
Ask HN: Are you working on any side projects that make "small/passive" income? - riskish
If so, what are they and how long did it take to make your first dollar?
======
il
A couple years ago I created a small international proxy service.

The service was targeted at advertisers who wanted to advertise in other
countries but didn't have an easy way to see international ads or landing
pages from competitors(most landing pages in this niche were geotargeted and
would redirect based on your IP). It probably took less than 10-15 hours to
hack together in PHP.

I didn't have a freemium model or anything like that, I knew that this service
had some value to some people and priced it at $50/month.

I never took this seriously as a major project/startup, and so the only
promotion I did were a couple of forum posts in the Buy/Sell/Trade sections of
relevant forums. In retrospect, it could have been much more successful had I
taken the time to drive paid traffic to it. I remember the customer lifetime
value was north of $300, and conversion rates were very respectable.

The service wasn't positioned as a tool for anonymity/illegal acts(we
explicitly stated we kept logs), so I was able to avoid the problem of
chargebacks common to such services.

Because of that, unlike other proxies that had to take payment in complex,
nonreversible forms like Western Union, I could take PayPal payments and
automatically provision an account on checkout. After you signed up, you would
instantly be given unique IPs for the countries you selected that you could
just plug into your browser. This ease of use was a key factor in the
service's success.

It ended up making between $600-$1000 a month pretty consistently only a
couple months after launch. Eventually, I got tired of dealing with support
issues and sold the site on Flippa for a healthy revenue multiple.

The coup de grace: I was approached by several of the people who didn't win
the auction but were still interested in the site. I ended up selling a few
white-label versions of my (very simplistic) software for $1000 each.

~~~
revorad
So you sold the original site on Flippa and then also sold essentially the
same code again to other people? Wasn't that against the terms of sale to the
Flippa buyer?

~~~
il
No, the buyer didn't mind. He was buying the site more for the
revenue/traction rather than te technology. It's actually very common to
create a script and sell both developed sites based on it as well as the
script itself.

~~~
revorad
That's great. Good work on finding an opportunity and acting fast on it.

------
astrofinch
In case anyone is reading this thread and becoming pessimistic about their
chances of achieving passive income, I'd like to note that there is a clear
sampling bias: folks that have found profitable niches are less likely to
share their projects for fear of attracting competition. I suspect that
choosing a good niche is pretty important when it comes to passive-income type
projects. It looks like the most profitable project so far in the thread is
il's, and he sold his site on flippa, so competition is now someone else's
problem.

Just to test this out, if anyone is staying quiet about their project for fear
of attracting competition, could they please reply to this comment and say so?
Don't worry, your silence is totally understandable :)

(The sampling bias will probably still remain somewhat due to folks have their
projects linked to from their profiles and not wanting to remove them.)

~~~
fooandbarify
My most profitable side project actually plays in an extremely competitive
space but I usually stay quiet about it because it's boring, extremely uncool,
and borders on sleazy. Anyways, I wrote it in a weekend and it makes me about
$400/month.

~~~
chipocabra
Boring AND sleazy. Now I'm intrigued.

~~~
ovi256
It's stripping for blind people.

~~~
joebadmo
That doesn't sound boring or sleazy to me.

------
dangero
Like someone mentioned, I don't want to increase my competition, so I'm not
going to get into the details, but I'll say that I started doing consulting
after work in 2007 to bootstrap my own project. I had absolutely no business
background.

In 2008 I spent $7000 that I had made off consulting and 8 months of my free
time to build my first project. It was a miserable failure. I've made about
$80 off of it, so I'm still down about $6920... 3 years later.

In 2009 I built my second attempt. This time I spent about $1000 building it
and it took me about 4 months to build it. I've made about $150 off that one,
so I still lost money, but much less than the first time.

In 2010 I made my third attempt. This one I built at no cost, and 2 weeks of
my free time. To date this one has made over $20,000.

I'm now in the 5th year since I first started on this journey and for the
first time, I wrote myself a profit check last month.

Hang in there. You'll figure it out if you keep trying.

~~~
zzleeper
Any advice on what changed through time? More focused attempts, better grasp
of the demand, or just more productive programming?

~~~
dangero
I've been programming for a long time, so I don't think it had anything to do
with productive programming. In fact, each attempt was less work than the
previous.

The thing that I didn't understand is that being successful in business has
very little to do with having an original idea. You're much better off just
looking at how other people are making money and becoming their competitor or
improving upon what they are doing. 99% of successful businesses work this
way. This may seem obvious to a lot of people, but I kept spinning my wheels
trying to invent something instead of doing market research and building
something that I know people need or want.

