
Ask HN: Passive income ideas for solo developers? - thakobyan
I&#x27;m a web developer who is looking for passive income ideas. I&#x27;m actively looking for income sources that fit well to my skills.<p>Do you have any recommendations, ideas, stories?<p>Thanks.
======
duckingtest
Affiliate marketing.

I'm making about $10k/month from several sites I don't really update. The
trick is to install yourself in some customer acquisition path no one else
figured out. When I started my first attempt I didn't even expect to make the
domain registration fee back over a year, I did it mostly out of boredom.

Don't look out for affiliate solutions specifically, but keep an eye out for
them. Especially when you found some product/service that's hard to find, but
very valuable - do they have an affiliate program? Great, that's your chance -
especially because, being a customer, you probably know better than them
what's their main selling point!

No more details than that, sorry. I'm not trying to sell you anything. In
affiliate marketing be super wary of those that try, most likely that's their
real income source.

It's mostly a parasitic income but sadly that's how current economy is, honest
productive work pays the least relative to what it brings. Mostly thanks to
central banks that artificially prevented a giant systemic reset.

~~~
nickthemagicman
This sounds very cool. What level of detail are your sites? Are they static
sites with your affiliate links on the front page? Where do you find your
affiliates that are buying leads?

I'm very interested in this and am trying to figure out how to do just a basic
affiliate site setup.

~~~
ingenuous2
These are all the secret sauce that very few affiliates will tell you. As OP
said, you have to find your own unique niche.

If you write convertible copy _, you can find an existing affiliate chain and
try to use that to leverage your advantage. Otherwise, I recommend trying
something that 's out there, realize you won't be able to compete in your
first niche (too much competition), then use that to learn.

Your first ROI might be 25%. Try again, find another niche, until you find the
right one. This is classic explore/exploit game theory (every well publicized
channel, e.g. the "Bingo Card Creator" of affiliate world) will be Red Queen'd
to death.

_ note - not "great" copy, but copy that converts! (Or maybe you make landers
that convert like crazy, or you have enough money to buy a ton of traffic and
conversion optimize like crazy)

~~~
nickthemagicman
Cool. Thanks for the response. Are there any good resources to go to learn
this stuff? Or any guidance on the basics?

~~~
ingenuous2
Neil Patel is a good first place to start to learn. Then you realize all his
(vanity) metrics are just measures of your competition. So I went to
Warriorforum.com to read what my competition was saying.

After that, I realized it was all about the basics + a niche. you need to know
the fundamentals of "buy traffic, convert traffic to business goal, collect
money for successful business outcome", but that was table stakes.

Once you know the mechanics of the game, it's up to you to niche/exploit.
You're not going to make money doing what everyone else does, so if you're
asking for advice instead of trying your own thing, you're already losing.

------
dsacco
My definition of "passive income" is income for which you need not work more
than five hours a week. Some people are stricter and define it to mean no work
each week. With very few exceptions, there are no opportunities which will
actually end up being passive income for you just because you're a web
developer. There are several opportunities to increase your income, but it's
rare that they are fully automatable (or even feasible as a part time
venture).

One option is running a successful service company; this is by definition not
passive unless you own it and don't need to actively manage it. So that's out.

Likewise, a productized SaaS company is not passive unless you have very
minimal customer support requirements, new feature development and marketing
to do. That's overwhelmingly unlikely (if you look through the routine threads
asking HN for SaaS success stories, you don't typically find instances where
there is a minimal time commitment).

I'm not trying to discourage you from developing a successful stream of
income. I'm just trying to push back against the idea that you can reliably
generate income passively using web development skills. There are a few
options that can require very little time (in theory, I still don't think
you'll easily get there in practice). But I think the only one that will
leverage web development and still be mostly passive is running a network of
websites monetized through ads that have low effort content. Other than that,
maybe write a useful ebook and promote it until it has excellent SEO and
referrals.

~~~
thakobyan
Thanks for the great answer. Maybe I should have mentioned "side income" not
"passive income".

