Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?
Side projects, games, open source.
Previous threads:
2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18906094
2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18479588
2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16815842
177 comments
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GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
It's a very nice app!
Total investment: ~250K Property values: 3-10M
I don't own these properties myself. I own a part. This is similar to Fundrise, except it's with a local investment group.
The commercial real estate agent that helped us get a couple warehouses does this on the side. He's also a former NFL linebacker, which added to his credibility to some degree (i.e. he wouldn't intentionally be running a scam, tarnishing his legacy etc.)
[1]: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/166-sam-eaton-of-crave-...
What are the future plans for the local business and the software?
Those revenues are incredible for a local cookie company with a single kitchen.
Well done!
Would you be willing to answer a couple of questions?
Started Jan 2020, looks like will be at 4.5k ARR by end of year.
Still, I have had companies on that tier. :)
And it's not basic, FastComments has a lot more features than the competition, like live commenting and such. I provide direct development and customization support, we support automated migrations from major providers, and it's reliable, covered with around a hundred E2E test suites that run periodically in production. It also has an "enterprise" multi-user/role system and SSO integration.
Still make between $10 and $50 a month.
So something in between.
It's just a content site about the keto diet. It runs in the background and earns money from Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliate links, the latter of which are dwindling because I haven't had time to fix dead product links. It's a plain static site, so it doesn't need any server maintenance or software upgrades.
Not totally passive because I actively tried to grow it for three months when I had to cancel my main business due to COVID.[0]
Jan: $786.71
Feb: $682.62
Mar: $362.28 (Amazon slashes affiliate payouts + drop in traffic due to COVID)
Apr: $220.48
May: $221.53
Jun: $180.66
Jul: $369.91
Aug: $486.22
Sep: $362.18
Oct: $510.86
Nov: $431.52
Total: $4,614.97
If you're interested in the details, I write retrospectives every month sharing stats and thinking through strategy.[1]
[0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/04/
[1] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/07/
The site code and content itself is worth very little. The history, traffic, and back links are the value.
Even if the site was copied or even improved on, it would take somewhere between 6 to 24 months to reach a comparable level of traffic assuming no black hat strategies are used.
That's 40 grand that could be used on traffic to the new site
1. 4x ~$4600 annual revenue = $18400, a far cry from 40 grand.
2. I seriously doubt that this site will be making $0 in four years. My vote is for the over by a lot.
3. Most folks who would purchase it at a 4x annual revenue multiple would have a clear plan to increase traffic and/or monetize the traffic more efficiently than the current owner does.
Speaking for myself, buying existing traffic is like printing money for me. Most people do not monetize their traffic very well at all. That said, getting white hat traffic from scratch is a slow and tedious process.
I have considered finding someone who wants to manage it under some sort of revenue-sharing agreement. I don't know if that's a common practice or if there are existing precedents for that, but I feel like the numbers are too small for it to be worthwhile for anyone.
Also, in some places, there were food panics, so people might have been less interested in buying keto groceries, as keto's heavy on meats, cheeses, and other things that spoil quickly.
I've got a 1.5x leveraged portfolio over on IBKR that is currently yielding ~2.9% dividends across a wide range of sectors. I am paying ~1% in margin fees at the moment, so I basically get to use their money for "free" on the growth side (of which there is plenty right now). It is turning into quite the comfortable safety blanket.
I almost feel like this is not in the spirit of the topic posed here because of how mundane and uninteresting stock investments are, relatively speaking. I am far more interested in reading through all of the tales of crazy side projects that have turned into something more.
By the way, this is called a carry trade. If you’re using a lot of leverage for small interest (1.9%) returns, it can seem like free money until it blows up in volatile times and results in huge losses. So anyone considering this should keep an eye on risk.
Subject to change at any time, but 1.59% per annum up to $100k, 1.09% up to $1M, and 0.75% after that. Lower rates in some other currencies.
The federal rate is currently 0.25%. They set this rate extremely low to encourage the exact behavior we are seeing here - investments in the US economy.
I have a 1.4x leveraged portfolio with similar reasoning.
Sadly I didn't sell when I could make x12 profit as I didn't expect it to drop as much as it did. Now I'd lose money selling so I'll leave it there and forget about it.
http://watermark-image.com
:)
Of course, very few things are truly passive, especially things that have minimal risk to the original capital.
