Ask HN: How much do you earn from side project or passive income?

53 points by jejuowooe ↗ HN
What is working for you and how much is your income from side project and/or passive income?

30 comments

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Been ten months, not earned a single dollar. Redesigned the blog again today

http://talkproductivity.xyz/

At a glance, the blog didn't give me the impression that you're trying to earn money (I feel like most blogs aren't). Do you have a products section or something?
I have not selected any product. Please tell me how to do it.
I recently developed/launched http://framestr.com. It's an online form software that I developed, originally, for a few lead generation websites that I own. It currently generates around $950 / month.
how long did it take you to get to $950
Sorry for the delay... about 6 weeks.
i have a number of side projects, none of which truly require my time anymore... income ranges from a few hundred a month of a couple thousand.
Do you mean the income varies on a monthly basis, or between projects? If monthly, why does it differ so much?
Between $150-250/month from Amazon associates referrals from http://hackernewsbooks.com/
Thanks for creating that by the way. I've subscribed to it, and my library of books to read is growing quite a lot as a result!
Glad you like it. My personal to-read list is also a bit too long now..
Which web programming langauge you built it in?
My site for learning tricks started making money last month: http://spellogram.com after around 2 years of existence. I didn't put a lot of effort though.
I have a small pile of SaaS products [1] that combine to bring in the equivalent of a nice Senior Dev salary (though far less than I would actually bring in were I to take a full time gig in the Bay Area).

I did a "passivity test" recently where I essentially took October off, just to make sure I still could. I'd do a morning email spin, then shut down and go bouldering or just play with the kids all day, averaging just shy of two hour weeks. Monthly Recurring Revenue grew on its normal path.

This month, I'm back working 6 hour days, 4 days a week, building the thing that will take up the slack [2] once those other products plateau. Fortunately, it's been raining a lot, or I might still be out climbing every day.

I'll reitorate once again that as a software developer, you absolutely should build one o' these SaaS things. It'll change your life.

[1] https://www.s3stat.com & http://www.twiddla.com [2] https://unwaffle.com

Do you have any advice for getting started?

In my current role I'm an Jr Dev, and have only recently graduated and started working full time but this sort of thing interests me.

How do you get customers? This seems to be the hardest part.
Can you recommend any resources on how to get started?

I built things in the past. But they were the wrong things.

I am front-end dev currently back to college for a masters. I really admire your drive.

I dream of having a similar income setup, I am in college and have more free time than ever; I must make most of this. I am reading through your articles on expatsoftware for some inspiration.

I have one project so far http://www.json-gen.com/ started one month ago. It is service that provides mocking REST JSON response. Could be used in front-end testing. Current income is 5$
I just released beta version of https://test-api.net. Until now don't have any concrete plan for monetization but planning for adding new features so that i can monetize it.
Not software, but I have a rental property that earns me about $400 a month in mortgage principle paid. The renter is a relative who's been there for several years.
Currently ... I aim for $1/day :), but my site is only a week old. I need to figure out SEO for a site like mine, as I don't have content. Right now it is all AdWords traffic. It's amazing ... I literally submit my bids and I have clicks within 60s.

I'd love to know if users would pay for something like unlimited multi-day search or ... more data like UV Index.

http://www.averageweather.io/