
Ask HN: Passive income ideas? - quietthrow
I can code well and I have 1-2 hours daily that I can spend on any project&#x2F;activity that will, after some work, generate $1000&#x2F;per month net in passive income. I have kept the number at 1000 as my hours to spend are limited. Change the number if you think I can have a bigger passive income with the amount of time I am have. I would like to hear ideas from the community, specially from folks who have done this in the past or are doing this currently. Please give concrete actionable ideas.<p>EDIT: I am willing to learn anything.
======
patio11
Some options:

1) Do you have freelancing or other experience which has exposed you to
multiple people with similar problems? For example, have you implemented the
same "$()#% authentication system for a web application 20 times? Package up
that one little piece of the puzzle into a scalable way to teach people to do
it without needing to have you or someone similarly skilled on their team.
Common form factors include ebooks. Sell the ebook. If you want to sell lots
of the ebook, start by offering some free incentive to get people to trade you
their email address, then send them email about $TOPIC for a while to make
them trust you as an authority on it, then ask them to buy your thing. (Note:
You don't have to be the world's leading expert on building authentication
systems. You've just taken somebody's shilling to do it twenty times, which
means that it is likely much, much cheaper for somebody to buy your thing and
hand it to his junior developer than it is to pay a similarly-experienced
engineer to do that part of the system.)

2) Failing that, talk to businesses. I could give you a vague fact pattern to
ask about (a problem which is amenable to a solution with code) but people
seem to get hung up on that so I'll give you something really specific: you
are looking for a MS Excel spreadsheet which has ever been mailed by Bob to
Cindy, had Cindy edit it, and mail it back to Bob. _Every time this happens a
SaaS app gets its wings_. Now go out and find, in the actual physical world,
ten firms which have that same darn spreadsheet. Offer to build them a
software system which solves the business problem which that spreadsheet
represents. Ask if they would pay (pick a number based on how big the firm is)
$50 to $250 a month for it. If yes, ask them to commit to buying it when it is
ready. If you get 5 commits, build it, sell to them (n.b. you'll lose some
commits here), and then start trying to sell it in more scalable Internet-y
ways.

3) Failing that, Bingo Card Creator, an app which does _everything_ wrong in
terms of business model and market selection, sold ~$1k a month something like
6 months after launch just because I got halfway decent at organic SEO. If
you're willing to get good at one generalizable acquisition strategy (SEO,
Facebook ads, AdWords, etc etc), with that wind behind you even turkeys can
fly. (It often turns out that there are more lucrative options than pushing
turkeys around.)

4) Find or create one proprietary data source which is not currently exposed
to Google which answers a question that demonstrates commercial intent. Expose
that proprietary data source to Google. The federal government has
approximately 100,000 CSV files of interesting data which are not helpful to
someone asking questions like (not a good example site, but a great example of
there-is-an-answer-to-this-buried-in-a-free-CSV) "What is the median salary of
mid-career dentists in Topeka, Kansas?"

How you monetize a site like that depends on the specifics of the niche and
how savvy you are about it. Lead generation is very lucrative, if the question
you're answering tends to suggest near-term commercial intent in something
with a liquid market. If you want to make a _lot_ less money in a braindead
simple fashion, just slap adsense on it.

Also, I think I alluded to this above, but anybody capable of executing on
_any_ of these has ipso facto developed skills which can be employed by Real
Companies with Real Budgets to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in
marginal revenue. I know you said you want passive options but more active
options, like selling consulting, are things that might well fit where you are
in life a few years down the road.

~~~
euroclydon
It's worth noting that Bingo Card Creator is very amenable to organic SEO. Not
only that, but the process of SEO actually expands the product offering at the
same time. That's the beauty of it. Creating a new bingo card is as simple as
pasting a bunch of related words into a form and maybe a description
paragraph, but now you have a new page full of words (hello Google) and you've
increased the real value of the product to some customers and the perceived
value to many more.

I think it would be challenging to duplicate Patrick's extremely low-cost and
synergistic SEO strategy with a SAAS offering that was not so text-centric.

~~~
webbie
User generated content is one way to grow content footprint at scale, you just
have to invest in seed content and then moderation. My site (also in education
space) [http://www.TestDesigner.com](http://www.TestDesigner.com) has about
150K pages indexed in Google with 90% of the content coming from users.

SEO is not just about content though. Huge part of Patrick's success comes
from link building via his very popular blog and his personal brand, this is
the part that I think is harder to replicate.

~~~
euroclydon
I like your site. Can we talk offline? You don't have an email address in your
profile.

------
dools
If you have 1 - 2 hours per day and you're willing to learn anything, learn to
write and build an audience.

An audience is a more valuable asset than a product. Once you have an audience
you can launch anything you want.