~~~
dsacco
Let's start by reframing your thinking: which business problems can you
reliably solve for companies that value time more than money by leveraging web
development?

If you already have a full time job, you might be disallowed from side income
derived from services (i.e. consulting). If you don't have such a provision,
you can start by selling your services for web development to companies that
need them. Search through patio11 and tptacek's comments to read more about
this route.

In my opinion consulting is easier than productized software (even if it's
less straightforward sometimes). But you can more easily scale up a software
product and reduce your time commitment for it. So if that appeals to you,
then you should start by looking at what domain knowledge you have.

~~~
icebraining
Can you really maintain a consulting service if you have your 9-5 weekdays
unavailable? Even on sites like Elance it seems like many clients expect you
to be available during the day for Skype calls.

------
02thoeva
We launched [https://emailoctopus.com](https://emailoctopus.com) around 3
years ago as a side project. The most difficult thing with launching a SaaS is
the early days, where you've spent hours upon hours building the app and are
only bringing in £400 a month.

We stuck with it though and today have a full-time team of 5 working on the
app, are paying ourselves a similar wage to what we were earning in our full-
time jobs and most importantly have almost complete ownership of our work-life
balance.

I'd really recommend a SaaS business if you are after recurring, side revenue
and as mentioned before [https://www.oppslist.com/](https://www.oppslist.com/)
is a great place to get some initial ideas. Your marketing skills will improve
too - just stick with it for a year or so if you do go that route!

~~~
comsci-bro
How do you even get started with building (and then marketing) a SaaS? Can you
share some helpful resources?

~~~
02thoeva
We did write an article here: [https://medium.com/emailoctopus/the-road-to-
one-billion-emai...](https://medium.com/emailoctopus/the-road-to-one-billion-
emails-4ed7d441e190)

Although in short, we built a product to serve our own need, launched it
totally free for everyone and ended up gaining around 2000 users very quickly.
Within a year we had grown MRR to the £3k mark, so we contracted alongside
running this 2 days a week. Now, another further year on we're full-time with
a few employees.

------
neurocroc
I made an open source search engine that searches her user curated mind maps
on the web. Here is the search :

[https://learn-anything.xyz/](https://learn-anything.xyz/)

Since everything is open source and I can't run ads or add any sponsored
content, the only way to support it is through Patreon. I think it is a pretty
cool idea and solves a big problem of not knowing how how best to start
learning a topic or what learning some topic X is.

I hope people will find it useful.

~~~
throwaway2016a
I'm a little late commenting but...

> Since everything is open source and I can't run ads or add any sponsored
> content, the only way to support it is through Patreon. I think it is a
> pretty cool idea and solves a big problem of not knowing how how best to
> start learning a topic or what learning some topic X is.

How so? There is nothing in the open source model that prohibits this. Is it
because it because you feel that the type of people who are interested in open
source will get angry if you have ads?

~~~
neurocroc
Yeah, I think ads can't really work well in our search + most users run
adblocks already. We are still experimenting with ways we can monetise this
project however in a way that doesn't reduce the value and quality of the
product.

------
WA
The thing with _passive income_ is: You only get to passive income if you love
to work on a specific problem. I think, most solo founders who are successful
today didn’t do it for the money. They found a problem and wanted to work on
it, regardless of the payoff. Sure, a nice payoff would’ve been great, but
that wasn’t the initial motivation.

I think the psychological aspects are vastly underestimated when people try to
find ideas for a business. There’s a reason why startup land says _don’t make
a fuzz about ideas_. Few people are interested in implementing solutions for
problems that they don’t care about. Caring about the problem helps a lot to
get through times when it all seems too much and you still don’t see any
success.

I enjoy reading those idea lists, but I never implemented one and I think
they’re worthless mostly, because there’s no emotional involvment from me.