~~~
Carl_Platt
Most innovation happens this way. Get some existing idea, develop on it and
market/sell it off as a better alternative. Seems simple. If only.

~~~
dko
"If only" - totally agree.

Just building something people need/want, or improving upon what works, is a
deceptively simple generalization. It boils down to execution, and that's
where our originality still comes into play.

~~~
dangero
I agree as well. I wasn't suggesting that's all it takes, but rather, that was
the missing ingredient for me. I think different people are missing different
ingredients to success, and that was the one that I was missing.

------
edawerd
As my Android apps started becoming more popular, I started seeing piracy of
my apps skyrocket. At the time, Google didn't have their application licensing
system in place, so I built my own. With the licensing system in place for my
apps, I was also free to distribute and sell my application binary on my own,
without fear of it being pirated.

After seeing piracy drop dramatically and talking with other Android
developers with the same problems, I decided to build a site around it and
sell my system to other developers.

It took me about 2 weeks to build www.androidlicenser.com and I saw my first
$40/month subscription within 5 days. It still brings in about $500/month
consistently. Google has since come out with their own licensing system, but
it suffers from the limitation of it only working for apps purchased through
the Android Market which, in a world with many Android Markets, isn't good
enough.

~~~
singer
What happens if someone bypasses your client library in the APK file? Also,
will the application fail to launch if it cannot reach androidlicenser.com (or
wherever it goes) to verify the user when the app is launched?

~~~
edawerd
As always, the APK needs to be obfuscated to prevent hackers from decompiling
the code and bypassing the client library.

If internet connection is unavailable or androidlicenser.com is unreachable,
it is completely upto the developer to determine what to do next. My best
practice recommendation is to allow the user to continue to use the
application.

------
famousactress
Not typical HN fare, but the wife and I started a business together that has
(almost) nothing to do with the interwebs. It's a photography business.. We
started it about 3+ years ago, and in most senses it's done quite well. She's
been able to quit her day-job. It's what HN folks would call a 'lifestyle'
business, I guess. You know, cause we're not _rich_.

I have to say, it's pretty rad. Software startups don't have a monopoly on
giving you experience in doing branding, marketing, sales, running ad-
campaigns, taxes, and just all manner of things that go into running a
business.

~~~
danssig
I'd like to hear more about this. I've been thinking of getting more into
photography myself. It seems like wedding photography is a bad idea as it's
way overdone. I was thinking architecture or portrait photography. What did
you all end up doing?

~~~
nhebb
I think an avatar photo business would be a good idea. Think of all the
twitter users with resized photos of themselves that are unflattering,
cryptic, or just plain bad.

~~~
famousactress
When I travel to SF (where the startup I work for is based), I often end up
shooting headshots for folks who have talks to give, or need bio photos, etc.
Someone could definitely corner the PA/SF entrepreneur headshot market,
without much trouble I think.

The trick with headshots is enough finding people (close to you) willing to
pay enough money to make it worthwhile. That usually means actors, authors, or
executives.. but I'm sure increasingly wide-eyed young startup kids and
software developers make the Bay Area an interesting target.

~~~
nhebb
There was a story a while back about two guys who set up a badge printing
service at SF trade shows. Something similar could be done for the headshot
biz.

------
joelg87
My most recent venture started out as a side project and is now becoming my
main focus. It is a simple Twitter App which makes it easy to share more on
Twitter whilst annoying your followers less (by helping you to avoid tweeting
5 links in a row within minutes).

It took 7 weeks for me to take it from idea to launching the MVP (during most
of the build period I had people using the service).

I had my first paying customer 4 days after launch. It has now been running
for just under 4 months and I am making $315/mo, though that number is rising
almost every day (it is a freemium service with a free plan and paid plans
priced $5/mo and $30/mo).

I am likely to reach ramen profitability within a few months and will focus
fully on it.

I blogged about how I took it from idea to first paying customer, which may be
of interest - [http://blog.bufferapp.com/post/3328167762/idea-to-paying-
cus...](http://blog.bufferapp.com/post/3328167762/idea-to-paying-customers-
in-7-weeks-how-we-did-it)

~~~
feelin_tired
Hey great to hear MVP works I was beginning to doubt the model :-)

------
geuis
I've had an application running in Second Life for the last 5-6 years to
facilitate people making machinima. I haven't changed the price since it
launched, at around $6 USD. When it first launched (also when SL was much more
popular), I was selling several hundred dollars a month.

I still pull in $30-$50 a month on it, but I don't do much to promote it
anymore. Linden Lab has really fucked up over the years and the quality of
their software (the environment my app runs in) has gotten considerably worse.
Its sad to say that my machinima app ran better 5 years ago than it does
today, and multiple re-writes over the years has proven it impossible to go
any further with the it.

Alternatively, I just put my first app up in the App Store last night. Its
waiting for approval. I'm going to keep launching small utility apps and see
where it goes.

