
A Passive Income Hacker's View on Wealth - mkrecny
http://x.myles.io/15t2TvB
======
dev_jim
All of these passive income stories fall into three buckets:

1) The passive income these people generate is from selling suckers who want
to believe in free money a book for $9.95.

2) Their definition of a good passive income is at or near the poverty line in
the U.S (That mustache guy?). That's fine, there's nothing wrong with that,
but it's not the life most people want to live.

3) The person got massively lucky with a startup (lots of hours invested
there) or real estate and think that idea is easily translatable into a few
blog posts. These stories are all survivorship bias and don't account the
1,000 people who failed.

Everyone wants to believe that there's a free lunch out there. That's why
scams like stock trading apps, time shares, ponzi home marketing schemes, etc.
are so prevalent.

~~~
snoonan
This is not accurate. A lot of people fail, that's true. So do a lot of people
drop out of CS programs and never achieve their goal of becoming a lawyer or
doctor.

On the "all the stories" part, there are a couple of things here worth
teasoing out. First, it is worth separating out the information marketers,
affiliate marketers and SaaS, etc. They're different businesses. Second, the
public success stories go through a spin cycle, but there are many more quiet
successes that never get above the radar. Why? Niches are small and take a
single human's effort to capture. No need to publicize that you're pulling in
$300k/yr doing this specific thing in this specific way 1000 other people here
could do. Many are a winner take all and you'd have to be a complete idiot to
share. That's like posting your credit card number on the web. I am not going
to tell anyone here what I do, but I will be happy to share how it impacts my
life.

So that's why it feels that way. The actual reality is very different.

~~~
brucehart
You are absolutely right about the small niches. What the public hears about
is a tiny fraction of the successes (and failures) that are actually out
there. If you are lucky enough to find a profitable niche then you don't
invite competition to take it away from you. There are several examples that I
personally know about that have never been shared with the public.

One example is a personal friend of mine. He developed a B2C software product
for a particular niche that you wouldn't think was very large or profitable.
He doesn't talk about what he does publicly or even read entrepreneur sites
like Hacker News. If someone were to show me his app and ask me how long it
would take for me to develop it I would say "three weeks: two to code it and
one more to make it that ugly". And yet this guy makes a ton of money (much
more than a typical software engineer) essentially for just handling the
occasional support or billing issue.

Another example was a guy I worked for in college in the early 2000s. He got
in early in the business sending out e-mail newsletters for professional
organizations. He bought a license of a high-end e-mail program for about
$15k, bought about $5k in server hardware and spent about $750/mo. in co-
location fees. Then he hired me and another college student to work remotely
part-time at $15-$20/hr. to handle the server administration and support. Add
all that up and his total costs were about $20k up front and $2500/mo. The
only work he would do is go to conferences a couple times a year and do a
couple of sales calls a month. He generally kept the details of his financials
hidden from me, but I know that at least a couple of his clients were paying
over $5000/mo. each. When you consider he had a couple dozen organizations as
customers, that is very impressive for something that is almost completely
passive with no technical skills required.

------
ZiadHilal
I am a passive income hacker, here are my thoughts:

Studied CS at university for 2 years, dropped out to pursue an idea. After a
couple years of work, I was bringing in 20k a month.

It was the most incredible time of my life. It lasted for 7 years before it
hit the bottom. During that time I spent my days playing beach volleyball,
tennis, golf, skateboarding, gaming, girls, beautiful car/apartment, the life
in Santa Monica CA!

I wasn't the least bit afraid when the project/business started slowing down.
I decided to launch two more ideas - BOTH FAILED. At that point I was burnt
out and was running low on savings. I had no other choice but find employment.
In my mind, I failed and lost everything. It hurt me for years, and still
hurts me to this day.

While I have a great job, the feeling of imprisonment and failure is always
with me. Eventually I got the strength to work on another idea during weekends
and late nights. That gives you very little time, especially when you have a
demanding job. It took over the course of a year to launch this new idea and
it's not working out the way I hoped it would.

Call it what you want, but in my mind that's three failures in a row.

I've learned that luck and timing are definitely part of the equation. I've
learned that you can spend year after year obsessed with coding your ideas and
end up with only the knowledge.

It's extremely tough and taxing to go down this route. Be prepared to fail
multiple times. Be prepared to lose every cent of your savings.