~~~
bigiain
Not sure that's iron-clad true - I doubt patio11 "loved working on" Bingo
cards or appointment reminders, and I'm reasonably sure neither were problems
he was trying to solve for himself.

~~~
WA
Better ask him, but I suspect he did enjoy it to some extend. I doubt he did
it only as a money grab, but rather because of some interest in the problem.
Maybe not the domain of bingo cards itself for too long, but everything else
that comes with that: writing, explaining the product to teachers, SEO,
marketing, customer support, automating everything.

~~~
patio11
There were probably higher-productivity ways to get money than writing bingo
card creation software for elementary schoolteachers. To put it mildly.

I didn't have "an itch" for either problem myself but I did really, really
love throwing myself into learning how to run a business. BCC felt like a
relatively low-risk way to do that. (AR didn't ever feel particularly low-risk
-- and the stresses implied by that are one reason why I'm glad I don't run it
anymore -- but that is neither here nor there.)

------
antoaravinth
May be you need to look into
[https://www.indiehackers.com](https://www.indiehackers.com). The site is
great that it contains all the information / stories / ideas, about developers
who sell their projects!

------
chvid
I had some passive income sources earlier but they all did not last forever
and they took a lot of work to setup plus a quite a few never made any income.

Don't fall for the ease implied by the word passive. This is a concept
designed to sell self help books and promote gurus.

What you can do as a software developer to make money requires effort and
chasing something that does not is fooling oneself.

A better perspective is to ask what can I do to generate the most income; and
maybe put up with a bunch of obvious and boring answers.

------
gsylvie
If you're in tech, you've probably used an Atlassian product (e.g., JIRA,
Confluence, Bitbucket).

Make an Atlassian add-on!

It's been a (mostly) solo gig for me so far. Two months ago my own add-on
happened to do $8K in sales within a 30-day window. That put me around the
150th position on this ranking (add-ons ranked by last 30 days of sales):

[https://marketplace.atlassian.com/addons/top-
selling](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/addons/top-selling)

~~~
Romajashi
That's turned out to be effectively a waste of time for me.

~~~
gsylvie
What's your add-on? It took me almost 12 months of working on mine (probably
500-600 hours) before it started to make money.

------
startupdiscuss
Solve one of these with a SaaS solution:

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

------
amdixon
In addition to [https://www.oppslist.com](https://www.oppslist.com) (as some
have already mentioned), check out
[https://www.indiehackers.com](https://www.indiehackers.com). Although not all
the businesses are entirely passive per se, there are a lot of interesting
stories and projects that you might find inspiring.

------
verigit
If you are not a web developer you may consider building an app. I find the
Mac App Store to be less competitive than the iOS one.

Personally, I released my app two months ago:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/easygit/id1228242832?mt=12](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/easygit/id1228242832?mt=12)

~~~
geekme
I am iOS developer and it has become a pretty tough market to crack. Can you
share some more thoughts on the MAc App store. Is it worth investing in Mac
app development?. Thanks.

~~~
verigit
Anecdotally it seems like the Mac App Store is easier to break into and
generate a steady income, at least for a while. Not sure if it is because of
less competition, or just mac users being more willing to spend money for apps
than iOS users. Keep in mind though that the market is at least one order of
magnitude smaller than the iOS Store, so it may be more difficult to go
further than side-project level.

~~~
geekme
Thank you

------
huckyaus
This topic has been covered extensively on HN. Check out some of the past
submissions:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=passive%20income](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=passive%20income)

------
soft_dev_person
OT, but could the [dupe] tag become a link to the duplicate topic or
something? It's usually in a comment somewhere, but would be nice with the
official explaination/cause somewhere consistent.

------
renownedmedia
Publish some books on the knowledge you've accrued.

~~~
Swizec
I do this. It's hard to grow at first and there's plenty of ongoing marketing
work but after 2 years I could already go full time if I didn't insist on
living in SF.

It's a fun little cottage industry.

~~~
vortegne
Any more details on how to pick the right format for the book, how to publish,
market, etc?