~~~
bobbyongce
totally agree with this. learning how to market is underrated big time. i'm
taking this route now by writing first, building an audience and then see how
i can launch things later on

------
davidjgraph
I hate to be the cynic (lies), but there's no such thing as a "passive
income". The moment you put your service online you'll have active maintenance
and support, even if you don't charge for it.

The other problem is that if you solve a problem well, it's actually extremely
hard to avoid the business scaling. Once the revenue goes past 1k/month, it'll
carry on going, and few people can bring themselves to remove purchase links.

I know that's essentially what you're asking, but my answer would be no, it's
unlikely that you can find a model that fits exactly the criteria you have.

I notice many people posting ideas, rather than low-maintenance ideas.

~~~
josscrowcroft
Totally agree - in my experience, passive income is anything _but_ passive.
It's more involved than most 'real jobs' I've worked.

Have you tried negotiating tax forms, outsourcing (ha) customer support,
maintaining a partially hacked-together codebase, or even having legal
documents written that cost an entire month's salary?

There are a great many unsexy things that need doing when you run your own
business, which regular jobs shield you from (my next 8 weeks' task list is
currently averaging 300 items) - that's the trade-off. And then there's the
12-hour days you'll put in for months, while setting it up...

PS: it's _so_ worth it.

------
Sealy
I made a lot of passive income by coding trading bots for bitcoin.

Its a steep learning curve but if you are willing to learn, it can be very
profitable.

Like you, I can code confidently so during my morning commute I would read
books about trading and economics. In the evening I would play with bits of
code interfacing with broker API's. Within 3 months I had a working bot that
automatically traded away as I slept and went about my day job (passive enough
for you?).

Fast forward 6 months with a couple of hours coding a week refining my
algorithms, my bots earned me more than double what I made in my day job that
whole year.

~~~
CPAhem
What did your bitcoin bots trade?

~~~
kseistrup
Bitcoin and another currency (presumably dollars, as BTCUSD has the highest
liquidity). Buy when bitcoin exchange rate is low'ish, sell when it's
high'ish, reap the margin.

~~~
Sealy
Yes thats correct. And yes, in a sentence you've described a simple but
profitable strategy, one of many :).

------
martinkallstrom
Here is a problem that I would pay a subscription for a great solution to:
Cron as a service.

Sometimes when you set up a simple codestack on Heroku or Parse or similar, it
would be great to be able to specify a web hook that should be called
repeatedly just to run maintenance code, summarize scores, clean up logs etc.
If you have root access you can set up cron but this is not always the case,
and I think it would be possible to build a SaaS that people feel is easier to
use and more flexible than cron. I would easily pay a few dollars a month for
a simple reliable cron service. Reliability is key, your service needs to
never ever fail.

~~~
davidjgraph
> Reliability is key, your service needs to never ever fail.

Then that sounds like it need a serious full time commitment. The OP seems to
be looking for a specific category of ideas that require minimal maintenance,
rather than any ideas.

~~~
rmc
100% uptime is impossible. Remember you can get 99% uptime (2 nines) if you're
down for 4 days in a year.

~~~
martinkallstrom
"Never ever" is at least two nines.. perhaps three. 4 days of consecutive
downtime would probably hurt a Cron as a service-service a lot in terms of
user happiness.

------
ctek
I created a simple SaaS app,
[https://www.pageblox.com/](https://www.pageblox.com/) that makes $300 dollars
a month. I think that in a year or slightly more it could break a thousand a
month if I market aggressively. I think I was able to pull it off by targeting
a very specific problem and its accompanying keyword phrase: "css layout
generator". Over-simplifying, the steps are: 1. find a problem that people and
have and its niche, low competition keyword that get about 5000-8000 searches
a month 2. build a web based app that solves that problem 3. grow your traffic
4. a/b test and iterate

Marketing is by far the hardest part!

~~~
adventured
Have you thought about charging $3 / month, or maybe $12 per year for this
instead of a one-time purchase?

If you're saving / hosting the layouts, in which users can come back and
create new ones or alter old ones, it jives nicely with charging on a
recurring basis.

Throw in another service or two on top of what you already do, and the value
proposition just keeps going up.