~~~
thetrumanshow
I also did a stint in SecondLife, trying to build web-enabled in-world
products and/or build web services that would take Linden dollars for payment.
Probably made $600 in revenue.

It was my Artix Phase.

------
fuckall
I help run a hotdog stand in NYC with my uncle in the summer on the weekends
for fun and (ridiculous) profit.

~~~
roel_v
Isn't the permit/city licence insanely expensive? Is it still profitable after
that?

On a similar note, I was looking at the difference in fruit prices between
'whole' fruits and sliced portions in super markets the other day and started
daydreaming about selling portions of pineapple on warm summer days, much like
an ice cream stand but with pineapple. I think the markup is similar to
hotdogs - can you share how many customers you serve in a typical hour?

------
acangiano
At the moment I make most of my non-day-job income from my two blogs [1][2],
and Any New Books? [3]. All together they make me over $5000 on a good month.
The two blogs didn't make money initially because I wasn't interested in
monetizing them when I started years ago. ANB made its first dollar on day
one.

[1] <http://programmingzen.com>

[2] <http://math-blog.com>

[3] <http://anynewbooks.com>

~~~
middus
How are the blogs creating _passive_ income? I guess you're spending quite
some time creating/editing content, don't you?

~~~
acangiano
The majority of my blog income is from existing content. If I stop posting for
a month or so, as I have in the past, about 90% of the revenue will still be
there. I'm currently posting about one post per week for each blog, and this
relaxed pace is enough to increase the revenue of my blogs. If I stopped
blogging altogether, it would probably take years before my revenue figures
would be hugely impacted. That's passive enough for me.

~~~
seunosewa
10% is a huge impact if you depend on the money. And you're likely to lose 10%
every month if you stopped blogging, not just the first month.

~~~
acangiano
10% is a lot but given that we are talking about extra money, it wouldn't
impact me. If I stopped blogging, the blogs would progressively earn less and
less for sure, but the majority of the income comes from posts that are from
several months to several years old. So no, they wouldn't lose 10% revenue per
month.

The gist of what I'm saying is that the majority of the revenue (which we may
define as the baseline) is, for all intents and purposes, passive income akin
to having self-published an ebook or an app in the past.

Besides, even if we disagree on the definition, the original question was
about "small/passive" income. The OP clearly wanted to know about extra income
on the side, more than limiting the field to 100%, strictly passive income
sources.

------
zzeroparticle
Does a blog reviewing music count?

Though I started in 2008, I didn't really make any attempts at monetizing
until late 2009 and started with Adsense, then linked all the albums reviewed
to two online stores that sell the CDs in question. All told, it took me maybe
3 months to make my first dollar and even longer for affiliate commissions to
come in. I didn't make my first sale until maybe February 2010.

Obviously this isn't a product-based project, so it's not representative of
the webapp stuff that others are producing.

~~~
getsat
Absolutely.

If you're using Wordpress, try one of the Twitter integration plugins. You can
choose hashtags when creating a new blog entry and it will be auto-posted to a
Twitter account. You should see a bump in traffic after each post.

~~~
zzeroparticle
Thanks!

I've actually been doing manual updates to my personal twitter account after
each post with a blurb about the latest article. Each tweet is customized
rather than a generic auto-update message. I'm just not sure whether this is
the best way of going about it or if I should take your suggestion and
completely automate it. Maybe create a separate twitter account and do both?

~~~
getsat
> Maybe create a separate twitter account and do both?

No reason not to. :)

I had a few blogs (well, "autoblogs") go from $5-6/day on 400-500 unique
visitors to $10-12 after installing and configuring Twitter Tools. A human
touch generally results in higher yield than automation with most marketing
stuff, though.

~~~
atgm
> A human touch generally results in higher yield than automation with most
> marketing stuff, though.

Do you think that's because readers recognize it as being "more human" and are
more interested, or because humans are better at making copy than automation,
or a combination of the two?

~~~
getsat
Probably more of a combination of the two. Automated posts are pretty obvious,
even to the less technically inclined. Lots of people will use something like
"spyntax" (stuff like "This is {awesome|cool}, {take a look|check it out}!")
to generate reusable copy, but it still generally feels fake. That's about the
extent of human touch most people will give things if their goal is complete
automation.

If you're writing posts/excerpts/replies manually, it's way more authentic and
believable. Language is obviously super important in marketing (especially
online), and it's one area where computers still have lots of improvement to
make.

