
Ask HN: Fastest route to $2000/mo. cashflow, worry free and conscience clear - jharrison
In the vein of "You don't need a million dollars..." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025122), I'm wondering what the fastest way to get the effective monthly return on investing a million in a safe, worry free, hands-off investment is. I think that roughly translates to a couple thousand dollars a month depending on where you insert inflation. I included "conscience clear" in the description because I personally would want to be entirely above-board (no "spam viagra ads" and the like).<p>Just to be clear, I'm not in dire straits or in need of a million dollars. I'm just curious.<p>Additional clarification:
For this purpose I'd like to assume someone doesn't have a million dollars or the prospect of receiving such in a lump sum. How would they go about building up to a cash flow that would be equivalent to having a million dollars in a safe, hands-off investment?<p>edit: Apparently I don't know the difference between conscious and conscience. Fixed.
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whalesalad
I made about 10k off sales from a WordPress theme over the course of about a
year. Not that much money, but it's a GREAT feeling to wake up in the morning
and see money in your account. I'd be walking through the mall with my
girlfriend at the time and tell her, "just sold a premium copy! want ice
cream?" Very, very motivating. It gets to the point that you get a "taking-
candy-from-a-baby" feeling that leads you to really try and improve your
product day-after-day, to keep your initial customers happy, and to get more
sales.

So, I agree that a niche software product you're actually passionate about
will help. I happened to be in a fortunate position where a demand existed for
a one-off product I had created a while back, all I had to do was fill the
void. Customers were already looking to me for it. I feel like a total fucking
idiot for not doing it sooner. I could have made probably 3x the money, just
guestimating. Find something that inspires you personally, because that is
what will push you to completing it.

I got laid off from a startup position that was caving in. I had a small
severance to live off of, and had always wanted to build this idea.
Unfortunately while at the startup I was also working on a second one on the
side (death, I know) so I never really had time to do anything but those two
things. Getting laid off was perfect. I sprinted as hard as I possibly could
for 3 weeks, designing, coding, and building a sale site with a mini
activation server. It was loads of fun. It was also very exciting to look back
on those three weeks and realize that I had done a great job making the right
decision when hit with a small road block. Asking myself things like, "Where
does this fit with the 80/20 rule? Can I launch this feature in a second
update a week later? Do I need it at all? Oh, wait, these two features can
easily be combined into one. The technology behind the two won't be nearly as
cool, but users will probably prefer it." All of that, I feel, is what lead to
my success. Getting the product out as soon as possible, without cutting any
essential corners. We've all heard it before, but living it was great. I guess
I pretty much built my own "nano" startup.

Damnit, now I want to do it again.

~~~
rms
I get similar emails throughout the day and while it might be healthy for me
to get the continuous stream of positive reward, sometimes it is demotivating
to me. I start the day by waking up in the afternoon and checking my email,
and I've already generated my wealth for the day without doing anything.

~~~
jrockway
This is significantly less demotivating than working your ass off for a year
with the promise of a promotion and a raise, only to be told that you won't be
getting a promotion or raise at the end of the year.

This happened to me today and I totally understand why people want to go the
startup route. Ever hour invested into your startup is an hour that gets you
closer to where you want to be.

~~~
jteo
Hard work is not always a necessary condition for success.

~~~
veritas9
Being lazy is NEVER a condition for success :).

~~~
danenania
A lot of market demand is driven by laziness, so some degree of insightful
laziness can pay off.

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patio11
I'd recommend a niche software product, preferably one with recurring revenue,
but you could do it with a day or two of consulting if you have skills and
contacts.

~~~
cvos
create a niche software product with recurring revenue in a day or 2? Sign me
up, i'll take 10!

~~~
patio11
I meant that if you were willing to count a few days a month as "not really
working", then you can trivially bill $2k quickly. Otherwise, niche software
is an option.

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robryan
Usually if something is easy, fast and worry free to get to that kind of wage,
which is very comfortable living in the vast majority of locations, there are
probably many people attempting to do said thing.

Really you need to leverage some kind of skills to go after something either
outside the low hanging fruit, or create something that people wouldn't have
considered to have a good enough market. Of course there is an element of
luck, if you can make some apps and get them to take off, the mobile ad market
seems to be like the early web advertising at the moment, probably returning
above the mark. Something like this for example:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1870960>

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Kilimanjaro
The fastest route would be an iPad app. Make an ABC book for kids about
animals, or fruits, or things, with big pics and nice visuals. Kids love them,
parents love them, instant winner.

~~~
prawn
Make a kids book with some interactivity. e.g., about a family picnic, but
with little ants or bugs invading the story space. The child has to move the
food around to escape the ants, squish them (might not go down well with many
parents) or brush aside the bugs, etc.

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lessthanideal
What you're really looking for is a product. I'll even wager you are probably
looking for a product that requires minimal unit production and distribution
costs. That puts you in a class of products that are electronic, or products
that you can convert from an electronic representation to a physical one and
have a supplier to deal with those physical challenges (like shipping) for
you. People often forget the 2nd option, but it's there.