~~~
Swizec
There's a lot out there. I'd start by reading Authority by Nathan Barry

------
bbayer
You can find lots of ideas just checking
[http://flippa.com](http://flippa.com) You can even buy an established website
from there and try to grow revenue but it would be wise to be careful about
metrics provided by sellers though.

------
bikamonki
Aside from the obvious: code something that solves a real problem, you need
someone to go out and sell it. Make him/her a partner/founder. That formula
worked for me.

------
tmnvix
Not necessarily passive, but an idea I was reminded of recently might be worth
pursuing.

Matching students with exam proctors.

Online education is the future (and to a large extent the present!). A common
requirement for students is to find an exam proctor. I had to do this myself.
I was lucky enough to know someone that qualified (a high school teacher) but
a lot of people won't. Googling for a proctor service didn't help much.
There's an obvious need there.

~~~
satya71
The easiest way to find proctors is at [http://www.ncta-
testing.org/](http://www.ncta-testing.org/) . Typically they are locate at
community colleges and universities.

~~~
tmnvix
Should mention this was in Australasia (NZ and then Australia).

Besides, even here there are a lot of people that qualify (anyone that works
as an administrator at a university for instance). The thing is, there isn't
much in the way of structured services (unless you happen to be doing a large
certification course where others nearby also are).

------
patrickk
Passive bitcoin lending, and bitcoin secured lending. You can partially
automate it, there are scripts on github to automatically manage your lending.
You are exposed to the full volatility of crypto price swings though.

------
alienjr
Open a cheap investment account (e.g. Interactive Brokers) and invest in cheap
ETFs (e.g. Vanguard Total World Stock and/or Vanguard Total Bond Market - in
proportions 70%/30%) until you have 25*your yearly expenses (that usually
means 10-12 years of investing, when you save 50% of your salary). After that
point, you're FI, you can withdraw (max) 4% a year and live off from returns
from your investments ad infinitum.

~~~
brobinson
I am following a similar strategy, but I am invested in other instruments,
too. I have everything from bond ladders to leveraged REITs. I invest 65% of
my post-tax income and 100% of post-tax bonuses. I use Schwab, though.

Schwab is now beating Vanguard on fees on their equivalents of Vanguard funds:
[https://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/nn/m/indexfunds.html?va...](https://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/nn/m/indexfunds.html?van=tqn)

Schwab also just recently lowered its commissions... a lot. Equities trades
are now $4.95 flat whether you buy or sell 1 share or 1,000,000 shares.
Fidelity also lowered their commissions to match Schwab. Everyone else is
still higher, including IB depending on your volume.

(Disclaimer: no relation to Schwab other than that I am an extremely happy
customer)

------
lukaslasso
I would also recommend affiliate marketing. Easiest to start because you don't
need a huge investmemt to get started etc. Check out
[http://marketingonlinecentral.com/internet-jetset-
review/](http://marketingonlinecentral.com/internet-jetset-review/) Hope this
helps you out!

------
rasmafazi
I have made way more money from my bitcoin capital gains than from anything
else I did for the last 3 years.

~~~
hueving
Congrats, but that's like mentioning that you happened to be a snapchat
employee or you won the lottery. It's useless advice for someone looking for
ideas now.

~~~
koonsolo
Are you sure it's useless? Ethereum seemed to have a jump recently, and maybe
Monero is just in front of a jump.

I don't know why the original post got down-voted. Crytocurrency is still in
its infancy. Much money can be made from it. And it definitely qualifies as
"passive".

~~~
averagewall
Early bitcoin winners had the advantage of hardly anyone knowing about or
understanding what it was. So they had a kind of inside knowledge within the
group of people who understood it enough to imagine the potential.

