Ask HN: Your best passive income sources? - robbiet480
======
nostromo
Real estate. (Ok, not 100% passive, but what is?) You can buy a duplex for not
much more than a single family house in many US cities and, thanks to the low
interest rates for an owner-occupied mortgage, rent out half and live for
free.

Unlike tech, you will not have a giant windfall with real estate; but also
unlike tech, it's very easy to price your product, find customers, and figure
out what your cashflow will be for years to come.

~~~
Vivtek
A word of caution: unless you have the personal skills to deal with tenants,
do _not_ make the mistake of thinking that real estate is passive income. Like
any earning occupation, landlording takes attention to detail, the ability not
to procrastinate, and people skills. Unlike most occupations, landlording will
bring you into contact with some of the worst people the planet has to offer,
under what has to be the worst possible set of circumstances. If you _want_ to
lose your faith in humanity, I encourage you to take up landlording.

There are easier ways to live rent-free, unless, as I say, you have the
personal skills to ride herd on grown children or if you are lucky enough to
own your property in an area where normal people rent, and you can find good
tenants on a regular basis.

~~~
curiouscats
Or pay someone else to manage the property for you. They are not cheap but
with the super low interest rates now (along with house purchase and rental
markets) you can likely find some workable solutions this way. It isn't
passive, but with a property manager it is much closer to passive.

~~~
jrajav
My parents run a property management business and they generally charge $100
of rent after the first month. You have to have a pretty high mortgage or a
pretty undesirable property (i.e. have to take low rent) for that to cut into
your positive net; In other words, likely if it's a old property you can't get
rid of, but unlikely if it's an investment property.

------
patio11
Halloweenbingocards.net will probably hit about $6k this October (BCC will hit
maybe $10k). Not bad for $250 paid in like 2009 or so.

I did a course on lifecycle emails for SaaS businesses recently. That did
pretty well - a few hundred sales.

~~~
tylermauthe
How are you monetizing Halloweenbingocards.net ??

~~~
patio11
The site encourages people to sign up for the free trial of Bingo Card
Creator. Some of them will pay $29.95 to print more than 8 cards. Trial signup
rates and conversion to purchase are both low but the volume is enormous.

------
choxi
This might not be the kind of answer you're looking for, but the best way to
truly _passively_ increase your wealth is to take care of your personal
finances (e.g. pay off your student loans, pay off your credit card balance,
invest in a lifecycle fund, see if your employer offers a 401(k))

I personally really liked the book I Will Teach You To Be Rich -- it has a
poor name but it's dense with incredibly practical advice particularly for
people coming right out of college suddenly making an income.

~~~
jfolkins
I support the idea of paying off debt. 401k (investment groups) however, is
essentially giving your money to a gambler, and having him play your hand. Bet
on yourself. Always.

~~~
jfolkins
Folks,

This is long, so I apologize in advance, bare with me.

A 401k is NOT a safe investment. People constantly mistake prior history to
future events yet there is no causality here. In fact, with QE3 in the wild,
the value of your employer matched dollar continues to degrade.

[http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/monetary/2012...](http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/monetary/20120913a.htm)

The question I ask myself is "What will my dollars be worth at the age of
retirement?" and the scenarios I paint continually are ones where I do not
like the outcome, should I continue down a traditional 401k path.

@Saryant and @wikwocket's advice is reasonable, if the current model is
sustainable. I have personally decided that it is not. This is just me. No
hard feelings guys/gals. I just don't trust someone who manages my account
making a gain in the good times, but suffering no losses in the bad times.

@hartleybrody

I really really love practical advice. And so you are in luck, because I have
a practical "betting on myself" story.

When I moved to Bend, Oregon it was 2005, I was 24, and it was shortly after
my brother had passed away. I was pretty emotional and wasn't in a rational
state at the time.

So when friends, family, every-freakin-person was saying the following mantra.

"Buy now or be priced out forever"

And with this chant ringing in my ears, I went to a mortgage broker. This
broker proceeded to approve me for up to 415k dollar loan, in Central Oregon,
with my wage of 45k annually. (If you have been following the mortgage crisis
this isn't the worst atrocity)

And sitting there with my young wife, wanting something solid to cling to, a
small mechanism clicked in my brain, despite the emotion. It didn't feel
right. So we walked away. I said to my wife

"I'll perform some research and we'll come back."

And so what did I do? I did what any solid nerd would do and went out to
gather data. How? I learned all about scraping (screen scraping, web crawling,
etc) from my new buddy Matthew Turland (plug his book not mine, which had not
been written at the time but I'd like to think my quesitons helpd him realize
his expertise. Yes it's all about me ;-)
[http://www.phparch.com/books/phparchitects-guide-to-web-
scra...](http://www.phparch.com/books/phparchitects-guide-to-web-scraping-
with-php/))

Using this knowledge I scraped and regexed the county records
([http://www.deschutes.org/Assessors-Office/DIAL-Search-
Form.a...](http://www.deschutes.org/Assessors-Office/DIAL-Search-Form.aspx))
and do you know what I learned? I saw that on average the annual increase in
real estate prices in Central Oregon hovered around 3%. Yet by the time 2005
rolled around, 50% YoY increases were the norm.

"Whoa" I thought channeling a Matrix style Keanu. "This is Not sustainable"

And so this is the beginning of "betting on myself". By analyzing the data, I
knew that this growth was not going to last, so I convinced my wife (bless her
for trusting me) that housing was a malinvestment, even though ALL our friends
were arguing our stupidity.

It was almost like the biblical story of Noah, where everyone thinks you are
crazy for saying a flood is coming. With everyone thinking you are crazy, you
eventually just shut up.

Then the RE market stalled. This were slowing down, but no one was putting it
together.

Then Lehman Brothers Crashed. And the World was like "WTF Lehman? Alright this
sucks but the losses are limited."

Then the market frickin crashed. By March of 2009 it was beyond ugly.
[http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...](http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1349467200000&chddm=746851&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=INDEXDJX:.DJI&ntsp=0&ei=tnJ2UJDlIuOOiAL7wgE)

And here is where I bet on myself again. I poured half our savings into GOLD.

OMG!

OMG!!

OMG!!!

This really is gambling. But the data and the research I had, helped me see
that there was this crazy opportunity. Buying into everyone's fear.

One thing I'd like to point out, is that I consulted with my wife. I told her
my thesis and she concluded.

"Well you were right about housing, I'm going to trust you. If we lose the
money, we will move on."

The last bit was really important. I only risked what WE were willing to lose.

Ok. Where was I? Oh yeah...

So I buy gold, then I start tracking foreclosures. But I get really bored of
tracking them by hand. So I write this sweet bot that scrapes the county
records and converts the PDF documents to readable text using tesseract (<==
so much badassness, I love tesseract)

<https://github.com/jfolkins/Deschutes> (<== teh codez)

Finally, last year, I reasoned that it was decent enough time to buy (Rent VS
Buy argument and data to support it given our local environment) and cashed
out our gold and bought RE.

Soooooooo....

Quite the rant, I realize. But hopefully it articulates the "betting on
oneself" philosophy that I've taken.

It may not pan out, I'm ok with that. I like my odds better than the 401k
folks.

One thing that sets me apart is that I've learned a crap pile about a ton of
different topics I never knew anything about. (Scraping, Economics, etc) and
am leveraging what I consider expertise into hopefully long term gains.

Take care -jared

(This is not investment advice. blah blah blah)

