
Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months? - rtcoms
I am a Ruby on Rails developer from Bangalore, India. Currently working for a startup in Bangalore as a full time employee.<p>Few months ago there were lots of posts on HN related to passive income. This gave me thought about having passive income which will give enough freedom to work on my own ideas&#x2F;project fulltime.<p>In India one can easily live on $500&#x2F;month, so keeping that in mind I have setup a timeline of 12-18 months(which I think should be enough) to generate that much amount.<p>Right now I don&#x27;t have any savings which I can invest to earn and I&#x27;ve free time available around weekends.I am working on few ideas of my own, but those will not necessarily generate income.<p>So what would you do suggest me to do?
======
simonhamp
I run Built With Bootstrap
([http://builtwithbootstrap.com](http://builtwithbootstrap.com)) that brings
close to $2,000 on average each month in "mostly passive" income.

How? Here are a few things that have helped:

1) I got lucky - I jumped on something early and got picked up quickly and
rode on the back of a giant gorilla as it kept getting higher and higher -
right place, right time

2) I keep costs low - I use Tumblr (free) and cheap, pluggable services like
Campaign Monitor, Wufoo, Buffer, and IFTTT to automate a lot of the process.

3) Don't be afraid to ask for money - I started doing this very early on, but
even that wasn't soon enough! People will pay if there's a benefit, so don't
be afraid to ask.

4) Keep it simple - I write brief emails, I don't respond to everything and I
only spend a few hours each week on the site - updating content, checking
stats, emailing etc.

5) Get multiple sources of revenue - I use a number of affiliates as well as
offering traditional advertising.

6) Be social - Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+ - BWB is on all
of these. I try to engage with people and respond to things

7) Start a mailing list - this is not to be overlooked!

I hope this gives you some helpful ideas :) don't be afraid to ask any
questions.

~~~
tomek_zemla
It's a nice and clear summary. You could probably expand it into mini book -
one page per each point listed - and sell it for additional revenue...

~~~
ytjohn
It'll take some work. You'll need to put an interesting quote on each page and
then some anecdote from the author's life that may or may not be related to
the the point at the top of the page. If author does not have enough
interesting stories to write up, they may have to borrow them from reddit or
such.

~~~
yzzxy
This sounds like about 1-3 days of work.

------
patio11
If you're willing to work five hours a month on your passive income project,
then I suggest doing five months of work on Passive Rails Consulting, as that
has minimal execution risk.

Can I make a suggestion? Most people who say "passive income" spend a lot of
time fantasizing about the lifestyle relative to actually producing value. It
is not terribly difficult to produce value as a programmer. Concentrate on
producing value. If you achieve that, you'll trip over $500 a month. Most of
the straightforward ways involve identifying a problem for a class of business
that you're positioned to solve and then solving it in return for money.

If you want concrete suggestions with regards to markets and form factors, in
lieu of repeating myself I'll post a link to an old comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5904316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5904316)

~~~
thenomad
I completely agree with this.

Generally, completely passive income is massively harder and more time
intensive to generate than minimal-time-investment income (which is what
Patrick suggests above). I have both completely passive and minimal-time-
investment income sources, and the passive ones have been MUCH harder and
longer work per dollar over the last few years.

Focus on optimising your $/hr (and your hr/month) rather than going for hr ==
0 and you'll likely hit your goal much faster.

~~~
michaelmior
I'm genuinely curious how "passive income" is defined if it takes
significantly more time.

~~~
graeme
You invest time up front, then reap the rewards. Residual income may be a
better term for what most people call passive income.

Most of my income is residual, and I love it, but there was a big hump to get
over at the start.

~~~
michaelmior
Thanks for the clarification. That makes sense to me :)

------
Red_Tarsius
I'd give a read to Start Small, Stay Small (www.startupbook.net) and other
startup literature. Study Paul Graham's essays (www.paulgraham.com).

Random ideas:

\- Start something like skoshbox.com, but with Indian goodies. You may not
realize it, but foreign countries crave Indian tastes and flavors. I would
probably pay for a monthly delivery of Indian spices and sweets.

\- Start a podcast on a passion of yours. Offer free newsletter and video
lessons, then charge for premium content or up-to-date episodes and
consulting.

\- Omegle meets paint. A collaborative canvas for children of different
nationalities to meet on the Internet. No chat, no video/audio – just the
canvas. Revenue may come from ads, sponsors, educational programs within the
platform.

EDIT: to whoever downvoted my post, may I ask why?

