I've continued running my Elixir screencast business, and added on a 2nd product, which is a starter template for apps built with the Phoenix Framework. Neither is 100% passive.
The screen casting business means continuing to make a few new tutorials per month and making occasional improvements to its site. It sure pays a lot more per hour of my time than it did 18 months ago, though!
The starter kit is still in alpha, so there's a considerable amount of work to do. I'll be raising the price as it hits various milestones, though. Once it's "done", it will be mostly passive other than updating libraries.
Elixir is a rough market since it's very niche but still has a surprising number of authors, conferences and screen casters in its ecosystem who are also creating educational materials.
My MRR is fairly low, but it's just enough to cover my expenses living in Taiwan.
When I have the bandwidth, I'll launch another product which will be still more passive and it won't be limited to only Elixir devs. After that, the plan is to spend some money on outsourcing the editing of my videos and some routine social media tasks.
I like AlchemistCamp. Hey I should've thought of your PhoenixIgniter, I kind of developed and still working on project just for me that solves same issue, I call it Phundation.
I guess you are not selling it just yet anyway. Anyhow, since I have multiple projects, going through the setup is hassle and I created started project essentially.
About two dozen people have bought it so far and will get the updates as I build it out. I also gave access for free (at least up through the beta version) to all the people who bought annual Alchemist Camp memberships at the end of last year.
That said, if you've watched all my tutorials there will be nothing new in it except the front-end components that still aren't done.
The screencast site is $21/month or $210/year (listed at the bottom of the /start page).
I don't put it front and center since my first goal is to get people to check out the free content, which is most of it. Eventually learners will usually try clicking on a premium episode, which is where the paywall shows up. The reason I do it this way is so that people will know exactly what they're getting when they sign up.
Also, even getting people learning from the 100+ free screencasts is a plus for me.
The other product is in alpha and the pricing is going up as I hit various milestones. It will probably max out around $250.
It's a Chrome extension that checks multiple pages at a time for common SEO, speed and security issues. I started working on it initially to automate checks I was often doing manually while developing websites for others. Developers I worked with found it useful so I spun it out into its own product. I wrote the online guide on the website too that explains all the web best practices Checkbot tests which I'm trying to turn into an ebook as well.
I made a web app that turns Google sheets into beautiful web pages in 3 easy steps. https://sheetUI.com it's still lacking in many ways, but I'm working on a V2 with paid features that'll be launched soon.
I am a serious practitioner of the FIRE (Financially Independent, Retire Early) philosophy. Over the years, I have accumulated assets in a very conservative portfolio. This portfolio has reached a point where it has consistently generated over 150% of my base salary for more than 5 years.
You give me too much credit -- it's a really boring approach.
My portfolio used to be about 50/50 in fixed income securities and real estate. I got lucky with the real estate, and I got out because I didn't think my luck would last forever. Now my portfolio is made up entirely of fixed income securities and blue-chip stocks that pay dividends. The dividends and interest payments are laddered such that I recieve at least 2 payments a month. I didn't choose securities based on payout dates, so the amount does fluctuate from month-to-month. However, the portfolio generates enough monthly income that the "leanest" month is greater than my paycheck's monthly gross income.
Being a software engineer myself, I don't qualify for the Roth accounts so most of my investments are done in a standard taxable account. I don't buy any particular funds -- just a variety of boring bonds and stocks.
I did try the RE (retire early) part a while back. It lasted about 6 months before I got too bored out of my mind. I still continue to work because of the mental stimulation and the social connections.
It's a function of percentage income saved, not amount earned. The formula is (income / investment rate / percent income saved). If my investment rate is 4%, I need to save 25 years worth of salary. Saving 50% of my salary looks like I would need 50 years on the surface. However, my portfolio generates income from day 1, so it's actually a lot faster than it seems.
Just for reference, I was living on less than $750/month until I got married. The companies I worked at had plenty of free food. I didn't need a gym membership because the handyman work I did on my investment properties was more than enough. Until we had kids, my spouse and I were still able to survive on less than $1,000/month. We are based in the south SF Bay Area. We had 100% income replacement by our mid-30s.
I really appreciate the details! Out of curiosity, how did you manage to only spend $750 a month to pay for housing, utilities, phone (you mentioned food was free) in south SF Bay Area?