~~~
nirvana
You reached the correct conclusions empirically, but you could have saved a
lot of time and effort by having the philosophy that would lead you to them.
Or more specifically, an understanding of economics. I don't mean this to
sound smug, or anything like that, I'm just saying that I went thru the same
process you did- only I did it in 1998! and then because I didn't believe it,
again in 2001. By 2001 I _knew_ there would be a housing bubble, even though
there were (at that time) no signs of one. Hell, 911 was the news at that
time.

Some pointers to help you be able to make these kinds of predictions (and thus
maybe look for better data for more interesting and profitable investments)--

The book "The creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffen (?) is the
history of money in america, the federal reserve, and the "bailout cycle" that
happens over and over every 20 years. (And people act outraged at the
"bailouts" in 2008, as if it hasn't happened dozens of times before.)

And "economics in one lesson" by henry hazlitt-- you can find a free copy of
this out of copyright book online if you google around. A great overview of
economics, starting from the premise of the broken window fallacy and how it
illustrates why so many efforts that sound plausible totally fail (like
keeping interest rates low and making banks loan money to people who can't
repay - the Clinton and Bush policies that led to the housing bubble.)

Also the topical articles at <http://mises.org> are great and that site also
has around 900 free economics books you can download.

I went the options-spreads on canadian junior mining companies route, and I
got out of the market in the summer of 2007 when I felt the crash was
imminent. (I was a year early, but for that kind of deal you don't worry about
not nailing the absolute top!)

Spreads might be something good for you too-- "Options as a strategic
investment", by McMillan is the bible. (Using spreads I get better returns at
much less risk than people who buy stocks directly.)

Economics is a lot like programming- the basics are easy but there's no end to
what you can learn, and it gives you such great power-- especially when the
rest of the world has as much understanding of the science as the average
person does of writing software-- essentially none. And, even better, the
people who create economic opportunity for you telegraph what they are going
to do years in advance- they campaign on it, even!

~~~
jfolkins
Thanks for the great suggestions Nirvana! I was only seventeen in 1998, so I
was kind of hung up on teen spirit, girls, and rock'n roll.

> Or more specifically, an understanding of economics.

You are very correct. I had no frickin clue about economics. I kinda feel like
you have to have the experience and wisdom to judge books. I didn't have that
at the time. I needed to fill that gap in. So although it may appear I wasted
a lot of time, I feel that I have a really solid grasp on many things that
were mysteries to me before. And I can't really put a price on what that is
personally worth to me.

> I went the options-spreads on canadian junior mining companies route, and I
> got out of the market in the summer of 2007 when I felt the crash was
> imminent. (I was a year early, but for that kind of deal you don't worry
> about not nailing the absolute top!)

Heh, that is awesome! Nicely done.

One of the things my data has also brought me is friendship. Usually from
people many many years my senior. One of them who has really helped me in life
and I consider a mentor, also pulled this exact same thing. Getting out in
2007. I was always impressed by that.

~~~
nirvana
I didn't mean to imply you wasted any time- you exhibit the one trait that I
find exceedingly valuable: the ability to think for yourself. This is way too
rare. And so I wanted to help you with some things that you might find useful.
(I'd also recommend Atlas Shrugged, there's a reason it's a popular book, and
if it's wrong, there's no harm in reading it, right?)