------
dangero
Pick an app on the iPhone that is currently selling well and you feel you
could build, then make a competing app. It's boring, but it works and it's a
good confidence builder. A lot of the advice in this thread is to build some
cool new tech, but I'm gonna say that's a bad idea because it's very risky to
do that. Sounds like you're trying to find a reliable way to make money. Also,
online offerings will need constant babysitting to make sure the site is up
etc. iPhone apps on the other hand can be fully self contained with just
little updates for new iOS versions and phones needed.

~~~
thenomad
YES.

New = risky. Risky = bad if you're just looking for income.

One of the biggest lightbulb moments I ever had in online business was when I
realised that if I saw a whole bunch of competitors in a given niche, that
meant _there was definitely profit to be made there_.

~~~
mixmixmix
Got any other "light bulb" moments to share?

------
chipsy
Find a very boring problem that you can automate into a product that needs
minimal support.

By "very boring" I mean: necessary for a certain line of business and not well
addressed by current competitors and not inherently interesting to work on and
full of ugly gotchas and corner cases.

In general, solutions to these problems will be very profitable because they
represent untapped markets. The only difficulties are: finding a problem
sufficiently boring, and how much of it you can tolerate before it crushes
your soul.

------
mynameishere
If there was some method of turning a skill into passive income with any
reliability, people would replicate the idea again and again and so get
1,000,000/month eventually. You're asking for the impossible.

~~~
jasonkester
False.

Imagine you had a magic formula to create businesses that make $5,000/month
and only take up 10 hours/week of your time. Wave that wand once and you have
a $60k salary and a thoroughly leisure class lifestyle. Wave it twice and
you're living quite nicely without really breaking a sweat. Most of us stopped
there.

Notice that every time you use your magic formula, you take away another chunk
of your free time. By the time you've done it four times, you've got a full
time job.

That's the reason most of us are smart enough not to build $1,000,000/month
worth of micro businesses. If that's the sort of money you'd prefer to make,
you'll need to find another way to get it. But don't knock the magic formula.
It works really well. You'd be doing yourself a disservice to believe
otherwise.

~~~
aaron695
I think you've miss read the question

> I have 1-2 hours daily that I can spend on any project/activity that will,
> after some work, generate $1000/per month net in passive income.

$1000/28days at lets say 1.5hours = $23 per hour.

So I'm guessing they are not wanting to do the 1-2 hours per day once it's up
and running, because $23/hour is not passive income.

------
trg2
Ramit Sethi has a great post from last year on why passive income is largely a
myth for most people:

[http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/how-i-traveled-
for...](http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/how-i-traveled-for-3-weeks-
and-made-passive-income/)

------
readme
1\. Identify a problem that affects a significant market, and a problem that
you can solve within reason yourself.

2\. Create a solution that people are willing to pay for.

3\. Sell it.

Tune out everything else. Ignore the gurus. Focus on the important things only
and just do it. Tune out HN, tune out everything.

I would look into doing paid mobile apps. But you still need to have 1-3
nailed.

Definitely read PG's startup ideas article. You don't just sit down one day
and think of startup ideas. It will come to you naturally because _you_ will
experience the problem. Any other way (other than partnering up with a problem
experiencer) will yield fluff.

~~~
joelrunyon
Find a problem. Solve It. Charge For It.

Start off with a service you provide manually. If you get a good response,
turn it into a tool or software that automates it in exchange for a monthly
fee.

Stop looking for "easy get rich quick" ideas and find the annoying, difficult
stuff that people want to offload from their task list. That's where the money
is.

------
contingencies
Work someplace. Live frugally. Don't spend the money. Leave it in term
deposits or other low risk, relatively high yield (ie. at least above
inflation) locations. Rinse and repeat. (Recently, I heard that Vietnam offers
solid rates on term deposits in foreign currencies.)

~~~
greghinch
Having spent some time in Vietnam, and spoken with residents (expats and
natives), I would _not_ invest my money there. Or most SEA countries. Too many
tales of foreigners getting screwed with little to no recourse.

~~~
wilfra
That's quite a sweeping (and inaccurate) generalization.

I have no experience banking in Vietnam but what he said certainly applies to
both China and Thailand, if you stick to the largest banks (ICBC and
Construction Bank in China are both probably safer than any US bank - Bangkok
Bank, Bank of Ayudhya (owned by GE) and Siam Commercial are all rock solid in
Thailand - along with HSBC in both countries). Singapore and Hong Kong are
both also extremely safe places to bank and very foreigner friendly.

Source: Lived over there for 6+ years. Still bank with all of those banks,
more or less doing exactly what he suggested. In China I earn 3.5% on my RMB
term deposits + appreciation vs the dollar, which is almost as predictable as
the interest. Personally, I prefer that to 0.1% at Wells Fargo.

~~~
cageface
I've been living in Vietnam for more than two years now and there is _no way_
I would put any significant amount of money in a Vietnamese bank. Interest
rates have already fallen to under 10%. What's worse - just about everybody
I've talked to that understands the Vietnamese economy thinks that the banks
here are headed for a serious insolvency crisis.

