
Ask HN: What is your best passive income 2019? - sa-mao
Time to ask again :)<p>Any side projects, Games, OSS.
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mikekchar
This might sound strange, but I don't like the term "passive income". It
sounds like a scam. Probably some people actually _want_ a scam, but I think
there is a better way of putting it. Profit is roughly "sales - costs".
Normally costs are scaled by labour. The higher the volume, the more labour
and therefore the higher the costs.

You can categorise the shapes of these curves. In a really dysfunctional
company, the amount of labour your need per unit will increase as volume
increases. A good example of this might be some bus companies where the cost
per rider increases as the number of riders increase -- you get popular and
you go out of business.

Consulting companies tend to have a linear relationship. The more you sell,
the more you have to do. However, the per unit cost doesn't really change
based on volume. Manufacturing companies tend to have a less than linear
relationship. The per unit cost decreases with volume. You get the "efficiency
of scale".

With computers we can create services with a very nearly constant relationship
between volume and labour. In other words, I do the work once and then there
is no other cost to increase sales. Of course, from a business perspective,
this is ideal. You do the work and then you can scale the business without
having to invest more money.

The thing I dislike about the term "passive income" is that it implies that
you are getting free money. It's not true. For this kind of constant cost
business, you've front loaded the costs. The first one costs as much as the
first million. In fact, you may be in the red for a _very_ long time (or
forever... "Any side projects, Games, OSS" ;-) ). For this reason, I'd much
prefer (the infinitely less catchy) term "front loaded business". I guess it
will never catch on, but I wish we could discuss this topic without having to
always derail into get rich quick and "living the dream of money without work"
schemes.

~~~
Spooky23
Passive describes the level of effort, not the investment. Usually passive
income is rent-seeking.

Property management is a great example. I can buy a cheap house in a lousy
neighborhood, make a modest capital investment, sign up with Section 8 and get
pre-screened tenants with guaranteed cash flow. My marginal work output is
very low - a few hours a month.

I used to lease a few acres of land to a farmer. The only work was meeting to
have a cup of coffee and exchange the check and paying the taxes. :)

~~~
beatgammit
And your work per month could be contracted out, so you don't actually need to
do any more effort than meeting with your account periodically to make sure
you're making money.

~~~
Spooky23
I know of a guy who has 3 employees who coordinate aboit 800-100 properties.

He probably turns over something like $20M, and can use the portfolio to write
off profits from other businesses.

~~~
marktangotango
Is that 80-100 or 800-1000? I have one single family rental and a new
roof(hail damage), busted water pipe, and toilet wax seal cost me $5000 this
year and that was with insurance covering 2/3 the roof) That was my profit for
several years. Ie I don’t see how this is profitable to anyone.

~~~
maerF0x0
A big part of that game is capital costs vs inflation.

Someone who bought their home before a price boom can often turn a profit
because the rents follow the price to purchase (roughly speaking).

So if you acquired a bunch of properties in 2008 after there was a crisis, its
likely that they're very profitable (month to month) now

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borplk
Cue the must-have semantic pedantic argument about "passive" not being passive
and so on.

Yes we get it. Stop fussing about the terminology.

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odomojuli
I run a clothing store online.

All of the order processing and fulfillment is handled automatically.

I do no marketing or advertisement beyond social media.

It's pretty nice. Sometimes I sell meme shirts that generate $3k in a month if
I'm feeling particularly clever.

I was able to bootstrap this business for like $12 for a domain name and a
free trial of Shopify which gave me enough runway to scale.

Been doing this for over a year, I still basically do nothing.

[https://odomojuli.store/](https://odomojuli.store/)

~~~
thatcat
Excellent America painting, really captures the passivity of the country and
the spirit of this thread.

[https://odomojuli.store/products/america](https://odomojuli.store/products/america)

~~~
nickthemagicman
It's not loading for me.

~~~
cafebabbe
Isn't that the joke.

~~~
nickthemagicman
:)

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owenwil
It really depends what 'passive' is defined as, but I can share some:

\- Recharged - $2720 / month. I write a briefing once a morning about the
technology industry, about 350 people pay to receive it + sponsor something
without advertising or nonsense tech stories. Still growing!
[https://char.gd/recharged](https://char.gd/recharged)

\- Write Together (new project, but hey) - $1,200 / month. I built a platform
for learning to Write with others, based around building habits/streaks.
[https://writetogether.space](https://writetogether.space)

Now the thing is, both of these require maintenance, but not like a full-time
job: I push code, write on them, etc. But they're not fully passive, so it's
quite a specific difference -- still wouldn't trade working on them for
anything, however.

~~~
csomar
How do you get your customers?

~~~
runjake
It seems like he gets traction by posting quality content. I got hooked onto
him via his excellent posts on switching from Mac to Windows and iPhone to
Android.

Since, he's posted some good stuff on various Windows and Android gear. He
seems fairly straight-up and calm with his opinions, which I appreciate.

------
throwaway98121
No side projects. The little time I have outside of work and family, I read or
browse hacker news before falling asleep. I did take vacation recently and
play The Witcher 3, which ruined gaming for me.

I have about $200k spread thoughout some index funds and individual stocks
that all pay dividends in my post tax accounts. I reinvest all that income and
the taxes are kind of annoying to deal with, but’s it’s better than nothing.

I also have a high yield savings account. A big chunk of my total cash is tied
up here because I’d rather stay liquid. I think the rate is now 2% annual or
just north of. It gets me $300 a month. I just save it and let it grow, aside
from taxes on the interest.

