Ask HN: Sideprojects/passive income businesses with little or no own coding?
Whenever sideprojects or ways to gain passive income are discussed here, the conversation focuses on programming projects that can be run on the side. Of course, this is very much connected to the nature of the side.
However, I'd like to hear from people who do/did sideprojects that involved little programming from their side and that, maybe, even provided them with a passive income. For me it's a bit difficult to imagine such projects and I think it would be a novel topic to talk about.
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[ 0.32 ms ] story [ 85.1 ms ] thread- Writing Books
- Content-Focused Websites or Newsletters
- Selling Digital or Physical Products
It probably depends on your skillset. Without some sort of specialist knowledge it may be tough. In the design world icon sets, UI kits and typefaces are popular things to sell.
I don't mean to make real estate sound like an awful/dead-end career...I simply want to clarify that it is not the easy career that people think that it is, or that it perhaps used to be so many years/decades ago. And, while it may start as a passive income job for many at first, in the long-term it requires the attention of a full-time career.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/
You pay the dropship warehouse, you don't pass the customer card info to them. It is as if you bought the product and picked someone else's shipping address.
No more / less risk than standard eCommerce, just someone else is doing the fulfillment for you.
Drop shipping is great in theory, one problem is that the margins are usually lower than if you bought the items wholesale but you don't have any warehousing or handling cost. The real problem is that if you are drop shipping an item odds are 1000 other people are and it is a race to the bottom to see who is willing to sell for the least profit.
In my third semester, I got some freshmen to take over the daily operations just taking a percentage off the top. Those freshmen passed the gig onto the next class and that kept going, that little table is still bringing in about $1000 four times a year for me (Valentine's day, independence day, thanksgiving and christmas)
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2016/09/13/ios-10-sticker-packs-messages...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/13/chat-app-line-makes-over-2...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6kyair/i_just...
Can't remember one now, but there are plenty of examples of startups that faked to be fully automated software but behind the scenes all was done manually.
Self-publishing is high profit but the same amount of work (if you care about quality and reputation), no upfront advance, and you have to do your own marketing.
[1] https://soochi.co
Edit: If anyone does have a business they'd like to list, just include HN at the beginning of your story to get $10 off!
If you are using Airtable are you using Zapier or some other tool to connect it to Carrd?
VPN seems to be a great niche right now to kick off affiliate marketing. You can run a review blog and join affiliate programs of different VPN providers. People search for VPN reviews, affiliate links make money.
For a developer, who understands Virtual Private Networks and its use. It can be a great passive income making project.
ITT: almost exclusively people who didn’t do the projects they’re spitballing.
Passive no-coding ways to make money: >Public market investments: stock market, ETF's, bonds, derivatives, commodities, real estate, bitcoin >Non-public investments: start-ups, business ventures, hedge funds, private equity, etc.
There are other businesses which people think are passive but they are not. Having a website that makes money is not a passive income. Ask anyone that has one, they have to put in some sort of work. If they don't the money dries up. You have to create new content and really target your ads to actually make money.
Good luck!
We had our first house built for us. I learned a ton in the process and lots of “if I ever have a house built again I will remember to...”
Some years later, we decided to move and build another house. Alas, all those things I “learned” were mostly forgotten. So I decided to journal the entire experience and turned it into a blog.
Most of the content I just gave away for free. But I also put up a $9 “kit” that provided a printable copy of the blog, additional pictures, my full budget breakdown, spreadsheets I developed to help manage the project, etc.
I’ve done nothing to promote the site but have earned in the low thousands over the years.
I quickly found more clients (word of mouth) that want the same software and can't find anyone that will provide it for less than $5k/yr. I work for a non-profit (education industry) that isn't really built to operate on funding streams like this, so I set up my own business and bought the rights back to my code/ip.
I'm currently in the pre-launch phase as I re-factor a bit and make the code better suited to multi-agent use, but honestly, it's something an experienced developer could code in a weekend. I'm a total hack, so it's taking time. I already have 4 clients and more calls coming in, so the only thing holding me back is myself.
But it's difficult to grow an audience, it's hard work to create quality products and even though you can set up an almost automatic selling machine with little coding, just plumbing WordPress, Mailchimp and PayPal, there are still some customer support to be done.
So it's long term, not completely passive income, but if you know something and other people are willing to pay for that knowledge, it can be done.