
Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2017? - negrit
Any side projects, Game, OSS, Hacks.
======
Adamantcheese
I got like $10 for the whole year selling books with literally only the poop
and alien emoji in them. Pretty sure it's just book reselling bots though, but
I can't be sure.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Is this a two-character book, or one or more longer (but illegible) books?

~~~
Adamantcheese
It's two separate books, each ~150 pages long with just that emoji repeated.
Completely useless, made em as a joke a few years ago, they still bring in
money during the holidays.

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muzani
Would you mind sharing a purchase link?

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Adamantcheese
Sure, here's links to both of them:

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1505357888](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1505357888)

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1507842953](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1507842953)

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STRiDEX
I made an Adsense plugin for Angular and if you copy and paste the doc's use
example with my ad code (it says to replace) it shows you my ads (duh).
Several people have for some reason used it in production, maybe hoping to get
their own adsense account/code later. It earned $140 last month.

~~~
gremlinsinc
I'd be careful, if the end-user breaks google's policies you could be banned
from adsense permanently.

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CryoLogic
100-200/mo from YouTube this year. Down from nearly a grand at it's peak.
Algorithm is worse, ad rates are terrible and demonetization for no real
reason is very rampant.

So I guess mutual funds is the answer this year.

~~~
arca_vorago
If yt/g isn't careful they are going to start bleeding out users even faster
than they already are. I've seen a huge uptick in comments like yours the last
few months. To go from 1k/mo at peak down to 100-200 largely due to their
arbitrary algorithm fuckery is... really fucked up.

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thedirt0115
Bought a couple cheap condos near the biggest university in a flyover state,
got a property management company to take care of everything (finding tenants,
collecting payments, handling service calls, etc). It's a few hundred bucks a
month on top of other people basically buying houses for me.

~~~
maerF0x0
Does it make free cash flow after all expenses (including amortization of big
ticket repair items) ?

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thedirt0115
Yes, the figure I gave was profit after all expenses. Since they’re condos,
the association covers the heating/cooling system and everything exterior. I
guess we’ve been lucky on the repair front, because the only thing we’ve had
to pay for (in ~6 years) was a cheap dishwasher and toilet fix and
occasionally repainting between tenants.

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jedberg
Truly passive: Stock gains

Mostly passive: Managing rental properties. There is some work involved
occasionally when things break or new tenants need to be found, but for the
most part I just collect my fee each month.

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heyyyouu
Do you worry about renters you'll have to evict? That's what scares me about
getting into this -- the thought of losing thousands when it can take months
and months to get someone out. Plus the emotional toll of having to do that;
not sure I'd want to, although from watching some TV shows on it it seems
there's quite a few people who do it on purpose. Still, if those people have
kids...

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amalag
You can use a property manager, they will take 10% of gross rent. If the
margins aren't good enough to support that, then the property isn't a good
buy.

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justboxing
> You can use a property manager

OP is the property manager :)

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qwerty2020
I make ~$200-250/month with Find-me[1]. Essentially a database with statistics
and contact information for content creators actively looking for
advertisers/sponsorship opportunities.

Had a lot on the road map (creating more of a platform) but have pivoted to
other projects since this doesn't seem to be getting the traction I was hoping
for.

[1] www.find-me.co

Also make ~$1.5k/year from old Udemy courses on pretty basic topics (beginner-
level SQL, Google Sheets, etc).

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vm
Public market stocks. I know this isn't exactly what you're asking but I
mention because it's worth considering in your personal decisioning framework
(and is my honest answer)

~~~
qntty
Just to put it in perspective, you can make ~$500 per month from having
$150,000 in mutual funds if you assume that you make an average of 4% per year
after inflation. VTSAX made almost 15% last year, but last year was unusual.

~~~
carmenjyuen
I've put $23k into $clm and make $345 in dividends a month.

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f3r3nc
A game that had 2mm++ downloads free / paid since 2012. It's an online game
with players still playing although well beyond it's peak. Since 2013 we
pivoted from making games to it services and had not much time to make
significant changes other than updating to newer iOS. It still generates about
2-3k yearly revenue which is a good bonus in central Europe.

soctics.com

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hidiegomariani
Checks if a website is mining crypto currency
[http://whoismining.com](http://whoismining.com)

Donations/Affiliates 10/month

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nicolrx
My blog gets 1M unique visitors per month and earns 2K/mo with adsense.

~~~
cko
Question: with that many uniques, wouldn’t you be able to monetize further?
Affiliate marketing and such?

~~~
Scoundreller
Seems low to me too. I'm getting ~US$200/month with about 30k page views per
month (not even uniques, but I'm a one-stop-shop, not a portal).

And it's all static, so zero maintenance. Just pay the couple bucks a month to
S3 and domain names.

But then again, I target people angry at their XYZ provider, so the
clickthrough rates are pretty good :)

~~~
arca_vorago
Are you doing the writing or are you aggregating or something else?

~~~
Scoundreller
Myself, but I haven't added any content for ~4 years.

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shanecleveland
I offer up a weekly printable office football pool sheet for the NFL season.
I've had it running for a few years now, and I find that it ends up doing
better each year. It's mostly automated/passive, but I spend about 15 minutes
each Monday night updating it for the next week.

I mention this one because it's one of those things that I just did, mainly
for my own needs, and put out there. And it mainly just sits there but does
better year-over-year.