A number of expats here that had planned on living comfortably off the
interest of their Vietnamese bank deposits are now scrambling to come up with
a plan B.

------
reinhardt
There are several replies that start with "find a problem". How do you find
problems small enough for a single developer to tackle but not trivial enough
for having people willing to pay for a solution?

~~~
PedroCandeias
I would suggest leaving your comfort zone.

Developers like myself have a tendency to reinvent the wheel, as in, solve
problems like online team chat over and over again. Because that's what we
know first hand and are comfortable with.

The webapp for online marketeers I'm currently building, with feedback from a
friend in the industry, caters to a bit of a niche but I'll probably have far
greater success with it because that niche is quite underserved. I would never
had thought of that particular idea had I not wondered off outside my comfort
zone and talked to people in other areas.

I don't expect my project to become a passive income stream. It'll take work.
But maybe the same method can be applied to find a problem which has a
trivial, low-maintenance solution.

------
scw
A service I'd pay for: Mailing list management that doesn't suck, and isn't
Google Groups. Something that can be backed up, and has a web interface.
Mailman is still king in this niche, and I'm not entirely sure why.

~~~
captainbenises
This is a good idea, surely someone has already made a good mailing list tool?

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Zed Shaw's [http://lamsonproject.org/](http://lamsonproject.org/) looked
interesting, last time I looked at it. (If you forgive it for pretending all
the world is UTF-8, which it emphatically isn't.)

------
WalterBright
One way is to write ebooks and sell them on Amazon. If you write things that
don't get dated, there is no further work on your part, Amazon just deposits
money in your account.

It's highly unlikely you'd make $1000/mo on a single ebook, but if you write
several, the trickle from each adds up.

~~~
zura
I'd definitely buy your book about compiler construction.

------
jacquesm
Passive income isn't. Lots of little projects may look like passive income but
almost all of them (not saying it can't be done but I just have not seen any)
have some kind of overhead.

It may be better to search for something that can be started small but that
you can eventually scale.

~~~
h2s
When people say they want "passive income", I take it to mean "I want to start
a tiny business and then neglect it and hope it dies slowly".

~~~
jasonkester
In my experience, tiny SaaS businesses tend to grow when neglected, rather
than die.

Once a product is good enough for people to start signing up for and using, it
often doesn't require much more development work. As long as people can find
it, more people will sign up than cancel in any given month.

"Passive" is a really good way to describe the experience of owning one of
these little businesses, once you've dialed things in so that the support
workload is measured in hours/month and you're firing up the IDE maybe twice
in a heavy month.

~~~
ValentineC
> In my experience, tiny SaaS businesses tend to grow when neglected, rather
> than die.

Just curious: what if a new competitor moves in? Or is does that not happen
often?

------
tudorconstantin
I am in continuous search for this type of passive income for about 8 years.
I've tried with (automatically generated) content farms, social media spamming
and all kind of more or less moral stuff.

I got to the conclusion that the answer should be in the immaculate white hat
area and i am focusing on building software in that area.

Also, i dont think that100% passive is even possible, but you could reach a
level where your product gets you enough income so that you become an
entrepreneur

------
joshdotsmith
Please read this post by Amy Hoy: [http://unicornfree.com/2013/how-do-you-
create-a-product-peop...](http://unicornfree.com/2013/how-do-you-create-a-
product-people-want-to-buy)

------
WestCoastJustin
When you have some ideas, before you start, spend the first couple hours
reading "The Lean Startup" [1] by Eric Ries. This book will give you a
measuring stick to see if these ideas work.

[1] [http://www.amazon.ca/The-Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-
Continuo...](http://www.amazon.ca/The-Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-
Continuous/dp/0307887898)

~~~
jacknews
The problem is most people don't know what they want even when it slaps them
in the face. Lean startup is just a search algorithm, finding what people say
they want, it doesn't create or educate markets. That's where the real
progress is.

------
drewcrawford
Two ideas.

1\. I desperately want to be able to send a link to somebody and have them be
able to book a N-minute meeting on my calendar (CalDav) without any further
interaction. I have spent probably several hours trying out products, all of
which suck. I currently spend $30/month on a tool that really doesn't even
work.

2\. The enterprise IM (CampFire, HipChat, etc.) is pretty well done at this
point, but the "group chat for the somewhat public" space isn't. If I am
supporting an open-source project the only game in town is IRC, which is hard
to use for people who need support. If I want to have a permanent chatroom
with 15 software developers that I know socially and allow people to drop in,
there's no system for that.