I know I'll continue trying, hopefully one day I'll come back on top again :)

~~~
wiradikusuma
May I know what's the idea that made you "retire early"? Have you ever
thought, "Should have put the money into saving, should have seen it coming"?

~~~
ZiadHilal
I created a CMS that did user integration with message boards, there were few
to none at the time.

I made many mistakes, the biggest ones were:

1) Having hit a relatively high success at 21, I felt indestructible. I had no
fear of spending most of my income on entertainment. I knew nothing about
budgeting, I should have saved.

2) Towards the end, I definitely spent too much time having fun and ignoring
the product. When you're on a high roll for so many years, you feel
invincible.

The decline started gradually, but in my mind I always believed I could easily
bring everything back on top. At the end, I repeatedly did everything in my
power to save the product but it was too late.

------
jasonkester
That's a nice way to think about it. Looking back at the big "travelling
phase" in my 30s, there were lots of years where I only grossed between
$10,000 and $20,000 for the year. That was plenty, though, to spend most of
the year living out of a backpack on some remote tropical beach. A lot of it
actually ended up in savings.

That was contracting, so I needed to come back to LA to refill the travelling
stack. It doesn't take much work to pivot that into a SaaS product or two that
replaces the same amount of income. Again, maximising for free time and
flexibility with profit being a nice side effect.

Then it gets really good.

~~~
andreipop
Curious what you learned from this experience, how old you are, and what
you're doing now.

~~~
effekt
I'm also interested in this, but I'd be more interested in how you can live at
a tropical beach on $10k/y.

~~~
byoung2
My wife and I just bought an oceanfront condo in the Philippines for $60k.
That is at the higher end of the range, because we wanted to be in Metro
Manila. You could get a place at a fraction of this price if you went to a
smaller city province like Cebu or Bohol.

------
noname123
I've had friends who tried to go the start-up route and didn't pan out; so
they decided to do some affiliate marketing with Google Adwords, that didn't
pan out. Then they tried to build a SaaS for developers to help with their
development, designers to manage their CMS. So far, they haven't seen a dime.
The only one success story I've heard said Google screwed up his search result
ranking, so it only lasted about a year of supplementing 15% of his full-time
job income.

I'd love to hear some passive income hacker (PIH) failures, risk & reward,
opportunity cost in terms of time spent on your own venture vs. spent on
climbing the corporate ladder and vs. traditional passive income paths say,
becoming a slum lord, dividend investing etc.

~~~
willholloway
In my college days I had dreams of passive income, because I wanted to self-
fund a career as a writer/director of micro-budget indie movies.

A friend told me about a friend who claimed to be making loads with affiliate
marketing, so I started to immerse myself in performance marketing, the
lifestyle was just too attractive.

I started with a $100 FB ads coupon and by the time that was spent I luckily
stumbled on a profitable campaign.

I quickly realized that the globalized economy is extremely competitive, and
internet businesses with low barriers to entry are radically hyper
competitive.

There was no way to be completely passive and successful.

So I obsessively scaled my profitable campaigns and researched and
experimented with new ones. I went to conferences, and sought to strike better
deals with affiliate networks and even sought direct deals with the companies
whose products I was selling.

I spent a lot of time building relationships with the ad reps of the companies
I was buying ad space from.

I did a lot of industrial intelligence to find what was working and what
wasn't.

My girlfriend at the time was finishing her last year of college and I did all
of this while she was at class. When she finished school we embarked on a
cross country trip, went to a lot of music festivals and moved to Boulder, CO.

It was a pretty sweet lifestyle for a while.

The money was still coming in from my old campaigns, but the distraction of
being on a permanent working vacation took a toll on my efforts.

Then the industry kind of imploded. The field got incredibly more competitive
and a lot of affiliates began engaging in outright fraud to increase
conversions.

Because of the unethical behavior, the companies I was buying traffic from
started making it harder for affiliates to operate, they wanted national
brands as advertisers and I don't blame them.

The industry was scummy, not so much because the conferences I went to had
their opening night festivities at strip clubs. Or that even at the relatively
more respectable events naked women wearing only paint would serve drinks.

It was just corrupted by the huge amounts of easy money made possible by the
implosion of the global economy and the resulting plummeting of ad rates
combined with the deceptive marketing practices employed by the affiliates.