Now, everyone (ie professional investors) knows about cryptocurrency so you
have no advantage over them and you're just gambling.

~~~
koonsolo
It was always gambling, especially at the start. Bitcoins are still making
major gains at the moment.

Here's a strategy that works: Take an amount of money that you own but can
miss. This means that you won't go totally crazy when you lose it all. Put
that amount in Bitoin, Ethereum and Monero for example. Let it sit there for
the next 10 years.

In 10 years, it's either $0 and you lost it all, or it became the best
investment you ever did. And that is counted in factors, not percentages.

Worked out so far.

------
dang
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=passive%20income&sort=byDate&d...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=passive%20income&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

------
parametrek
I've mentioned this before [1] but affiliate sites work, particularly if you
are already doing web dev.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14473272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14473272)

------
MrMoenty
,

------
halayli
take on 1-month or less web related projects on upwork and the like?

~~~
sunilkumarc
My account was recently suspended from Upwork because I was applying for more
number of jobs without landing at any. When I sent a mail to Upwork support,
they said they cannot help me once it is suspended. Currently I'm trying to
find some work on freelancer.com. Do you know any other similar websites for
freelancing for beginners?

~~~
tomtompl
there's also remote.com

------
averagewall
Work in some unrelated industry and find out enough to know their problems
then make a web app that helps them. With businesses or professionals as
customers, you can charge much more and with such a uncrowded niche, you can
do a relatively poor job.

An example, I've seen is a site for property managers to share information
with their landlord customers. It's just a CRUD app with a list of
transactions, area to post pdfs of invoices, etc. The web app is old, ugly and
basic but I bet they're collecting big regular subscription payments from
their customers who can't justify hiring their own web developer and building
and maintaining their own site.

The key here is having knowledge that most web developers don't have. It's
going to be an uphill battle trying to sell golf clubs or restaurant bookings
or solve any problems that everybody and their dog understands.

~~~
malmsteen
how's that passive ?

------
SirLJ
As someone said bellow, the stock market is a good place to look and develop a
quantitative trading systems, it is almost free to build and back test and
once done, will run on autopilot, but you'll need capital to invest... Good
luck!

~~~
nurettin
Needing "Good luck" defeats the whole purpose if these kinds of threads. QT is
a complete waste of time as most of the skill you will acquire revolves around
hopelessly looking for patterns that don't exist within time series. Flag
formation? Predictive capability: zero. Trend: zero. Congestion: zero. Most
positions win? Great. The one that doesn't will take it all back.

~~~
SirLJ
I do agree that candle formations like head and shoulders, bull flags, etc do
not work in the market (at least for me), but I don't quite get your point on
why QT is a waste of time, since there are a lot of systems and people big and
small beating the market on a regular basis, so let me give you 1 quote from
Warren Buffett:

“Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish.
There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the
marketplace, and those who read their Graham & Dodd will continue to prosper.”

~~~
nurettin
My point is, QT methods have zero predictive capability, and are a complete
waste of time and will not give you any usable skills in any other field,
either.

Opportunity trading (what Mr. Warren and others who occasionally profit from
the market do) on the other hand, are entirely different animals.

Not sure what you didn't understand.

~~~
SirLJ
Agree to disagree, a lot of examples, best is probably Renaissance
Technologies

~~~
nurettin
And they had 3bn$ to begin with. Those pockets are deep enough to pull a
martingale. And this thread is about a web developer asking how to make side
income. Still don't see the contrast?

~~~
SirLJ
Nope, I started small years ago and have a great success, so if I can do it as
a side project, he can do it as well, it's not a open hearth surgery...

~~~
nurettin
Yes, it is so easy to get rich quick using QT, now I feel sorry I ever doubted
it.

~~~
SirLJ
It's not easy, but if you put the time end effort, it is quite possible...

~~~
nurettin
These kinds of statements unfortunately depend on your personal credibility.
Anyone can claim to be doing anything in order to feel good about themselves.
I'd suggest keeping this to a circle of people who personally know you and
know that this is true, not a bunch of strangers who will doubt your every
word.

