
What was your best passive income in 2014? - ericthegoodking
previous posts<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6661536<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4639271<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7094402
======
jawns
I am the author of two books: "Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science
Projects You Can Perform on Your Kid"
([http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com](http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com)),
which came out in October, and "Correlated: Surprising Connections Between
Seemingly Unrelated Things"
([http://www.correlated.org](http://www.correlated.org)), which came out
earlier this month.

One thing I didn't realize when I started pitching the first book was that
there would be "passive income" in addition to the book advance and royalties.

For instance, I've had three foreign-rights deals for "Experimenting With
Babies," and the only additional work I had to do was put my signature on some
paperwork.

And I have Amazon referral links on both websites, pointing to each book on
Amazon. Those links generate a monthly average of about $40 in commissions per
month, although my monthly high has been as much as $630.

~~~
lijjumathew
Great work. For writing books do you use any book editor/software of just MS
Word ? I am in the process of writing a book and couldn't find a good
editor/software. Thanks

~~~
jawns
For "Experimenting With Babies," I used Google Drive for rought-draft stuff,
then switched to OpenOffice. By the time you're passing it back and forth with
your editor, you'll need to be using something that's compatible with Word,
because that's what your editor will be using (assuming you're working with a
traditional publisher).

For "Correlated," I used a lot of natural-language generation, so I suppose
you could say that my editor was Sublime Text, at least for the drafts. Then
ported into Word format.

~~~
lijjumathew
Thanks for the info.

------
jasonkester
It's been a while since I shared my S3stat [1] numbers. I prefer to talk in
vague handwavy terms rather than concrete numbers, but this should give a
picture of the trajectory:

6 months: Regularly covering server expenses (which were ~$50-100/month at
that point).

18 months: Would have paid for me to live nicely on the beach in Thailand.

30 months: Would cover my rent (and nothing else) at a nice apartment in a
major city.

40 months: Passed the monthly take-home pay from my first (non-software)
Engineering job out of college.

60 months: About what I'd have been making had I stuck with that first job out
of college for 10 years.

80 months: Roughly a Senior Dev salary anywhere but the Bay Area.

As I noted a few years back for the first version of this list, this is for a
SaaS subscription product that I built with the explicit goal of having a low-
level income stream that I didn't have to put much time into. Early on, there
were periods where I worked 80 hours or more per month to get the
infrastructure ticking away to my satisfaction. These days, it requires maybe
six hours of my attention each month.

This year, though, I've been back to full speed (meaning high single digit
hours per week) building out and releasing a bunch of new features.

[1] [https://www.s3stat.com/](https://www.s3stat.com/)

~~~
ohblahitsme
I'm curious to know how well your cheap bastard plan
([https://www.s3stat.com/web-stats/cheap-bastard-
plan](https://www.s3stat.com/web-stats/cheap-bastard-plan)) has been working
out. Has it brought in some customers?

~~~
chatmasta
Isn't this almost exactly what Google punished rap genius for doing?

~~~
petercooper
Nah. The Rap Genius representative was offering up a specific and unnatural
chunk of HTML with numerous links to different areas of the site. The rules
for that S3Stat plan says nothing about linking back at all, although of
course you are _naturally_ likely to. Not even in the same ballpark.

------
euroclydon
Here are the all time sales figures for
[http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com](http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com)

They've been pretty bad the last few months. I think it's because the server
was overloaded and response times were getting really bad. It was running on a
GoDaddy $70/mo VPS with IIS, SqlServer. But that server was also hosting an
Umbraco site and a WordPress blog. The PHP process was taking up 99% CPU
nearly all the time.

Now I have it running independently on a GoDaddy VPS and all the static
resources are on Amazon CloudFront. It is much faster.

My wife says the designs we have are out of date and we need to make some
newer designs. This involves going to Target, looking at the greeting cards,
place mats, napkins, and other nick-hacks to get ideas. Also, Pinterest is
great for design ideas! Then, opening up InkScape or a D3 console and creating
SVG color-in templates in the site's specific format.

    
    
       +-----------+--------+
       | Mon (desc)| Sales  |
       +-----------+--------+
       | July      | 128.70 |
       | June      | 227.45 |
       | May       | 124.65 |
       | April     | 301.50 |
       | March     | 274.40 |
       | February  | 287.35 |
       | January   | 415.25 |
       | December  | 128.70 |
       | November  | 175.65 |
       | October   | 188.60 |
       | September | 132.75 |
       | August    | 330.25 |
       | July      | 343.20 |
       | June      | 297.45 |
       | May       | 505.90 |
       | April     | 351.30 |
       | March     | 484.05 |
       | February  | 188.60 |
       | January   | 248.50 |
       | December  | 38.85  |
       | November  | 155.40 |
       | October   | 89.85  |
       | September | 209.65 |
       | August    | 179.70 |
       | July      | 299.50 |
       | June      | 329.45 |
       | May       | 229.50 |
       | April     | 279.45 |
       | March     | 419.15 |
       | February  | 249.45 |
       | January   | 149.70 |
       | December  | 119.75 |
       | November  | 199.60 |
       | October   | 109.75 |
       | September | 99.80  |
       | August    | 99.80  |
       | July      | 70.80  |
       | June      | 25.90  |
       | May       | 25.90  |
       | April     | 38.85  |
       | March     | 0.01   |
       +-----------+--------+

~~~
unreal37
I looked at your site briefly. Great idea, similar to patio11's Bingo Card
Creator site. Are you doing any A/B testing at all? I think you should be able
to ramp up your sales by being more active managers of the site, instead of it
being something passive. But even patio11 didn't want to manage bingo cards
forever.

Also, the number of template available seems very low. From your home page, if
you add up the numbers under "Categories", you only have 10 templates to
choose from? You need to get that to 100. Seriously. This is like a business
card creator site - you need lots and lots of choices, and people will buy.

Not many want to custom design a complete cupcake wrapper themselves. Just
pick a nice baby design and add text to it for the baby name.

Email some of your customers and ask them how you can improve.

My 2 cents. Congrats on the success, and good luck!

~~~
euroclydon
Thanks for the tips! There are actually 41 canned designs
[http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com/Wrapper](http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com/Wrapper)
and users do share some of their custom designs which can then be edited by
other users.

But, it's been on my to-do list for over a year to build a wizard on top of
the custom designer with a step 1) choose a design, step 2) upload photo, step
3) enter text, type of experience.

------
vilius
$5k per month for 18 months in a row.

Made a portfolio website for my girlfriend. Got positive feedback, refactored
into Wordpress theme and published on ThemeForest. Not 100% passive as I spend
3-4 hours per week for answering support emails.

ThemeForest is a perfect place for passive income if you are a website
developer. At first it challenges your skills as you need to create the
concept, design it and code it. Then it challenges your business, marketing
and support skills. You become a one man factory and learn a lot.

~~~
johnward
Is this all from a single theme? What percentage are you at?

I've contemplated converting some of my custom WP themes to sell on
ThemeForest but I didn't think it would be worth the time.

edit: I often wonder if it would be worth it to try to compete with theme
clubs. They seem to make a killing on recurring revenue and release a couple
of themes a year.

~~~
chatmasta
Theme clubs? Are those the places where you pay a subscription fee to be in a
limited club of people that get a new theme every couple weeks?

In general people spend a lot of money on themes. I think you might be better
off competing with themeforest or more likely, any of the number of bootstrap
theme website popping up.

~~~
johnward
There a few but elegantthemes.com is one that comes to mind.

You pay yearly to access to a bunch of quality themes. They pay out 50%
commissions (and on renewals too) to affiliates but they have 200k+ plus
users. They have to bring in a couple million a year.

I believe they started out at much lower prices and started raising it as they
released more and more themes.

------
dpcx
Dividends on stocks.

I've never had an idea good enough to make an app out of, or build a company
around. So instead, I started investing a small amount of my paycheck in to my
brokerage account. Buying lots of stock in Dividend Kings[1], I've earned $25
this year, with another $20 through October. It's not a lot, but I'm fully
thinking long-term.

1: [http://long-term-investments.blogspot.com/2013/02/15-Best-
Di...](http://long-term-investments.blogspot.com/2013/02/15-Best-Dividend-
Kings-To-Buy-Now.html)

~~~
vetler
Have you compared this to just putting the money in a high-interest savings
account?

~~~
eli
What counts as high-interest these days? Half a percent?

~~~
vijayr
Depends on where you are. In the U.S, interest rates aren't anything to talk
about. In India, my dad gets something like 7% (I think it is more for people
over 60)

~~~
jo_
I considered investing in a foreign country bank since I happened upon $20k
through some fortunate stock picks. I was advised that this is a _very_ bad
idea because of the currency fluctuations between countries. You might earn 7%
in India (or 19% in the Ukraine), but if suddenly the transaction rate
doubles, you've lost half your money.

~~~
vijayr
19%?? woah, that is crazy.

~~~
vonmoltke
So is parking cash in Ukraine at the moment.

------
parfe
Bought a house 12 months ago which included a great tenant. Rent checks showed
up early every month for the last year. So far the house has been such little
work I sometimes feel confused then surprised by his hand written envelopes
addressed to me in the mailbox.

~~~
danielweber
Keep the rent low. A great tenant is awesome.

~~~
computerbob
Don't know who downvoted you but I absolutely agree. I have a few homes that I
help rent with and having a good tenant is high above and away better than
having a bad tenant pay more money. Just the cost alone in time is worth
giving a good tenant cheaper rent.

~~~
phkahler
I think the normal reasoning is that higher rent filters out the bad tenants
(statistically). But once you have a good tenant then you probably don't want
to raise the rent unless they move out and you're seeking a new one.

~~~
mjwhansen
Another way to screen out bad tenants is to offer zero deposit for high credit
score applicants. Several large apartment buildings in my city (DC) do this,
and the buildings are full of professionals.