~~~
PedroCandeias
1\. Just out of curiosity, could you please share what that tool is?

2\. Like iffyuva said, I believe HipChat has that option. As does Campfire.
The thing is maybe those groups aren't willing to pay for such a solution?

~~~
drewcrawford
> The thing is maybe those groups aren't willing to pay for such a solution?

Actually I think they want to pay more. At least I do. HipChat charges
$2/user; I would pay $5 or $10.

The real problem is that tools designed for companies consolidate the billing.
If I start a chat for my local user group then I am on the hook socially to
upgrade my plan to let new people join. If I am successful in cultivating a
useful chat then essentially I am punished for it, and the punishment grows
without bound. One of the groups I participate in has over a thousand members.

Meanwhile I would be happy to pay for a friend or three, with the
understanding that the other 997 people who may want to join need to pay their
own way. And with mostly individual accounts you can probably ask for
significantly more per user than HipChat can.

And the effort to get people to sign up might be effectively free if you
funnel part of the license fee back to the organization who no longer needs to
pass the hat around for pizza money or whatever. This may create regulatory
problems, but if we're just talking about the customer acquisition equation,
there are a lot of awkward situations where somebody forgot to bring cash that
I would very happily roll into a monthly debit to forget about.

------
jbrooksuk
I've also been thinking of the exact same thing myself, something which will
generate enough profit to pay off bills, buy something nice and invest a
little in growing the idea.

Recently I've been working on [https://www.emlipo.com](https://www.emlipo.com)
which was scrutinized by HN for essentially being "little code nobody would
pay for". So I've not really wanted to work on that now.

Still, there will be something out there I'm sure.

 __By the way, the demo is currently offline. I 'm currently at work, but
shall try to get it back on. __

~~~
bulatb
That semicolon (;) in your footer should be a colon (:). [0]

[0] [http://i.imgur.com/VHYGbSd.png](http://i.imgur.com/VHYGbSd.png)

~~~
trusche
Same in the tagline, or better yet, just remove it there. Interesting idea and
nice site.

~~~
jbrooksuk
Thank you :)

------
cglee
1\. Identify a very niche pain for businesses. 2\. Make phone calls every day
to the people making buying decisions for that pain. Try to close the deal,
even without a product. 3\. Start building after your first deal closes. 4\.
As you build, keep calling and closing. 5\. Script out common support issues
as you encounter them, and offload to VA.

My previous startup generates many times more passive income than $1k/mo, and
I did it the "hard" way by building the product first, then try to sell to
customers. Also, don’t underestimate support costs.

Finally, keep in mind that you'll probably have to start an actual business in
order to open a business bank account to collect money, and you'll have all
the fees and legal obligations that goes along with owning a business, so your
$1k/mo can easily turn into $500/mo after all that jazz.

Edit: I'll also add to stay away from targeting consumers directly, and
instead go after businesses. Much easier to charge $199/mo to a real estate
broker than $9/mo to Joe Consumer. The former won't blink an eye for a truly
useful service, whereas you'll get overwhelmed with support issues on the
latter.

~~~
CPAhem
Businesses are way better than Joe Consumer, they need less support and pay
more.

On that subject, stay away from "free" plans, unless you really need freemium
marketing - the support for free users is usually the most.

------
gfodor
Save $200k and buy a 33% leveraged muni bond closed end fund, which are
currently yielding approx 6% tax free at a 10% discount due to the recent bond
selloff.

Disclaimer: if interest rates rise you will be unable to reclaim your
principal but, generally speaking, this income stream should be pretty safe
for the foreseeable future. And of course, $1000 a month today is not going to
be as much in the future if inflation returns to 3%.

~~~
adventured
Doing this at the point in time in which money is about as cheap as it has
ever been in history due to hyper QE to hold down rates, is a very, very bad
idea.

It's not a question of if rates will rise. They're going to rise a lot,
because every day that goes by the cost of artificially suppressing rates gets
more expensive (which is why the Fed has had to keep expanding their QE
program). Equal but opposite reaction, is what will occur, conceptually. To
the extent they've created hyper cheap money, is the extent to which money
will be expensive, sooner than later I'd argue.

The bond bubble is nearing an end. If the Fed wishes to continue it, it's
going to cost trillions worth of new inflation, setting up a damned if you do,
damned if you don't scenario. The era of cheap money is over.

