
What was your best passive income in 2015? - joebaf
What is your best source of &#x27;passive&#x27; or recurring income?<p>previous links added in the comment
======
dangrossman
Improvely ([https://www.improvely.com](https://www.improvely.com)) and
W3Counter ([https://www.w3counter.com](https://www.w3counter.com)) have grown
to $45,000 MRR.

W3Counter is completely passive -- no new code or features in over a year, no
customer support load, autoscaling frontend (EC2) and backend (Aurora).
Improvely gets feature updates a few times a year and has some light e-mail
support load. I continue to have no employees or contractors.

Trying to diversify more in 2016.

~~~
sauere
How do you make money with w3counter?

~~~
dangrossman
It's freemium. People pay monthly or annually for extra features (real-time
reports, e-mail summaries, multiple websites on one account, etc).

------
baccredited
$93,917 for 2015. I was lucky enough to be born with gifts that make me good
at writing code. I trade that coding ability for money. I invest that money in
the S&P 500 (ticker VOO). I've been doing this for decades and have invested
about $1,173,971 to date. The trailing 10 year return is about 8% per year. So
let's call it $93,917. $93,917 of passive income.

~~~
kohanz
Well done! Would you be willing to comment on what % of your income you invest
each year (on average)? Also, have you suffered a "passive loss" in some
years?

~~~
mywittyname
If all of his investments are in VOO as he claims, then he would have suffered
several yearly losses.

Some people only count only dividends as income. In this case, there would be
no "passive loss", but the total income would only be ~2-3% pa instead of ~8%
pa average.

~~~
Someone1234
Indeed. When people talk about how well their investments are doing they
should utilise a ten year yearly average (or longer). I bet that $93K figure
doesn't include the years where they LOSE money, but a ten year yearly average
would (e.g. making it 80K or similar).

And as you said they definitely lost money during the recession if they're
seeing 8% now. There's no way they're just doing that from bonds or dividends
alone.

~~~
SyneRyder
You could get 8% from dividends if you're specifically hunting for dividend
stocks, buying individual stocks, and only buy when they're at that level. The
Australian stock market has had lots of opportunities like that over the
years, where major brands have had falls that briefly made them terrific
bargains. But it would have to be your specific strategy.

~~~
Someone1234
I just don't run across them very often (ever?) at that level. I think 5% is
extremely good for a dividend.

Do you have an example of an 8% dividend stock?

~~~
SyneRyder
If you want 5% dividends in Australia, that's easy - Telstra (TLS.AX) is
regularly at levels where you'll get a 5% dividend. Right now you'd get 5.8%.
Motley Fool mentioned it a couple of months ago as well, and if you can make
use of Franking Credits you'll get even more value out of it [1].

If you've got E-Trade, go into Quotes & Research -> Tools -> Basic Stock
Filter and search by Yield > 8%. Today there's 66 results. Of course, you need
to do your research: Dick Smith Electronics is supposedly offering 33.5%
yield, but they've just gone bankrupt. Slater And Gordon at 13.95% yield have
been hugely impacted by UK Regulatory changes in recent months.

You might look closer at BHP Billiton: (BHP.AX, 9.95%). One of the world's
biggest mining operations, and the shares have tanked post-mining-boom. Surely
they'll have to cut their dividend, but even if it was halved, it would still
hit your 5% extremely-good-dividend level.

Other names I recognize are Seven West Media (SWM.AX, 10.44%) who own
newspapers & television stations, but also have part-ownership of Netflix
competitor Presto that is preloaded on Samsung televisions. Beyond
International (BYI.AX, 9.09%) produce television shows like Mythbusters, and
have had steadily increasing dividends over the years.

Anyway, that's the approach I've taken: it's usually about buying into well
known companies that pay dividends that steadily grow over the years, at times
when the share price has been hit so hard that the dividend yields become
huge.

[1] [http://www.fool.com.au/2015/12/04/todays-telstra-share-
price...](http://www.fool.com.au/2015/12/04/todays-telstra-share-price-is-
offering-a-5-8-fully-franked-yield/?source=aptyholnk3030003#)

------
andersthue
My total from [http://www.watermark-image.com](http://www.watermark-image.com)
last year has been around 35.000€ and it takes 5-10 minutes of support a day
and 30-60 minutes once or twice a month doing bug features or new features.

My new project [http://timeblock.com](http://timeblock.com) that are funded by
that income and that I do not write any code for has generated app. 2000€ in
recurring revenue last year although it is not passive yet it is MRR :)

~~~
ekr
After going through your timeblock app, I still don't know what exactly it is
for, or why people would pay for that. I get that it is a sort of calendar
with time tracking features. What makes it different from the thousands of
other similar apps?

~~~
andersthue
Most og all it is an agile method, improving communication and time in flow -
the app is "just" a helper app that makes it easier to run the weekly meeting
and get an overview of resource allocation and project eta's.

Besides the RR we also help new users with their weekly meeting by
facilitating a good communication.

------
someotheridiot
[https://rebrickable.com](https://rebrickable.com) \- A LEGO database that
shows you which sets you can build from your existing collection, also
includes thousands of fan-submitted designs.

I guess it would only loosely be called "passive" as I spend a lot of time on
it. But, I can take vacations and it continues to earn... for a while :)

~~~
joebaf
I've seen it some time ago and this site is great! it really brings value to
users, so I am not surprised it's growing.

------
ddgflorida
[http://convertcsv.com](http://convertcsv.com) \- In 2015, I averaged
$650/month by using google ads.The site converts delimited (CSV,TSV,...) data
to and from different formats (JSON,SQL,HTML,..). It was written in
HTML/Javascript and I average about 4 hours a month supporting it.

~~~
Someone1234
What type of support requests do you handle for a site like that? Seems like
much of it would be automated.

~~~
ddgflorida
Most comments on the site are thanking me for the site or asking for specific
enhancements. So support time consists of reading comments/emails and adding
enhancements and/or an occasional bug fix.

------
mr_overalls
It turns out that I had more income from a single rental property than my tech
entrepreneurship.

------
joebaf
previous:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822151](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822151)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107588](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107588)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8201392](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8201392)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8395801](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8395801)

------
herbst
I have a game related site i created for myself that now made $1700 (adsense)
in december, and will reach about $1600 in januar, otherwise it was always
just growing. Its so passive i did exactly nothing in december except
restarting the box once.

I also work on a full recreation of the website, because now i only make a
small part of my target audience happy, the rest only clicks a few times and
comes again after a few weeks.

I am afraid shipping the new site will change my income tho :/

~~~
iSloth
Release it to a few users, and monitor their usage and feedback to gauge if
it's better or not.

~~~
herbst
Its a totally different site in the end, that could lead to awkward
situations. I thought about putting it on a subdomain (noindex?) and announce
it in my blog, like a "feedback beta before release", but i am not sure if
that would tell anything at all from the numbers.

------
DrNuke
Written digital content about nuclear energy at
[http://www.nuclearresearch.net](http://www.nuclearresearch.net) . Not much,
really, but passive. New e-book coming later this week.

~~~
wingerlang
How are you counting writing passive? Sounds like it is the opposite.

~~~
mywittyname
You do something once and it earns income for a long time. It's no different
than writing a program or building a website.

------
stevekemp
[https://dns-api.com](https://dns-api.com) \- A system which wraps Amazon's
route53 with git, allowing simple updates to DNS with complete revision
history.

------
wingerlang
Maintaining some let's just call them apps. Updating for new OS versions and
so on.

------
schappim
Shopify Apps, the most trivial of which displays a snow effect using
JavaScript.

~~~
tixocloud
What's been your experience working with the Shopify platform?