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jaggederest
$32 a month from a cash pension (in the form of an annuity) from a previous
employer. Apparently they still exist, and it pays half of my phone bill.

~~~
dawhizkid
wow how'd that happen

~~~
maerF0x0
Once I worked for a forestry industry company and they forced me to be in the
union. After a month of working with them I had accrued like $300 in pension
(total value, not monthly). They actually tracked me down and paid it out to
me like 4 yrs later when I had completely forgotten about it. Probably cost
them $300 to get it into my hands.

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pablo-massa
$1000/year for hosting.

Got a cheap HostGator shared hosting and host low traffic websites for some
clients (static/WordPress).

As a designer with no advanced knowledge in hosting/IT/domains/backend, it was
pretty easy and no complications, I can't complain.

Now planning to move from HostGator to DreamHost because HTTPS is expensive in
HG and free in DH (also using the free Netlify plan for static sites, HTTPS
free).

~~~
Bromskloss
How much to people pay you for hosting one such site? The idea to design and
host simple sites sometimes crosses my mind when I go to some restaurant that
doesn't have a working site.

~~~
pablo-massa
$100-$200/year.

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nikkwong
Got lucky with a Kickstarter project that has evolved into a business which
finances my life/interest in programming+design. It was definitely the most
lucky thing to happen to me in my entire life.

~~~
welder
Is it truly passive if it's a business?

~~~
nikkwong
Debatable, but I've hired a few people and do next to nothing—maybe an hour or
two a week. Plus, aren't all profitable side projects technically
'businesses'?

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shostack
I'd consider spending time organizing and planning my finances a "side
project" since I'm a spreadsheet geek and enjoy doing that sort of thing.

As a result, I realized I was an idiot and had let too much accumulate in my
checking account that gets abysmal interest. Moved it to a savings account
with slightly better interest and I get a little more money from it. Nothing
worth writing home about, but definitely worth the few minutes it took me to
make that change.

~~~
softawre
What savings account, if you don't mind?

~~~
shostack
I don't share that information, but I'd suggest you check sites like Bankrate
or other comparison sites (warning, they are all affiliate sites) to check out
savings rates.

Suffice to say, I went from something like .01% APY to considerably more than
.01%.

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panorama
I make ~300/mo off of a peer-to-peer loan management software I created for
lenders off of 0 marketing (just word of mouth sales). I have some residual
revenue along those same lines for a book I wrote in 2015 on helping junior
developers get hired at their first job (link in bio if interested).

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NoCanDo
100 bucks about every 2 months from Youtube ads. Aboot 10 bucks a month from
adsense. Can't be arsed to do more aboot my Youtube and webpage. 's fine for
now. Maybe down the road sometimes in the future. There's definitely
potential, definitely an audience with need tho.

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craftyguy
I feel like this recent article "Don't give away historic details about
yourself" is relevant:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16793636](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16793636)

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StavrosK
Made [http://historio.us](http://historio.us), a full text search engine for
bookmarks, nine years ago. It's been making a few hundred dollars a month with
zero marketing ever since.

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davidivadavid
Releasing the Landing Page Cookbook[1] and making Product of the Day on
ProductHunt worked pretty well.

[1]
[http://yourlandingpagesucks.com/cookbook](http://yourlandingpagesucks.com/cookbook)

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johannkaupen
Interesting answers. I expected Bitcoin owners to be a big part, 2017 was
crazy.

Wondering if, a) there are not too many people owning bitcoin in the hn
community. b) everybody is a HODLER. c) nobody counts this as passive income.

~~~
nadezhda18
or maybe they cashed out in 2018? I sold my Ethereum in 2018

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nadezhda18
In 2017, I made a net profit of $11,000 from 3 niche websites + my blog about
said websites

I also have other investments I keep for retirement but I really do not track
how much I get there. It is for the distant future.

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jonandersense
iOS app “Leap Second” made about 2k a month last year this year 5-10k.
Required some initial upfront work to create the app but since then Ive been
putting in about 2h per week.

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muzani
I got about 20% ROI from cryptocurrency. I didn't get greedy, just targeted a
better return than any other account.

~~~
arca_vorago
Are you targetting a specific coin you like for the featureset or are you
diversifying and just spreading it out and focusing on the volatile liquidity
at play?

~~~
muzani
I keep it simple. Only invest in coins with very good fundamentals, as in so
strong they could potentially beat Bitcoins.

Buy when people are panic selling for no reason. Sell when everyone gets
excited about it, when people like my farmer uncle are advising me to buy.

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runnr_az
Emoji domains... making enough to pay for a Subaru Outback car payment every
month!

~~~
Psilidae
Where can you buy those now? I remember they existed, but I thought that was
basically a registrar bug that was fixed. The last time I searched around, I
couldn't find any registrars that permitted emoji domain names.

~~~
runnr_az
Yeah! [https://xn--i-7iq.ws](https://xn--i-7iq.ws) Still a work in progress,
but we've sold like 25,000+ of 'em. Just launched .fm as well...

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gnarcoregrizz
crypto "investments" and some mining, 401k, etfs

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superkitty
I got $1500/month for cleaning houses on weekend.

~~~
verylittlemeat
Are there many part time cleaning jobs out there for men? It seems like an
interesting way to make side money but it strikes me as a job people prefer to
hire women for (sort of like nanny jobs).

~~~
dudul
Good question. While I do get the bias of society towards women for nanny
jobs, I don't see why this would apply to cleaning people.

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philip1209
Amazon stock

~~~
carmenjyuen
$nflx stock

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annon2323
Bitcoin investment up to 40k

