, can you elaborate?

~~~
josephschmoe
Most tip calculator apps are really limited - they can do what a basic
calculator can do, but slower. The front page is filled with these apps. Mine
can do a lot more - it can handle groups pretty well. And it's genuinely
faster and easier to use for every use case the first page ones cover as well.
Also it finds out the sales tax in your area for you.

I haven't updated it because it contains a fatal flaw that, I think, keeps it
from being anything more than just a better mouse trap: It can't split a
single item between multiple users. It's designed for everyone to put in their
own values independently.

If I were to do it again, I would add a "table sharing" feature with Parse and
find some decent way of splitting individual items that didn't do it by hand.
It could be very novel - but tip calculators just aren't very useful. It's
much faster, easier and involves less friction to do it in your head and just
round out the differences. Alternatively, just ask the waiter to split the
bill.

It's called Tipsy Tip Calculator if you're interested.

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junto
I used to run a number of niche sites that used product feeds from affiliate
sites. They were highly seo optimised and until Panda and Penguin they were
making me ok passive income. They dripped off the scale last year and have
never recovered so last week I canned the hosting account to stop the loss of
hosting payments. Time wise everything was automated.

~~~
rahimnathwani
Would you mind sharing which affiliate sites you were using?

~~~
junto
Just one since it had a UK focus. Affiliate Window.

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scottlilly
I wrote an ebook about a non-technical topic I had experience with.

I spent 18 months doing all the things I was "supposed to do" to build traffic
and sell copies of it - frequent blog posts, SEO (including some recommended
grey-hat stuff), weekly "newsletter" e-mails, etc.

Before the Google ranking algo change (Penguin? Panda?), I had my best month
ever - US$ 150 in gross income. After the change, I lost 90% of my traffic and
didn't have the heart to continue.

Even without the traffic loss, the site was going nowhere, due to a bunch of
other mistakes I made. The biggest problem was that the maximum lifetime value
of a customer was less than US$ 25.

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stevoo
www.cygamerentals.com

I found a gap in my market and said that it needed to be used. Renting
platform games in my country. You would pay online and the game would arrive
by post to you. Play it and send it back to us in a month(max time).

Unfortunately it never caught on. My "partner" didnt really do anything. I
designed, developed and marketed the whole thing. Tried to find clients and
everything. But since i was alone, i lost motivation which come mostly to the
fact that i was supposed to not be alone on this. If i was maybe it would have
been different.

Either way, this never worked, people always complained that they bought a
game,spend good money, played it for a month and then it ended at there shelf
never used again. I believe that they would end up using the service. It was a
win win.

Ended up losing a lot of money due to the games that we have bought. Amounted
to around 1500-2000 euros.

Lesson learned : 1 ) Don't partner with someone that just talks and doesn't
want to do anything. 2 ) Always do you due diligence and check that the market
wants what you are about to offer. Talking to 2 - 3 people is not enough.

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cmaxwe
www.golfingstat.com

I had never really created anything before and wanted to learn Rails.

Built it and have been paying $10/mo in hosting for the last two years. I use
it and have around 30 active users (couple hundred non-active). So I kind of
keep it going just because I realize that the 30 people who use it have
invested a lot of time entering scores and stuff.

My monetization strategy was to get traffic and rely on Google ads.

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amarcus
I wouldn't consider this as an example of having lost money. You built
something with the intent of acquiring knowledge (Rails). It's also something
that you use. I would say that it's a success based on your original goals for
the project.

~~~
cmaxwe
Yeah I guess. I don't regret it but it has cost me money and when I was
building it I was naive enough to think that I would make money on it.