Digging through my old bank statements:
- $500/month for rent and utilities by splitting 1 bedroom apartment with roommate)
- $30/month for my cell phone plan
- $100-150/month for a car 15-year old beater at the time. Mostly gas and minor maintenance
- $70/month in spending money
Just curious, what kind of conservative portfolios are you investing in? I was recently trying to get my wife and I invested in something similar, but didn't find many products. We are very risk adverse and recently (after maxing out 401ks) have been "hoarding" saved money in our bank, which doesn't help much.
The key thing for me was to constantly and continually invest. I'm sure you've heard the saying to "maximize time in market; don't time the market." I buy a mix of bonds and stocks that pay dividends. I'll skip reading the financial news from time to time and buy shares in low-cost funds when I'm busy or just feeling lazy.
I'm doing roughly the same thing, but just starting out. The focus is on real estate and business ownership. How long did it take you to get to the RE point?
I reached 100% income replacement for myself in my late 20s. Then I got married and had kids. My spouse and I reached 100% income replacement in our mid-30s.
Glad to see a fellow practitioner. Best wishes on your journey!
You need to require HTTPS for all requests on your website, and redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS in order to protect users’ personal information and passwords.
Invent or license things and sell them on Amazon. It's amazingly passive after the first production run. I just re-order and re-supply Amazon occasionally.
I love the idea of providing a platform to share rage/frustration or whatever in such a raw mode, without the destructive/negative comments. Just pure emotions.
For now, it's not updated automatically, so I can prevent this sort of thing from happening. Eventually, I hope it will be more automatic, but I'll still mark all screams that can be transcribed for human review before posting. (This also serves as a spam filter.)
Riding a nice bike is an exercise in something that costs $20-$40 always needing fixing every so often. So I do Uber Eats when I ride every so often to offset that. Almost time for new rims though. It's not passive exactly, but it's getting paid to do something that's 80% the same as what I was going to do anyways.
My onlyfans makes way less so far, but hope springs eternal.
I'm definitely not the best at it. I'm in the middle of job applications right now so I'm not going to push all my chips in on marketing myself in case a hiring manager finds it distasteful. And it's almost certainly not the best way to get FP content: there are definitely monetized youtube channels that have a lower barrier to entry for viewers. And of course there are pornographers producing more and better content. But I'm having fun. Kinda at a weird midlife crisis point so I might as well take my shot right?
Absolutely. I been thinking not so much about doing it, but how mechanic of OnlyFans is really useful for more then just porn. You can find my details in profile if you want to continue chatting about it. I feel like there is potential to do things in that space and it is fairly obvious to just go and pay for more information, as this pay would not be huge.
I'm flattered! Wanna make sure everyone's aware I'm a cis-man. I've just gotten started honestly, so the only tutorial video on there is walking through a point-free JS solution on Codewars using Ramda. If I put up some more FP content then I will actually link it, promise!
Just my modest investment portfolio, and credit card rewards (not technically income, per se, but it's money the card companies give me just for being cool and using their cards, so I'm counting it).
I'm looking around for some slightly less passive ways of making a modest income that don't turn the slider all the way to "start and run a business."
I co-run http://vsual.co . We make five figures of monthly revenue, and generally my partner and I work 8:30-10 AM before our "regular" jobs. We're growing at a moderate pace—for now this is passive(ish) income, but one day we may dive all in.
That's awesome! I saw on your original submission on showhn for vsual that you were trying to figure out the marketing. How have you done since then and what worked for you? Five figures is quite impressive
The short answer is no, we don't have it 100% figured out yet. But we have learned a few things:
- The cost per sale of paid marketing targeting CUSTOMERS is just a little too high to be sustainable right now. Part of that, I think, is because the searching/tagging/categorization of VSUAL isn't great. We can create an ad with interesting art that causes a clickthrough, but if that piece isn't quite compelling enough to sell, we don't do a good job showing similar pieces. We're working on improved tagging and categorization right now to make finding curated, related artworks easier.
- Many of our best selling artists do quite well attracting their own traffic to their store. They already have IG/FB followings significantly greater than our own. So, we're investing in tools to help those artists with marketing (such as markup generators) and to help tools specifically for artists with distribution. For example, those artists who already have distribution want to link people to their shop, not to an entire platform. We're working on building whitelabeled shop pages without the platform nav bar for those partners in particular.