------
luke_s
I run a e-commerce website, selling tools for grafting produced by a company
my wifes family own:

<http://www.grafting-tool.com/magento/index.php/>

I started by buying a few samples to sell on e-bay to see if there was a
market. So I guess you could say I started making money right away. The
problem with trying to replicate my business, is finding the right product to
sell. I was lucky that I saw they had this item, and I figured that there
would be a market online for it. Trying to find a new product to sell and
establishing links with the manufacturer would take some time. You would also
need to contend with issues of minimum order size.

I guess you could call it a partial success. Currently its bringing in about
$300 per month. I want to increase my revenue, but it hard to know what to
focus on. The other problem is it has somewhat of a high overhead - we need to
spend time shipping products, etc.

For my new side projects, I'm thinking of doing something digital, that can be
handled entirely online.

I have tried selling photos to a stock photo service. I spent many hours
tagging photos, waiting for them to work through the approval process, etc.
After many months of letting my photos sit, I have yet to sell one.

Next I am looking at writing some Smartphone apps. We will see how that goes
...

~~~
ovi256
There was an Eastern European dude that used to submit his monthly sales
reports to HN. He made quite a bit of money from stock photography. The catch
? Most of his stock photos were not still life, but people in different life
settings - this must be the kind that sells the best. I'm sure it helped that
his young blond girlfriend was a frequent subject :)

~~~
luke_s
Yeah, I read his posts - its what inspired me to have give it a try. That and
somebody who posted on HN, saying they had a passive income stream from
selling their holiday photos as stock.

'Staged' photos of people in various situations do sell better. People are
always looking for photos that illustrate different abstract concepts, such as
"income protection" or "brown nosing with the boss".

In my case though, I was looking to make some money of the photos I already
had, which apparently were not that suited for stock. I don't doubt that if I
invested time taking photos that were betters suited, I could make a little
money. But from my early experience it would seem that too much effort was
required for too little pay off.

To throw out some totally made up numbers, it was like; for every hour of
effort invested in my grafting tool site, I could increase my monthly income
by $2. For every hour invested in stock I could increase my monthly income by
$0.10 . It quickly became obvious where I should spend my time :-)

I would guess that for anybody who can code, the numbers would likely prove
similar. Therefore I would not recommend stock photography to the HN crowd.

------
phirephly
I was surprised that just putting an adsense unit on the side of my personal
blog (4k hits/month) manages to generate $25/month.

It's a highly technical blog, mainly documenting my personal electronics
projects, but covers pretty much anything I want it to, which rather limits my
readership. Having a more cohesive, single subject would certainly raise the
glass ceiling on readership.

~~~
SeoxyS
I don't know about you, but I don't think $25/mo is worth cheapening my blog
by plastering tasteless ads on it. I'd have to be pulling significant income
from it before I would even consider putting ads on my blog.

~~~
phirephly
<http://kennethfinnegan.blogspot.com/>

Text ads, top banner and bottom of right bar. $300 a year; as a college
student, yeah, that's worth it.

~~~
alphamale
Damn bro, Looks like you just stepped out of the 1970's Microsoft pic. Bro hit
up my site for a makeover at alphamal.es

~~~
kirse
I never understood this, what sort of "alpha" male goes on the internet and
looks for advice from other people on how to be a man?

The first step in being a real man is not looking to others on how to be a
man. (Or at least finding a mentor with true character, not Maxim magazine
articles and other garbage)

I still think your site has a great potential for an audience though, I fell
for the same sort of BS when I was a freshman in college. Took me a couple
years to undo the stupidity I had come to believe about what being a "man"
really meant.

------
wladimir
My side project involves recognition of captchas; it is a pretty tough one-
time time investment to create a recognizer, involving machine learning, image
manipulation and statistics, but as payment is on a per-captcha basis, the
income after that is passive income. I started with this a few years ago, and
after two weeks of obsessive-compulsive hacking, my first dollars started
flowing in. All in all it now gets me something like $2000 per month.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Are your customers spammers? I'm having some trouble thinking of a legitimate
use for this service...

~~~
wladimir
Nope, they are not spammers, the captchas are not for creating accounts; it
has another use. But obviously I cannot go into details about my customers
here.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Fair enough, good luck!

------
atgm
I published an ebook (<http://www.branchrock.com>) and it's been selling.
Since I'll never run out of stock and it's priced as an impulse buy, I expect
that it'll continue to earn passively. I got my first dollar on the first day
I started selling.

I plan to continue writing books, both non-fiction and fiction, and I expect
that they'll all help bring in passive income.