Economics in One Lesson is so cogent that it will, I think, let you absorb a
great deal. And then the Creature from Jekyll Island, which is really a
history book that reads like a thriller, will let you see how the departure
from economics has had an effect on the country-- an effect the most recent
version of which you correctly identified. (Which was impressive, frankly,
can't tell you how many times people argued with me about house prices between
1998-2007. Sadly, going back to them in 2008-2010 and saying "See, I was
telling you this!" didn't earn any kudos for my having called it correctly...
I think their worldview is plastic and easily gets remapped by TV news.)

Anyway, the departure from economics is for very sound reasons-- it profits
the people who are peddling the bad stuff. But that also means we can profit
from it too.

Anyway, I just wanted to give you the books I thought would be most effective
for you. I read a lot of investment books when I needed to learn how to invest
(Vick's books on Warren Buffett I found particularly interesting-- now I
calculate what my return will be before I make the investment. People assume
that buying stocks is really risky, but the reality is risk is quantifiable. I
can buy a stock and know that I will be able to sell it for a specific price
at a specific time-- you can calculate this!)

Anyway, good luck! I admire your datamining-- there's a lot of opportunity for
you out there if you keep that up.

------
spiredigital
I'd have to say my two eCommerce businesses. They took a ton of time to setup
and market initially, but now they generate a full-time income as I have a
team in place to manage operations.

I love to work on them and often do, but I'll frequently take weeks off at a
time to travel and everything continues to run smoothly. The entire business
is based on the drop shipping model, so I don't have to stock any inventory
and can run the business from anywhere. Plus, the initial capital outlay was
just $1,500 so I didn't have to take on any risk.

For anyone interested, I blog about running my two businesses and eCommerce in
general at:

<http://www.ecommercefuel.com>

~~~
armenarmen
loved your book by the way

------
rjurney
In California, selling cannibas to a co-op you belong to as a patient could be
a nice supplemental income. An Aerogrow makes it easy, and with six legal
plants, you can grow at least 1.5 pounds every 90 days. I think it works out
that you can make $10-15k/year for not much work.

And no, my wife would not let me do this :)

~~~
brianwillis
I think you win the prize for the most creative idea in this thread.

~~~
jarek
If true, that'd say more about the thread than about anything else.

------
JoeCortopassi
[Related]Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what? (1
month ago)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603>

~~~
sprobertson
[Related] Ask HN: How do you generate passive income? (3 years ago)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387789>

~~~
khet
I am glad this (and similar) questions gets asked. As a community of makers,
we can get very good at making things but just making things is not enough. We
need to prove to our customers that we created something of value and then
charge them for that value.

This topic cannot be talked about enough.

------
apike
Two years ago, when we started Steamclock, we spent our first two months
building a niche iPhone app. We've done point releases but not added much, yet
today it pays our rent. <http://www.steamclocksw.com/weddingdj/>

We haven't done any serious research or marketing for it. We simply focused
down and built the highest quality app we could build, and it worked.

~~~
w1ntermute
You're practically giving that app away at $5. Wedding-related businesses are
_extremely_ high margin, simply because it's super easy to rip people off when
they're really happy (same applies for funerals, except people are too sad to
care in that case).

You could probably sell this for 5x as much and still make more money - the
bride will want everything to be _perfect_ for the wedding and will be willing
to spend whatever it takes.

~~~
apike
Intuitively, I'd agree. When we release the upcoming major version (iPad
support, advanced queueing, etc) I'd like to try $10.

On the other hand, after 1.5 years at $5 we've been trying $2, and revenue has
been consistently higher since the change. I suspect this is because it drove
us into findable range in the "Top Paid Music" chart, but with no analytics
it's frustratingly hard to prove.

~~~
SiVal
Sorry for such a naive question, but is it possible to do A/B testing on the
Apple App Store? I don't know what their turnaround time is for changes, but
do you just change the price, wait a while, change back, wait a while, etc.,
or do you do something else?

~~~
apike
The price updates within a day, and you get sales reports daily with a delay
of a few hours, and a mix of old and new price sales on the first day. So it's
possible, but the feedback loop of the charts means that this kind of
measurement is hard to analyze. If you do a test that fares poorly, the next
test will probably be affected by that.

------
veb
I use TeeSpring (<http://www.teespring.com>) to create t-shirts and market
them towards people on my Facebook page
(<http://www.facebook.com/ModernSherlock>).

Generally does very well. Way better than other stuff I've tried, like
SEO/Marketing etc. The only problems I have is using a crap design, so it pays
to know what the audience _really_ wants before I try selling it to them.

~~~
Eliezer
I've considered selling T-Shirts. How much time do they take to create? How
much income do you make, for how much effort?

~~~
veb
My last design took about 5 minutes, and it took maybe 20minutes in total
"advertising" and I got back... two months salary. (software dev, in NZ)

------
mcantor
I sell posters of a vim cheat sheet I designed (see my profile for link). I
ship my inventory to a 3rd-party fulfillment provider who plugs in to Shopify
with a custom app, so all I have to do is re-print when the inventory runs out
and handle the occasional customer service problem. Digital downloads are a
total freebie.