~~~
aestra
It is totally legal to refuse to rent to people with low credit scores, so
that's an option too. Just keep the standard consistent no matter who your
applicant is and have a standard criteria to keep everything both fair and
legal.

You probably can also charge a larger than average security deposit to weed
out the people with cashflow problems. Most states have a cap on amount of
security deposit collected, I know here it is twice the monthly rent if under
60. Otherwise the cap is one month's rent.

Here's the rub: You usually gotta have a great place to rent that attract such
tenants.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a landlord but I am considering becoming one. Yes, I
FULLY know the risks, my parents were landlords for over a decade. So I know
exactly what NOT to do as they only made pennies. My grandparents are also
landlords and make plenty of money on their rental properties, so I have a
positive model as well as a negative one. :)

~~~
danielweber
You probably know this, but for the sake of anyone else reading, your home
state probably offers a brochure on how to be a landlord, including what
rights you _must_ enforce. It's essential if you ever get a bad tenant. Plus,
find a real estate lawyer to go over your lease and whom you can go to in
trouble comes up.

~~~
aestra
Oh yes, I am aware. I would never dream of drafting up a lease without the
assistance of a landlord/tenant lawyer.

My TOWN even has a whole book of additional rights for tenants/obligation for
landlords in addition to national and state regulations.

Being a landlord is serious business.

------
dusing
My business partner and I started Snow in Seconds
([http://snowinseconds.com](http://snowinseconds.com)) on the side, 6 years
ago. It is a powder thats been around for decades (used in diapers) but when
you get it at just the right grain size it looks, and feels like snow when
water is added. We found a good source, designed a professional looking brand,
made a TV spot (kinda), bought some search ads, and boom, predictable income.

Sales are online only (have not pursued wholesale yet) and is enough to live
off of if all else fails. After 6 years we are have about $600K in total
sales.

~~~
zizzer
You might want to edit your login page
([http://snowinseconds.com/account/login](http://snowinseconds.com/account/login))
it still has some Lorem ipsum on it!

~~~
dusing
Fixed. Thank you!

------
iD3
I purchased, gutted and renovated a 1 bed flat in the city 4 years ago. It's
gained about $7,000 a month every month for the last 3 years, plus saving
about $3,000 in rent. Not exactly 'income' but most certainly passive, and I
do plan to sell out when I feel prices are aproaching a peak and move out the
city so will yeild then. Neighbouring flats usually sell within 7 days of
going to market.

~~~
opless
Which city?

(There's more than one you know!)

~~~
iD3
London. The financial district is often referred to simply as 'the city', so
force of habit!

~~~
opless
I had assumed that, but thought it best to ask :)

~~~
stevenspasbo
I was thinking San Francisco, that sounds about for the bay area too.

------
glxybstr
In August 2013 I released a very simple web app called Space Email - where
users send out messages and read messages others have sent, totally
anonymously. It had too much volume for what was built on a very poorly
designed backend, and with no reporting/flagging system it had to be taken
down. This past June I re-launched it on a better platform. This time users
could pay a dollar or more to sign up for an account where they get a few
extra nifty features.

The first week I made $1200, the last month I made around $450. Things have
been slowing down with some personal things going on, so it's been mostly
passive as of late. When I launched I had some real speed issues and a lot of
optimizing to do, which was incredibly nervewracking as it's my first web app
built on PHP and the first project I did that uses a database.

edit: forgot the link:
[http://space.galaxybuster.net/](http://space.galaxybuster.net/)

~~~
_nb
This is pretty darn interesting. I've definitely noticed there's a clear split
between the interesting, longer, sort of more profound messages 'from space'
and the flood of 1-word test or joke messages. Any thoughts on this - is it
even a problem?

~~~
glxybstr
it's to be expected. most of my users come from tumblr, where those sorts of
longwinded posts and that style of humor is pretty common. i don't think it is
a problem - i'd rather have a happy medium, though. things like this:
[http://space.galaxybuster.net/shv.php?id=NTIw](http://space.galaxybuster.net/shv.php?id=NTIw)
or
[http://space.galaxybuster.net/shv.php?id=MzAwMTg=](http://space.galaxybuster.net/shv.php?id=MzAwMTg=)

------
rachelandrew
I keep meaning to write up complete figures but I launched my self-published
ebook The Profitable Side Project Handbook in January
[http://rachelandrew.co.uk/books/the-profitable-side-
project](http://rachelandrew.co.uk/books/the-profitable-side-project)

Sales from that are well over 10K USD at this point. A lot of that was over
the launch week, I've not had a huge amount of time to devote to marketing it
over the last couple of months as our main business (which was a side project
until it took off) has kept me busy, so it really is passive income at this
point.

~~~
lijjumathew
Great work. For writing books do you use any book editor software of just MS
Word ? I am in the process of writing a book and couldn't find a good
editor/software. Thanks

~~~
rachelandrew
I start out in Scrivener and end up in HTML. Scrivener is great for the actual
writing process, although it takes a bit of learning to get used to.

I wrote up on my blog about creating the various versions
[http://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2014/01/07/html-epub-
mobi...](http://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2014/01/07/html-epub-mobi-pdf-wtf-
creating-an-ebook/)

I've also recently presented on how to build books in CSS and HTML and the
slides and various useful resources are here:
[http://rachelandrew.co.uk/presentations/css-
books](http://rachelandrew.co.uk/presentations/css-books)

------
TamDenholm
Its not yet passive because i choose to spend most of my time on it to make it
better, but i bought a cleaning business 10 months ago. I recently took a
consulting contract for some additional money for expansion and it does run by
itself (in the capable hands of my biz manager), however there are more
optimisations i wish to make to it. Its the hardest thing i've ever done, but
its at a stage where if i wanted to, i could simply take any time i wanted off
and all i'd need to do is spend 15 mins a week entering payroll.

I've written about it before, if you want to look through my history.

~~~
mseebach
Start blogging about it, there's got to be a good handful of stories and
advice in that throw-away "Its the hardest thing i've ever done". When you're
at a 100-odd pages, make it an ebook for more passive income :)

Mind sharing what the cleaning company is? You appear to be in the UK, and I
will soon be in the market for a cleaner.

~~~
eminkel
I plan to launch another cleaning business, utilizing what I learned in my
launch 3 months ago and write an e-book, and of course sell it for passive
income. :)

------
easyname
I had a motorcycle which I had bought for 126K INR. I was not using it much
except to commute from home to office. I was going to sell the bike, then
suddenly this idea clicked. It took few hours to make and host
indiarider.com(people can take the bike on rent). Its been two months now, I
have made 15K till now, 7K last week.

~~~
instakill
That's cool, but how do you deal with speeding fines?

~~~
MidnightRaver
You do realise INR == Indian rupees, right?

~~~
dpcx
They don't have speeding fines in India?

~~~
sanketdasgupta
Unless there's actually a cop watching the streets, NO.

------
stupejr
Very proud of this, my first passive income ever: developed an add-on for a
popular video game and it's been making me $60/mo.

edit: to mention that it bounces around between $1.50 a day to $2.50 a day
based on usage

~~~
Lockyy
I'm really interested in how you managed to monetise your addons. I've made
some fairly popular addons in the past but I'd always considered them just
free things I throw out into the world.

------
dangrossman
Improvely ([https://www.improvely.com](https://www.improvely.com)) has more
than doubled in customers and revenue since the last post, when it had
recently broken 5-figure MRR. It could easily support salaries for a small
staff at this point, but I still run it myself from home. I try to push out a
set of new features every 1-2 months, and have to answer an e-mail on occasion
to help out a new user, but otherwise it's very hands-off as a business. I
don't do any outbound sales or anything else high-touch.

W3Counter ([https://www.w3counter.com](https://www.w3counter.com)) meanwhile
generates less than 10% that revenue from 100x the users. They're really
similar services fundamentally, but worked out very different. W3Counter ends
up being used by hobbyists that want to see vanity metrics like page view
counts going up, most of which will not pay for analytics, while companies
eagerly pay for Improvely as a profit multiplier for their online marketing.

Aside from those sites, not much has changed. I have a few e-commerce stores
that essentially run themselves as passive income, and a steady stream of
commissions from various business referrals I made years ago.

~~~
tbuehl
Nice! How do you market Improvely? Or which channels do you use to attract new
users?

------
baudehlo
I started EmailItIn[1] to allow people to email files to Google Drive, then
added DropBox and SkyDrive/OneDrive support. Premium accounts bring in about
$200/m right now, and it's steadily rising.

Support is low - though it took a while to build the initial technology. I get
a lot of traction from realtors and lawyers. I've tried paid advertising but
the conversions are too low to make it worth it.

Initial goal was "vacation money", and it's currently on track to hit that
level next year.

1: [https://emailitin.com/](https://emailitin.com/)

~~~
christiangenco
What do you charge for premium accounts? I can't find pricing on your site.

I've had a similar service, [http://dbinbox.com/](http://dbinbox.com/), slowly
growing with entirely free plans for the last ~year and a half up to ~25k
users and am about to add premium plans.

~~~
baudehlo
25k users is amazing. With a premium plan you should be able to convert that
into excellent revenue. I suspect getting on CNet, Lifehacker and PCWorld
helped a lot there - mind sharing how you got published in those places?

The site is a bit lacking in documentation (typical side project issue). It's
$3/m or $30/year. I get a good mix of both types of subscriptions. I figure
the price is low enough that it's not a barrier to entry for the majority of
people. I also need to document better what premium accounts get you (ability
to upload to different folders, etc).

------
somebodysomeone
I built an information website (not USA) that now pulls in roughly $8800 a
month via adsense. To get to that figure takes about 500k user sessions/month
(lots of long tail traffic). Runs on a single medium website instance in
Azure, takes about an hour a day in maintenance and monitoring for malicious
traffic like scraping that can be a problem for info sites (I've mostly
automated this).

The initial time outlay was quite large, but it was always approached from the
point of view of generating a lot traffic to get the payback.