If you want to earn a return on your $200k, wait for the inevitable disaster
that follows these insane central bank policies. Swoop in with your pile of
cash and pick up dirt cheap assets after the next crash. Or go after yield as
rates skyrocket in the next five years.

~~~
gfodor
You have no idea if this is true, this is 100% speculation. Rates could rise
dramatically, they could rise gradually (which is the most likely scenario),
or they can stay at 0% for the next 10 years.

This is why buying a bond fund at a deep discount (these are at 10% discount
as we speak) provides a nice cushion for all cases except the catastrophic
"yields rise quickly" scenario. If you are worried about that, you should be
setting aside some cash to try to time the market.

~~~
adventured
No, it's not 100% speculation. Although that's an amusing claim, because your
own parent post would fall under your same position of being 100% speculation
if you were in fact right.

However, your premise requires a world in which nothing can truly be known for
certain and all outcomes are equally likely. Such is not the case; not even
remotely the case.

Rates cannot stay at 0% for the next 10 years, the math involved won't allow
for that scenario. The Fed is already having their hand forced right now, as
is easily demonstrated by the huge spike in bond yields, oil being at $100,
housing and stock prices skyrocketing due to asset inflation generated
intentionally by the Fed (as they openly said they wanted to have happen).
It's a repeat of the last asset bubbles they brewed, and for exactly the same
reasons, only this time it's 100% intentional. The clock is rapidly running
out on their fraudulent game. They're already being wedged between a rock and
a hard place; continue the policies of cheap money, and assets go so high they
rip the economy apart upon implosion, again; stop the policies, and the
economy implodes instantly. Rates skyrocket either way, as the bond buyers
begin demanding higher yields to compensate for worsening inflation with
continued QE; or rates skyrocket as the Fed stops QE and stops artificially
holding down rates.

You might as well claim that rates can stay at 0% forever, or for 1,000 years,
or for 100 years. Again, your position requires the premise that all outcomes
are equally possible, and that is not true.

It's obvious the era of cheap money is ending. The era of expensive money is
about to begin, as it must by the basic laws of economics (which is in fact a
science, despite the many witch doctors in the field).

~~~
gfodor
When did I say all possible outcomes are equal? The _most likely_ scenario is
not a sudden explosion of yields but a gradual increase in yields. Other
possible scenarios are low yields for much longer than you expect, or your
"armageddon" scenario where yields jump by a few hundred basis points in a
year or something. If you don't believe central banks can keep rates low for
another decade in the U.S. see: Japan. (Don't assume I am claiming this is a
good idea, I am just explaining the reality of the incredible leverage central
banking has.)

If you buy a 10% discounted tax free bond fund (a taxable equivalent of a 9%
yield currently) that has medium duration (~6 years) then you are fairly well
cushioned from gradually rising yields, as the fund turns over and moves into
higher yield bonds your distributions should increase. In other words, all of
your fears are not hidden, secret, insider knowledge, but are largely getting
priced in at this point.

The biggest risk with long-term CEF muni bond holdings is not interest rate
risk (since you don't have to sell them, you have a 10% cushion, they have
moderate duration, and a large enough spike in yields to really impair your
principal is a pretty low probability outcome. but again: you don't have to
sell them.) The real risk is inflation risk. And this is what I said in the
Disclaimer:, which you seemed to not read. Also, your viewpoint seems to
indicate the best assets to hold are gold and cash, and the cash side of your
portfolio is going to be exposed to the same inflation risk as your bond
coupons. There's also risk of default, but you can find national funds that
are well diversified, etc, so this doesn't seem to serious a concern either.

edit: Also, one thing you are overlooking is that if the shit hits the fan,
there is a lot of greedy, borrowed money in equities right now, both people
chasing dividend yield and people chasing capital gains now that we're in a
bull market, thanks to the Fed's bubble, that will head for the exits. It will
go where it always goes: government backed fixed income and money markets.
This will cause downward pressure on yields in the scenario where Fed moves
cause a panic in the stock market, even though ironically the Fed doesn't even
buy equities, it only buys bonds.

------
gab008
Another thing you could try is building dashboards for firms/companies that
are plug-able into major databases (Excel also as a "bonus", there are many
using Excel as database...).

Most will require your board to hook into their ERP system, which is run by a
database. The idea it's not new but existing solutions are over-complicated or
expensive.

Build a few templates and run them in browser (HTML 5, Java Scrip, CSS,
database connector, and a scripting language), get them to look
good/attractive (I know it's not easy, but hey... it's not that difficult
either).

I believe most companies will be happy to just invest in a LCD screen, an
Android device and your labor - to have the boards displayed on the factory
floor or at reception (they can also run presentation slides).

As a bonus you can manage the systems remotely - for servicing after
installation or changes, if required (another source of income).

I know that this is not a really "passive" income idea, but if you get
passionate about it, I think that it has the potential of turning out nice. I
have build one of this boards for my work place, and I am thinking of putting
this into action.

------
unono
Think of problems, outline a solution into a video and a pitch, put it on
kickstarter and market. You only need to implement it after you received the
money (the lean startup method).

To find problems, do searches on google, yahoo answers, and twitter. Look at
the bureau of labor job outlook handbook online and see which parts of each
job could be eased with software, or whether online marketplaces could be
created (taxi drivers -> uber, hotel desk clerks -> airbnb). Also, each
section of craigslist is potentially a online marketplace.

Grab data and build recommendation systems. Movie, music, book, stock/currency
prediction, photo, video, blog, vacation, sentiment, patents, similar people
(from facebook/twitter/blogs).

Programmatically generate data visualizations and put them on youtube, slap
ads on.

Build control systems for drones to automate
transportation/photography/surveillance/games. Look at the academic research
and commercialize it. Drones that can play catch games, deliver orders to
tables, do photography for functions/weddings, do surveillance of perimeters
of offices/homes.

------
WalterBright
Cut your spending so you have a few hundred extra per month. Invest it in SPY
(an index stock for the S&P 500). Over time, you'll build up passive income.

One reasonable way to cut spending is to sell your car if you have financed
it, and buy a car you can afford to pay cash for. Financing is a huge drain on
your cash.