~~~
statictype
Neat. I've thought of doing things like this before. Do you mind sharing how
many figures you make on this? How do you handle the actual printing? Is that
also outsourced?

~~~
mcantor
I lucked out with this project; it began as a Kickstarter which got incredibly
overfunded:

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/maxcantor/beautiful-
vim-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/maxcantor/beautiful-vim-cheat-
sheet-poster)

It hit the front page of "Featured Technology" projects and lived there for
almost the entire funding run.

I used UPrinting for the printing, who I'm quite happy with. It cost less than
a thousand dollars to do the initial run of 500 posters.

Initially, my approach to shipping was to buy 500 poster tubes from Uline (no
relation to UPrinting) and ship them myself. This was an unmitigated disaster;
a cataclysm; a miserable shit-show of Brobdingnagian proportions. There is
simply not sufficient support for the "hobbyist shipper"; USPS doesn't know
what to do with you, UPS and Fedex charge too much (especially for
international shipping), and the label-printing tools are across-the-board
some of the worst software I've ever worked with. After months of Kafkaesque
hijinks with USPS, I gave up and shipped my inventory to Fulfillrite, a third-
party fulfillment provider. Thank God for those guys.

I haven't run the numbers to determine my exact profit & loss, but I make more
than just beer money. I don't know if I'll ever sell enough to come even close
to what the Kickstarter originally made, but the web store has been bringing
in around $750/mo in revenue, which translates to something in the range of
$350 - $500 of profit.

I tend to make money to the extent that more eyeballs hit the site. Last
month, someone mentioned the poster in passing in the _comment_ of a blog I'd
never heard of, and I made $300 in six hours. I have no idea how to advertise,
though, so that kind of thing is usually just lucky happenstance for me.

I'll probably do another couple of poster projects (bash, emacs, etc.); if
they are even nearly as successful as this one, I might eventually be able to
live exclusively off the profits! An exciting prospect, but one that is quite
far off.

Feel free to drop me a line if you have any other questions. I really ought to
condense this stuff into a blog post some time.

------
neel980
A supportive working wife, nothing beats that :)

~~~
danellis
I should hope not.

------
jawns
This is probably not your ordinary type of passive income, but it's income for
work I would otherwise be doing anyway, so hopefully it counts.

I run Correlated (<http://www.correlated.org>), a site that publishes one
surprising correlation a day, using data generated by readers.

It was never really intended to be a money-making project, although I did give
display ads and affiliate links a try, with very little success.

And then ... a book deal fell into my lap.

I had been shopping around a book proposal for "Experiments on Babies"
(<http://www.experimentsonbabies.com>), and one of the publishers that was
interested in that book also happened to note that I was the creator of
Correlated, and asked if I would be interested in a separate deal to turn
Correlated into a book.

I got a very nice advance for the two book deals, and in the case of
Correlated, the writing involved is, for the most part, what I'd be doing
anyway, deal or no deal.

------
sinak
Two friends and I started <http://repeaterstore.com> straight out of college.
Within a year it was profitable, and within 3 it was doing $3 million in
revenue (and about a 15% profit margin). It's pretty much stabilized since
then, and we hired a manager to monitor the operation. Most stock is shipped
through drop shoppers, we just have 2 customer support people to handle phone
calls and emails. Forthe last 2 years we've been working on new, more
interesting startups - but having a stable source of income has been
incredibly valuable in letting us bootstrap until we could raise funds from
VCs. Niche eCommerce can be awesome.

~~~
ssebro
You're having db issues here :
[http://www.repeaterstore.com/applications/small-
building.htm...](http://www.repeaterstore.com/applications/small-
building.html)

------
suresk
I really like building developer tools and kind of miss doing it full time. I
built a tool for testing/playing with REST services last year and sell it on
the OS X app store:

<http://www.uresk.net/httpclient/>

I'm not getting rich off it, but it usually brings in a few hundred bucks per
month and I like hearing from fellow developers who benefit from using it.

~~~
nja
That's pretty cool, actually. I would never have thought of selling an app for
that, as most everybody I know uses Advanced REST Client (
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/advanced-rest-
clie...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/advanced-rest-client-
appl/hgmloofddffdnphfgcellkdfbfbjeloo) ). It must be really neat to know
people are choosing to pay you for your product over using a similar free app.

~~~
suresk
Thanks.

The browser-based ones have improved quite a bit recently. I use Advanced REST
Client whenever I'm on a Windows machine - it is quite good.

There are a few features that my tool has that make it worth a few bucks for
some people, I think, most notably being able to save requests and share them
with other members of your team. I've heard from a few folks who have them
checked into source control as part of manual testing scripts (there are some
interesting opportunities to automate this kind of testing, too, but I haven't
had time to focus on it).

And I'm releasing a feature soon that will let you paste in cURL commands and
turn them into requests, which is handy when you're working with a webservice
that has examples of requests given in the form of cURL commands (which is a
lot of them).

Even if you're competing against free apps that match and even exceed what you
can offer in some areas (which is frankly going to be more and more common),
you can still find little features that might be fairly simple but add a ton
of value for a certain subset of people.

------
andrewljohnson
Our highest selling app (a hiking app) makes 15-30K/month, depending on the
season. Our other navigation apps don't make quite as much yet, but some are
getting there. You can figure out from my profile which it is, but I didn't
want to name it in the thread and have this be something that turned up in
searches.

I wouldn't call it totally passive, but if we ignored it, it wouldn't stop
making money. We have consistently grown the sales over the last couple of
years, and we are about to introduce a premium in-app purchase.

I have always thought making iPhone apps was a good business, despite what you
hear on this forum.