Won't share the link as it's a competitive niche.

~~~
epayne
I am curious about how you chose the niche and which factors you think make it
successful for you?

~~~
somebodysomeone
It was certainly an area that I was interested in and understood. Also, I made
a conscious decision to choose something that would have interest for a very
broad group of people, or that was owned by a lot of people.

------
jadc
I have a few rentals properties which each brings in around $300/month after
all expenses (including property management so I don't have to do anything).
Each property price is around 56-60k so if you get a mortgage you only need to
put down around 20% of that. It's a pretty good ROI of ~30%.

Email in my profile if you are interested in details.

~~~
scott_karana
How do you handle property management?

------
mjwhansen
Geocodio ([http://geocod.io](http://geocod.io)) is adding 5-10 new users a day
and monthly revenue has gone from <$100 to >$1,000 in just over six months.
It's a self-serve product (geocoding US addresses via API or CSV upload),
though there is a fair amount of support and continuing development.

I've posted this before, but I wrote up some thoughts about things I've
learned about launching a side project here that you might find helpful:
[https://medium.com/@mjwhansen/things-ive-learned-
launching-a...](https://medium.com/@mjwhansen/things-ive-learned-launching-a-
side-project-2968c3becd17)

~~~
AlexNeoNomad
Can't people just make a request to google maps? Why do they you use your
service instead? In what sense is it better (if it is)?

~~~
mjwhansen
Great question! There are a couple reasons people use Geocodio over or in
addition to the major providers, like Google:

* Google's free tier is 2,500 a day. But if you need more than that, you have to sign a yearly contract ($10,000+). Our pricing is 2,500 free a day with additional lookups at $.001 each.

* We don't place any restrictions on our geocodes. The major providers often a lot of restrictions on how you use their lookups, like having to use it with a particular brand of map, can't use it in a backend, can't resell, can't store them, etc. Our lookups are completely restriction free.

* Related, at the enterprise level, we have an option for unlimited geocoding for $750 a month. Major providers usually have a daily limit for their enterprise plans, such as 100,000 lookups a day.

* We provide additional data that people often need along with lat/lon, like timezone, Congressional district, school district, and state legislative districts.

* We're non-developer friendly. We have a CSV upload option ([http://geocod.io/blog/2014/04/30/csv/](http://geocod.io/blog/2014/04/30/csv/)) that lets people upload a spreadsheet of addresses and download it directly from the same dashboard.

A big difference is that we're US-only for the time being. Additionally, it's
worth noting that our data is close to Google quality, but not quite. They've
embarked on an ambitious, admirable, and expensive quest to map the world and
have cars driving around the globe daily. We don't.

~~~
AlexNeoNomad
Thanks, more clear now. So where does your service perform a search (fetch
data from)? Does it use Google itself? Is it just mediator between an end user
and google maps which gives the end user more freedom than google maps does?

~~~
mjwhansen
We've built our own dataset, largely based on the US Census Bureau's
TIGER/Line data which we've converted into a useable format. This is why we
are US-only -- most countries don't provide such data, and if they do they
charge an arm and a leg for it (ex., the UK).

~~~
AlexNeoNomad
By the way, how big is your dataset: millions, billions records for the U.S.?
Or how many (approximately) records are there for, let's say, Washington city
or LA?

------
mythril
iPad port of a 5 year old game of mine (which previously already paid for
itself about 9 times over in its PC and Mac versions) was released a few
months ago.

Didn't expect much but amazingly it pulls in consistently $70-$110 a day
(about $2,500 a month) for a few months now (not counting the initial release
spike).

Game is free to download with 1 In-App-Purchase that unlocks the full game.

Thinking of doing an iPhone version soon which will be a bit more involved
than a straight port due to the small screen size and different screen aspect
ratio, but I'm currently convinced it will be worth it since the genre
actually usually does better on iphone than ipad.

Just wanted to add this to counter all the doom & gloom posts about iOS games
not doing well. If you have a great and unique product for a good target
market with good retention and monetization, then you can still do very well
without too much marketing.

(I actually run ads with about $4 daily budget. Not sure if it actually helps,
but I think it does.)

~~~
existencebox
Mind sharing which game this is? I'd simply be curious to see what sort
of/quality of game generates that sort of (as you said, very favorable) income
characteristics in this current market.

~~~
mythril
Sorry, I can't for fear of competition.

~~~
godDLL
Competition is not an actor. It is a process, of which you're part; whether
you want it to be this way, or would prefer a different market to the one we
have.

Embrace the competition. Plan for it. Set time aside for it. Make it work for
you.

~~~
sejje
In the meantime, keeping smart people off your back works, too.

------
gaeappthrowaway
I have an AppEngine app that brings in $7k/mo with very little work, with
about $2k/mo in server costs. Roughly 50 users paying between $30/mo and
$500/mo

There's about 10 minutes of support work per day, but besides corporate
customers occasionally needing some phone salesmanship and some manual
tweaking, everything else is automated.

~~~
timjahn
Can you talk more about what the app is and what it does? Curious.

~~~
gaeappthrowaway
I wouldn't be on a throwaway account if I felt comfortable mentioning its
name. But, basically, it's an analytics API.

------
Cthulhu_
About $30 a month off of AdWords for a fansite I run; it covers about 2/3rds
(if that) of the server costs, so I'm content with that. I could earn more if
I placed more ads, better ads, worked actively on the site / promoted it, but
it's a fansite, and I think it'd be unfair for the people that actually spend
obsessive hours writing content for it - if I were to make big money off of
it, or would sell it (it's probably worth a few thousand due to content +
google rankings), I'd have a massive headache and drama trying to distribute
said money.

Effort is relatively low, a few weeks of on and off work to get it online,
styling, moving servers a couple of times, etc. I need to move servers again I
think, or at least upgrade all the software, it's kinda wonky for some people
at times.

------
PawelDecowski
£55 in just over a year from ads on
[http://jquerycreditcardvalidator.com](http://jquerycreditcardvalidator.com)

Not a lot but it’s something. And I built the validator without even thinking
about monetizing so it’s quite nice to get rewarded with some pocket money.

It’s not 100% passive, as I do spend a little time maintaining it and adding
new features, but what income is 100% passive?

~~~
hcho
Let me get this straight. You have a piece of software which helps monetary
transactions, and yet you don't charge.

~~~
Someone1234
No disrespect meant to PawelDecowski at all (his CC number validator looks
awesome, I'd use it) but he couldn't monetize it even if they he wished to --
too much competition in that space. Nobody is going to even pay $1 when they
can just go on GitHub and find several similar libraries which do somewhat
similar things.

I think £55 a year is best case scenario. At least it likely covers web-
hosting costs.

~~~
berberich
You can absolutely charge money for this if you solve a painful problem for
businesses: [http://creditcardjs.com](http://creditcardjs.com)

~~~
Silhouette
But you're still up against freely available libraries that let a web
developer build similar functionality, as as jquery.payment from the folks at
Stripe:

[https://github.com/stripe/jquery.payment](https://github.com/stripe/jquery.payment)

While it's not a completely like-for-like comparison, I suspect it will be
tough to justify $299 per single web site for many businesses that might use
these tools in the first place. Personally, I'd want solid data about
conversion rates to back up the marketing on the creditcard.js website before
I'd consider spending real money on anything like this.

~~~
weaksauce
Some companies value the support you may need over initial cost.

------
fookyong
$1000 a month on book sales.

I was surprised since I'm a software guy I didn't write the book to make
money, I just did it for something to do.

Although my software business makes much more money, I was surprised at how
truly "zero maintenance" book sales are. My software I'm constantly fixing,
tweaking and improving (which I enjoy). The book is just "out there" and is
priced at $30 per copy. I sell > 1 per day.

The book:
[http://www.growthhackinghandbook.com](http://www.growthhackinghandbook.com)

~~~
drzaiusapelord
What marketing do you do? I think I an write a decent book on a technical
subject, but my big worry is I'll spend hundreds of hours on it and it'll just
be another entry on Amazon.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
Checkout Nathan Barry's Authority:
[http://nathanbarry.com/authority/](http://nathanbarry.com/authority/) I know
a couple different people that swear by it.

------
dotnetkow
$2-5k per month (after Apple's cut) from my Fitbit mobile app, Fitwatchr:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fitwatchr/id684005201?mt=8&i...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fitwatchr/id684005201?mt=8&ign-
mpt=uo%3D4). The unique value is Fitbit activity conversion to Weight Watchers
points as well as a tougher but more rewarding calorie tracking that is based
on real science (Mifflin equation). Effort on my part really depends on me/my
current schedule as it's a side project. I admittedly have some bad reviews
that boil down to getting users to understand how the calorie tracking works.
Using Freshdesk (love it!) to answer 1-2 emails per day. It'll be 1 year
working on this next month.

~~~
TheAlchemist
That's quite a good revenue. Is it only from app sales ?

I've checked on App Annie ans your app seems to be around 500 (grossing) in
health & fitness in the US. I find it a bit surprising that there are 500 apps
in health alone making >2k month.

~~~
dotnetkow
Yes, only app sales - no IAP. Not sure how to explain other apps, but if you
look at the list of top paid Fitness ones, many of them charge more than the
typical 99 cents - that probably factors into it. It certainly does for mine!
Also, I've noticed Yoga, pregnancy, etc apps absolutely kill it
(consistently!) in sales day after day after day....

------
bengarvey
About $50-$100/month on
[http://kidsdungeonadventure.com](http://kidsdungeonadventure.com) a role
playing game for pre-school age kids.

~~~
theycallmemorty
This looks like a ton of fun. Think a bright 3-year-old could play or should I
wait a year?

~~~
bengarvey
Some definitely have with three year olds. It depends on the kid.