~~~
siruncledrew
Putting money in holdings like stocks, funds, and other investments seems like
the closest thing to “passive income” based on how I would expect “passive” to
be defined. It’s getting paid to park money in something for some time. If
it’s simple investing like in mutual funds and ETFs, then almost anybody could
handle the level of personal resources that goes into maintaining that source
of income which is mostly just checking the performance and filing taxes once
a year (pretty much this could be accomplished with price notifications and
something like turbotax).

I don’t know, maybe that kind of “passive income” is no longer cool or
desirable.

Every form of passive income requires periodic blips of input, but the
magnitude and frequency of those blips could vary a lot depending on the
business. There’s some forms of passive income that are really like part-time
jobs or require a full-time job worth of effort to launch something. These
don’t seem very passive to me.

I see people preach on the internet how they found some golden opportunity
that lead to raking in thousands of dollars on a monthly basis with minimal
oversight. I’m sure instances of this exist, but frankly I think there’s a lot
that is still unsaid about what was required to pull it off. There’s a group
of people that are instead looking for the snake oil fountain that allows
someone to live like their retired in their 30s but without doing any work.
This is no longer “passive income”, and is instead just another “what’s the
easiest way to become rich” search. The reality is that identifying and
executing a high-ROI opportunity that recurring brings in money with low input
is not as easy as following an A->B->C guide or else every market entrant
would have like a 90% success rate and everyone would already be doing it.

If people genuinely want _passive_ income, then financial investments or
monetizing hobbies (to the extent it’s still enjoyable) seem like a good place
to start for providing a good lifestyle/income balance.

~~~
shanecleveland
"Investment income" is certainly a good example of "passive income." But it
seems when investment income is touted as the only true form of passive
income, it is forgotten that, in most cases, some outlay of effort was
required to first generate the initial investment.

Likewise, many projects that require some initial effort upfront may
eventually produce income with little to no continuing involvement. Passive
income.

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SimianLogic2
I bought a site last summer that sells YouTube intro videos for $5/$10 a pop:
[http://introcave.com](http://introcave.com)

I made about $13k off it, which sounds good but was really only about
$20/hour.

Hoping to grow it quite a bit this year and then start offloading tasks. I
don’t know if I can ever get it truly passive, but that’s the dream.

~~~
kivind
Where did you find the site to buy it?

~~~
SimianLogic2
There are brokers. I used FEInternational.

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jansan
My wife's job.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
Is that really passive though

~~~
h1d
Unless he takes it all.

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cartercole
the first rule of passive income is you don't talk about passive income...
(cuz someone will copy it and end the gravy train)

~~~
swat535
I don't understand this logic.. are you saying you are secretly running a
business operation?

It's virtually impossible for one to prevent competition

If your business idea is so fragile that can be blown away by competition, you
might want to rethink your strategy.

~~~
devbot9
"If your business idea is so fragile that can be blown away by competition,
you might want to rethink your strategy."

It may not be that you "want to rethink your strategy," but if you stumbled
into becoming a one man show for a super niche unrivaled business app, why
talk about that on a forum of developers?

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verylongname
I inherited a house and condo from my parents. They are in California and
purchased long ago, so the property taxes on them are ridiculously low (the
condo, worth about 700K has a property tax valuation under 150K ... thank you
California taxpayers).

I rent them both out I pay a management company to handle maintenance. I
screen tenants myself, and so far I've been lucky getting tenants who stay for
fairly long periods. I clear about 5K/month after maintenance fees, taxes and
insurance. Its very little work.

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kohanz
A blog I wrote about 5 years ago on obtaining your licensing as a professional
engineer includes affiliate links to a site that sells packages that help with
the application process. It's a very niche area but earned me about $5k in
2018 and is what I consider passive income at this point (haven't contributed
to the blog in years). That amount was about double 2017, so I'm interested to
see how much growth is left.

~~~
enjoyitasus
Sounds pretty cool and very passive. Do you mind sharing how long it took you
build that audience, community and content to reach critical mass?

~~~
kohanz
Wrote the blog about 5 years ago, to a non-existent audience. The blog writing
was simply to motivate myself to complete the application, which is an arduous
process and, for me, was optional career-wise. At first I did things like
create a Twitter account, follow people, tweet it out, etc, but that didn't
work at all. I basically had negligible traffic for the first year at least.
Then Google organically started picking it up because I had written useful
content in an underserved niche - one of the things that got me writing the
blog was searching for free help in the first place and not finding anything.
Even after a couple of years, I was earning maybe $15/month in AdSense. Then
the affiliate site reached out to me out of the blue, we tried some tests, and
they failed miserably (no one converted). Months later he came back to me with
an actual affiliate program, we tried it and it slow started to work and has
scaled up to what I described above.