When more and more people heard about the easy money available, only the
sociopaths or otherwise ethically impaired could profit.

My dreams of easy passive income were dashed and I threw myself into software
development. Now I create real value, instead of exploiting narrow arbitrage
opportunities.

Making amazing software products is so much more valuable, rewarding and sane
than film making anyhow.

To answer your question, is it possible? Yes it is, but it is very dependent
on market conditions and they are forever trending to be less favorable.

There are still incredible opportunities in lead gen (better connotations than
affiliate marketing) but these days you have to build a platform that delivers
real value instead of just buying cheap traffic and selling it for more.

~~~
noname123
Thanks for sharing, esp. the part about the strip clubs and Sports Illustrated
style clothing. I wish you best of luck in your software venture. What was the
best festival you went to?

~~~
willholloway
Thank you!

My most poignant memory from the time was being a part of a circle of festival
goers holding a large circular nylon parachute that caught and launched a
seemingly infinite series of glow sticks into the air in a fountain like
manner at Rothbury on July 4th 2009 during a Grateful Dead set.

The money from that period is long gone, and so is the girl but the memories
and skills remain.

Ill share one more story about the ethics of the industry because it's worth
it:

An acquaintance in the biz once bribed a Facebook employee whose job it was to
approve or deny ads on the platform. His inside man set his account to auto
approve any ad he wanted.

He used that to get the scummiest, most downright fraudulent ads he could up.

He told me that he made $80,000 in 4 days by placing ads like 'Google is
hiring, apply here' that led to credit card rebill free trials for how to make
money from home info products.

The bribed employee was led out of the building after four days of this.

I had always wanted to write a book about this industry titled "Internet
Bandits", it was quite fascinating. There was a time when a kid with a credit
card, poor ethics and some basic web design skills could make $50,000 a month.

~~~
noname123
Maybe you can write a treatment and direct a youtube short. I feel like the
YouTube audience would be the target audience as both potential victims and
wanna-be scammers of to Internet marketing.

------
noelwelsh
I was waiting for the pitch at the end, but it didn't appear. Other than that
it's a straight forward restatement of what others have said already.

The problem with these types of posts is that they make it seem like passive
income is easy. In fact it is a hell of a lot of work to create, say, an info
product, and marketing it can also be a full-time job. You need to have
surplus income and time to take on the risk of doing this, which is hard to do
if you're an employee. This probably explains why most of the passive income
stuff we read on HN comes from consultants.

~~~
jasonkester
Seems like you have your answer then: don't build an info product. Build a
product product. With customers.

It will only ever be a full time job if you work on it full time. Since it's
your company, you get to choose the hours you work, so you can make your
lifestyle look however you want it to look.

So yes, it may in fact be a hell of a lot of work. But fortunately you possess
a hell of a lot of _time_ before you die. Divvy it up any way you choose, but
please don't give up because it takes effort.

The end result is really nice.

~~~
noelwelsh
I am building a product product. It has customers. It is a heck of a lot of
work. (I'm also building an info product.)

It may be surprising to you that my customers actually don't care how many
hours I want to work, but only about the value I deliver to them. I don't get
to wave a magic wand and work 10 hours a week and keep all my customers,
though I'm sure my competitors would wish I tried.

The place I see "lifestyle businesses" working best is where the market is
unattractive to larger competitors due to size, difficulty reaching clients or
others. There only select markets where this is the case.

Look, I love all the lifestyle business stuff and I'm adopting some of the
tactics myself, but the suggestion of this article and your comment that the
hours you work is solely a matter of choice is bullshit. You have to give up
something, normally money or proximity to family and friends. Or put it a lot
of work upfront building a business that you can then coast on.

~~~
jasonkester
In what way?

What would happen to your business in you spent 20 minutes answering emails
tomorrow morning then went fishing for the rest of the day? What would happen
if you did that twice a week from here on out?