A short list of items that meet this qualification: software, writing (books,
novellas, blogs, etc.), digital art, digital photography, music (original),
sound of other types (background sounds that can be used in the production of
music, for example), designs/instructions (for building something) and a
probably a bunch of other stuff. If I missed a big one, please reply to this
post with it. You should also be looking for free resources online that you
can leverage. Are there free services that you can leverage to make your
business easier to manage? Can you do some work (collection or processing) of
some freely available data that might give it additional value which you can
then extract through sales or in some other way?

Because your goal is to make a living and give yourself some extra freedom,
you don't have to overengineer this. This isn't your masterpiece. It doesn't
have to be pretty or break new ground necessarily. Don't chrome plate it if
you're writing software for it or to support it.

Frankly, I just started taking advantage of this type of business and I feel
almost guilty. The code isn't that great. The idea isn't that great. It's not
something to write home about in terms of engineering a solution. But it makes
me money even if I don't touch it for a month at a time. I'm not living off
this business yet, but I am seeing good growth and I see a virtually infinite
path to expanding the digitally based offerings of the business (more
offerings = more money).

------
calbear81
So I'm not sure if you're asking what are some business investments or you're
asking about financial vehicles that can generate $2K/month of cashflow off of
$1M of initial investment.

One option during this down market is to purchase rental property, you'll have
to do some digging but the most depressed markets are 70% off of their peaks
and most pros will tell you it won't drop much more than that (but it's not
ZERO risk). You need to crunch the numbers and then renovate and find tenants
but I know of a few small investors that own 15-20 rental properties and can
generate ~10% margins monthly and you have the potential upside of property
appreciation.

If you don't want to deal too much with getting hands on and managing a
business, it's conceivable to be pretty low-risk to go with high dividend /
low growth blue chip stocks. For example, AT&T is at $29/share right now. It's
been paying $.42/share per quarter so about $1.60/year. It'll move around a
bit but assume that they won't get screwed when the iPhone goes multi-carrier,
you are talking about $1M for 34,483 shares which will pay $13,793/quarter in
dividends alone which is $4,597 per month. Assume 40% taxation rate and you're
$2,758 post taxes. You can use any finance site to screen for companies with
high dividend yields. Keep in mind that high dividend usually means low risk
of stock price movement but there is still risk.

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gregjor
Conscience is the word you want. And cash flow is not the same thing as
income. There's an old Monty Python sketch called "How To Do It" where the
explanation of how to get rich is "First, get lots of money."

~~~
jharrison
Thanks for the correction and clarification.

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keiferski
Make a simple web app that sells for $15 a month. You'll only need to get
roughly 150 customers to make $2000. Or change the price and recalculate.

~~~
iworkforthem
Alternatively, make a simple web app that subscribe for $5 a month, 400
subscribers will get you the same $2k. People are more willingly to spare a $5
change.

~~~
mmap
This has a strong element of "build it and they'll come."

It leaves out a large part of the problem of selling something. How will
enough interested people discover the "simple web app"? If there are
competitors (chances are there will be) and the app's page is in the 12th
results page of Google and PPC keywords cost $5 per click, getting enough
relevant traffic to ultimately reach 400 subscribers can be quite a lot of
hard (and costly) work.

As an indication, if you look at point 5 in this survey
<http://webappsurvey2009.techcrunch.com/> you will see that ~50% of marketing
sites of web apps got 0-1,000 visitors a month.

It can be done but don't just expect to "build it and they will come."

Also, a book that sums up good points about selling a web app (especially if
you are a developer) is <http://www.startupbook.net/>

Good luck!

~~~
pontifier
It's got to be coincidence that 40.48% of the marketing sites got less than
1000 visitors, and 40.48% of the businesses in the survey had a single founder
right?

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Kilimanjaro
I just coded <http://boog.me> over the weekend hoping it may generate some
revenue while running unattended.

If it brings at least $100 a month, I'll work on nine more sites like that to
make a grand.

~~~
andy_boot
I dont know if you're joking or not. But how is that going to generate
revenue? I mean the site is cool and useful and all. But its just anoth
<http://mailinator.com/> clone.

~~~
Kilimanjaro
Yes it is a mailinator clone. I hope to provide a better service with more
features like auto-forward, private inboxes and stuff like that.