------
BryanBigs
$1000/month from adsense on my free background picture (no attribution
required, use it for whatever you want) website. Kinda looks like crap, but
I'm afraid to touch it because it's such a steady-eddy producer. I add a
picture every month or two, and get <10% of my traffic from direct search. Has
so many links from Uni's and articles on where to find free stock photos that
traffic just rolls on it.

~~~
the906
You make 1000 a month from this site? I'm very impressed. I feel like I should
be doing something with the gigs of photos I have sitting on my computer
now...

~~~
BryanBigs
I wouldn't try to sell them - there's a lot of supply in that market right
now. But people will always visit free once they know about it - it's then
your job to figure out how to monetize them while keeping the nuisance factor
for the user to a minimum.

That said, my site seems to get picked up in an unhealthy number of "top free
images for your website" type list articles - I'm not sure if other sites
would get picked up at the same rate, but you could always try.

------
marktangotango
I have a house my sister and her partner rent. Some may say never do business
with family, but we've been doing it for a few years now, and they've never
missed a payment. I pay down about $1k every 4 months in principal.

------
vlucas
I created [http://jscompress.com/](http://jscompress.com/) several years ago
as a simple online JavaScript compression tool that can also combine multiple
files into a single output (and guarantees they will be compressed in the
order input).

It's been making around $200-300 per month for several years, and this year
has jumped up to $300-500 per month. This is only from Google Adsense:
[http://cl.ly/WobJ](http://cl.ly/WobJ) \- I also always get a nice holiday
spike in traffic and revenues, even though there is nothing seasonal about
compressing some JavaScript.

It's zero maintenance, and sometimes I even forget about it. I spend maybe 1-2
hours updating the website to a new Uglify.js version per year. It's a simple
single file node.js app hosted for free on Heroku.

~~~
ohblahitsme
That's great! Did you do any advertising to get it going? How long has it been
around?

~~~
vlucas
Zero advertising. All I did was link it from my blog and a few other websites
I own and tweet about it a few times. I imagine the strength of the domain
name and the keywords on the page help a lot. It's also been linked as a
useful tool on many highly trafficked and well respected blogs, so it's got
some very good credible link juice going for it.

Honestly I just created it for myself back before Grunt, Gulp, etc. after
searching for some simple online tools and not finding any that allowed
uploading and combining multiple files together. The first version was PHP,
and I switched it to a node.js app in 2011 after Uglify.js came out (there
were a lot of problems with the PHP library I was using).

I created the website in 2008, so it's been going for quite a while,
collecting backlinks and traffic ever since. I am not looking at the reports
right now, but I believe it made less than $200 the whole first year I had ads
on it (it didn't always have ads).

------
patio11
Bingo Card Creator is still plugging along, though both down from previous
years and an increasingly small portion of my business. I spend under 20
minutes a month on it on about 2 to 5 issues which make it past T1 support.

As for numbers: [http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-
month](http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month) Historically,
multiplying by 60% usually gets a good approximation for profits.

~~~
OrwellianChild
Probably been addressed already elsewhere, but for a relatively static non-
tech-dependent product, did you ever figure out why these were such epic
months?

    
    
        9/12	$6,399.30
        10/12	$7,811.95
        11/12	$6,169.70
        12/12	$7,063.20
        1/13	$5,221.25
        2/13	$8,236.25
    

If at all repeatable, that's a fairly attractive revenue level...

~~~
patio11
The Google gods (AdWords and organic) were kind to me.

------
bradly
A bought a vacation rental in Hawaii this January. It has been very nice.
Purchase price was 510k. It rents for $260-$400 a night and has 90% occupancy
rate. I can share more details for those interested.

~~~
aestra
I hope you don't get offended by this question but are you doing this legally?
I know in some areas renting a vacation home is legal as long as you do the
right paperwork.

~~~
bradly
No offense taken :) Yes, it is legal. In Hawaii the condo buildings are setup
to be ran as vacation rentals. Some people do live in them, but most are
rentals. The building are more similar to a hotel in that they have a front
desk, luggage carts, and things like that.

------
MobileAppVault
Built an iPhone app which is still featured by Apple in the new selfie
category. 90$/mo with no marketing costs. :) The app called Picr.
[https://itunes.apple.com/app/picr-everyday-photo-
reminder/id...](https://itunes.apple.com/app/picr-everyday-photo-
reminder/id778479025)

~~~
cageface
Congratulations! Sad though that even a featured app only pulls in $90/month.

My own iPhone photo app, Liquid Lens:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/liquid-lens-real-time-
psyche...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/liquid-lens-real-time-
psychedelic/id465231902?mt=8)

actually briefly cracked the top 200 photo apps this month and pulls in more
than $90 but is still only in the coffee money income bracket.

After four years of the indie iOS thing I'm tooling back up to do web dev
again.

~~~
sdernley
I have an app that floats around the top 200 in the travel section but it
doesn't really bring in much (i'm only using iAD and not charging for the
app). I guess the travel section is probably a little easier to crack than
some sections though.

~~~
MobileAppVault
I made really bad experience with iAD and other monetizing frameworks.
0,50$/day and >2k impressions. I think iAD works only with iOS games. Can you
share a link?

------
ryanfelton
I built an niche e-commerce marketplace called
[http://doleaf.com](http://doleaf.com).

Independent Nurseries and Garden Centers (the sellers) sign up and can
instantly upload their items for sale directly to customers expanding their
sales region of their niche products from just their neighbored to the entire
USA. Since its niche customers who are looking for specific items customers
find the site fairly easy through search.

The site is now doing about $2,000 total revenue per month. I'm taking a
proportion of each sale. For now, I'm mostly covering cost, but hoping to work
on some automated marketing tools to increase revenue.

As others have mentioned, my best performing referrers in terms of sales
completed are often Forums (as opposed to AdWords, organic search etc).

The site does marketing via emails and some top products Google Ad Words,
Facebook, and hopefully Titter soon. I'm using Google Analytics with the
e-commerce plugin to build Adwords remarketing campaigns and plan to do
Facebook rmarketing campaigns soon.

It's not totally passive as there's some support request, but I'm hoping to
bring on an on-demand virtual assistant for support requests as discussed by
the Internet Business Mastery guys:
[http://www.internetbusinessmastery.com/ibm-218-work-less-
mak...](http://www.internetbusinessmastery.com/ibm-218-work-less-make-hiring-
virtual-team-interview-chris-ducker/)

~~~
sdab
You mention being easy to search, but I cant seem to find your site on google
or duckduckgo (in case it was my historical disinterest for plants affecting
google searches). I tried some combination of the keywords garden, nursery,
seeds, plants but never saw doleaf on the first page of results. Am I using
the wrong keywords?

~~~
ryanfelton
I'm still working on improving SEO, but here's some examples for Google:

"buy variegated peperomia plant" #7 / DuckDuckGo #2

"jackson vine" Google #9 / DuckDuckGo #4

"rainbow eucalyptus for sale" Google #22 / DuckDuckGo #6

Apparently I need to start using DuckDuckGo!!! These results are great!

From the attracting perspective sellers (nurseries), the "Buy Plants Online"
search has a lot of competing bidders on Google so I'm going to have to get
creative there.

------
chrissyb
I ran my own team as a non-dev and built
[http://drawvault.com](http://drawvault.com) \- Took a bank loan to fund it,
and ran out of money on the final straight.

I really was hoping to be earning a meagre passive income by now, but i'm
searching for a second job.

Lesson learned!

------
ivan_ah
My math textbooks [1,2] generated over $20k since 2013. The sales are split
between print and pdf sales. It's definitely motivation enough for me to
continue as is, but I'm scaling the business further with better distribution.

Books are not dead. I believe there is a great opportunity for specialist to
"distill information" in their field and offer it to others as books. People
don't pay for the content (which can be found on the Internet) but for the
analysis and the curation of this content.

It's not "easy money" because writing and editing a book takes years of
sustained effort, but if you're an expert in X, you already spend your days
explaining X so writing down your explanations won't be //that// tough.

[1] noBS guide to Math and Phys:
[http://minireference.com/](http://minireference.com/) [2]
[https://gum.co/noBSLA](https://gum.co/noBSLA)

PS: Anyone interested in writing a book about Chemistry and/or Biology? Get in
touch with me so we can combine forces and take over the UGRAD textbook
market!

~~~
elliotanderson
I bought your Math & Physics book a few months ago. Only got a chapter or two
in thanks to time constraints, but I really enjoyed the approach. Hopefully I
can finish it in the coming months. Cheers!

------
polimux
About 500€ a month with automated soccer bets. It's 100% passive but it' still
a gamble. So it coud be over in a day with some bad luck ...

~~~
corobo
Any chance of going into detail on this one for the curious? Automated in what
way, putting bets on low odds results? Through an API?

If anything I'm interested more in how it works than how I can do it myself!

~~~
polimux
I have some bots placing bets for me 24/7 on betfair. They provide a nice API
for that ([https://developer.betfair.com/default/api-s-and-
services/spo...](https://developer.betfair.com/default/api-s-and-
services/sports-api/)).

The bots written in JS running on a node.js server. The strategy (bet pattern)
I use is actually pretty simple. But it's not betting on low odds only, tryed
that and failed :)

~~~
tjtang
Is this arbitrage betting? What is the capital you use to generate the $500?

------
gavinballard
I make about $200/m in affiliate revenue from Shopify
([http://www.shopify.com/?ref=disco](http://www.shopify.com/?ref=disco)) <=
Yes, that's an affiliate link.

~~~
fiatjaf
From where do you get your affiliates?

~~~
gavinballard
I sell a framework for Shopify theme development
([http://bootstrapforshopify.com](http://bootstrapforshopify.com)). It's free
to use on sites that have been set up with my affiliate link.

------
bnycum
Last September I put Amazon Affiliate codes on links in a somewhat popular
post about setting up a Raspberry Pi to open my garage. I know I'm not suppose
to divulge exact numbers, but lets just say I've bought games, books, toys,
and a PS4 so far with my earnings. On around ~1,000 visitors a month. I wish I
had it setup when that post got a ton of traffic from reddit.

------
solomania9
I created a website where you can pay per character using bitcoin:
[http://bitcoinmegaphone.com](http://bitcoinmegaphone.com)

On average it generates around $1 per day (in Bitcoin, of course :-)

------
chrisa
$500/month from "Play Piano HD" iPad app:
[http://mobilesort.com/play_piano.html](http://mobilesort.com/play_piano.html)
I built it two years ago, and have only had to do minor bug fixes to keep it
up to date. It stays on the top iPad music charts in at least a couple of
countries, so it does ok without any marketing.