If the answer is yes, the business would implode within a day, is there not
something you could do to change that?

~~~
noelwelsh
In my case, I'd go broke. Consulting pays the bills while we get the product
to profitability.

------
ironch456
Every ounce of energy you put into a side project comes from your main job and
is carved out of your free time and peace of mind. Period.

I used to think I could just contract on the side and make some good money. I
did that for about 7 months...but every day you come home wanting to mentally
relax...guess what? More work! Your weekends? More work too! Everyone has
deadlines at their main job...now you have two deadlines! Deadlines when you
are at work and deadlines when you get home.

I ultimately decided to never take any more side work (which might lead to
passive income) simply because the mental toll it takes is harsh. Money is
sort of not really just lying around on the ground...if it were that easy,
some hacker in Russia who is out of work would figure out how to get it before
you simply because they are desperate and you are just sort of doing this as a
hobby.

Real success requires being pathologically driven to beat everyone or having
some kind of advantage of everyone else.

I work with a very smart engineer who runs a full on side business which nets
him a good amount of money. His day-to-day motivation is noticeably less than
everyone else and his output is less...because he is dividing his time between
work, side work, a child, a wife etc. He eventually just announced he was
leaving to do his side project.

Yes you can do side work, but if you are any kind of regular adult your side
projects will all be temporary unless you are willing to quit for them. The
mental toll adds up.

------
mixmixmix
I've been traveling full time for the past 5-6 years ever since leaving a full
time job in Silicon Valley. I've lived pretty much all over the world (now
based in Eastern Europe).

I probably only make about $20-$25k a year off a few low maintenance projects,
taking up random contracting gigs when I feel like.

The experience of seeing new places and meeting new people is priceless. No
amount of money, equity or incentives can ever make up for that.

If I could change one thing, it would've been quitting my full time job even
earlier.

~~~
Zaheer
Do you mind sharing some of your projects (even if its by PM)? In college
right now and desiring a very similar lifestyle - trying to figure out how to
translate my current PI niche into something more substantial.

~~~
joonix
I'm not sure why people ask what people's profitable projects are. Do you
expect to just copy the idea? If so, why would they tell you? If not, what's
the point of knowing what it is?

------
epoxyhockey
My 2 cents:

 _Passive income_

\- To echo many other entrepreneurs in this thread, successful passive income
_does_ contain a healthy portion of timing and luck.

\- Passive income also requires a lot of optimization and making slight
changes to improve performance, adjusting to new trends over time.

\- Passive income is a lot about running a business and exploiting
opportunities. For example, cold-calling a non-tech-savvy mom & pop store to
become a partner in your online venture.

\- One good passive income generator is not enough for the long-haul. One will
need 3 - 5 different niches to be comfortable for many years to come. There is
lots of volatility and some niches will eventually fail.

\- The only real passive thing about passive income is that your websites are
running while you sleep. There is always day-to-day work.

 _Finding new opportunities_

\- Once you find a good niche and quit your day job, you will try to create
new businesses in other niches and fail dozens of times. It may take 2 - 3
years to find or create another viable niche or business. This can be soul-
crushing if your expectations are not set. However, all of the tech created in
those failures _will_ come in use in the future.

\- My [current] most successful way of finding new opportunities is to do
contracting work for small businesses. They always have lots of problems and
deep knowledge of their niche. Keep a conversation going with those small
businesses and start creating solutions for them.

~~~
sledmonkey
> One good passive income generator is not enough for the long-haul. One will
> need 3 - 5 different niches to be comfortable for many years to come. There
> is lots of volatility and some niches will eventually fail.

I learned this the hard way. I had a great passive income site that was at one
point making $12k a month. Spent more time tweaking text and other (in
hindsight) trivial things than finding other passive income methods and when
the gravy train failed I didn't have anything to fall back on.

------
dsschnau
They make it sound so easy. I'm holding down a full-time job and raising a son
with my fiancee. I've only got 2.5 years experience programming, but I'm
getting up an hour early to hack on side projects, hoping to get some of this
mythical passive income that people talk about like its so easy.

I can code/debug for a corporate in my sleep but creating entire products on
one's own is a whole different ball game. I'm tired of these articles making
it sound _so easy_.

~~~
jmduke
I'd say two things:

1\. You've touched on the hardest part about consulting/side projects. The
idea of freedom to code on whatever you want to is slightly shrouded in myth
because so little of it has to do with code: marketing, bizdev, and even
accounting/forecasting are all handled by you, the VP of Marketing and CFO of
Dsschnau, Inc. It's like exercising a muscle group for the first time: it's
incredibly difficult, but you get much better at it much quicker than you
expect. (You also get a new level of appreciation for all those silly
marketing types.)

2\. Any post about financial/personal freedom is generally geared towards a
early-20's male hacker who doesn't have a family to support. It's an entirely
different ball game: the value proposition suddenly gets a lot more complex
than "welp, if I can't sell X subscriptions/bill out for $Y I guess I'm eating
ramen this month.'

