

How do you fail to make money passively? (Passive Income) - fogonthedowns

Inspired by another question, and we all have these experiences. How do you fail to generate passive income? What have you tried? Which apps have failed to take off? Who is to blame?
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smartician
To learn Android development, I created a simple vocabulary learning app, a
mash-up of iSpeech, Google voice recognition, and even some Instagram thrown
in. There was some interest, despite zero marketing (currently > 20k total
installs), and I was approaching $200/month in ad income.

Then Google disabled my Adsense account because of "invalid click activity",
which also meant my Admob account was gone, since they're now linked. I moved
to a combination of other ad networks, but ad revenue was slashed to a quarter
of its former glory. Appeals to Google were fruitless, and to this day I have
no idea why exactly I was banned.

For my next app, I'll probably avoid the "free with ads" model.

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jonaphin
Instimage.com here.

We haven't "failed" yet. But we're dying slowly. No one cares for Instimage,
and there's no money backing it up.

No Investors, no angels, just a bootstrap and no boot.

Reminds me of companies that call themselves "startups" for 10 years...

Shouldn't one start-up then get moving?

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fogonthedowns
Let me get the ball rolling. My first app was called Barcoden. It generated
barcodes for science labs. The debt crisis and cuts to schools ensued. Total
sales: zero dollars.

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AtTheLast
We built a SAAS product that would allow merchants to build their own coupon
landing page or coupon site. It never got any traction. It was a super niche
product and none of us wanted to go around selling it. We spent a year
building it and simply lost interest in the product as more time elapsed. We
should have taken a step back from the project after a few months and realized
that it wasn't worth our time to continue working on it.

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pdenya
[http://inspecthq.com/](http://inspecthq.com/) \- clipboard and camera
replacement for construction/inspection companies. Had a large (enterprise
level) company interested for almost 2 years before we gave up.

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coopdog
I built a tool for visual interpretation of test results against requirements.
It was pretty cool and I'm sure large engineering companies would use it if
they knew they needed it.

I learned that you should go niche, but find a niche with a problem that
customers KNOW they have. Otherwise you have to educate them before even
having the chance so closing a sale, which is too expensive.

I'm backing up and making simpler tools for the domain, this one could become
an advanced feature for big enterprise.

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cprncus
I have been working on a desktop application--not yet ready--since the Bush
administration.