- Finally, I believe that with the amount of UGC on the site, we're currently not taking full advantage of the power of SEO. Creating landing pages specific to art styles and techniques is high on my to-do list after our upcoming tagging improvements are launched. I'm hopeful that moderate SEO improvements can drive our traffic up significantly.
If I had a side project that was bringing in five figure monthly revenue it would become my regular job pretty quickly. Are you hesitating because you don't think the revenue is going to last?
No, the revenue seems like it will last. But revenue is not profit, and I have a family to take care of and I'm the breadwinner. Plus, my regular job is good. Leaving my regular job for VSUAL right now would mean a 20x reduction in income, and I can't support myself on that. In time, hopefully that divisor gets smaller.
Thanks! If you (or anyone else reading) want a study plan for free, fill this out out https://chessgoals.com/contact-us/, mention HN, and we'll send you whichever one you want.
I make about $0.05-$1.25 a day from my YouTube channel. All my old lectures from various CS courses are hosted there. I'm not sure if the algorithm's changed or if some of the videos have gotten traction for Berkeley's CS50, but I'm now one of the top results for "cs50 credit" and "luhn algorithm".
I am running na online art gallery specializing in AI art. Recently, instead of just printing the art on canvas I started using even real robots to paint it down [1]. Still it is only a small passive income but looking forward to make it really big as I believe this thing is a historic moment in time where art and tech started to converge into one.
Well, the space ai art space is getting pretty competitive. I have seen many people starting and then quitting these kind of projects because they approached it purely from the money side. I make only few sales every couple of months and so far it is mostly coming from social media (@ai_art_supreme on Instagram) or word of mouth channels. I am targeting high end of the market so that is fine by me and also ready to play this for the long term as I wholeheartedly believe this is an monumental moment in art history. These kind of artworks are going to be worth a ton of money in 20-30 years when we get super AI.
I'm in the same space as the founder of NightCafe Creator [1]. It's been running at a (substantial) loss for the last year until September which was my first break even month. I'm hoping to turn it around and have made great strides so far. The biggest expense (95%) is GPU compute time. It runs on Algorithmia which was super convenient to get up and running with, but is now very expensive. Switching compute providers is a big opportunity. Unfortunately I suck at devops.
Thanks for the support! I haven’t thought about mailing lists so far. However, I am posting artworks regularly on social media (@ai_art_supreme on Instagram). Do you think mailing lists would make sense as I am mostly sharing the artworks and not so much the news content?
Following you on IG now. I just wanted a medium where your site and it's art work would bubble up on occasion since I'm not always buying artwork. I think IG is perfect considering you just share art work. Perhaps promoting the IG channel more on the website would help?
A mailing list is nice because you're actually collecting emails and can use them somehow in the future. You could collect emails and then send users a welcome email that also promotes your IG channel. It just wasn't obvious you have an IG channel. Hopefully this is helpful.
I built a webapp with hundreds of SQL and python questions to help aspiring data scientists practice for their interviews. It's not really passive because it was a massive undertaking to write the questions/solutions and create the app. Now I got to market it by creating video solutions and posting it on Youtube. But I created it to help with my other side job which is teaching data science in the evenings at a university.
Did many side projects over the years, never having monetized any of them, so monetizing was indeed my goal in 2020. I monetized 2 of my projects.
First one was Newsy (https://www.newsy.co) - which allows people to turn their un-used domains into something useful - a tool I built for myself first and slowly let others in. It's been a little slow since I'm not doing much marketing, but getting the first ~10 customers was an awesome experience.
Second was my long-term project - SideProjectors (https://www.sideprojectors.com) - a market place for selling & buying side projects - monetized with some standard elements - ads, pro membership, sponsors - all of them turned out to be great way of getting some side income.
I really like the idea of a Marketplace for side projects. I have had a couple of side projects myself and sometimes they died because of the lack time or resources even if they had some traction.
I created this online graphing tool in 2007 and haven't updated it in years: http://fooplot.com/
It's still generating a small amount of ad revenue every month. It used to generate 5-10X what it does now before the days of mobile apps. Back then it was a very meaningful addition to my grad student salary. I had 250K MAU at one point, many of which seemed to be coming from middle and high schools in lower income places that had common computers but presumably not graphing calculators for every student.