~~~
hluska
A monthly delivery of Indian spices would be incredible. If you could get it
past the Canadian food inspection agency, I'd definitely subscribe (and
possibly get your logo tattooed on my arm)...:)

~~~
spicemaster
I had been thinking of starting this service. Good quality spices are
expensive. Also I think shipping costs are relatively higher from India
compared to developed world. Considering these points the subscription price
would have to be slightly high. Do you think there would be enough interest at
a relatively high price point?

~~~
DanBC
I'm confused about the need. Although I live in a small English town (pop
110,000) which has a number of shops selling a wide variety of spices.

Would you be selling small kits of spices to prepare a meal, with a recipe
delivered at the same time?

~~~
spicemaster
Me and my wife love quality spices and experimenting with different recipes.
We had been thinking of starting our own business. Sending out Indian stuff
monthly is one of the ideas we had been toying with. When one thinks of stuff
from India, spices seem to come at the top of the mind. (honestly we haven't
thought this through yet; the idea was inspired from a Japanese candy
service). I am aware that spices are available in most places in the west
these days. But I guess it is not easily accessible in all the places.
Convenience can be reason for someone to subscribe to the service. Another
value add is accompanying details introducing the spice, its properties, uses
and some sample recipes.

This is a time intensive operation. As of now, I m not convinced the returns
would be high enough.

------
apdinin
Since you're a developer, you already have the most important asset, which is
the ability to basically create anything (web services related, obviously).
From there, it's "just" a matter of finding something to build that other
people will value and then telling as many people as possible about it.

The best way to figure out what to build is by thinking about what YOU would
find useful, and then build that. Don't get too big with the idea, though.
Just analyze your day-to-day routine and ask yourself what kind of little
piece of software would make your day 1%-5% less annoying.

For example, I'm a developer but also a startup founder. I've wasted entire
days doing repetitive email follow-ups to investors, partners, customers,
etc., which means I wasn't committing code. So I put aside a weekend and built
a system to automate my email follow-ups. After it worked well for me, I
showed it to some colleagues, they started using it, too, and before I knew
it, I had a nice little SaaS app going. With another weekend of work, I added
a frontend and billing system, and I launched it as
[https://autopest.com](https://autopest.com).

(I'm including the link at the suggestion of some of the other folks in this
thread, and also to show how it matches well with their advice -- target B2B,
build a SaaS app, keep it simple, rely on quick solutions like Bootstrap and
Stripe, etc.)

Step two is getting people to it. Best way I found for that is social media --
especially Twitter. It only takes me 15 minutes a day to be "active" on
Twitter, I can easily target BizDev people and GrowthHackers (my target
audience), and slowly but surely, they start signing up. It's been a few
months and I'm on pace to hit your $500/mo target in the next 30 days.

Best of all, because I built something that _I REALLY WANTED_ , even if no one
ever pays me another penny, I'll still come out ahead because the thing I
built works really well for me.

------
jasonwen
I have several passive income sources. I started a community websites since
2006 which generates me around $1500/mo in passive income.

Have you any ideas what tools might make your (dev) life easier? You can
create a small productive/utility SaaS app. Use bootstrap if you don't have
any design skills. Use PayPal/Stripe to setup a (recurring) payment system in
a day.

Test using lean methodology, buy a domain, create landing page with bootstrap,
pricing page, and a fake sign up page. Takes max a week. Then spend another
one week driving some traffic from Google/Facebook ads to see if there's any
interest. Usually Facebook, if targeted well, is way cheaper. Start using
Google once you know your LTV (Life Time Value of customer) and conversion.
Start by spending for example $20.

One tip: Don't target US customers in Facebook for polling interest, they are
harder to convert, and from my experience around 10x/20x more expensive than
Asian/Spanish speaking countries.

After you see interest, try to find a quick way to see if people are willing
to pay. This might not as easy as most users want to use your product before
paying. You might explain the product in better detail after the signup and
ask what they want to pay for it.

After you are able to confirm if people are willing to pay for your service,
only then spend serious time building.

You can apply the same tactic if you're selling an e-book, maybe the spices
idea as someone mentioned before.

Good luck!