Ad revenue. Mailinator claims they get a million emails a day, that's a lot of
money in ad revenue. My goal is to dethrone mailinator as the de facto temp
email provider.

~~~
zinxq
Paul from Mailinator here.

We get, on average 15million emails a day with peaks much higher.

Definitely don't confuse that with ad revenue. No one ever ever said we get
millions of users a day. Alexa or Quantcast can show you real user traffic -
please consider ad revenue to be more realistically based off those numbers.

Simply emails. Pure spam. Once a user signs you up - you're getting spam for
them - forever.

If you think of a dead-simple feature Mailinator doesn't have - its because
we've probably tried it and backed it out from abuse.

With no exaggeration, we get one or more subpoena inquiries or subpoenas a
month. On top of that, we have more code in anti-abuse systems than features.
A sad reality but otherwise we'd be long gone. Despite claims of Mailinator
being often banned, we go a long way to prevent people from using a feature
like forwarding to automatically do an internet vote thousands of times. While
that would be fun, we'd be banned in short order and that helps no one.

The most interesting point to me is that you need very strong infrastructure,
servers and bandwidth to handle the load if you become popular. In other
words, there are many many Mailinator copycats and historically, once a
copycat reaches a certain level of popularity, the owners need to make a
decision.

Paying for all that isn't easy. As far as I know - this is exactly what
happened to the now defunct disposable email sites Pookmail, 2prong, and
dodgeit.

Death by popularity without revenue.

~~~
Kilimanjaro
Hi Paul, thanks for your insight. Wise words I'll always remember when facing
adversity. This project is just to get a couple of bucks a month, nothing
else. Running on top of google infrastructure I'll try to see how much it can
handle without breaking apart, I'll be reporting on any scaling issues.

This will be a great learning experience for sure.

~~~
haploid
"My goal is to dethrone mailinator as the de facto temp email provider."

"This project is just to get a couple of bucks a month, nothing else."

Which is it ?

~~~
chad_oliver
Those statements were said at different times, before and after new
information was available. Kilimanjaro is working to a plan that can adapt;
this is something to admire not mock. Personally, I reckon what he's doing is
great, and I'm also impressed by Paul's openness and willingness to give
advice.

~~~
zinxq
I agree. Kilimanjaro's enthusiasm is just what you need as an entrepreneur :)

In some sense, my "openness" might be too much reality. He may find the
business model he needs (and I was serious when I said there were 10's of
copycats already - good idea to check those out for ideas)

And, of course, Mailinator is surely just a "weekend project" for me too. It
just has an advantage of a good few years worth of weekends.

------
JasonPunyon
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

~~~
jharrison
My mistake. Thank you for pointing that out.

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jraines
Take a few hours to scan the "recently sold" listings on flippa.com and you
will have a few answers to that question.

~~~
slindstr
Be wary of the more expensive sites that sell - something seems fishy about
selling a wordpress blog with no revenue, no page rank, and no site stats
attached to the auction.

I recently asked a question about this:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2000924>

HN gave me a lot of great insight to Flippa

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coffeenut
Leverage existing equity as collateral and purchase one or several investment
properties (very carefully of course). There are some incredible deals to be
found right now.

~~~
thrashr888
I may have this opportunity as early as January and would like to be smart
about it. I can leverage existing property equity at ~3% APR and I'm sure I
can use it wisely to pull in much better than that. Any example ideas? I'm
just now starting to look into this.

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feint
I take a multi stream approach to the problem. Half my income comes from a web
app I built (task.fm) and the other half from my personal site - I just review
the books I read and products I use and earn through affiliate commissions. A
couple of pages on my personal site make over $500 a month in commissions,
because they are highly targeted (first result in Google).

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rishi
The fastest way to $2k/mo in your own business is a lot of hard work.

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cheald
Create a product and sell subscriptions. Even at a low price point, if you
offer something people are willing to pay for on a recurring basis, you'll end
up with a steady and growing income stream. Niche products work here - find an
itch in a niche market you participate in, scratch it, and then charge other
people to have you scratch the itch for them.

I've done side/hobby projects of both the ad-driven and subscription-driven
flavors, and the subscription-driven stuff gets a lot more profitable a lot
faster. It does incur additional stress, because you have direct paying
customers to take care of, but depending on the nature of the product, it
might not need that much support. On the flip side, it's friggin' _amazing_ to
watch payments come in on a daily basis, then look back in a week and realize
that you've got your rent paid for.

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chubs
Seems like the common thread here is to 'start a web app, charge a recurring
fee'...

Any suggestions for such an app that people here would find useful and willing
to pay, say, $10 a month for, that would be small enough to be developed by
one guy? I can't think of any ideas off the top of my head.

~~~
rhizome
A better to-do list. Seriously.

~~~
chubs
My best idea in this vein is a multi-user todo list for small companies, where
people can assign todos to each other, and mark their own todos as depending
on someone else. That way you could always see what you need to get done, that
isn't being blocked by someone else.

~~~
sgallant
You're describing wedoist.com I've struggled with finding the right to do list
for my partner and I until I stumbled on this. Here's a great interview with
the founder on techzing [http://techzinglive.com/page/538/90-tz-panel-samuel-
clay-ami...](http://techzinglive.com/page/538/90-tz-panel-samuel-clay-ami..).

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jaywalker
Perhaps, "a money machine" is a better word than "hands-off investment."

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chubs
Make a few iphone / ipad apps? Start an ebay business?