It's SORELY out of date with current web tech. Problem is it's not generating enough ad revenue for me to want to go and rewrite it (over working on all my other side projects), and it's not generating little enough for me to want to shut it down -- it's still profitable even if it's just a little.
- The site is NOT mobile friendly (it wasn't a consideration in 2007), and the specific segment of the population that appeared to be the majority of users (people who had access to computers but didn't own graphing calculators) now have phones and look to their phones for graphing calculator functionality
- There are competitors with better UIs (http://desmos.com/) that sprung up later and seemed to have sweeped up a bunch of users from mine. Mine was, to my knowledge, the first web-based graphing calculator that you could click and drag the graph around with the mouse, and zoom with the scroll wheel.
- There are lots of new features in web browsers that could make it faster, snappier, and also support 3D graphing, which was a popular feature request
- I could base it off React and also release both mobile apps as well as a webapp, since people today seem to prefer native apps to webapps
- It looks outdated compared to modern graphing apps available for iOS and Android
That said, no motivation to do the above unless I had a guaranteed payout. Making graphing calculators isn't what I want to be spending my time on now considering the site is <1% of my income now. Back when I was a grad student, back when it had a lot more users, it was >30% of my total income. If someone gave me 30% of my income now to modernize its UI, I'd do it.
I have a rental house that does not cover the mortgage on it. Real estate investing is where I am focusing, but I also have two software projects that I am working on in addition to my regular job. Not a lot gets done on either one these days.
168 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadThe screen casting business means continuing to make a few new tutorials per month and making occasional improvements to its site. It sure pays a lot more per hour of my time than it did 18 months ago, though!
The starter kit is still in alpha, so there's a considerable amount of work to do. I'll be raising the price as it hits various milestones, though. Once it's "done", it will be mostly passive other than updating libraries.
Elixir is a rough market since it's very niche but still has a surprising number of authors, conferences and screen casters in its ecosystem who are also creating educational materials.
My MRR is fairly low, but it's just enough to cover my expenses living in Taiwan.
When I have the bandwidth, I'll launch another product which will be still more passive and it won't be limited to only Elixir devs. After that, the plan is to spend some money on outsourcing the editing of my videos and some routine social media tasks.
1) https://alchemist.camp
2) https://phoenixigniter.com
I guess you are not selling it just yet anyway. Anyhow, since I have multiple projects, going through the setup is hassle and I created started project essentially.
About two dozen people have bought it so far and will get the updates as I build it out. I also gave access for free (at least up through the beta version) to all the people who bought annual Alchemist Camp memberships at the end of last year.
That said, if you've watched all my tutorials there will be nothing new in it except the front-end components that still aren't done.
I don't put it front and center since my first goal is to get people to check out the free content, which is most of it. Eventually learners will usually try clicking on a premium episode, which is where the paywall shows up. The reason I do it this way is so that people will know exactly what they're getting when they sign up.
Also, even getting people learning from the 100+ free screencasts is a plus for me.
The other product is in alpha and the pricing is going up as I hit various milestones. It will probably max out around $250.
It's a Chrome extension that checks multiple pages at a time for common SEO, speed and security issues. I started working on it initially to automate checks I was often doing manually while developing websites for others. Developers I worked with found it useful so I spun it out into its own product. I wrote the online guide on the website too that explains all the web best practices Checkbot tests which I'm trying to turn into an ebook as well.
Expanding to full acquisition toolkit / training with established entrepreneurs.
It’s weekly trivia quizzes via Slack or email for work teams to build connection!
My portfolio used to be about 50/50 in fixed income securities and real estate. I got lucky with the real estate, and I got out because I didn't think my luck would last forever. Now my portfolio is made up entirely of fixed income securities and blue-chip stocks that pay dividends. The dividends and interest payments are laddered such that I recieve at least 2 payments a month. I didn't choose securities based on payout dates, so the amount does fluctuate from month-to-month. However, the portfolio generates enough monthly income that the "leanest" month is greater than my paycheck's monthly gross income.
Being a software engineer myself, I don't qualify for the Roth accounts so most of my investments are done in a standard taxable account. I don't buy any particular funds -- just a variety of boring bonds and stocks.