~~~
luke_s
Just a suggestion - perhaps you place a sample of the book on your page? A
paragraph or two, just so people can see what they are getting. Also it would
be good to know how long it is.

~~~
atgm
Thanks! I'll think about how to integrate everything nicely during the
blackout. Not going to change anything now since I don't want to get caught
with my pants down.

Edit: I put a one-page sample on Lulu if you're curious.

------
mcdowall
About a year ago I built a number of micro niche sites aimed specifically at
generating adwords income for high ppc terms. They weren't especially pretty
but they were a good exercise and more than paid for themselves.

At the point I sold them (22 sites) they were generating about $190 a month in
adsense revenue, all this from me buying 'keyword in domain' urls, having a
relatively good eye for writing seo copy and building some inbound links.

I sold the lot on flippa for just over $1k, so I suppose it made me about
~$300/mo for a year. I know of some individuals who have over 1,000 domains
running (across some of the most random niches you would just laugh at!) so I
think it's a pretty decent passive business for them.

~~~
lurchpop
you could do better. i have an identical business with exactly 23 sites that
averages about $900/mo and rising.

~~~
mcdowall
I am acutely aware of how well some people can do but I just didn't have the
time to do more back linking / articles, so for me I was more than happy with
the return.

------
kposehn
I actually live off the passive income (I've been an affiliate full-time for
almost 4 years). While it has been quite a ride and I can't really share my
most profitable sites/tools (without my wife - who is also my business partner
- getting me back for it), I will say that it can be a good thing. That said,
it is also an extremely competitive business. It is very easy to generate
$50/month off a little blog, but generating $10,000/month takes a lot more out
of you and carries far more risk.

If you've got something that is growing or doing well already, see if you can
grow it - when there is little competition in whatever segment it is an
opportunity not to be missed. They are rare.

------
franze
a few years ago (well, the weekend after my second son was born and i thought:
hey, i need more money) i created <http://www.facesaerch.com/>, basically an
alternative interface to googles image search with face filter turned on. the
initial version took me 2 days (my son slept the most of the time anyways).

i did some basic SEO stuff (i.e. alt tags for images, a sitemap XML, an auto
expanding index) and got some coverage for it on various sites (lifehacker,
...) which was quite easy because everybody loves searching for themselves.

the site is still hosted on a 1 EUR webspace / month and during its best time
it had about 54.000 visits a day.

as for the business case: on a site with only images, people click on (google)
ads. don't know why, they just do it. so the money was good.

google was ok for it for quite some time (hey, they even covered it on a
google code showcase blog) but well i kept pushing the boundaries so i got a
penalty (again and again).

now i got about 5000 visits a day from baidu and bing, but it's hard to grow
these traffic sources (well that's true for bing, for baidu its mostly the
language barrier). it was fun while it lasted, now i just don't care anymore.
i keep it around (even though some people would like to buy it) as i might
transform it into a real product sometime.

so what the bottom line: building a (SEO) sideproject for passive income is
possible, but don't bet on it that it will last forever. oh yeah, maybe also:
images + ads = awesome conversion

------
goo
I have a network of several crowdsourced humor sites that make a decent profit
(~2k) every month between them-- they include unrelatedcaptions.com,
mylifeisbro.com, and averagetextsfromlastnight.com. I sold the flagship site -
mylifeisaverage.com - since it demanded too much time and I had other projects
I wanted to focus on.

Licensing for the paid iPhone application for mylifeisbro.com (I didn't
develop it) also brings in about a grand each month.

It took about a month or so to make my first dollar from the first site I
launched "mylifeisg.com" (now defunct)

Once there was a user base to pitch new projects to, the other dollars became
easier to make.

------
tayl0r
I have a game on the iOS app store.

[http://itunes.apple.com/app/river-cross-logic-puzzle-
game/id...](http://itunes.apple.com/app/river-cross-logic-puzzle-
game/id306053976?mt=8)

It brings in $100+ per month. I'm pretty happy with it.

~~~
lylejohnson
For cryin' out loud, I've got to get my act together and learn Mac/iOS
development.

------
nigelsampson
I have a small WP7 application I submitted around launch, I'd done Silverlight
development before so it was pretty easy to jump in. I built it over about six
weeks of occasional evenings and started selling pretty much immediately. I've
released my downloads and sales figures for the first three months.

The App: <http://compiledexperience.com/windows-phone-7/to-do>

The Numbers: [http://compiledexperience.com/blog/posts/a-windows-
phone-7-a...](http://compiledexperience.com/blog/posts/a-windows-phone-7-app-
the-numbers)

------
MortenK
Not entirely sure this fits the bill, but I've leased out one of my former
lead developer to a client, when our consulting business got rammed. He's is
offshore, and the client is in Europe. Right now I do individual consultancy,
and then get a form of passive income from leasing the developer out. I make
around 700 USD a month, with effort limited to sending out the invoice.

~~~
biot
Former lead developer? Do you bill on his behalf (similar to an agent) and the
$700 is the markup? I'm curious as to how you're able to keep billing for a
former developer.