~~~
adventured
This isn't a good strategy. First of all the timing factor alone can hammer
your principle (particularly with stocks sitting at all time highs).

If you have a skill that is valuable, you're far better off leveraging into
that, for the returns are massive by comparison to the puny returns in stock
indices. If you can earn just 10% every year in stocks, you're a wizard that
should be working on Wall Street earning millions.

It's radically easier to invest $100 into hosting ($10 or $20 / month at
digital ocean), build a service, and make $1,000 a month (a huge return on the
invested capital) - than to earn a mere 10% per year in stocks.

$1,000 / month = $12,000 per year. To put together $12k per year from stocks,
at a 10% return (which is a great return per year historically), you'd need
$120,000 in capital to begin with.

Scenario 1) you need $120k in cash to put to work in stocks to yield just
$1,000 per month average in new capital, assuming a great historical return
(and assuming you don't get demolished by a market down turn). And if you're
riding dividends, you're going to be hard pressed to consistently yield 10%
every year even from the best dividend investments (such as public trusts,
real estate vehicles etc).

Scenario 2) invest $20 per month into a hosting account at digital ocean and
build a service that yields $1k per month in income.

#1 is silly compared to #2

~~~
flyinRyan
>It's radically easier to invest $100 into hosting ($10 or $20 / month at
digital ocean), build a service, and make $1,000 a month (a huge return on the
invested capital) - than to earn a mere 10% per year in stocks.

But the stocks can happen with no effort from my side. Just invest in some
fund and let it ride. Building a service that will make $1k/mo isn't "racially
easier", it would take many hours of work to accomplish which means I can't be
using that valuable time for something else more interesting.

------
waster
I am no expert, but if I understand correctly, a blog can generate passive
income from archives, although this requires that you steadily update the
current content (to retain and/or increase site traffic). Not sure this would
meet your needs, though, because maintaining a blog can require a lot of work.

------
mixmixmix
No such thing as "passive income" except maybe buying securitized debt (bonds,
etc. but then you got inflation to worry about).

A business is a business; the amount of labor you'll have to put into it will
be proportional to the supply and demand that exists in that specific market.

Sorry, but there's no free lunch.

~~~
dlss
He's not looking for a free lunch -- he's looking for specific market ideas.

Also, while I sort of agree about the "no such thing as passive income" point,
I think he just means 1-2 hours a week level passive.

------
mammalfriend
You could generate targeted affiliate links on social media sites. (from
social media sites to amazon, etc)

------
noAlchemy
How's your maths? Here's something I'd pay quite a lot for: intelligent
inventory optimisation in an easy to use SaaS format. Quite mathematically
intensive to do well, so most SMEs don't have the skills, but directly saves
money so has a clear value proposition.

Some pointers for an MVP I think might be sensible: Model stock arrival and
product ordering as Poisson point process with probability based on recent
data Combine with sales data & length of ordering cycle to reach suggested
quantity per order (you could make suggestions to account for covering
variations in customer ordering based on standard deviations)

I'm thinking of doing this myself for my business but really not finding the
time to get it done!

~~~
anty
There seems to be a lot of competition in this field. Did you evaluate
existing services? It's an interesting problem.

~~~
noAlchemy
I've had a look (but not intensively, it's a back-burner thing for me at the
moment). Everything seems very heavyweight and aimed at big businesses with
long supply chains.