~~~
progx
And how long did it take until you make $1500 / mo ? And how many time you
spend to build it up ?

------
santhoshr
From Bangalore too. Amateur programmer, but have a ton of experience and
networks in a niche sector. I pull in decent amount of money in passive
income.

(1) I would say focus first on value rather than money. I delivered my service
for free or on trial basis for almost 6 months before clients signed up to
pay.

(2) As a freelancer, focus on long-term retainer relationships, built on your
value-proposition. And work with clients who have solid reliable cash flows.
This way, your income would be guaranteed via 1-2 year contracts.

(3) Please stay away from consumer focused businesses/services if you are
looking for small side income (this can be your focus for your big main start-
up idea). B2B is always better. The only exception I think is if you get lucky
in the app economy or if you could build 1m+ page-view site (Amit Agarwal)

~~~
zo1
What is "B2B"?

~~~
namenotrequired
Business to Business; so when you sell your product/service to other companies
instead of to individuals (which would be B2C; business to consumer).

~~~
zo1
Ah, I see... Thanks for the info!

~~~
teach
In the future you can avoid downvotes by searching rather than asking HN for
the answer to an easily google-able question.

------
IgorPartola
Meta: if you respond with "I run a small project and it is generating X per
month for me", would you please provide links? I know it seems self-promoting
but in reality in discussions like this it is very interesting.

~~~
dmos62
I find people in these discussions rarely want to share their actual
products/sites. If I had to speculate as to why, I'd say that many of them
profit from having found a micro-niche with minimal competition, so it makes
sense for them to keep it to themselves.

~~~
iurisilvio
In my case, it is a niche with some competitors. I don't share because I don't
want to relate the project with me (I'm not worried if someone find it). I
don't share it even with friends.

Also it is an SEO experiment, all my traffic (97%) is Google organic.

It's ~4 months old, has 75k hits/month and generate USD 60. It still growth
100% month over month.

I need some months to return the money I invested (designer, domain, ...), but
I don't even count my time. I'm learning more from this project than with
anything else I already did.

------
revorad
There is a strange obsession here on HN with passive income. Yet I haven't
seen any good examples of passive income, which were built without significant
effort or time. Income is anything but passive.

Here's a better way to look at it:

You want to earn $500/month? As a good Ruby developer, you can earn that much
in _two days_ doing contract work. And no, it doesn't matter if you're based
in Bangalore, you could be based in Belgaum and it wouldn't matter, as long as
you had a good internet connection.

You can make more money while doing work you enjoy, instead of trying so hard
looking for passive income. And you can save up, invest that money and buy
solid chunks of time to totally focus on your crazy startup ideas.

~~~
danneu
I own a forum that makes me $1500/month. I haven't logged in for 6 months. All
the effort was done in 2007.

Contract work, like 9-to-5 employment, is the opposite of what people have in
mind when they say "passive income". The goal of passive income isn't to get
something for nothing. It's to create something that generates income that
isn't linked 1:1 with your time.

~~~
revorad
I meant that you can earn enough in 2 days, and then spend the rest of your
time building a product which you really want to build and get off the time-
selling treadmill.

------
csomar
You don't want to earn a passive income. You want to leave your job. Fine.
Except that looking for passive income stream is not the best idea out there.

If you can contract for $80/hour for US/EU clients (really possible), you'll
need to work only 40 hours to cover a 6 month expenses.

But that won't probably be enough for one month, once you start earning it.
You've been warned ;)

~~~
zo1
" _If you can contract for $80 /hour for US/EU clients (really possible)_"

Do you have more info/advice about that? I've often flirted with the idea of
online freelancing for overseas companies... But a lot of the freelancing
sites either seem too dodgy/cheap, or elitist about "github" commits and the
like.