~~~
MortenK
No, he is still paid a monthly salary by my company. The client that he works
for, is then billed monthly for his salary plus the markup.

------
perlgeek
I have an old project (<http://sudokugarden.de/>) where I built a website
about Sudoku back at University when I was bored. I consider it feature
complete, and have stopped to actively promote or develop it for two or three
years now. I still make 1.5k to 2k per year in advertising (mostly CEO text
links - adsense prices in that segement are too low to be profitable, and I
don't want to bother the visitors too much. People who sign in for free don't
see any adds). I made my first dollars a few month after the launch, when my
adsense account finally reached the threshold for the first payment.

I'm now working on a project where I want to collect semantic relations
between books (sequels, prequels, translations into other languages etc.).
It's not launched yet, so no income so far. It will have affiliate links to
book stores. See <https://github.com/moritz/quelology> if you are interested
in details.

------
pathik
If you consider blogging to be a side project, I do make a small amount as
passive income. It definitely doesn't compare with web apps or services in
terms of coolness, but money is money, right?

~~~
getsat
In addition to money, it's also likely a focused audience that could be
diverted into other potential monetisation vectors you come up with. Ideas are
the easy part, getting traffic to them is the hard part.

------
leftnode
Yes, I launched a piece of software to build your own social network. It took
several days to make my first dollar, and I made $1300 in revenue and about
$1000 in profit for the first month.

[http://blog.leftnode.com/entry/first-month-kwolla-sales-
repo...](http://blog.leftnode.com/entry/first-month-kwolla-sales-report)

Then I made my code free.

~~~
dangero
Just curious, why would you make it free if you could have continued to make
money off of it?

~~~
leftnode
I made it free to get a lot of users using it, and then I'm going to charge
for the 2.0 version.

~~~
edge17
best of luck, think this through carefully. I had some software that had some
3-4m downloads for free. We later put out a pay-for version, the conversion
rate was quite low (as expected) but netted some okay money for starving kids
just out of college.

------
wushupork
I've have/had many side projects that make small side income.

1\. A tshirt site. This one is a step above cafepress. I designed all my
tshirts but also had them printed on really nice alternative apparel shirts
and people bought them.

2\. A photo sharing widget that integrated w/ Flickr and SmugMug that people
would embed into their blog/website. I put Adwords on the site.

3\. A hot or not site for twitter with ads on the site. This still
surprisingly generates more traffic than all my other sites combined.

4\. A social media dashboard site w/ some decent analytics. This was geared
towards marketing and pr firms.

5\. Put up a Youtube review of the Iron Gym Pullup bar that did really well
SEO wise and got rev share from Google/Youtube. I get a check from Google
every 6 months or so.

6\. An instant book search site - <http://Shelfluv.com> \- got a few dollars
from affiliate sales.

7\. An iPad app that shows inspirational business quotes.

------
tansey
I have some trading models and financial tools that I license. They're
currently generating about $200/month, but I'm expecting that to increase
within a year. I'm also working on an iPhone game with two of my roommates
right now that I'm hoping will bring in a couple hundred a month, but that's
just a dream at the moment.

The tools probably took around 80 hours. The models probably are hard to say
because a lot of discovery was done over time; actually implementing them only
took a weekend. The iPhone app is probably going to take around 40 hours, but
it's as much a learning experience and labor of love as it is an effort to
make serious money.

I'm starting to focus on looking for passive income, though. I am entering a
PhD program in the Fall, so an extra ~$1000/mo will make a huge difference in
standard of living.

------
yahelc
While I was unemployed, I did conversions of sites to WordPress themes. I was
fast enough at it that I could devote most of my time to other endeavors.
Since I didn't do content creation for my domain, SEO was out of the question,
so all my traffic came through AdWords. With well targeted keywords, my CPA
was ~$20, and the average client took 5-10 hours of work, since they'd often
want content migrations, too. It took a week until I made my first dollar, and
for the few months I did it, I brought in ~$700 a week, while never taking up
more 20-25 hours a week, while also doing more committed, serious freelance
jobs. I dropped it, though, when I got a full time job, though I'd probably
pick it up again if I found easy to work with subcontractors.

------
reynolds
I finally jumped into ios development. Not really on the side since it's been
my main focus lately. I went from not knowing any ios stuff to launching my
first app in a week. I'm about to put my third app on the app store. I'm not
making much money but there's a ton of potential.