~~~
tomjen3
You could than likely charge significantly more for it if you positioned it as
a way to learn to play the piano - ten bucks (or twenty) is much, much cheaper
than a teacher.

------
fabiendem
Not proud of it, but around $500/mo thanks to 3 white label dating websites.
Easy money, no maintenance needed for 2 years now... Could make much more with
some time invested in it!

~~~
maxlamb81
What dating niches did you come up with? Why do you say you are not proud of
it?

~~~
fabiendem
I have targeted some very specific jobs which are usually known as "sexy". I
am not proud of it because I don't think it's very ethic, I can't imagine
putting this on my resume and technically the challenge is nonexistent (a
simple html page with some css, few hours of marketing) Though the service is
real and people don't pay for nothing, at least it's legal...

~~~
chatmasta
What's unethical about this?

~~~
fabiendem
Okay ethic is not the right word. I just think that these are just 3 more
website in the p0rn/dating/drugs Internet landscape, and technically very easy
to do. I don't regret it, it's free money and other friends have tried the
dating/porn market. One of mine was making 30k/mo via porn ads, another never
made any money. It's just that I would now prefer to come up with a project
which I am proud of, which can be of any help to someone, that I could talk
about without wondering if the person in front of me thinks it's creepy...
Soon soon :)

------
stevoski
I have an app in the Mac App Store. It is a simple app, I do no work on it,
receive no support emails, it has been there for three years, and I get around
50 Euros per month.

~~~
ariejan
Link? Details?

~~~
stevoski
[http://pokerzebra.com/](http://pokerzebra.com/)

~~~
michaelbuckbee
You would probably double your revenue if you just displayed images of cards
above the input line. You could even make it something you could disable in
preferences, but I'm pretty confident that the improvement in the screenshots,
etc. would help sales quite a bit.

------
jaymzcampbell
My best month was around £120 (in February 2014) (~$200) through Amazon
affiliate links & Admob. All within a very simple shopping app 'designed' for
android 2.1 back in the day and updated just once in 2 years. I've since
pulled it due to changes upstream breaking data so it became useless, I didn't
find the time to really fix everything.

I have just launched (like a few days ago)
[http://photobrix.com](http://photobrix.com) \- but that is yet to bring in a
penny from the limited adverts - I'm likely going to add a higher end/more
featureful interface to generate instructions that people will spend $3 - 5 or
so on. Additionally I'm aiming on allowing users to order their own prints
(rather than deal with the hassle of individual bricks).

------
gtheme
My passive income, Ghost Theme marketplace
[http://www.gtheme.io/](http://www.gtheme.io/) Revenue around 100 USD per
month. Running for half year need more marketing for better revenue. Ghost
blog is the next big thing in blogging space.

~~~
chatmasta
Nice. Staying ahead of the curve like this is the right move. That's gonna pay
off when 10x as many people are using Ghost and your site is already ranked at
the top of the search results.

Similarly, if you're building a content site, the time to do it is right when
the hype around your topic gets started. Think upcoming movie releases, video
games, elections, etc. Build out the content around the hype, then when the
time comes you're at the top and nobody's gonna knock you off. I know quite a
few people banking some serious coin from this strategy alone.

~~~
gtheme
Thanks for the advice. We already built some contents around Ghost blog. :)

------
v512
I get it around $200 per month (overall about $2500 till date) through my
WordPress Genesis child Theme which I spent designing hardly 2-3 days.

------
ivanyv
An AdSense site that's been running since '04:

    
    
       +-----------+--------+
       | Year      |      $ |
       +-----------+--------+
       | 2004      |    343 | (I was 24)
       | 2005      |    440 |
       | 2006      |  2,800 |
       | 2007      |  8,900 |
       | 2008      | 11,400 |
       | 2009      | 12,500 |
       | 2010      | 12,400 |
       | 2011      | 18,000 |
       | 2012      | 21,600 |
       | 2013*     | 34,000 |
       | 2014*     | 19,800 | (probably about $39k by year's end, more like $50k if I can help it)
       +-----------+--------+
    

* These are approximate as Google started paying in my country's currency.

I've made redesigns and adjustments over time, but it's been mostly passive,
specially the past three years or so as I haven't touched it at all.

Don't ask me the URL, it's fugly and I'm embarrassed (though you can probably
find it). Over the past few months I've been actually working on the side
building a platform to help me launch other similar projects in a more useful,
less ugly fashion. Too much to do, too little time. Stupid wasted youth :D

I never done a calculation like this before, and I didn't realize it's its
10th year anniversary! How cool is that. I would live like a king at 24 with
my current cashflow.

------
michaelbuckbee
I built a Heroku add-on that handles the purchase and installation much more
quickly and safely than they could do manually (about 80% of our customers get
SSL installed on their sites in less than 5 minutes).

[https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl](https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl)

It's been more challenging to get going than I anticipated as it's a
significant upfront cash investment to get good cert reseller terms.

------
habosa
Made an Android Snapchat client called SnapHack. It allowed you to download
Snaps and send pictures from your Gallery, pretty much the only features
people would want to add to Snapchat.

Powered it with an IAP to add 'My Story' support and small banner ads at the
bottom of the screen. The app got about 2,500-3,500 downloads a day up to a
total of 165,000 downloads. When searching for 'Snapchat' on Google play it
was the 2nd or 3rd result. IAP brought in about $25 a day (after 30% removed)
and the ads peaked at about $70 a day, so total was between $90 and $100 a day
when things were good.

Didn't last long though, took a while to get to that daily amount and
Google/Snapchat removed it from the store after the 3rd month of availability.
So total was a few thousand. Still a very, very good result but not full-time
income.

Side note: Java library that I made for interacting with Snapchat API hosted
on GitHub
([https://github.com/hatboysam/SnapHack](https://github.com/hatboysam/SnapHack)).
Contributions are welcome and it supports even all of the new Snapchat
features like messaging. Feel free to recreate SnapHack!

------
bvogelzang
I make an average of $70/day on my app in the Mac App Store called HD Cleaner.
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hd-
cleaner/id836769549?mt=12](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hd-
cleaner/id836769549?mt=12). I wish I had more time to invest in making more
apps like this one. I've been really surprised by how well the app has done
with little to no marketing.

------
jhwhite
Other than stocks and mutual funds I've only got one source of passive income.

I made a Pathfinder Ability Score Calculator last year and it got picked up by
d20. There's an ad on it so I get revenue from it. Right now only about
$40-50/month but it's been steadily increasing since I put it up a year ago.

A friend was going to sell me his hosting business but that fell through. That
would have added about $100/month.

------
gmays
Residential real estate. I bought a few short sale condos here in San Diego
from 2010 to 2012 at 1/3 their values from a couple years earlier and hired a
property manager.

Now I get about 1.5% their purchase price gross in rental income every month.
After buying them and fixing them up the majority of the work I do on them is
at tax time (still do taxes myself to stay in the loop). HOA and property
management fees eat into it a bit, but it's not a bad haul. In addition to the
cash flow, they've all appreciated from 20%-50% in the last couple years.

These days dividends from Apple stock (not bad for a tech company) and some
other investments are doing better, though not even close to as well as the
real estate.

The key is often to save up enough money to be able to take advantage of
opportunities. For example, we just decided last week that we're moving to
Florida. We were planning to rent, but we found a 3BR condo in a high-rise
gated community on a golf course about 1mi from the beach for around $300,000
that went for $800,000 before the financial crisis. Luckily, we had the cash
to be able to capitalize on the opportunity. I assume the property value will
at least double in the next 5 years. Even if it doesn't, if we had to rent it
out tomorrow we could break even on what we pay for the mortgage + HOA fees
with rent.

It's risker than other endeavors, but investing in residential real estate
like this is the best kind of investment I've found for my risk profile with
the amount of money I'm willing to invest.

The hard part is getting together the initial capital to do so. I started
working full time at 21 and it took me until around 25 to be able to make my
first investment saving most of my modest income during that time.

------
galfarragem
40-80€/month (depends on the season - college holidays are bad seasons) with
adsense and amazon affiliates.

It demands from me 5 minutes each day (or 3 hours monthly, 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:

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

\- Adsense is (and probably will always be) ugly but is the fastest way to
monetize a blog. I was making 15€/month before adsense and now I have slightly
less traffic. Text ads or images ads? If you have a text intensive blog go for
image ads and vice versa.

------
rphlx
An undisclosed amount, mining an undisclosed (but top-50) cryptocurrency, with
an undisclosed (but legal) technology.

Mining is so rediculously hyper-competitive that I hope you'll understand the
lack-of-detail. You learn to keep your mouth shut, head down, and just hope
that you'll remain marginally profitable after the next difficulty adjustment.

------
m-i-l
Where I live (or have lived). Aim to get other people to pay for my mortgages.
Started out by renting out a spare room, then moved and rented out the whole
property, then moved again and rented out both properties. When I started out
the rent was around GBP300 per month and the mortgage peaked at GBP450 per
month (interest rates were unusually high at the time), and now (after many
years) two lots of rental income total approx GBP2700 per month after fees and
three mortgages total approx GBP1800 per month (although interest rates are
unusually low at the moment). Calling it passive as I've never bought a
propery as an investment, just a place to live. Not entirely passive though as
there can be a bit of work when there are problems with tenants. I reckon the
hassle factor is worth the free accommodation though, given how large a chunk
of people's income accommodation usually is.