~~~
SirLJ
You are probably right, but still I find it very amusing, if I was saying I am
making the same amount of money with some sort of referral web site market
dubious products, everyone here would have been very excited, but as soon as I
mention the Stock Market I am getting down voted...

This explains a lot: Wall Street is definitely succeeding brainwashing even
the smart people that investing is something very complicated and everyone
should be happy with average returns... Years ago the rage were the mutual
funds, now are the passive buy and hold index funds (don’t get me wrong I have
one long-term strategy investing in SPY, but making twice the average)

No good deed goes unpunished here I guess... Not that I care very much, since
I am not selling anything or peddling a personal blog for example... But what
opens my eyes it the realization, that those people that dismiss the idea
about making money from the stock market are the ones I am making money from
one way or another, in the end it is a zero sum game, so if you are not making
money in the stock market you are probably loosing one way or another...

~~~
nurettin
The difference between these (good) examples on HN

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8499305](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8499305)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11887147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11887147)

And your so-called good behavior in hn is; you show no substance whereas they
provide something to start hacking.

Perhaps this helps?

~~~
SirLJ
Thanks, I did check both examples and what it strikes me about them and other
similar "good" examples on HN are they are usually based on failed strategies
or technologies, so basically the discussions are pointless...

All in all, the YCombinator is a for profit corporation, which by censorship
and bullying (or so called "down voting") is shaping the people on Hacker News
to frown upon small or lifestyle businesses, because they need the flock of
dreamers to get their underpaid workers to work on mostly failed startups...
They are not out to help you or anybody else, this is how they make the money
in the end and they go after everyone who threatens their business model... If
you are to remember just one thing from my short stint around here, please
remember this: They need you, but you do not need them!

Good luck!

~~~
nurettin
Well, no, you did not look at them.

First link doesn't constitute a trading strategy at all. Again, all rant and
no substance. I'm starting to think asking for more is pointless after this
moment. I give up.

~~~
SirLJ
I said failed strategies or technologies, but better would be failed ideas,
which is precisely the same point...

------
wolco
Adsense / content sites. Automated saas business. Stock market.

~~~
ghughes
The first two are sensible suggestions, but playing the stock market is
essentially gambling. Most people would be better off investing in index
funds.

~~~
StavrosK
I've recently heard doubts that index funds are a good investment. They're
meant to be "investing in the US market", but aren't they really "investing in
the Vanguard/whatever ETF"?

Basically, doesn't the value of index funds reflect how much people think
index funds will rise in value?

~~~
conception
Index fund prices are tied to an index, hence the name. If the DOW goes up for
a DOW index fund that fund will increase in value proportionally. Vanguard
gets paid for managing the fund.

~~~
StavrosK
Ah, so the value of an ETF isn't what someone else is willing to pay for it,
like a stock?

EDIT: Apparently you can exchange the ETF for the underlying securities at any
point, and vice versa, so the ETF's price can't diverge much.

~~~
encoderer
It's not so much that you can exchange a share of an ETF for micro-shares of
the underlying security, but that the ETFs themselves keep their assets in the
underlying and if it gets out of balance professional investors will short one
side and go long the other and make the difference -- a form of arbitrage.

Specifically, in the case of SPY, if the ETF was trading higher than the
underlying, they would short the ETF and go long an appropriate number of
shares of each of the 500 companies. The difference in the price is their
profit. The very act of doing this brings the two prices inline and eventually
you sell both sides and close the position for realized gains.

Brokers let you do these transactions atomically. Of course, for transaction
fees alone, this is not a strategy available to retail investors.

~~~
tanderson92
This is correct; Authorized Participants are the ones who exchange baskets of
securities. It isn't really possible for individuals to exchange shares
directly with the fund manager, but that's not an issue because the secondary
market prices are kept reasonably close due to the professionals. The amount
you can expect to lose relative to NAV (the actual value of your shares) is
around half the bid-ask spread at the time you buy/sell.

It also helps with tax efficiency since the creation/redemption process allows
for shares with significant appreciation to be retired.