------
dools
I make between $500 and $1000 a month off 8centsms.com - but we can't send to
the US :) Should really plug in Twilio or something one of these days ...

------
donny
Yes, I tried my hands on "hardware" stuff, specifically iPad cases.

<http://millswyn.com/> <http://worqbench.posterous.com/>

Have a few sales. Not complaining.

------
allenbrunson
i wrote an iOS card game that makes me about 300 bucks a month. i do almost no
maintenance on it anymore. it would probably do a whole lot better if it had
any kind of marketing behind it, but it's not really in my nature.

~~~
perlgeek
> it would probably do a whole lot better if it had any kind of marketing
> behind it, but it's not really in my nature.

I've read quite some remarks like that here and in other places, and I've said
it about some pages of mine too.

Maybe it would be a good idea to build a marketplace where developers and
marketing people can get together, and share the additional profit that the
additional marketing generates.

If anybody wants to take up that idea, I'd be happy to be your first customer.
Currently I'm just working on other projects (see another reply from me in
this thread, for example), so I won't do it myself any time soon.

~~~
Zecc
> Maybe it would be a good idea to build a marketplace where > developers and
> marketing people can get together, and share > the additional profit that
> the additional marketing generates.

Sounds like something someone could pick up as a side-project and maybe even
earn some passive income. :)

------
lachyg
I started a company this January based of a product I saw in a book that I
knew would become incredibly popular. It brought it in quite substantial
income for the following 2 months, and I sold it in the third :-).

I do this quite often!

~~~
bigbang
Cool. Could you give more details? Not about the particular site(though that
helps), but how do you sell sites often? Do you sell it in places like flippa?

~~~
lachyg
I find Flippa and similar sites to be much too much hassle. I just work my
network and ask if anyone would be interested / if they would know anyone that
might e interested. Theres usually a match :)

------
iuguy
I used to have a site that was set up for pancake day, stuff to do on pancake
day, about a couple of hundred different pancake recipes and so on. Every year
I'd make about £200 in advertising revenue, which would pay for the hosting
for other projects, some general shenanigans and (of course) my pancake day.
My plan was to do something similar for other temporally-targeted holidays but
valentines day was extremely competitive and easter was too big. In the end I
swapped the site for a friend's laptop.

------
x03
I'm a fairly eager, though passive, Hacker News reader and it seemed that a
lot of startups were getting the message about what exactly they do a little
jumbled: I imagine it's their own entrepreneurial excitement bouncing around
with their own understanding of what they know they do, and so presume others
will, to.

So I setup a service (<http://www.pearwords.com>) to help startups get their
message across to sites like Hacker News, The Startup Foundry, TechCrunch,
etc, and, to use on their own websites to give customers a "two-second
summary".

We hit profitability in our first 24 hours and we've have had a steady stream
of customers since (some of whom are working on some really cool stuff --
communities like HN really are fully of some brilliant people). We've spent
zero-dollars on advertising and have only posted a couple of comments
(literally two) around on sites where people might be interested.

I attribute our success so far to: being very specific in what we do; high-
quality work; being very quick; a clean website; and being cheap, though I
think we could charge a fair bit more with little impact on orders -- we're
just keeping it low for launch time while we really ramp up.

------
wiradikusuma
I'm developing a penny auction website for local market
<http://www.lelanggokil.com/>. The auctions are not even started yet and I'm
already getting money (albeit small). But I'm still at loss since the
marketing cost (FB Ad and AdWords) outweigh the profit (I spent about $40/day
for the last 2 weeks).

The website actually acts as a proof of concept as I plan to white-label it
(that's why the stuff being auctioned are not expensive). But if the PoC
works, I will focus on it.

My problems so far: \- Credit card and PayPal are very rare, I must rely on
manual work (user banks in, I check my bank account balance, I approve/reject)
\- Negative sentiment against penny auction \- Customer support (manual work)

To be honest, this is my first non-consulting real personal project (that is,
a product, spends money, gets money). So even if this project fails, I still
learn from it and reuse a lot of its software parts.

~~~
taphangum
What's your email address?