~~~
delinka
I've always thought that living my entire life "having others pay for mine"
would be ideal. Rent out property, the margin pays for my own residence.
Operate restaurants, the margins provide (at a minimum) my own meals. Get into
the car rental business, it provides my transportation as needed...

Can't quite get myself to bootstrap this idea...

------
eignerchris_
I built docklister.com in 4 months during my spare time. I started
approximately 24 months ago and have a single customer that covers the hosting
costs (~80/mo). I just got back from a 30 day honeymoon; anxious to get back
into the flow!

Marketplaces are hard to bootstrap. For the last 6 months I've been trying to
grow pageviews and leads by doing low-touch marketing experiments: post
listings to Boating and Yachting FB groups, asking for feedback in /r/sailing
(lots of great feedback and pageviews), replying to craigslist ads for boats
suggesting they list on docklister.

I have a several great blog ideas and I have a newsletter with approximately
45 people that I plan to start actively emailing content to.

Currently doing ~100 pageviews/day.

edit: forgot active link -
[https://www.docklister.com/](https://www.docklister.com/)

------
aroch
"Administrating" a few servers that are rented out (ie, running apt-get every
week and fixing the occasional symlink the tenants break).

-$2000/m in power/space/bandwidth in costs

+$4000/m in fees

Banking a little under ~$1700 after I account for taxes for what amounts to an
hour of effort a month.

~~~
stevekemp
I do like the idea of being a remote system administrator, but the trust
issues seem to scare people away.

(Though I realize you're doing more than that if you're renting out physical
boxes too.)

~~~
junto
Indeed, I personally am looking for a nix admin to help me setup/secure my
personal Ubuntu server. Finding someone I can trust is a huge battle.

~~~
stevekemp
This is usually the point where I volunteer ;)

------
tjsix
Not entirely passive due to a small amount of support emails each month, but
bringing in roughly $1600-$2500/mo (slower in summer) for niche WordPress
themes. That's with virtually no marketing or advertising other than a $5/day
adwords budget.

~~~
rolfvandekrol
$5/day adwords budget is not 'virtually no marketing or advertising'. That is
about the sales of a slow month over the year.

~~~
dabent
$5/day x 30 days is $150, not $1500.

~~~
seanwalker08
He said "over the year" so its $5/day X 30 X 12 I believe. I could be wrong
though.

------
opless
A friend wanted a glockenspiel app for their daughter, so I took his thrown
together html demo and coded a unity3d app and made it free.
[http://www.simonwaite.com/apps/glockenspiel](http://www.simonwaite.com/apps/glockenspiel)

After a little bit of feedback about "making the keys bigger" I threw together
a paid for app [http://www.simonwaite.com/apps/glockenspiel-
plus](http://www.simonwaite.com/apps/glockenspiel-plus) which brought in £2.50
from the android store last month which I was deliriously happy about.

The free one has about 10-20 downloads a day on iOS and 80-130 a day on
android.

------
asteiger
Last year I made a wine cataloging app for iOS based personal gripes that I
had with all the others out there. I just wanted something incredibly simple,
and all the others were ugly and complicated.

I was inspired by the 7 minute workout app posted here, and set aside 8 hours
to build the whole thing. All told I ended up spending about 40 hours on it
and haven't really touched it since.

I started selling it at $.99, but sales were slow and I wasn't really making
anything at all off it. So I raised the price 5x to $4.99 and sales didn't
really change much. Now it brings me in about $50-150 / month that I use as
extra cash toward paying off my student loans.

~~~
cotsog
Do you mind sharing a link to your app? I'm a wine aficionado. :-)

~~~
asteiger
Sure. Here you go:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vino/id666479302](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vino/id666479302)

------
goofygrin
Sold some Microsoft office365 to a handful of clients. Averaging 1200/month.

------
searine
Wrote a Fiction Novel.

Still in the red, but I've handed out about 10,000 free copies...

------
yaronl_elh
Not as successful as the other ones here, but it's starting to show promise.
[http://mynativemap.com/](http://mynativemap.com/)

I created it to help people that can't surf into Google Map's in their own
language. the link's forces the selected language manually and ignore the
automatic language detection.

Started a few months ago and it's already covering my hosting in ad revenue.
hopefully I'll have better numbers to report on the next Round of "...best
passive income.." :)

------
seestheday
No Revenue for me yet, but I've been inspired by patio11 and Amy Hoy to build
a product. I'm starting very small with a premium wordpress plugin focused on
food bloggers.

Progress has been slower than I'd hoped due to personal distractions.

My plan is to spend equal parts on marketing and development. I have released
a free version of the plugin in order to get it listed on the wordpress
repository and to start seeding my mailing list. So far I have 20 people that
signed up for "product updates and early release pricing".

------
dsizemore
I make $200+ with Adsense and BuySellAds from
[http://www.logogala.com](http://www.logogala.com).

It's been online for around eight years or so now. I typically work on it
maybe 15-20 minutes a night or every other night uploading new designs that
have been submitted.

Currently planning to re-develop it and make it so designers can sign up and
manage their own profile and designs but I'm a little afraid to touch it and
end up losing all of the little bit of money I'm currently making.

------
drpgq
I've been experimenting with Adsense on blogger for years. I had some ideas
that the company I work for could put on the web and wanted to work with
Adsense so I just started with a blog about my local sports team.

Eventually I made another blog about local and regional politics and analyzed
and repackaged some government data as a whole series of posts that proved
slightly popular. Now I'm up to around $1000 per year.

I'm working slowly at making a few sites based on the data I've already done
and some new data.

------
stevenwilkin
The last few years I've been building up a portfolio of dividend paying
shares. In the previous 12 months dividend payouts have totalled GBP 2488.31.
There has also been some capital growth.

The portfolio is inside a SIPP (self-invested pension) and the funds funnelled
into it have been the profits from my contracting business which would have
been liable to higher-rate income tax here in the UK.

Keeping money from the taxman which then makes me more money is great, shame I
can't access any of it until 2040 ;)

------
markrickert
I have a plethora of niche-based iOS apps for skydivers, beer enthusiasts, and
people in direct sales. Bring in about 1-2k a month, but I actively maintain
about half of the apps and am actively developing new apps.

Since January, I've netted roughly $13,000 after Apple's 30% cut. I also make
income through Apple's affiliate links that are automatically applied to my
apps on my website - [http://mohawkapps.com](http://mohawkapps.com)

------
notoriousjpg
Bit late to the party but i've been arbitraging promotions on Sports betting
websites. Yes this sounds incredibly suspicious. It's pretty interesting, and
easy. Much easier than trying to monetise blogs (which i've also done).

Not exactly an intellectual exercise but it gets me enough money to pay for
public transport, lunch etc.

If you're interested just google Punting Deals ...They've got an article
explaining how they do what they do.

PS Australian only I think

------
clarky07
So far this year I've made ~33k on my iPhone apps. I'm actively working on new
apps and doing freelance work, and every once in awhile things need updated,
but for the most part it's passive. I have > 20 apps at this point, the best
one doing ~7500 so far this year.

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/30-south-
llc/id331245760](https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/30-south-llc/id331245760)

~~~
juicejerry
link is dead

------
TylerJewell
I may have written about this before, so apologies if this is repetitive. In
2010ish, I had gotten fairly sick due to a metal poisoning. The biggest issue
was that it was messing with my cognitive abilities and that made me fearful
of not being able to work and earn an income at the standard of living I had
become accustomed to.

I quickly recovered, but became obsessed with finding a way to live -
indefinitely - off of the savings that I had accumulated in my 20 year
software career at that point. I had chosen a path around increasing
responsibilities of management as opposed to startup founder (though I am one
now). And I had diligently saved money, but didn't have not-work-anymore
money.

I looked for a way to generate 20% returns reliably on my money, requiring
little effort, manageable risk, and - mostly - passive. The stock market
proved to be an answer. I ended up developing a couple of theories about how
markets behave, generated some derivative trading algorithms and have been
investing 100% of my spare cash since. The mini hedge fund requires activity
once / week (generally) towards the end of the week, and also has two nice
benefits of mostly getting taxed at long term cap gain rates along with being
in all cash (fully liquid) with more core funds every weekend.

For this year, the algorithms have produced a return of 14.11% YTD. Since
beginning the algorithms, they have averaged a yearly return of 24%
compounded. I have traded these algorithms in a normal trading account and in
an IRA, though the IRA returns are a bit lower around 20%. When the market has
a flat year, vs. an up year, the algorithm is likely to perform closer to 30%.
Down years that drop less than 10% will return closer to 30% as well. Up
markets return lower.

I publish a white paper on this, and happy to share with anyone interested.
It's a few quarters out of date, but the essence is all there. You can email
me tylerjewell [at] gmail dot com for the paper.

For those that are curious, the algorithms depend upon a few assumptions: \-
The market has never crashed "up" \- they only crash down. \- As a result, the
market climbs upward very orderly, but moves down very disorderly. \- Time is
infinite. \- There is always volatility.

When you start with those assumptions, and then you apply maximum leverage
(with safety nets for blue moon crashes with a max 35% loss), then you can
start to derive algorithms that achieve the results expected, by using your
money as an insurance provider to others in the market place by selling
derivatives.

FWIW - when I started playing with the concept of the algorithms, I did not
think it would be possible to achieve these results. So am quite pleased that
it's possible to do so. Also, it's very easy to down dial the algorithms to be
1/2 the risk and get about 1/2 of the returns as well.

~~~
firebones
A lot of the efficacy of this depends on when you started.

The S&P500 total return last year (2013) was 32.39%. The year before (2012),
16%. [1] The two year annualized: 23.92% which is really near your 24%
compounded. Weekly trading sounds like a lot of transaction cost for not much
alpha. It sounds like you are doing better this year-to-date, but be careful
drawing conclusions on a system when the market is going gangbusters.

Does this strategy involve a lot of covered calls? That would seem to fit
better returns in flat/down markets and lesser in raging markets (since you'd
be taken out early).