~~~
peto123
Congratulation, good work! Anyway, the question was about passive income...I
suppose you have to do a bit of marketing, user support, thinking about new
features, etc...isn't it then just a business?

~~~
andrewljohnson
Perhaps, though it seems like a lot of these responses fall in that category.

I'll say this - I used to work on this app day and night, and now I try and
just do the part I enjoy the most, and leave most of it to expert developers
and friendly support people. My focus is now on growing the platform, business
development, and design work.

------
kolinko
Real estate - I used to own two flats, and get $200-$300 from each one of
them. I recently sold one though - I think I can make a better use of the
money by other means. iPhone/iPad apps - I did two or three successful apps,
right now they bring in $20-$40 daily. The last time I touched/promoted any
one of them was last December, and the sales are quite steady now. I bought
some S.DICE shares ( <http://polimedia.us/bitcoin/mpex.php?mpsic=S.DICE> )
@0.0032, spent 800 BTC on them I think. Got ~20BTC from dividends first month,
~5BTC dividends the second. It's very risky, but there is some potential for
growth there.

All in all I get ~1200 USD of passive income which would be considered an
average pay in Poland. I've got a startup on top of that which brings a lot
more though.

~~~
Marwy
Can you tell the name of this startup?

------
danneu
I make (well, past-tense at the moment) almost $2k/month on a vBulletin play-
by-post gaming forum I started back in 2007. One single adsense banner below
the navbar.

I actually burned out within 6 months of trying to bootstrap the fledgling
forum with fake activity, clever backlinks, and entertaining the trickle of
registrants.

Burned out enough to take a a break for a while. Came back months later and it
was a bustling forum of activity. Apparently I'd just reached that critical
mass necessary for the community to be autonomous (able to entertain itself
and cajole newbies to stay) before I took that break. Nowadays, I do very
little beyond pay the server bill. It's staggering the amount of work
volunteers (moderators) will put into maintaining a community and I'm
grateful.

Recently had adsense disabled on my website after some automated process
decided my website was "mature/adult-themed". The automated email cited a post
in our forum's off-topic spammy section where some user copy and pasted the
phrase "sexual intercourse" over and over again _in Mandarin_. Just some non-
Mandarin-speaking teenagers being silly for a moment. Now I'm working on
getting adsense reactivated.

~~~
dholowiski
I'd just like to point out that this is a classic "Overnight"... well, after 6
months of crazy hard work "success" story.

~~~
firebones
As well as the risk of dependence on a single revenue stream subject to being
shut off by automated algorithms flagging your site based on UGC from
teenagers.

------
bigethan
Airbnb. High value customers and very little overhead on my part. Not totally
passive, I guess, but takes up very little time and makes us a decent bit of
money on the side.

~~~
EGreg
Could you disclose how much one can make on airbnb? I have a 2 bedroom
apartment and sometimes, when I leave on vacation, I would like to rent it
out.

~~~
bigethan
Depends on your location. Do an airbnb search in your area to get an idea. I
just made up a price for mine, and when I was getting tons of requests for it,
raised the prices to slow them to a manageable rate. Living in SF doesn't
hurt.

~~~
marcojgm
In SF you could easily rent out a spare room in a 2br apartment for $65-120
per night depending on the quality. I typically do 10 days a month at $100 per
night. Sometimes I hire a cleaner, and buy some wine/snacks/breakfast for
guests but it's been very easy and I love doing it. Disclaimer: I work for
Airbnb.

------
ericdykstra
Not 100% passive, but fantasy sports has been a nice side income for me this
year. I used to play a lot for almost nothing, but then found daily fantasy
games (pick a new team every game day, play against other people) and have
made a decent return on my investment.

I play on fanduel.com almost exclusively. If you have any questions or want
some help getting started, send me an email (in profile). My referral link if
you're so inclined:
[http://www.fanduel.com/?invitedby=yudarvish&cnl=da](http://www.fanduel.com/?invitedby=yudarvish&cnl=da)

~~~
sejje
I have an old poker friend who started a similar site: <http://buzzdraft.com/>

It's formatted to be similar to poker sit-and-gos.

------
scheff
I'm about to write a book on precisely this topic. I have been looking hard at
addressing this issue over the past 10 years so that I can focus on what's
important (Startups!). And I believe that I have finally found the best
passive income source, given the limitations that people like ourselves are
working with.

I'm still in the process of experimenting with my method to see how far I can
take it, but the basics of it work already.

A lot of what people define as "passive income" is questionable. Most, if not
all, passive income investment strategies require you to hold down a job, or
other income, while financing assets that some day, HOPEFULLY, will be paid
off enough that you don't have to work ever again.

Most of those plans take too long for my satisfaction. There are other means
and methods if you learn and apply yourself. My book will hopefully detail and
compare my method with a majority of others.

The obvious ones to look at, if you can invest time and/or money -

* Share trading * Property investment * Property flipping/options * Google AdSense (or similar) * Affiliate marketing * Tim Ferriss' muse / 4HWW * Network marketing/MLM * Website flipping

All of them have varying degrees of learning curve and time commitment to make
happen. Few people will tell you how much commitment you need to make, they
just focus on dangling the carrot.

~~~
goggles99
I always question people who write books, produce DVDs, hold seminars or sell
any kind of knowledge concerning how to get rich or make extra money.

If you or any of these people are so good and know all these 'secrets' to
success and money - Why don't you just get rich off of it and retire? why
would you let everyone know you secrets? Won't this just crowd your space? Why
do you need to sell this product to make money? Some of you claim that you
just want to give back or help others and you have such success, then why are
you charging me $20-$500+ ?

So I am always skeptical. I think that this is generally snake oil.

