Ask HN: Freelancers who transitioned to passive income, how did you do it? - freeee
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seanwilson
Try to package up as a product the experience you're selling when you're doing
consultancy work e.g. as a book, a SaaS, a mobile app, an online course.
Jumping between companies as you freelance lets you see common pain points
that you could address and manual work that you could create a product for to
automate. It's probably harder to do this if you're on a salary in the same
company on the same project for years too.

[https://www.checkbot.io/](https://www.checkbot.io/) is a paid Chrome
extension I built that automates many of the checks I used to do manually
during contracts when optimising the SEO, speed and security of websites. I
found many developers and content editors on websites I worked with weren't
checking for web best practices because of lack of knowledge + time and
because doing manual checks is error-prone + tedious.

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DrNuke
That’s it, really. Adding that passive is a bit of a myth, you will actually
become a salesman for your personal brand.

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seanwilson
It's possible to get to a stage eventually where you're making money daily
without needing to put in a full working day every day (e.g. selling a
SaaS/app/ebook, consultancy retainers), but that's not likely to happen
without many hours invested beforehand somewhere.

I'm guessing it's extremely rare you can create + sell something with minimal
hours invested with little specialised experience though.

I agree though, I think you're always going to have some level of ongoing
responsibility as well e.g. responding to customers/clients, keeping an eye on
server issues, checking up on contractors, marketing.

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tstegart
I have an Amazon affiliate site that I've posted about previously. As the
other poster suggested, passive is a bit of a myth, its actually quite a bit
of work. But its always at my pace and no one is looking over my shoulder. I
can craft things in the winter when I'm at home a lot (I live in Wisconsin),
and then they make me money in the summer when I don't want to put in as much
work. It's enjoyable work, I virtually meet a lot of wonderful leather
crafters (its a watch strap website), and its fun to post about stuff they
have created. Some of it is incredibly beautiful. All in all I like it as a
side project, but I'm not sure if it could ever replace my job income totally.
It would be placing too much importance on one vendor.