~~~
csomar
The internet has got fair pricing. You can work for $10/hour or $300/hour. It
depends on the value you bring, and your negotiations.

Now how to get the clients. I'll leave you to figure out that part on your
own.

------
silver1
Either you can sell your own product/services or sell someone else's
product/services ...

\- Take advantage of growing e-commerce in India - sell other peoples product
... buy directly from manufacturer and sell it to consumers thru platforms
like Flipkart, Snapdeal, etc. ... most of the manufacturer in tier-2 and 3
cities dont have a clue about e-comm selling so help them out and make a good
return...

\- Start affiliate business (selling other people's products/service)
online...

\- Create your own product/service and sell it thru your own e-comm store or
thru Amazon or Ebay or Yahoo stores.

\- Start writing a blog and make it so popular with your amazing content that
you can make money thru Ads, affiliate marketing and/or by email marketing.

\- You can also start a drop-ship store and sell to the consumers in north-
america, europe and/or australia.

\- there are small businesses on sale on Flippa (however you need to learn how
to find a good one) that can easily make you $6k a year .... find a business
that is of your interest/passion ....

Good Luck!

~~~
imaginenore
Drop-shipping is a still-born idea. 99.9% of the time you will not make money,
and will spend time advertising someone else's product.

Same with "buy from the manufacturer" \- unless you have a lot of storage
space, and enough money to hold a lot of inventory, you can't even get into
that business. That's assuming the product can even be stored for long periods
of time without depreciating (pretty much all of electronics is out of the
question then).

Many of Flippa businesses have fake numbers, be very careful. They buy traffic
to get Analytics, and when they get a few months of it, they post it on
Flippa.

~~~
silver1
Dropship: In india its an untapped opportunity ... someone can just create a
fortune by even tapping 1% of the market - of course its a little bit of work.

Buying from Manufacturer: again its a haven if you can find a niche product
... there are millions of manufacturers in small cities in india who create
fantastic products ... you do little bit of research about what is selling or
trending and start with small inventory .... some investment for trial and
error is required but not difficult to catch a niche in couple of months ...

Flippa: now a days flippa has become more careful about listing fake sites -
there are many tools ... one of the is services offered by Centurica ... they
do thorough due-diligence for you (especially revenue and profit claims)...

~~~
imaginenore
> _there are millions of manufacturers in small cities in india who create
> fantastic products_

Such as?

------
DanBC
Good quality videos of construction equipment aimed at children. Put those on
Youtube with ads. Link to a website that has affiliate links to stores that
sell toy versions of the equipment - Bruder is one manufacturer to
investigate. Gently adsense that page. Careful SEO.

------
euroclydon
Build curated lists of small businesses in the US. I mean really quality
spreadsheets, with city, state, address, owner name, contact name, email,
phone, etc. Do this for business categories, like: bakeries, caterers,
dentists, doctors, plumbers, etc. For the doctors and such, I would focus on
small town entities who are not part of a large medical practice.

Then you sell exclusive, limited access to the list. The internet is virtually
littered with small SaaS applications which are targeted toward small
businesses. They are selling software for bookkeeping, time tracking, shift
planning, appointment reminders, practice management, etc. These SaaS products
have LTV numbers such that direct calling is worth their time.

~~~
simi_
For UK: [https://www.duedil.com/](https://www.duedil.com/)

------
kephra
Build a pile of small (Ruby) applications. Small in terms that the prototype
could be delivered in weeks, and only needs a few weeks till production. So
first step is to fine "easy jobs" that you can solve faster then others, and
sort out the bad customers. I offer 2% discount if they pay invoices within a
week. Only two type of customers would pay late: Those with a cash flow
problem, and those with an account problem. Drop them! Also drop any kind of
toxic customers. Keep the good ones.

Offer a maintenance contract of $50 per month for the server and the software
to the good customer. A year later you will have 4 or 5 contracts paying half
of your bill, for doing backups once a week, installing security updates,
writing invoices, and perhaps sometimes writing an email to the customer or
even patching a bug.