~~~
mkrecny
OP here - totally agree with both, and sorry that my posts thus far haven't
acknowledged that the focus shifts so drastically from programming to
marketing, bizdev, accounting etc. It certainly does and it can be really
rewarding. Also regarding #2 - yes ... I'm 25 and male.

------
bernardom
Great post. I wonder if there's space for an alternate Hacker News- a Passive
Income Hacker News (PIHN) that works as a sort of support group for PIHs.

~~~
phreeza
Quick search turned up
[http://www.reddit.com/r/passive_income/](http://www.reddit.com/r/passive_income/)
but that seems pretty dead at the moment.

~~~
yeahrightdbag
I'm more interested in programmers who are into passive income. Too many
passive income message boards are filled with mlm scams, 1 page sales ads for
ebooks, etc.

~~~
phreeza
You have a point.

------
resu
All these posts about 'Passive Income Hackers' and I have yet to see any
mention of what a reader of these articles could do to become one.

"That's a shame, because as a programmer in the 21st Century, you're in a
unique position to do something that most people simply can't; live a life
with adequate income, lots of time and total freedom over what you do with
it."

That sounds great, but how?

~~~
mkrecny
OP here. I'll be getting to that in subsequent posts. Here's my mailing list:

[http://visitor.r20.constantcontact.com/manage/optin/ea?v=001...](http://visitor.r20.constantcontact.com/manage/optin/ea?v=001xzhc59f6LQ_eTSA9m3uKLQ%3D%3D)

I only spam you once or twice a month.

~~~
resu
Thanks, looking forward to reading it!

------
dicroce
Here's what I've tried: 1) Built a website that let people send USPS (real)
mail, from the website. 0 sales. 2) During the social news height, built a
digg like social news website with a coworker. Never used by anyone outside of
those I work with. 3) Built a custom trail mix website (still running, making
regular sales.... barely profitable...).

I've been building sites for years, and I'm starting to think that my focus
should be on what I'm really good at: C/C++ software (instead of trendy
websites). I've been obsessed with the idea of finding an underserved
vertical, and taking my knowledge of machine learning and analytics and
building some game changing software for that niche. The only issues I have
is: what niche?

------
caliix
"As at all times, so now too, men are divided into the slaves and the free;
for he who does not have two-thirds of his day to himself is a slave, let him
be what he may otherwise: statesman, businessman, official, scholar."
~Nietzsche

------
walshemj
Can we have a moratorium on calling dodgy ebook sellers mlm scam artists and
doddgy time share sales men hackers

~~~
kybernetyk
That ship sailed a long time ago when we started calling marketers and
salespeople "growth hackers".

Nowadays everyone is a hacker in some way. But honestly - who cares? Just
ignore it if it upsets you (I do).

~~~
walshemj
yeh but i don't want to see mlm and make money fast dodgy people on HN.

------
philfreo
The myth that all startups make their employees work 7 12 hour days every
week, pay them way under market rate, and that there's no flexibility for time
off or travel is pretty silly.

Do you work extra hard at startups? Of course. But in my experience startups
are _more_ flexible in terms of working remotely while traveling and freedom
in letting people work on parts of the business they are interested in.

And maybe I'm the exception, but I've been able to take a lot of weekends off
- it helps me be more productive during the week.

~~~
coldtea
> _And maybe I 'm the exception, but I've been able to take a lot of weekends
> off_

Saying that as if it's some kind of feat actually reinforces the whole
"startups make their employees work 7 12 hour days every week" thesis.

Aren't you SUPPOSED to take the weekends off?

------
zobzu
so this basically mean you gotta take the spot of the actually rich people (ie
the top 0.5%) of the planet, which don't need to work.

This takes a lot of luck, in general (more than work) or/and a lot of ruse and
malice.

Otherwise, if everyone just end up being a founder, it obviously doesn't work
either. You need minions to do the actual work. If you don't wanna be a minion
anymore, someone else has to be. Never ending loop.

------
crazy1van
I like this article more than the typical PI article because he clearly states
that there is a trade off. Want more freedom? Be prepared to accept less
money. I don't understand some of the criticism in these comments. He never
claims there's a free lunch to be had here.