~~~
scheff
It's good to be skeptical. I have seen people get fleeced by get rich quick
schemes, and have concentrated on not being one of those victims.

Just to be clear - the strategy I'm proposing is NOT a get rich quick scheme.
It's "create a passive income stream", with the focus on "passive". The
definition of passive income is simply "I don't have to work for this money."

There are several reasons why I'm writing a book. 1. because it's not a simple
strategy - it requires explanation and details. 2. I know that a lot of people
here would be looking for the same solution that I have found, and they
shouldn't have to go through 10 years of exploration and experimentation to
find it, like I did. 3. My knowledge and time is worth money. People who
recognise that are willing to pay money to access it.

But the key reason why someone like yourself might pay someone like me money
to learn from my book is the same reason that I have done the same for others.
Without paying for that knowledge, I would not have this opportunity to earn
passive income.

------
Matsta
Facebook was definitely my biggest earner until they decided to crack down on
everything at the end of last year and basically screwed everyone over.

It's the same deal for SEO, used to be a easy way to promote Adsense, CPA
offers and what not, but the penguin change just makes it harder and harder to
rank for keywords.

2012 has been definitely a slow year for Internet marketing, the worst I've
faced since I started in 2006.

~~~
robryan
You could argue that this stuff being harder is actually a good thing for the
end user. The stuff that is still around is likely offering more value.

Coming from someone who has done a fair bit of CPA/ Adsense stuff in the past
myself.

~~~
cgag
I think it'd be pretty hard to argue otherwise.

------
thangalin
<http://www.davidjarvis.ca/entanglement/>

A paltry $100 per year in ad revenue.

~~~
supersaiyan
I loled, but you should make some youtube videos, its a very niche topic you
would drive good traffic back

------
pkamb
The Mac App Store. Consistent sales of my $8 app EdgeCase and the $3 Reddit
Notifier. Plus the more expensive One-Hand Keyboard.

In my experience it's much easier to price higher on the Mac App Store
compared to iOS. Especially when you're selling a constantly-running
notifier/utility. Feels more _worth it_ when the app is passively used every
time you use your Mac, as opposed to whenever you happen to find and use the
random app on your 3rd home screen in iOS.

\- EdgeCase <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/edgecase/id513826860?mt=12>

\- Reddit Notifier [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reddit-
notifier/id468366517?...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reddit-
notifier/id468366517?mt=12)

\- One-Hand Keyboard [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/one-hand-keyboard-one-
hand/id...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/one-hand-keyboard-one-
hand/id465275525?mt=12)

------
hendi_
Bunker App (<https://www.bunkerapp.com>)

Bunker is my SaaS solution which I market to freelancers and consultants who
are looking for a complete solution for their small business (from creating
quotes and proposals over project management and time-tracking to invoicing
and payments).

Most other services specialize on a subset of what's needed (e.g. they're only
doing invoicing, or only time-tracking, or only project management) and you
have to go shopping for multiple solutions (and cross fingers that all of them
integrate well with each other!). With Bunker my focus is on providing a
complete, well-integrated experience.

So you could say my niche is "covering multiple niches" ;-)

I'd say that Bunker provides me passive income because my support burden is
negligible and my churn-rate less then my conversion-rate. So if I wanted to I
could go completely passive, but I'm committed to improve the app further and
grow it.

------
dangrossman
I launched <http://www.improvely.com/> in August, and it's already eclipsed my
other sites in recurring revenue.

~~~
nja
I've been hearing more and more that B2B is the way to go. Sounds like it has
worked well for you.

------
bdunn
Planscope (<https://planscope.io>) \- predictable, more-growth-than-churn SaaS
revenue

Compared to my book, which fizzles out when I'm not actively marketing it,
building a B2B subscription product is the best, most turnkey income source
I've ever had.

~~~
pan69
Looks great. But is this passive income? It looks like you've invested a lot
to get this off the ground, correct? How much time do you spend on this, let's
say per week?

~~~
sprobertson
Passive income generally means that hours spent don't directly translate to
dollars. All passive income solutions (that I know of) require some initial
investment. Maybe "time-scalable income" would be a better term?

~~~
pan69
I understand that. But if you spend 80 hours per week on it, is it still
"passive" or do you simply have two jobs?

To me the idea of "passive" income is that you might spend a certain amount
upfront but after that initial push it doesn't require a lot of attention,
i.e. passive.

~~~
sprobertson
Well if he's spending that much time on it, then yeah I'd agree, not passive.
In the interest of naming arbitrary cutoff points I'd call anything more than
10 hours a week not passive.

------
tudorizer
Good timing with this thread. My attempt is with making iOS games. Trying to
mix pleasure and profit. First attempt is <http://clumsyandthestars.com/>.
Working on a second one now...

~~~
xgalvez
Good luck! I'm trying the same thing myself with <http://yata.ca>. It's more
of a party game played with the iOS device, and thought the interactivity with
people in the same room would add to the fun. Hope all's well with the second
one!

~~~
tudorizer
looks pretty simple and sweet. Best of luck!

------
ryangilbert
nflbyeweeks.com - gets over 1,000 uniques each day and generates between $2
and $5 each day with Adsense. Not overly impressive but it's still nice.

~~~
kaizendc
You should split test some NFL jersey e-mail submit offers from CPA networks,
instead of Adsense.

I bet you will make way more money from those 1,000 daily uniques with a good
jersey e-mail submit.