You can play around with own ideas, once you have a semi passive income. I
would try to solve a problem with a software as a service.

~~~
fiatjaf
Can you give some examples?

------
meric
$500 per month is $6000 per year. $100,000 in high dividend stocks may
generate close to that much in dividends per year. So contract for $100 per
hour for 1500 hours in the next 18 months. Then make a good investment.

~~~
exhilaration
How does one identify high dividend stocks?

~~~
bsamuels
just stick to an index fund - never hand pick securities!

~~~
zupa-hu
sure, that's what the big winners do (pun intended)

------
mattdlondon
1) Find a niche area of interest and build a web site and put AdSense ads on
it

2) Promote the website a bit

3) Profit.

The trick is working out what your niche is that hadn't already been done by
someone else.

I lucked out with some websites in the UK about fuel consumption (for cars) a
few years ago. I invested a weekend of my time and a little promotion effort
and it snowballed - initially it made maybe £1 a month for the first year to
24 months but now I get about 150,000 hits a month which with ads earns a
decent amount of money (more than you are looking for)

------
superplussed
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2547254](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2547254)
[http://www.quora.com/Is-it-hard-to-build-market-and-
maintain...](http://www.quora.com/Is-it-hard-to-build-market-and-maintain-a-
web-app-that-makes-at-least-1-000-a-month)

------
mjnaus
Since March this year, I have been able to build a semi-passive income of
around $1500 per month (lowest around $1000 and highest $2000) by
building/selling items on CodeCanyon.

Granted it's not truly passive income, rather semi-passive. That said, with
minimal monthly efforts, the money comes in each month.

~~~
vittore
aren't they taking 50% of your sales?

~~~
zura
Huh, and here is another idea - build CodeCanyon clone but take 20% :)

~~~
untilHellbanned
Onarbor takes code and only 10%, [https://onarbor.com](https://onarbor.com)

~~~
mjnaus
Nowhere near the same amount of exposure. Yes, you'll earn a higher
percentage, however with the lower number of sales, the money you pocket will
be significantly less.

------
benmorris
I haven't given up on passive income, but I try to work smarter not harder.
That being said what I do would be considered semi passive income. Since
consulting work isn't consistent I've spent about 2 years building up a
network of design online vinyl lettering and graphics sites that require
little to no daily work on my end. I outsource production and shipping and
take a good piece of each sale. On average I devote 30 minutes a day handling
emails, phone calls, and submitting POs. I've automated nearly everything once
an order is placed from generating the vector cut files to submitting purchase
orders. My image generating api does all that magic
[http://ionapi.com](http://ionapi.com) (closed beta) and a few of the sites
[http://boatdecals.biz](http://boatdecals.biz)
[http://letteringhq.com](http://letteringhq.com) and
[http://racegraphics.com](http://racegraphics.com). Slowly building on past
work over these two years I've went from making nothing to being able to live
off of the income of these businesses.

So my main advice is start somewhere and don't find yourself so indecisive you
do NOTHING. There are lots of opportunities in small niches especially. Pick
one you love and try to tap into something. Myself, outside of being a
developer I know signs and graphics pretty well, so it was a logical direction
to go.

------
zeynalov
I started a youtube channel 2 year ago. Just for my personal use. When I want
to show someone something, to be able to upload it, if it's not on youtube
yet. So I invested 10 minutes per month to upload some videos that I think
interesting to share. After a year I saw that to0 many people watch my videos.
So I activated ads on my channel. My last video was a year ago I think. And
Google still sends me 200-300$ monthly. I've invested only 2-3 hours totally
on channel.

------
AJ007
#1 This is way easier, and can last longer, if the business involves user
retention.

#2 Study other micro-businesses carefully.

#3 Apply an existing model to a brand new area or technology.

Personally I think the passive income concept is crap. It is real but is a
concept that people who don't want to work hard eat up so is used in business
opportunity marketing heavily.