------
kybernetyk
Hmm, I guess many people have a false definition of 'passive' in mind. It's
not like "build something and it will make you money forever" \- it's rather
like "Build something and for the time you build another thing it will make
you money. But then go back and put some more work into it or it will die".

Passive income sources always dry up if you don't put constant work into them.
I never had one last longer than 2 years without working on it from time to
time.

To me the prototypical passive income model is a software product. Once you
get it out you can reap revenue for one or maybe two years without much
additional work. But after that you better release an update.

~~~
codex
Doesn't this describe every scalable business?

------
josscrowcroft
Beautiful post, thank you! Love the idea of a 3-dimensional matrix. It really
is that complicated, and simple.

Harder than you thought it would be, but easier than most just-starting-out
passive-earners would expect, if that makes sense.

~~~
mkrecny
thank you :-)

------
ronilan
If you care about anything or anyone then you have obligations. Such
obligations are not liabilities. These are assets. The entire conceptual
optimization offered is false.

~~~
rhema
Obligations are only assets insomuch as they provide value to both parties.
Interdependency can be a stabilizing and beneficial force, but working 12
hours a day on end is bad for everybody. It's not sustainable.

------
toddsiegel
This is not a PIH vs. VC funded startup issue, except that this seems to be
part of an ongoing flamewar between people from both communities.

You can achieve the same balance and freedom with a part-time job,
freelancing, as a PIH (although I don't think the OP actually earns passive
income in the accounting sense) or some other work arrangement.

What's most important to have the kind of freedom that the OP describes is to
first have a relationship with money that supports it.

------
dangoldin
Even if passive income is easy, it's not for everyone. I've been doing
consulting work the past couple of months and can have 1-2 days of straight
work pay for my entire week. Unfortunately, the free time isn't as fun as
you'd think since almost everyone I know is working full time jobs. Maybe I'm
more social than most but having free time without being able to enjoy it with
others isn't something to strive for.

------
peter303
There is a difference between wealthy and financially independent. FI is have
about 20 times or more your annual exenses saved up. Except for deep
recessions you could live off an income stream from that. If you got a good
job and are frugal you might reach that stage in a decade as I did. faster if
you start a successful business.

Wealthy means few constraints on lifestyle. travel where you. Buy most of the
stuff you want.

------
gordonbowman
Counter point:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelellsberg/2011/06/24/the-t...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelellsberg/2011/06/24/the-
top-4-reasons-why-passive-income-is-a-dangerous-fantasy/)

------
basicallydan
_But if you 're interested in pursuing passive income, you probably have a
different view of what constitutes wealth._

I have the same view of wealth as you and I am a programmer at a startup. I
wasn't hugely interested in this but now I am.

------
gadders
Offtopic, but is the blog meant to be accessible or designed for people with
poor eyesight? The font is enormous and only 4-5 words fit on each line. The
column width should be at least doubled.

~~~
beat
Elsewhere on his blog, he mentions that he has very poor eyesight. He probably
designed it for himself.

~~~
gadders
Well then fair enough.

------
6ren
Your personal value is not how much you take, but how much you give. You are a
resource.

Some resources are richer than others.

------
michaelochurch
There's a false adversary here, in the 12-hour days and 7-day weeks associated
with startups. If you're not a founder, don't work more than 40-- possibly 50
on occasion but only for a project that benefits your career in a major way.
Giving your all to a company in exchange for 0.02% of something without a
well-defined value is a chump's game.

On the other hand, most passive income material smells more like an old-
fashioned pyramid scheme than anyone else.

Yes, there are terrible startups out there that expect extreme hours. It's
easier to leave one of those, and get a better job, than it is to generate a
passive income stream from that point. Take the first step first. Get a better
job first. Get some security and sanity in your life. Then, start to think
about passive income.

It's hard to come up with good ideas when there's a gun in your face, which
means that having a really bad job (e.g. the 84-hour-per-week startup gig)
will make it almost impossible to build something that people will pay for.
However, I wouldn't advise quitting wholesale for most people; if you end up
with no job, then you have a different gun in your face, which is that you're
rapidly running out of money.

I'm not going to argue that it's easy to generate passive income while working
full-time; only that it's not easier for most people to just quit their day
jobs and "magically" come up with the golden iPad app.