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500)

~~~
TylerJewell
The strategy performs optimally in markets that are flat to +-5% on a given
year. Last year's 32% gain in the S&P 500 was essentially the nightmare year
and yielded 6%. 2008 would have been a nightmare year and yielded around the
same. The strategy involves selling strangles with European contracts with
portfolio margin using algorithms to determine a 95% likelihood of contracts
expiring OTM, with a couple dozen adjustment techniques that occur if the 5%
scenario plays out.

------
lessmilk
I wrote an ebook on how to make games in HTML5 with the Phaser framework. It's
been out for a month now, and it has made me over $16,000 in sales. I keep
making a couple hundred dollars per day with it.

Link to the book:
[http://www.discoverphaser.com](http://www.discoverphaser.com)

More sales number: [http://blog.lessmilk.com/ebook-
sales/](http://blog.lessmilk.com/ebook-sales/)

------
fsethi
My social game (for the last 3 consecutive months) has brought in about $8000
- $10,000 a month. Pretty consistently averaging about $300 a day. Generally
spend about 4 hours a month on it total. To note: The developer I work with
spends much more time on it than I do; but it is not a focus / priority for
either of us. It took about 18 months to get it to this point. It probably got
to break even in roughly 5-6 months.

------
waterside81
Personalized kids books for the iPad:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/little-
heroes/id477247738?ls...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/little-
heroes/id477247738?ls=1&mt=8)

We're completely revamping the app because it's very hard to be noticed when
all your books are in one app, so we're splitting the app into individual
books. But this "library" app does quite well.

~~~
pewpewlasers
That's pretty funny, because my girlfriend's sister asked me last year if I
would develop her million-dollar-idea: an app that creates personalized books
for kids.

------
dpweb
Websites. Totally autopilot. Only $300/mo. so its nothing compared to my
regular income/job, but its a car payment - and it does beat working.

~~~
damian2000
How many have you got in total - what's your hosting costs? thanks

~~~
dpweb
Five or six.. Almost nil I have $12/yr. VPS and wrote a nodejs app to host
them all off one port..

------
hughes
A good mix of ETF funds from Vanguard Canada. It has been a very good year for
equities, and all I had to do was literally not touch what I had bought.

~~~
richardlblair
It's been a strong year for equities. When I was looking the other day at
vanguards list they all seemed really strong.

I purchased one in January and it's been doing pretty good. Hopefully the
second half of the year is just as good.

------
vbsteven
I currently earn about $1000/month after Googles 30% cut with an Android app
that syncs with OmniFocus.
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.quantus.app...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.quantus.apps.androidfocus)).
I'm still improving the app in my spare time so it's not completely passive
yet.

------
bernatfp
Not much at the moment:

Profits realized from a very long term Bitcoin investment: 10000$

Bitcoin miner: 600$ (profits) so far.

Now I'm covering the costs of running my own SaaS [1] with these profits to
create a more sustainable business (I've lost confidence in Bitcoin from an
investment standpoint). At this moment my SaaS has 2 trial users but no paying
customers.

[1] [https://calloud.com](https://calloud.com)

~~~
mncolinlee
Has liquidity ever been a problem for you with Bitcoin investments? I would
imagine limited supply and short term spikes could result in filling currency
trade orders at lower prices. In other words, it's not clear if you can always
depend on selling at face value.

~~~
bernatfp
Yeah, but quite a relative issue depending on the exchange. The first thing
you learn is that you can't sell at market prices, you just have to place some
orders and wait. To be honest I made a few mistakes related to this when I was
starting and lost some money. On Btc-e my orders aren't that large so there's
nothing to worry about when placing them. It felt more risky on Bitstamp, and
Kraken specially due to low volume, but I rarely have to trade there.

------
martinvol
About $50-$100/month on [http://onlyfonts.net](http://onlyfonts.net)

I'm not proud of this product by any means, but it is good for experimentation
and A/B testing.

One thing that I should point out is that even if I don't write any code, I'm
still thinking about how to improve it and looking at the analytics, so having
a passive income is not totally free.

------
anonu
Wrote a basic strategy to sell call spreads and put spreads on various index
ETFs. I only sell near-dated stuff <1 week expirations to avoid paying too
much theta. A fairly consistent trading strategy can easily gross >50% returns
on your capital. Not exactly "passive" \- but with enough tweaks to the
strategy you can get this to run with fairly minimal input time.

~~~
malchow
What platform do you use to automate the trading? I was always surprised that
innovative companies like Interactive Brokers never invested in a simple to
use scripting language that would allow people to try out ideas out in the
markets.

------
senko
Embeddable shared whiteboard (jQuery plugin + backend service):
[https://awwapp.com/plugin/](https://awwapp.com/plugin/)

Around $500/mo at the moment, with very little marketing and sales effort.
Putting more effort into sales now, aiming to have it cover one full-time
person on the project in the next few months.

------
raelmiu
I build small web apps, like [http://blankpage.io/](http://blankpage.io/)
Since the last thread on this I've cut my costs from $200 a month to about $5
a month, but it took months to rewrite the backend to do that. So still losing
more than I'm making.

~~~
boaticus
Excellent landing page! Love the use of typography! And, the animated gifs
make it quickly obvious what your app does and how someone would use it. Best
of luck!

~~~
raelmiu
Thank you! Worried a bit about if it was clear or not. Thanks!

------
kanakiyajay
I manage a simple jQuery plugins blog [http://jquer.in/](http://jquer.in/) in
which I list one plugin a day. Hosting costs are about 20$ a year. Average
monthly advertising revenue is about 100$ not bad considering I haven't
started sponsored posts yet.

------
ComNik
~100$ / year from an Amazon Price Tracker
([http://www.rankique.com/](http://www.rankique.com/)) I wrote a long while
ago.

It's 100% passive and is free to run, although some SEO should increase that,
which frankly I neither have the time nor the expertise to do.

~~~
mail2vks
I run something similar for India.
[http://www.pricetrak.in](http://www.pricetrak.in)

------
c0nsumer
I host a forum and website for a state-wide non-profit that I volunteer for in
exchange for a single sidebar Adsense ad on the main page and in the footer on
the forum. It's a hobby of mine, but the $300-$400 (gross) covers my expenses.
Self-supporting hobbies are nice.

------
privatedan
~$50,000 USD per year in dividends from individual, public stocks, which isn't
bad considering I do not seek out dividend payers specifically. Was earning
another $25,000 or so renting out an apartment, but sold that recently to look
for a larger property.

~~~
new_test
>~$50,000 USD per year in dividends

How much is your invested capital?

EDIT: I think I got my answer:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7749253](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7749253)

------
rk0567
$300-$400 per month from my side project [0]. I spend 5-10 hours per month on
updating/adding_new_features etc and the revenue comes from Affiliate/Ads.

[0] [http://assembleyourpc.net](http://assembleyourpc.net) \- a pc builder
tool

~~~
mrfusion
I assume you've contacted the builder communities on reddit? there's a build a
pc one, and a build me a pc, something like that.

~~~
rk0567
No. I tried once but didn't get any response. I submitted there and received
some feedback though.

~~~
mrfusion
I know on build me a pc (forget exact URL), they have a standardized format
they paste in. I wonder if you outputted that format, maybe they would take it
up?

~~~
rk0567
Thanks. I'll check out.

------
JamesChevalier
I'm getting about $50/month through an IFTTT/tumblr/AdSense setup that I have
running.

That pays the server costs for
[http://citystrides.com](http://citystrides.com) which hasn't generated much
revenue, yet.

------
black_friday
My side project is www.stealengine.com

It yields about $50 a month, I'm just happy it pays for itself and requires
little maintenance. During Black Friday(November) it made $400, other months
are a lot slower.

I have not done any marketing and my friends like to use it so its fun.

~~~
rail2rail
You might consider listing some example searches under the search box. My
initial impression is that I'm not quite certain what I'm supposed to be
searching for.

~~~
black_friday
Thanks for the feedback, I am going to add that.

------
nicholas73
Best month so far has been 50 bucks. It'll take a long time, but I'm hoping
eventually enough people link to it and add my widget, so that I can capture
search traffic.

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

------
clarky07
I've made a few thousand on an ebook about my app business. Not as much as I
make on the apps, but it is 100% passive as opposed to mostly passive.

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

------
mkertajaya
Earlier this year, I helped out a friend setting up online shop selling
electric bike (dropship model). It has been good this summer, average of
$1000/month net profit. Traffic is still very low but constant buyers. -
shopebike.com.

~~~
graftonshow
I'm very intrigued by the dropship model, would you mind sharing how to go
about evaluating suppliers? Or even where you start looking for suppliers?
Thanks!

------
cityzen
I wrote an ExpressionEngine Add-on called Detour Pro that sells for $22
($17.60 after the site I sell it on takes their cut). I released it back in
February of 2012 and to date I've made about $15k, this year alone $4k to
date.

------
mindbreaker
I have some german nice sites like [http://www.garten-
fussballtor.de](http://www.garten-fussballtor.de). My best website earns 100 €
/ month. If you have any question i will try to answer it.

~~~
MobileAppVault
Is www.garten-fussballtor.de the website which earns 100€/mon?

------
phatle
I earned about 100$/month from knocktocall.com product. It's okay for me
because I don't do any marketing for knocktocall.com. Have a full-time job,
some freelance job and I'm still making new app for my passion.

------
ocram
I developed some Opencart and WooCommerce extensions (payment gateways,
product feeds). They've been generating ~$600-800/m for 3 years now. Not
completely passive due to some service emails, but overall a very good ROI.

------
someotheridiot
$2500 for Dec/2013 (close enough to 2014)
[http://rebrickable.com](http://rebrickable.com) \- reuse your LEGO pieces to
build other cool stuff. Not exactly passive yet, but maybe one day.