For a small ecommerce retailer, you don't want much like that; maybe I've
missed it but there seems to be a gap for the Basecamp of this niche. A
shopify plugin might be a good way to get standardised i/o rather than
adapting to proprietary systems

------
hayksaakian
If you have any kind of social media following, you could exploit it with
affiliate links.

Someone posted a good article about finding niches in the app store recently.
Something simple that satisfies an unmet need could earn decent ad money.

~~~
tpsc
[http://www.trevormckendrick.com/how-to-choose-a-
profitable-n...](http://www.trevormckendrick.com/how-to-choose-a-profitable-
niche/)

~~~
hayksaakian
Yeah that's the one. There's a follow up worth reading as well.

------
Jach
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5207179](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5207179)
Discussion on making your own "Incredible Secret Money Machine".

------
rk0567
Write an ebook on something you're passionate about (it would be better if it
solves a problem, in a niche) and self publish it online, use gumroad or
something to handling payments and delivery!

------
score
I recently bought a Blackberry because of its built in encryption features.
It's a great phone but is missing two popular apps: Evernote and Audible.

If you made an app to substitute for either one and charged a few bucks for
it, you'll make passive revenues for a long time. Not only that, you'll be
loved by crackberry users the world over.

Seriously, how many business types subscribe to Audible and to Evernote? And
people are looking for more secure communications. It's an incredible
opportunity.

------
jzcoder
Does anyone have experience with what they call "app tender" sites like
[http://appcity.org/](http://appcity.org/) ?

I've heard one anecdote about a guy who knows a guy who bought a very simple
iOS app for 10K, did some marketing on FB and made like 20K within a month.

I'm more interested in any experience from the developer perspective selling
apps on a marketplace like this. I've also heard the new iOS makes this easier
to do.

------
gesman
Learn PHP and write software for Wordpress, like useful plugin or theme.
Distriubute free version to wordpress.org repository and then develop and sell
premium version of the same thing on your own.

I personally made $100K+ with this approach and it works like a charm.

------
thejosh
If you think there is such thing as passive income, you have anything thing
coming.

If you want to be sold a "passive income mega business", go and have a look at
Blackhat World, the scummiest place on the internet.

------
sharemywin
Follow the paper trail. State or Federal governments mandate business
regulations. Z new piece of paper work or efiling gets created which someone
can create a service to help businesses with.

------
ihatehandles
Ever noticed that all the suggestions you are getting are to some other person
a passion and full startup that they are pursuing? That should tell you
something. Good luck :)

------
hislaziness
Monetizing your hobbies/interests would be a good way of enjoying your free
time and make some money. It won't be very passive though.

------
Hydraulix989
I've done this through licensing SaaS to social gaming companies (apps). It
took a fair bit of work though -- I'd say 6 hours daily.

------
andrewljohnson
I think it will be hard to build much of note in 1-2 hour chunks. Better to
spend 16 hours every other weekend, in 2 eight-hour blocks.

------
hkmurakami
do any kind of freelance/consulting work then invest the process into high
dividend stocks and eventually shift to bonds as interest rates rise in the
next few years. you can find quite a few large cap, stable companies on the
cheap that yield on the order of 5%. take into account the lower tax rates on
dividends and your real income rate becomes higher.

------
pknerd
create an iPhone/Android app

------
perryh2
I trade stocks as a hobby and have been able to make some money.

~~~
jerguismi
It is not passive...

~~~
WalterBright
Buy & hold is about as passive as it gets.

------
aaron695
I never get why these vague I want money posts get to the front page, how is
this hacking? Wanting more money, for little work? That's status quo.

Anyway stop wasting your life on stuff would be my tip.

Or

Learn to cook well(healthy and tasty) over a few months, it'll save you money
and health costs. Great tax free not wasting money passive habit to pick up.

~~~
patio11
Consider it the creative application of computer code to systemic weaknesses
in the global economy, with a clearly defined success function which is fairly
difficult to fudge. That might help explain some of the attraction. (There's
also the "If you only know W-2 employees, then making money by a legitimate
means other than a day job _feels_ like cheating", and for some reason a lot
of hackers like winning by rules exploitation more than they like winning.)

~~~
aaron695
Good hack, yep that's a interesting question.

Edit: Weakness - language. Solution get a bi-lingual friend who can suggest a
non English success story. This in reverse
[http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-29/the-
germany-...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-29/the-germany-
website-copy-machine)

------
nichols
Have you tried getting reincarnated as a rich guy?

Alternately, you could create your own crypto-currency and get chumps to bid
it up.

Buy some oregano and try to sell it as marijuana.

If all else fails, you could try doing some actual work.