There are things that can produce revenue for a long period of time after your
initial upfront investment where you work really hard for a while for free or
at a great loss (investing money in assets vs just your own time.) However,
the nature of traffic flows online & technology mean if you use the revenue
for personal consumption rather than re-investing it in the business one day a
few years from now you will wake up no better off than the day you started. In
some circumstances where the individual increases their standard of living or
takes on debt, they will end up much worse off.

Not speculation, I have watched this happen to friends.

As a programmer your best opportunities are most likely writing tools and code
that can be resold multiple times. Huge chunks of redundant work is done by
freelance developers.

------
bikamonki
You are trapped on a catch 22: you want free time to work on cool projects but
need one of these projects to drip $500/mo so you can free up your time to
work on cool projects ;) This is how I did it: 1\. Get to zero debt. Cut your
credit cards. Keep one at home to pay for online services/emergencies. 2\. Aim
to make double of what you think you need/mo. 3\. Go freelance and sign paid
SLAs/Support Contracts. After 2yrs/4-6 projects you will have stable monthly
checks and if you play it smart most of your maintenance tasks will be
automatic. Add 1-2 projects to the mix/year. 4\. Don't grow, don't hire help.
That will turn you into a manager+programmer and the train will lose track. Be
like the expert doctor: if you are good clients will line up. 5\. Pick good
value projects: short (1-2 months), well paid, at least 2 yrs of SLA, 50%
upfront. 6\. Save!!!!!!!! 7\. Quit your current job when you find your first
client, not before. Work is essential to a happy life, not only "paid" work.
Find a good balance.

------
malditojavi
It's me or passive income posts in HN flourish on weekends?

~~~
maccard
It's because we're not in work

------
abuzafor
I think, You should join Freelancing sites like freelancer.com You can also
try fiverr.com,

Alternatively, You can try to write your experience for others like
DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean will pay you $100 for per approved article. You can
try DigitalOcean here [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to-
write](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to-write)

And if you are not interested in writing for others or writing as a
freelancer, Why don't you start your own Ruby on Rails tutorial blog. A blog
can make you more than $500/month by using Google Adsense or Affiliate
Marketing. As a blogger, I believe that, Blogging is the best ideas to make
money online and the possibilities are endless. But here, In blogging at first
you will have to spend around $50.

Now choice is yours.....

------
shabinesh
I am from Bangalore. I freelance as a python developer.

Tough this is not passive income this might give an idea: Billing $20/hr
(that's what we get in Bangalore), getting $500 a month from a single client
is very easy. But finding few more clients will get you more than what you
want. You will also get a lot of time. Toughest part is getting the client,
good clients usually come from your contacts.

Another thought, finding customers for your SaSS product will not be difficult
if you have a good circle, attend conferences and workshops in Bangalore which
will build you this circle.

I do a day job as openstack dev, freelance on django, and also working on my
own ideas - I am doing this to pursue my passion of traveling(digital nomad).
:)

~~~
F_J_H
How can we contact you?

~~~
shabinesh
my email is: shabi (at) fossix (dot) org, my skype id is my HN username

------
progx
Play lottery, win and live from the money.

This advise is good as as 90% from the other postings i read here ;-)

~~~
hluska
If my addiction to entrepreneuring doesn't abate, this will be my retirement
plan...:)

------
eibrahim
I started [http://www.startupoffers.net](http://www.startupoffers.net) to put
together a list of offers and discounts for services and products that might
be used by startups (and that I usually use myself) - all money is from
affiliate links. This was meant to generate passive income unfortunately it
hasn't taken off and mostly because I did almost zero marketing other than a
few social media links here and there. so i don't know if it is not a good
idea or it just hasn't be marketed right!!!

 __if anyone interested in helping it get to profit email me at HNhandle at
gmail.com

------
xinwen
It's not easy. I had the same plan a few months ago. Thought I'd share my own
(ongoing) story, maybe it will give you some ideas. Some background, I'm a
engineer at a YC company in San Francisco. I was also looking for a passive
income side project and after a few attempts from scratch sputtered I happened
upon a website auction at flippa.com for an interesting webapp:
www.postrgram.com

I spoke with the owner over Skype about it, he'd run the site for a couple
years, had invested a lot of time into getting the licensed mosaic software
tuned correctly, but had put virtually nothing into marketing and was still
printing orders himself with a giant industrial Canon printer. Not
surprisingly he was tired of it. I realized the printing process could be
automated and business could potentially be expended by integrating with
Facebook and offering a free digital option if the customer allowed a post on
their wall. Long story short I bought 80% of the business a few weeks ago and
I'm working on those things right now. I'm sure there will be snags in the
road but I'm on my way toward my primary goal of getting a product on the
market that will not require my time to run on a day-to-day basis. Currently
income is less than 1000/month but I hope to see that grow.