~~~
ryangilbert
Could you email me at draftpulse at gmail dot com to give me a little info on
how that works?

------
ashray
I started a site 13 years ago and it is one of the largest sites in it's niche
right now. Very very popular. I do work on it many hours a week (can range
from 0 to 100 hours/week) but I don't really have to. I just love working on
it, adding new features, etc. I would definitely call the work passive or
hobbyist - even though sometimes I'm up till 4 in the morning working on X new
feature.

Income is in the early 5 digits per month range (USD). Traffic dropped a bit
from August to September so I've been working more on it lately :)

~~~
intended
Hobbyist would be the better category for it.

At a variable range of 0-100 hours a week, your top end is very far removed
from the passive income part of the question.

In this case the average number of hours per month may make more sense to
discuss.

~~~
ashray
You're right. And maybe average number of hours per month is more appropriate.
Or lets, say average number of hours per week. Usually the top end goes to 100
when I'm working on some new feature and am completely obsessed with it.
However, following that there is definitely burn-out which causes me to go
down to the 0-20 per week range.

Also, considering that I've been working on this since high school, I used to
have a lot more time for it back then ;)

In a regular month I probably average around 20 hours per week. However,
during a particularly overzealous month I may go to 35 or higher. I think at
20 it still falls under passive income.

Just to give you an idea of how my commitment varies. A year ago I had a full
time job and I would sometimes work only 5-10 hours per week on it. Also, I
completely neglected it in my first year of college (yet it paid for my
college) and by my 3rd year there were enough problems that I had to again
spend considerable time bringing it up to spec :)

I'd love to call it a hobby - because that's how I feel about it - but when 24
hours of downtime can cause more than a few hundred dollars of losses - it
becomes tough not to take things a bit more seriously =/

~~~
intended
Well the way you talk about it, it sounds like you are conflicted in how to
describe it. Your word choice seems to acknowledge that its a job to an
extent, while the intentions behind it are insistent that its your hobby.

I found that interesting.

------
Jemaclus
For a long time I refused to sign up for Amazon Prime, and I'd order things
that cost $19 or $23, and I'd hunt around for something that would bring in
that additional $6 or $3 to meet the minimum price for free Super Saver
Shipping (USD $25). I got tired of hunting around for that, so I built
<http://finishmyorder.com/>.

I get like $6/mo in affiliate fees, but I don't really advertise it so I'm
lucky I get even that.

------
pacomerh
Very low ones, the first one is selling a set of shutterstock pictures, aprox
100 bucks a month. And the lowest one, 30-40 bucks a month with adsense
clicks. Basically a list of powerpoint presenations (chain letters) for the
spanish speaking. I spend 30 min a week. I get the PPS files, convert a couple
of them to html and put them on a wordpress blog. edit: forgot to put a url
<http://powerpointz.com>

------
kcorey
I make lower 5 digits per year from <http://docrobot.co.uk>.

It's effectively an online desktop publishing system aimed at making it easy
for HR teams to deliver TRS (Total Reward Statements) in 10% of the time, at
10% of the cost, and with fewer errors.

It took a couple years to write, so I wouldn't say it was an easy investment,
but it was fun to write. These days it ticks over and I don't spend much time
on it at all.

Perhaps I should work on advertising more...

-Ken

------
seanlinehan
I was making a few thousand dollars a month from a coupon site. The Panda
update completely knocked me out of the rankings for the past 4 months, but
I've been slowly climbing back up on my top keywords. It was literally no work
whatsoever - I wrote a script to aggregate coupons automagically and
outsourced SEO. Turns out the latter wound up killing me. (If you're an SEO
master, please reach out to me on Twitter) :)

------
vu0tran
How timely. I'm actually starting a challenge for myself to see if I can
bootstrap something to at least $5,000 in revenue a month. I've tried and
failed many times, but this time, I'm going to force myself to only live off
what I can make with this product.

<http://vutran.me/blog/desperation.html>

~~~
sejje
Did you release this (blog says oct 15th)?

------
byoung2
I have two sites that I built 3 years ago that still rank well for a few
valuable keywords. Each site has hundreds of pages of content but one page on
each site is number 1 on Google for keywords that pay $5-10 per click. Not a
lot of traffic, but enough for a few hundred a month from adsense and
affiliate links.

------
bosco
pixurwall.com - about 2-3k hits a day generating $20-30 in revenue. Cost 200
bucks to make and has been pretty consistent for over 8 months.

~~~
volandovengo
where does this traffic come from?

~~~
bosco
The way the app works, it auto tags 2-3 people that are in the collage poster
that was generated. I believe most of the traffic is generated that way.

------
raintrees
Real Estate, multi-family rentals.

------
fudged71
Amazon affiliate links somehow floating through the abyss and still pulling in
pennies.

------
mgz
I have built <http://search-logs.com> back in 2006 in a couple of days and ad
revenue still lets me work on interesting projects, not worrying about getting
a "real" job.

------
da_n
I make about $80-100 per month in Adsense from a 'scratch your own itch'
website I made to help calculate battle outcomes in a game. Did it over a
weekend. I don't actually play the game anymore, was taking up too much of my
life. Working on a new version though as the code is a shambles and it isn't
responsive and most visitors come from iOS, I didn't know much about
JavaScript or responsive design at the time I wrote it so a horror show
underneath. <http://battlecalc.net>

------
icoder
I created <http://www.colormandala.com>

It makes ~2 dollars a day from adsense. Breadcrumbs, but I haven't spend any
time on it for like half a year. Amazon affiliate adds almost nothing to this.
Being in the Chrome Webstore seems to have helped a lot in page visits.