I did try the RE (retire early) part a while back. It lasted about 6 months before I got too bored out of my mind. I still continue to work because of the mental stimulation and the social connections.
Just for reference, I was living on less than $750/month until I got married. The companies I worked at had plenty of free food. I didn't need a gym membership because the handyman work I did on my investment properties was more than enough. Until we had kids, my spouse and I were still able to survive on less than $1,000/month. We are based in the south SF Bay Area. We had 100% income replacement by our mid-30s.
Glad to see a fellow practitioner. Best wishes on your journey!
If not, gz to making your dream.
[1] http://www.postcardmailer.us
Don't get me wrong I like the idea, however the world at large is full of people waiting to ruin the nice things.
My onlyfans makes way less so far, but hope springs eternal.
I'm looking around for some slightly less passive ways of making a modest income that don't turn the slider all the way to "start and run a business."
https://stanthecaddy.app
- The cost per sale of paid marketing targeting CUSTOMERS is just a little too high to be sustainable right now. Part of that, I think, is because the searching/tagging/categorization of VSUAL isn't great. We can create an ad with interesting art that causes a clickthrough, but if that piece isn't quite compelling enough to sell, we don't do a good job showing similar pieces. We're working on improved tagging and categorization right now to make finding curated, related artworks easier.
- Many of our best selling artists do quite well attracting their own traffic to their store. They already have IG/FB followings significantly greater than our own. So, we're investing in tools to help those artists with marketing (such as markup generators) and to help tools specifically for artists with distribution. For example, those artists who already have distribution want to link people to their shop, not to an entire platform. We're working on building whitelabeled shop pages without the platform nav bar for those partners in particular.
- Finally, I believe that with the amount of UGC on the site, we're currently not taking full advantage of the power of SEO. Creating landing pages specific to art styles and techniques is high on my to-do list after our upcoming tagging improvements are launched. I'm hopeful that moderate SEO improvements can drive our traffic up significantly.
[0] https://www.chessgoals.com
1) https://art-supreme.com/ai-art-with-robotic-arm/
1. https://creator.nightcafe.studio
A mailing list is nice because you're actually collecting emails and can use them somehow in the future. You could collect emails and then send users a welcome email that also promotes your IG channel. It just wasn't obvious you have an IG channel. Hopefully this is helpful.
https://platform.stratascratch.com
First one was Newsy (https://www.newsy.co) - which allows people to turn their un-used domains into something useful - a tool I built for myself first and slowly let others in. It's been a little slow since I'm not doing much marketing, but getting the first ~10 customers was an awesome experience.
Second was my long-term project - SideProjectors (https://www.sideprojectors.com) - a market place for selling & buying side projects - monetized with some standard elements - ads, pro membership, sponsors - all of them turned out to be great way of getting some side income.
It's still generating a small amount of ad revenue every month. It used to generate 5-10X what it does now before the days of mobile apps. Back then it was a very meaningful addition to my grad student salary. I had 250K MAU at one point, many of which seemed to be coming from middle and high schools in lower income places that had common computers but presumably not graphing calculators for every student.
It's SORELY out of date with current web tech. Problem is it's not generating enough ad revenue for me to want to go and rewrite it (over working on all my other side projects), and it's not generating little enough for me to want to shut it down -- it's still profitable even if it's just a little.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
- The site is NOT mobile friendly (it wasn't a consideration in 2007), and the specific segment of the population that appeared to be the majority of users (people who had access to computers but didn't own graphing calculators) now have phones and look to their phones for graphing calculator functionality
- There are competitors with better UIs (http://desmos.com/) that sprung up later and seemed to have sweeped up a bunch of users from mine. Mine was, to my knowledge, the first web-based graphing calculator that you could click and drag the graph around with the mouse, and zoom with the scroll wheel.
- There are lots of new features in web browsers that could make it faster, snappier, and also support 3D graphing, which was a popular feature request
- I could base it off React and also release both mobile apps as well as a webapp, since people today seem to prefer native apps to webapps
- It looks outdated compared to modern graphing apps available for iOS and Android
That said, no motivation to do the above unless I had a guaranteed payout. Making graphing calculators isn't what I want to be spending my time on now considering the site is <1% of my income now. Back when I was a grad student, back when it had a lot more users, it was >30% of my total income. If someone gave me 30% of my income now to modernize its UI, I'd do it.