My advice when thinking about a project like this yourself (and it's fine to
start from scratch, though that's not what I did) is to take the basic tenants
of running a startup to heart and just apply them on a micro scale:

1) let the real world inform your choices. In my case I happened upon a
product that already had some validation. In your case maybe you just need to
find that one pain-point you can help solve. Always be thinking of ideas, ask
your friends, read a lot.

2) be efficient. get good at rapid prototyping and shipping ideas for
validation. Always be asking yourself this question: is this the most valuable
thing I can be doing with my time right now? Force yourself to move fast.
You'll get better at learning what works and what doesn't.

3) Consider finding a partner who you can join forces with. Two people can be
more effective than the sum of their parts. Not to mention expanding your
network of friends and contacts is in many ways more valuable than wealth.

4) follow the money. It sounds crass but after all it is the goal and it's
also the most tangible effect of providing value to someone. Even at a micro
scale if you're not converting customers it's a red flag.

5) my personal style is to be be wary of saturated markets like social
networks, mobile apps, etc. on the flip-side i personally feel there's
potential in the blogging landscape and popular product integrations (like
widgets).

Sorry that ran a little long, I'm on a road trip right now (not driving), just
some stream of thought ideas. Good luck!

~~~
hywel
If anyone is interested in tech like this, I'm selling a Rails app that makes
a photomosaic from your Facebook photos. It's no longer online, but there's no
licensing the photomosaic part, cos I built it myself. Contact me at <my HN
handle>c@gmail.com.

------
lnreddy
I'm a Rails developer from Hyderabad,India . I did some freelance work for a
client from USA at $12/hour . Ofcourse I realised that I was making next to
nothing after taxes(20 %) and oDesk fees, So I quit .

I've been searching for a simple income generating idea too for the past few
months . I'm torn between trying to build a well paying freelancing career vs
building a Saas product/service that's going to pay over time .

I tried to contact you but your email isn't public. Ping me if you wanna
bounce some ideas regarding this sometime !

~~~
avinassh
can you share some ideas? from hyd as well ;)

------
lnanek2
It's easy to make that much on ads and ad removal upgrade fees for a semi-
popular game on mobiles (Android, iOS). You don't have to be on the charts. I
make that easy and only ever made top 200, I think. Games are a nice category
for new entrants because Flurry reports have shown that as a genre they aren't
super sticky. Users flow in and out of new offerings constantly.

------
BorisMelnik
OK I'll give away a really simple one for the lazy: start your own hosting
(reseller) company. Grab a dedicated, throw up some billing software and sell
a shared hosting plan to every Tom, Dick and Harry that you know. At $9.99 /
month for essentially unlimited email, space, transfer you should be able to
clear a few hundred bucks a month in a few months.

------
bennesvig
Listen to James Altucher's podcast with SJ Scott. He made 40k last month by
continuing to publish several books to amazon.

~~~
xtrumanx
Link[0] for the lazy. I'm kinda curious as I had fun writing some articles in
the past and know someone who's been talking about writing book for
Amazon/Kindle. Might be fun.

[http://www.stansberryradio.com/James-Altucher/Latest-
Episode...](http://www.stansberryradio.com/James-Altucher/Latest-
Episodes/Episode/591/Ep-23-How-To-Go-From-0-40-000-a-Month-Writing-From-Home)

------
ca98am79
you could buy domains on park.io and then sell them immediately on Flippa. For
example, see: [http://blog.park.io/articles/park-io-users-making-money-
flip...](http://blog.park.io/articles/park-io-users-making-money-flipping-
domains/)

------
duiker101
Make something that people are willing to pay for. I have a series of project,
each makes a relatively small amount/month but all together make a decent
passive income, not enough for me to live on but I am sure that you can
probably do something similar. Try many ideas and see if you can find
something people need.