These days it is a few minutes a few times a week, doing support.
The fun tech is that I use a pen plotter. [2]
I don't really make that much money selling them but at the same time I had a 400% increase in sales this year (Thank you etsy algorithm, and probably thank you pandemic). 0 investment in marketing, I just make sure I have stock (16h of work per year probably, but hard to measure). Also this year I moved to a place where the grocery store and the mail office are in the same place and 5 minutes from my home which is perfect.
I have a a bit too much fun optimizing processes. finding weird ways to automate the writing of shipping info in the packages.
The only thing I wish I had more time to, was at improving the drawings.
[1] https://www.etsy.com/shop/gunaPT
[2] https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2019/bike-bells-with-axidra...
https://youtube.com/parttimelarry
Over $2K/month as of November from a combination of YouTube ad revenue, Buy Me a Coffee donations, and affiliate links (TradingView Pro Subscriptions, Tradier, Amazon books etc).
Should hit 10,000 subscribers in the next couple of weeks. Plan is to grow this to 100,000 subscribers over the next 3-4 years.
It's amazing that people will consistently pay me money for the chance to buy my stocks at the end of the week.
What's important is to not take other people's experiences in the market as "knowledge". People say a ton of stupid shit and give you the sense you cannot even make 1% more than whatever the market does so you might as well just buy an index and hold forever. Literally in 2020 my stock portfolio is 83% higher than what it was at the start, which is probably an unbelievable amount for people who think anything more than 10% gain in a year probably means you're taking massive Las Vegas style risks or whatever. To be fair though, I'm sure anyone who has remained invested in this market has seen similar gains, so it's not like I should be working at a hedge fund or something.
I took a lot of the conservative advice for too long: investing in value, looking at fundamentals, avoiding cultish stocks. It was a waste of time. I bought Cloudflare and Fastly last year at IPO putting almost $20k in each and have made over $75k profit off of both, and that's just two of my stocks.
I find the amount of money you're willing to risk is a very personal thing, and often is influenced on how much money you're getting from other sources of income in your life. Since I'm a typical dev making six figures a year I'm willing to risk quite a bit.
For me, I treat my stock portfolio more like a business than some kind of savings account for the future. That helps me make optimal decisions and not get swept up in emotions. Businesses do go out of business and you can lose all the money you invest in them, so why not a stock portfolio?
Truth is though, my risk was never all that great anyway. A couple tens of thousands in losses doesn't really move me anymore since I know recovery is always possible, and almost always seems to propel you to greater highs if it happens. There was a point this year I lost $60k in gains, but I held strong and it all came back and then went on to make even more massive gains.
Enough of this rambling though, my advice is just get out there and see the truth for yourself. You'll see what I mean.
If I don't know the stock well (maybe less than a month or so of watching it daily) I'll just get a low IV contract.
Basically if you get called out you wait for the price to come back down and buy in?
If it was a hot stock though you could be burned forever if you miss the rocket takeoff.
The true risk is if the stock suddenly gaps up without warning, not the slow gradual climb in price. But that’s really around earnings time and I don’t sell calls during a stocks earnings.
But I have capital in other portfolios with different strategies, including one where I took a massive short position in NKLA and made a ton of money, though I wish it had gone to ZERO. Here's where it all started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24473631
I recently had my first baby and had a few ideas for some sardonic baby attire, so I whipped them up in a store for drop-shipping. It nets a half-dozen sales per month, with almost zero upkeep beyond new designs when I've got a new idea.
The pictures I get of babies wearing the clothes is exponentially worth the effort put in.
Chrome Webstore are shutting down their payment system, so I've spent some time migrating all that nonsense.
If you're interested, I also wrote about others monetising their extensions and how they did it. [2]
[1] https://beebs.io/
[2] https://tillypay.com/blog/how-to-monetise-a-chrome-extension...
I went with https://paddle.com/ for my paid Chrome extension (https://www.checkbot.io/) as I was sure Google would deprecate their payment service, given how few paid extensions there were. I don't understand why they didn't integrate it with their Android payments.