~~~
wiradikusuma
if you don't mind, can you drop your email in
<http://www.lelanggokil.com/do/feedback>

it'll be automatically forwarded to me. please ignore the language (it's
Bahasa). my website is i18n ready, but i'm just too lazy to make English
version (only less than 20% Indonesians speak English).

~~~
taphangum
OK. Sent it. :)

------
agentultra
I just bought a few domains recently and thought, "Why haven't I done this
sooner?"

It's still hard working on these things with a full time job, but I'm hoping
one of them will come through and I can start a business of my own. I used to
freelance, but got tired of it pretty fast. A small business would be nice.

------
user24
I run a few wallpaper sites which make profit on the domain registration fee
(eg <http://geekwallpapers.com> ) and also the adverts on my blog make me some
pocket money :)

The blog I've been growing for six years, the wallpaper sites are pretty much
instantly profitable for me. But we are talking about £40 per year. So like I
said, profit on the domain name, probably not profitable when you take into
account time spent developing them.

------
barnsweetman
<http://www.StatusCrap.com> <http://www.TodaysBigDouche.com>
<http://www.Whack-a-Deal.com>

Status Crap took about a year to make some income (currently gets about
250,000 page views a month and growing between 10-40% each month). I've been
trying to launch side projects since I was 17 though haha!

------
damoncali
I have two side project sites that make about $500/month, mostly from
LinkWorth links, but some from AdSense was well.

LinkWorth is nice because you an make decent money without any traffic. You
need to have the right niche, a modicum of pagerank, and it helps to pay the
small fee to promote your site. It also takes a long time to sell the links.
My first one took 3 weeks.

But the last few months have seen a decline. Perhaps people aren't buying
links as much any more.

------
thenduks
I'd been working on a bug tracker as a side project for almost a year
(strictly as an off-hours hobby type thing) but as I got closer to an (awesome
:)) working product we decided to turn it into the real thing. Thus my 'day
job' employer (now co-founders of the new company) were the first customer. In
fact, we've been quietly sitting on it for a while, maybe it's time to post an
Ask HN...

------
hemalk
I made a website that finds where to buy tracks from DJ tracklists. Had to
wait a couple of months for it's first £1 as I had no efficient way to drive
traffic to is (the CPA from PPC was way too steep). It makes a few quid a
month and pays for itself. Funnily enough it generates affiliate commission
from Amazon, and that pays for the hosting on EC2...

------
wenbert
i have a lyrics site that earns 100usd every year thru adsense. it runs on
zendframework(tried others but zf wins by a huge margin in caching on shared
hosting). the income has paid for my blog, domain names, my brothers site, and
a couple of beers.

------
kschua
Yup. A call filtering application with the ability to filter off unimportant
calls from family and friends and allow urgent calls from these people
through.

Took about 2 weeks to get the first sale. Now it is selling at a rate of 1
copy a day

------
swah
Are those running on your name or do you guys created a company?

~~~
perlgeek
I've registered a business without creating a full scale company (which limits
maximal income, but I'm far from that limit anyway). Don't know if that's a
German oddity, or available everywhere.

------
xtrycatchx
Yes, but it's not yet up and running. It's on its prototype stage. I'm
planning too to deploy it as a free service. Don't know yet if I'm gonna
monetize it or not.

------
HeyLaughingBoy
Hardware. I have a small device that reads digital sensors and outputs data
via RS232 serial. Made first dollar (actually about $100 of them) with first
sale.

------
nerfhammer
I posted about it awhile ago, but <http://www.dotcomroulette.com> still makes
me a few dollars

------
zackattack
I have not updated my blog ZacharyBurt.com this month but it has already
generated $8.84 in commissions from Amazon affiliate links. It generated $1.96
in its first month of operation, when it drew 1,035 pageviews.

------
Bravais
Very small, very passive side project. <http://goo.gl/tPPJz>

Wrote it for my own use as a better "alternative" to browse for Kindle books
after too much frustration with Amazon's site for browsing about.

Since it works via affiliate fees, between friends and family I easily made my
first dollar in the first hour of going "live" with it.

A few dollars come in here and there. A passive, side, small project for sure.
But I still add stuff during the weekend.

------
fleitz
Currently putting together some adsense sites. Looks very promising.

------
alphamale
Just launched my Guy's Lifestyle site. Q&A and advice from Alphas. Expect it
to be HUGE bros. I will be building it up in my spare time.

<http://www.alphamal.es/>

~~~
hparra
Is that really Wandi on your site?

And fill out your "About" page. That's always one the first sections I look
at.

------
systemtrigger
Yes.

~~~
intended
Why was this down-voted? a request was made for people with
successful/profitable passive income sources to chime in. I believe the author
responded to that.

~~~
prog
While the answer is technically correct, its not very useful. If this entire
thread just consisted of just Yes and No answers there would not be much value
in it.

~~~
intended
I see your point. I was keeping in mind this comment - "Just to test this out,
if anyone is staying quiet about their project for fear of attracting
competition, could they please reply to this comment and say so? Don't worry,
your silence is totally understandable :)"
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358309>

After reading that comment, I felt a simple yes/no answer seemed a viable
answer (at least to me). I agree though, that this response would detract from
the general trend and usefulness. (Although getting a neg score seems a bit
harsh). Thanks for the response.