~~~
shocks
Some examples would be nice. What are these small projects?

Selling apps? Ad based revenue? SaaS?

------
johnnyio
Become French resident, you will have a guaranteed living income of 434Euros
(600$)

~~~
frpt77
Really?!

As an EU citizen can't I just relocate there and collect without ever having
contributed to french social security?

Doesn't seem to make much sense...

~~~
tonfa
Sure you can do that, you need to stay at least 3 months before asking for it
first.

Note that how much you get is barely enough to live (but it fulfills its goal
which it to reduce poverty).

(and there's a good chance the program will be scraped at some point, since
while it fulfilled its goal with reducing poverty, it didn't have much impact
in term of employment and there is still a ceiling effect even so it was
supposed to remove them).

(and I'm not sure which part of reducing poverty doesn't make much sense, and
as a EU citizen you can profit from any wellfare system within the EU)

------
tim333
Sell Indian pharmaceuticals by post? There's some margin there I'm sure.

~~~
iopq
Already a huge amount of competitors out there.

~~~
sitkack
Take bitcoin, have a nice minimal site and decent package tracking.

------
thegrif
echoing the prior comment: you have to actually do something of value before
it can be positioned as the gift that keeps on giving :)

------
arbitragedude
you can open a producthunt or hackernews focused on indian startups..

------
CraigJPerry
Kindle singles.

~~~
laurenbee
This is not entirely passive (at least, in my experience) because in order to
get people to continue to buy your books long after they are published, you
need to continue publishing (unless you hit the kindle lottery and are wildly
successful immediately).

~~~
CraigJPerry
As in publish new revisions?

~~~
laurenbee
No, entirely new books/stories. New books can get a nice bump in sales if they
make it into the "New and Noteworthy" list or if Amazon mentions them in their
"New books in [x category]" emails. Publishing a revision to an existing book
does not change the publication date.

------
garysvpa1
how about freelancing?

------
longtime-lrkr
www.possiblestartups.com A startup idea generator.

------
scheff
forget it. you guys are negative.

------
TomGullen
Passive income is generally a unicorn

~~~
walshemj
yes and is it just me but don't all these "passive" posts seem to be very
spammy.

~~~
zo1
Or perhaps people are desperate for it? It is a bit of a "over the rainbow"
type of idea. I.e. getting a continuous stream of money for once-off
work/idea.

------
sainib
What I suggest you to do first is to stop working on the ideas that will not
generate any money...

------
Thiz
Everybody in the world loves incense.

Make a beautiful webpage with a mystic style and offer all kinds of incense,
scents, shivas, buddhas, elephants, spiritual stuff all over the world.

In no time you'll be as big as amazon.

------
mozilla
Step 1 make 500/mo after 2mo of work. Step 2 repeat every 2mo. .... Be
multimilionnaire.

Bonus: Believe in fairy tales. Get a free, pink flying pony.

Also - all developpers are now multimillionaires with the passive income magic
formula.

Im astonished this keeps poping up.

~~~
sumedh
Why are you so negative, people learn something new with such threads.

------
heart-os
No, no, it is not a Unicorn: Open Source, Open Company, Helping Others make
money will do it bu growing a very large network of people. This way you too
can use the software to make a few dollars. See an open company is many minds
in, and very few well made products out:
[https://github.com/regenerate/snippets](https://github.com/regenerate/snippets)
Everybody takes the product, and for as long as it was aimed at money making;
they make money. You need a lot of products of this kind, similar to how a
supermarket has many products for sale: [https://github.com/revenue/awesome-
revenue](https://github.com/revenue/awesome-revenue) Go ahead ask about
specifics, I think a lot about this. I dedicated this whole decade to helping
people with passive income, without asking for anything in return. My focus is
non-programmers, young families. The big idea is: A Global, Paying, Mechanical
Turk similar to this:
[https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome](https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome)