I recommend just getting into it. Dip your toes in the water, it'll feel a bit cold, let it warm up and eventually you will be swimming in the deep end.
I put money into a mix of long and short stock positions as well as long call options (LEAPs). The shortest call options I would do are quarterly, where I will listen to the earnings call, watch how the market reacts in the next day. and then set a call option that expires after the following earnings if I think the stock has been unfairly punished. But I usually stick to call options > 1 year. I have about 2/3's of my total portfolio in stock and 1/3 in options just to get good leverage.
This is sort of where I landed at right now. I didn't have any strategy going into all this. I am the kind of person that likes to learn for themselves and I knew I would lose money doing it. I just tried to know my limits and not lose too much when I thought it might happen. Looking back there was a time when I had maxed out my margin account buying AAPL as it was tanking in September. I sold that margin off for a big loss. I made some really stupid choices. But I learned and processed everything I did.
Let me clarify my situation first. I didn't have a bunch of cash to buy stocks in March. I worked at Google for 4 years and had all my cash sitting in GOOG stock via RSU vests. I didn't hold any other positions. Over the course of weeks I watched all the gains that had accumulated over those 4 years evaporate to nothing. There were a few days where these savings actually went red. By the time the bottom hit I didn't have a bunch of cash sitting around. I had a bunch of stock that had lost substantial value. I remember thinking "I am now officially losing money I had previously earned from hard work". I got really scared. I thought I was going to _continue_ losing money. The bottom never really looks like a bottom when you are in the thick of it.
This is the _starting point_ for when I began to actively trade around my equities. I thought, the markets are wild right now and here is my chance to come out ahead. I can sell all this GOOG stock tax free since there was no capital gains any more (consolation prize for me). Let's get going. It was difficult because I was so used to the comfort of just holding the same thing and watching it grow. It was like the autonomous car just handed over the steering wheel as it was going off course and I needed to get back on the track and learn to race at the same time. I now have a balanced portfolio, with tons of extra cash with a lot less exposure to GOOG. I also quit working for them.
I do think what I've proven to myself is that I can read environments, react accordingly and have the conviction to make good moves at the right time. The world will be different going forward and the same opportunities might not exist. I built confidence but most importantly I learned that I absolutely love waking up in the morning each day and getting into it. This is something I didn't have working at Google, and whether I can sustain this or not, I know I am moving in the right direction (away from there!).
I still hold all my LEAPs. I am up 60-100% on those but they are unrealized and don't want to pay taxes on them this year. We will see where things land when I sell them. Anything can happen.
I'm mostly dull indicies, with a middling adventurous fund that has more than doubled in the last year; my investments increased by about 30% overall. My investments brought home more money than I did (I've been in full-time employment throughout) and I'm starting to wonder if Piketty wasn't on to something.
Utterly passive and zero effort on my side; I just do what they say and stick my pennies into indicies (and a small amount into more adventurous funds).
Of course, it's not just this year. Anyone who has been able to have a significant of money in the market over the past ten years with any reasonable diversification strategy has done more than OK--even if they've been somewhat conservative.
I do that by not looking. Didn't check the value of any accounts from about late March to September. Just kept putting my pennies in like always. Doing what they say has worked out pretty well so far; buy the dips, buy the peaks, buy whatever there happens to be the same time every month when I have some pennies to spare. The conventional wisdom on investing seems to work out so far. As you suggest, anyone just dumping it into index funds over the last decade has had a good ride.
Sales past 12 months: $290K
- Dec: $25K
- Jan: $26K
- Feb: $8K
- Mar: $9K
- Apr: $43K
- May: $59K
- Jun: $25K
- Jul: $14K
- Aug: $21K
- Sep: $12K
- Oct: $17K
- Nov: $29K
Profit: $256K
https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1333888186762678274?s=2...
As for affiliates, they bring about 7.5% of the sales. Not the most important source, but it's nice to have. I onboarded almost all my affiliates from this one tweet: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1273335185946238976 — I have about 100 affiliates, but 95% of the sales came from the top 10.
My own Twitter account is still the main source of sales: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1333889974362488833
There was a sharp rise in profits during April and May, could it be because of more people staying home and learning new stuff or is it due to any other strategy you adopted?
Not sure if the pandemic helped; likely did a bit.