------
passive_ish
I built a B2B SAAS app about 18 months ago. I neglect it now, as I took a full
time job (living in NYC isn't cheap, and I needed a better living situation).

It brings in about $1,800-$2,400/mo. I'd sell it if I had a buyer.

~~~
jteo
If you're keen on selling, could you email me more details?(my email is in my
profile).

~~~
passive_ish
Doesn't seem to be there.

~~~
jteo
Sorry, added email to my profile. :)

------
michaelcampbell
Not "best" by any means, and perhaps not even passive, but I'm earning around
5% in my LendingClub account. I had some bad bets early on which lowered my
returns a lot, but it's building up again.

------
ghhutch
Built an e-commerce site, pro bono, for an acquaintance and get a profit share
each pay period. Occasionally I monitor, upgrade, enhance, and fix it up which
results in more income. Great Situation!

~~~
Yardlink
Take great care to sign contracts for anything significant you expect to get.
I did something like this once and after spending a long time enhancing it,
suddenly the acquantance decided he didn't need to share the profit anymore.

~~~
damian2000
Although you'd expect being the dev and possibly admin, you hold some control
over the other party?

~~~
coev
Better to have more than vague threats on your side, like having the law _and_
vague threats on your side.

~~~
LyndsySimon
I hear that "very specific threats" is also a workable model.

------
bprajapa
I do consulting around enterprise software and typically make about
$1500/month. It's not quite passive income because it requires me to work in
the evenings but its not bad.

------
weiran
I get around $30 a month from a Hacker News app I made for iOS.

------
Carl_Platt
This is an excellent post, I am looking to setup streams of passive income
mostly for savings and to allow me to travel. Just never sure which itch to
scratch :/

------
eddievb
Publish a friend's political writings at MetricHour.com, split the AdWords
revenue. Learned a bunch about Handlebars and the Ghost.io CMS in the process.

------
dmarlow
Just launched [http://www.smscmd.net/](http://www.smscmd.net/) so not much at
the moment.

------
th1agofm
Stock market: I'm breakeven in a meh year in my country's stock market(Brazil)
and it's my only passive income.

------
frownie
I build a small ERP (closed source so far)... 3 customers at 100€ / month =>
300 €/month, paid in various ways...

~~~
fiatjaf
I'm doing something like this.

Where did you get customers?

------
vicwhiten
~80$ a month from ads on [http://steamroulette.net](http://steamroulette.net)

~~~
tomjen3
You could make a lot more if you did two things:

1) Remove that under construction thing. Granted it has no gifs, but as a
potential user it distracts me.

2) Describe what value I can get from using it. What problem do you solve?

~~~
vicwhiten
I actually realized I never pushed out my new version haha, thank you for
pointing it out! Just deployed it.

------
ph4
About $75-$100 a month from a simple AdSense site that ranks highly for some
key terms. Pretty lame.

~~~
bengali3
I'm not sure why i'm not even doing this. (i'm at 0 passive right now)

It's not lame at all. How many hours of maintenance does it require per month?

Whats the content like? blog/photo/aggregator?

~~~
ph4
I wrote all the content myself, which took maybe 20-30 hours. The theme is a
profession in the veterinary field, so it offers advice to prospective
students and people interested in the career (schooling, salary, etc.)

It requires zero maintenance. I haven't touched it or written anything new in
a couple years.

------
snoonan
between $3000- and $18,000+/mo in online courses. The latter being more active
in terms of sales, promotion, offers. It's not sustainable since customers are
not responsive to this kind of thing each and every month.

~~~
patrickk
Care to provide examples? Was thinking of getting into this myself with
premium courses.

Edit: this is a good example of the type of courses I mean
[http://www.diygenius.com/courses/](http://www.diygenius.com/courses/) (not
affilated)

Is it on your own site? Or the likes of Udemy?

~~~
snoonan
I'm not sure if its a good idea to share the exact topics, but generally they
are language learning and software training (for example, specific CMSs).

I do everything through my own sites and find customers through via free
podcasts, free and promoted youtube videos, etc. Udemy's on my list, but I
believe in always owning your own brand, customers and leads.

~~~
patrickk
Thanks for the info, I understand completely you don't want to give away
profitable niches.

> I do everything through my own sites and find customers through via free
> podcasts, free and promoted youtube videos, etc.

Very clever, creative promotional strategy! I would love to read more if you
have a blog (again without giving too much of your exact products or niches
away). I'm building up a side business currently, and cost effective, targeted
promotion is high on my list...(there's a great idea for a premium course btw,
would purchase in a heartbeat.)

> Udemy's on my list, but I believe in always owning your own brand, customers
> and leads.

I guess there's an important trade off between owning the customer
relationship 100% and getting exposure on a huge marketplace...

~~~
snoonan
Drop me an email! (info in profile).

I definitely want to get around to doing work in Udemy, but I do have to say
that they're not as big as, say, Youtube. :) For example, if you have a
popular video, that gets embedded and linked to a lot. That builds link juice
to your Youtube channel page and main site if write your video descriptions
right, then suddenly you are ranking in Google search faster than you would
normally. Same for a podcast and episode summaries. Having position and your
own users in one channel also lets you ratchet up another by launching to
those users. Over time, you build up big lists of people who you can re-launch
updates or work with to develop new courses and products. Some people also use
the leads to do affiliate marketing, but I personally prefer not to.

Anyway, owning your own traffic and lead list gives you the ability and
permission to do that, so it's my approach.

btw, I forgot to mention I do have some free iOS apps to drive free users too.
That by itself accounts for maybe 20% of my leads. I haven't touched Android
yet.

~~~
patrickk
Sounds intriguing! Thanks for the offer to connect, email sent.

------
C00L
$10K-$25K/mo for past 2 years. Product sales + adsense + adsoptimal.

~~~
bstew
Could you expand more on this? Is this all on the same website?

------
gaadd33
XOM and AGNC dividends

------
0x420
i have a niche humor blog on tumblr that makes about 30$/mo from adsense ads.
not bad considering i was doing it for free up until recently.

------
sourabh86
admob earning of ~$100 from 2 very small android apps catering to a very small
set of users.

------
mahdavi
Selling 3d assets on Turbosquid.

~~~
raelmiu
Nice. How much does it bring in?

------
KurtElster
In my best month, I did $3.3K in AdSense.

No idea is stupid if you can monetize it.

To explore projects outside of clients’ demands, we began a Labs initiative in
March 2012. Think of it as a palate cleanser between client work. It's
resulted in about ten completed projects. The formula is pretty simple. Find a
problem, build a website to solve it. If it can be done in an afternoon, we
don't even think about it. We just do it.

Of the ten sites we've built in the last year, the most popular are:
RainyCafe, CalmingManatee, Is this Retina?, and Will there be mail today?

Getting traffic is a pretty straight forward process. Submit the site to blogs
in relevant niches. In the case of RainyCafe, we submitted it as a tip to
Lifehacker who posted it the next day. Once you've got a major blog exposure
like that, having frictionless sharing (in the form of social media buttons)
is enough to keep it going. However, this assumes the content is compelling
enough to share to begin with.

Sometimes doing that much isn't even necessary. CalmingManatee was different.
We tweeted it once, and about a week later it was everywhere. A million visits
in the first month everywhere. We received requests for interviews from NPR,
Huffington Post, and some other random blogs as a results.

The success of these afternoon projects was a pleasant surprise, and the free
publicity was welcome, but what would be even better is some extra revenue. As
freelancers, having recurring revenue is critical to building our business.

Our first attempt at monetization was to sell Manatee greeting cards through
Zazzle. After six months, we sold so few that we couldn't meet the the
threshold to get paid out. Fail.

We switched to donations. Using WePay, we allowed people to donate via three
suggested donation levels. That netted about $100/mo. Better but not great. We
had to reconcile dozens of micro-transactions in Quickbooks which, when you
factor the time, made it a net loss. Fail again.

Then we tried making a RainyCafe iOS app that we planned to sell for $1. Apple
rejected it because they found that our Rainy Cafe app provides "a very
limited amount of content and a very limited set of features" specifically
because it "only contains two ambient noises." Strike three.

Finally, I got off my high horse and switched to AdSense.Not only did we hit
out of the park with AdSense, but it was the easiest of our four monetization
attempts to implement. I wish I'd done it sooner.

Lesson learned: Simple is great. Ever since CalmingManatee, if someone in the
office has an idea that can be implemented in less than an afternoon, we don't
even debate it, we just implement it, put AdSense on it, and see what happens.
Some work, some don't. At the very least, we always learn something from it.

~~~
goblin89
> Then we tried making a RainyCafe iOS app that we planned to sell for $1.
> Apple rejected it because they found that our Rainy Cafe app provides "a
> very limited amount of content and a very limited set of features"
> specifically because it "only contains two ambient noises."

It's a shame. I'd pay up to about 2 dollars for the app as it is now, up to 5
if it had:

\- copy _hinting_ at how I'm going to make much more money with this app
thanks to increased productivity compared to working from home in silence and
saved coffee/transportation money;

\- copy bragging about all the binaural recording techniques and smart
processing you used to achieve exceptional realism and deep immersion, hours
of café recordings without discernible repetitions, etc.;

\- actually those techniques implemented;

\- higher customizability (pick rain/storm, ambient audio image
characteristics).

There's [http://www.coffitivity.com/](http://www.coffitivity.com/), but
frankly _their_ sound plain sucks compared to yours. Their “Morning Murmur”
has hissing recording noise all over it and unrealistic rubbish instead of
stereo image. They do have an iOS app, but I wouldn't have it for free.

I realize their hiss may result from actually higher quality audio (though
they still need to filter it out), but in this case even audio quality is of
questionable matter. In a real café I can put my headphones on in order to
reduce distraction, but in this case I can't, so the recording has to be pre-
processed (certain frequencies subdued) or allowing to pick from a number of
processing presets.

------
martianmartin
hopefully the idea that i'm working on right now...:)

~~~
borplk
well what is it?