I still wonder from time to time if I should put some effort in upping this a
bit. But my time is limited and the app doesn't fit my current strategy
(mobile, mhealth specifically).

------
khet
I spent 2 weeks on a Themeforest xhtml/css theme about 3 years ago. It still
gives me a 40$ every month. Nothing to brag about but it takes care of my
hosting bill :)

~~~
tudorizer
Link?

------
pczzy
I have a website, <http://www.mfrbee.com> . Not a lot of traffic, but enough
for a few hundred a month from adsense.

~~~
whalabi
No offense, but you should get someone to fix the English, I was immediately
turned off.

------
abhishekdesai
SignInStyle.com

Launched in 2007 as a free service, got covered in CNBC India. Got loads of
requests overnight so had to make it paid afterwards.

Around USD 2-3k income without doing lot of efforts.

It is one of the most unique ideas you can ever come across. Requires no paid
marketing. You get extremely happy when Olympians, photographers use
signatures designed by you on their websites and photographs as autographs.

Highly gratifying passive income.

------
dshimy
<https://www.jabwire.com> \- collaboration tool for software projects, SaaS
revenue

------
dhechols
Last February I started a small YouTube channel surrounding eSports called
DrZealotTV. <http://youtube.com/DrZealotTV>

Although it hasn't even broken even, I'm now equipped with a ton of expertise
and I have a few efforts I'm working on that I think will be quite popular. :)

------
demostenes
My website about PC processors <http://www.jaki-procesor.pl/> (in Polish) gets
me around 200$-300$ per month. US version <http://www.best-processor.net/> is
barely alive tho.

------
kkoppenhaver
A site that I've recently stumbled across and been reading through voraciously
is smartpassiveincome.com. It has some pretty solid tips and in 3 episodes of
his free podcast, he goes over 8 potential types of "passive" income business
models.

------
collegeappz
I've learned that my passive income sources have become nonexistent and going
into the biz. That's to be expected in the early years of a startup. If anyone
has other advice if I were to have pennies to save, do share.

------
marcelfalliere
> theonemillioneuromap.com

I got 4 euros (minus google checkout fees) so far.

------
ispekhov
Whoever is offering stock as an income opportunity is not smart. And if you
think stock is a passive income opportunity, you are dumb. Go read James
Altucher.

~~~
rm999
All passive income comes from something with value, and hence carries inherent
risk. I'd argue real estate is even riskier, yet you aren't criticizing people
in this thread who make money from renting/airbnb.

------
SeoxyS
Airbnb + legacy Mac & iPhone apps. 50k/yr on average.

------
enobrev
No matter how hard I try, all my eggs only seem to fit into one basket at a
time. I don't recommend it, but it has worked well for me thus far.

------
ispekhov
Go download Qriket app for your iPhone. It lets you scan QR codes and win
money. Not a tedious task that will net you $20 per day.

~~~
nXqd
is there any similar app on Android ?

------
armenarmen
I own aidsforhearing.com a shitty amazon store selling hearing aids, go figure
it's made nothing.

ideas?

------
ww520
Real estate

------
hodder
Stocks work the best for me so far. Specifically Graham style net-nets.

------
vjz
Tax-free municipal bonds

~~~
aantix
Care to expand on this?

~~~
hkhanna
State and municipality bonds are sort of like U.S. Treasury bonds, except
they're issued by a state or local government. They pay a fixed interest rate,
but your interest is usually tax-free.

Of course, they pay a lower interest rate than taxable bonds. Thus, the only
reason these tax-free bonds would be better than taxable bonds is if you are
in a high enough marginal tax bracket to compensate for the difference in
interest between these tax-free bonds and taxable bonds.

An example should make this all clear. Assume you have a marginal tax rate of
40%. (You earn a lot of money.) If you invest $100,000 in a typical taxable
bond that pays 10%, each year you will get $10,000. But subtract out the 40%
tax, and you are left with only $6,000 after-tax.

Compare this with what would happen if you invested that same $100,000 in a
tax-free state bond. This bond only pays 8%, being tax-free and all. Each year
you get $8,000. But you pay no tax, so you are in fact better off than if you
had bought the taxable bonds!

Now, lets change your marginal tax bracket to 10%--you don't earn much money,
so your marginal rate is low. You invest that same $100,000 in the taxable
bond that pays 10%, you will get $10,000 pre-tax but only pay your marginal
rate, 10%, on that sum, so you are left with $9,000.

With the tax-free state bond at 8%, you only get $8,000, though you don't pay
any tax on it. So at your low marginal rate, you would have been better off
buying the taxable bond.

My point is, tax-free bonds are probably only useful if you earn a lot of
income each year to put you in a high marginal rate.

Source: I'm a law student and we learned about tax-exempt state/municipal
bonds today in Tax!

~~~
nlh
Excellent explanation - thank you for the write-up!

Now if only we could find those muni bonds that pay 8% ;)

~~~
curiouscats
True. Just wait, it will happen eventually. But until then, sadly, decent
income producing investments (bonds and the like) are not easy to find.

------
nsoonhui
Setting up an ecommerce shop and let my friend runs it.