So to summarize, by far most of my time was spent writing the blog posts and
watching my non-existent analytics. Nothing I actively did to market the site
(and I did very little) worked. It was a project that didn't intend to make
money, that ended up making money.

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Giorgi
Passive income is like a winning at lottery, and those who won will not invite
competition.

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marketgod
I trade options. I used to post the plans for free for people to follow but it
was really time consuming, so I would post every now and then. Someone asked
to see all my plans, so I created a script to read it via my brokerage account
and post it to Discord/e-Mail. Now, I just continue buying and selling options
when my system tells me to and it messages the channel. The most time
consuming part is advertising which I sometimes do. I plan to automatically
post free plans to different social media platforms (randomly) in the future
and that would make it completely passive most likely.

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dsaavy
For the past couple years I’ve been running a pet supply business focused on
eco friendly and high quality toys, treats, collars, etc.

Originally started as a T-shirt company specializing in dog puns but expanded
a couple years in. The T-shirts are all printed and fulfilled by a US company
and I have the pet supply inventory at my house so it’s quick to ship. Not
entirely passive but only takes about 5-10 hours each week.

Been gaining momentum recently so it’s been an increasingly better income
source.

[https://www.casualfuriday.com](https://www.casualfuriday.com)

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Random_Person
The only TRUELY passive income I have is a YouTube video, unedited, published
in 2012 that generates me $500-$1,500 a year. I do absolutely nothing to the
video to promote it. YouTube seems to recommend it every fall and it has been
a nice little Christmas bonus each year.

Other than that, a few games I've published generate ~$100 a year without
input from me. Everything else requires at least a little bit of my time on a
regular basis and I wouldn't count it as passive.

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countryqt30
I've co-founded (CTO) AlleAktien.de
([https://www.alleaktien.de](https://www.alleaktien.de)) 4 months ago, writing
unseen high-quality and professional long-term stock analyses online.
Capturing ~400 subscribers a EUR 20/month so far. The entire platform is in
German, focussing on the Germany/Switzerland/Austria market :).

Disclaimer: it's a side-project, but not passive. Writing high-quality
analyses is extremely time consuming (30-500 hours each) for ourselves, and
our analysts - but it pays off in compound terms. I personally worked only on
weekends for 4 months on this.

Before that, I was at MIT, UBS bank and McKinsey. Currently, I'm also looking
for additional CTO co-founder opportunities globally (I'm co-located in SF and
Switzerland) - please reach out to jakobm@mit.edu if you want to launch an own
online product or course in a matter of days, and reiterate at an insane speed
(only if you have a solid pitch or massive online followership, OR: if you
know sb. who has such, there's a HUGE finder's fee of several 10k USD).

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tachibana
A self-managed portfolio consisting of various government bonds. Ever since I
started working, I have been saving >30% of my annual income every year. Not
accounting for the income from the portfolio or for raises since, this means
that every year of savings, the portfolio can replace 1.2% of my annual income
(assuming an effective yield of 4%). Been doing this for over 20 years now.

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Adamantcheese
Someone bought like 40 copies of a book I "wrote" back when I posted on HN
about it in April. Otherwise bank interest has been the best.

~~~
h1d
Which country at what rate? Bank interest is like 0.01%.

~~~
tjons
I get 2% on my savings account in the USA. Check out Ally Bank

~~~
gnulinux
2% barely compansates for inflation (2-3% in US).

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apotatopot
I started a sort of joke lifestyle microblog website and a podcast. Not
exactly passive, bit doesn't take up more than a few hours a week. Hoping it
takes off this year to generate more income than other things I've tried.

Https://accidentallyfasting.com

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ninefoxgambit
Ive started working on a themes site for static site generators and it's
already done a few sales. I'm hoping it will be generating more revenue by the
end of 2019!

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atsaloli
I sold a GitLab subscription last year. Today the customer renewed and their
user base doubled. (I'm a reseller.)

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hcs
I designed a t-shirt I wanted to wear, now every few months someone buys one
on Redbubble and I get a few bucks.

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ohiovr
Publishing is a nice income to have if you are lucky enough to win it

~~~
notomorrow
Do you have any success story to share?

~~~
ohiovr
I made an app called Phonics and Reading with McGuffey that made around 80k
over the years (9) and had about 960k free version downloads. Its due for an
update but so far I have not been able to repeat a success like it.

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enjoyitasus
a SaaS product. something i'm starting up such as a job board.

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quickthrower2
Sold some shares.

~~~
quickthrower2
To clarify - this is the most passive income I have ever had. No customers, no
promotion, no headaches.

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exolymph
Legitimately passive income is not a thing.

~~~
kranner
Income from interest is as passive as it gets.

~~~
quickthrower2
But the catch is devaluation of the principal.

~~~
charlesdm
Not if you account for inflation in your calculations..

~~~
tluyben2
Which you should...

~~~
quickthrower2
Then you end up with very little (if any) income :-)

~~~
marketgod
Not really. Look up lazy portfolios by Bogleheads. If you continue to invest
it can grow for you. I mean not at insane levels but definitely a decent
return for many.

