Your best passive income? (2014)
This post gave me the motivation to give it another try: https://medium.com/business-startup-development-and-more/e0937c7f0951
Previous years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6661536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4639271
436 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 375 ms ] threadI do wish I'd held onto my dogecoins though, I would've made a LOT more if I hadn't kept pumping/dumping.
It's not really different, for both mining bitcoins and investing in stocks you need to spend some money. You aren't issuing anything for free.
So at least one person is definitely getting passive income this way, and I'm almost sure I'm not alone.
Because they're liquid with bitcoin they're effectively liquid with all the other currencies in the world, including each other. So you can do things like gauge the profitability of a given altcoin with code and switch your mining based on the current highest daily return, and you can do things like run trade bots that trade into and out of bitcoin and that altcoin depending on various market indicators etc to get the best return on top of that base return, and last of all you can do the same trading strategies with bitcoin and fiat currencies themselves, so it becomes a three layered freelance trading strategy.
To summarise;
* Miners pull down altcoins with raw GPU horsepower.
* Bots trade between the altcoins and bitcoin on market indicators that work best.
* Other bots trade between bitcoins and fiat on market indicators that work best.
I used to just be a coder working for employers directly but this makes me accountable to nobody but the effectiveness of my algorithms. I'm still open to the freelancing side and looking at other opportunities because it is largely passive, but it's the first opportunity I've ever had where I become completely unaccountable to other human beings, and I must admit that has a lot of attraction to me.
I'm a global roaming digital nomad and have been for the past five years or so, but I have always had to worry about being contactable by my clients and timezone shifts and things of this nature, now that doesn't matter so much as I don't even need to talk to anyone at all if I don't want to. After finally achieving absolute complete communication disconnection with the entire rest of humanity though I am starting to feel the slightest inkling of what I have constantly heard other people talking about with feeling something missing in not being in the office and interacting with others all the time.
It's a crazy world, and I'm a crazy person.
Every two or three months I attend a local meetup, or try to arrange contact with some of my old friends that travel frequently enough that our paths nearly overlap, that's basically enough for me I think. Perhaps that will change in the future but for now it's certainly the case.
Two things that fit the "passive" mentality that have been picking up steam recently:
1) I offer an affiliate program with a revenue share commission (upfront bonus plus 10% of the referred customer's payments for a year). A couple of my best customers have become my best affiliates, recommending the product on industry blogs they write for regularly. It doesn't get better than having excited customers marketing your product for you. In the early days the affiliate program wasn't doing much at all, now it's a meaningful contributor to subscriber growth.
2) I've been running Improvely long enough now (just over a year) that some of the clients are growing their businesses significantly. I've got quite a few marketing agencies on board, and they're picking up new clients and adding them to their accounts. As their business grows, and their usage grows, they upgrade to plans with higher usage limits. Same customer base, higher revenue per customer. In the beginning, a new customer was worth $30ish per month. Today that's over $70/m per customer on average.
Do you have an in house affiliate program that you use or a third party one? How did you get affiliates interested (other than existing customers)?
1: https://www.shareasale.com
...any chance of an HN discount? :D
cheers!
1. Affiliate links. Each time someone buys a book through my site, I make ~5% from the retailer.
2. You know, not very well, but I think its a cool perk to give to customers you interact with ("glad I fixed your issue - want some free stickers?"). My biggest ROI to date is from google adwords, but they're outrageously expensive, so I'm going to be focusing on natural SEO for this next semester.
(I have a product with 4-digit monthly RR and I would like to take it to 5.)
Just putting this out there: if you're generating that scale of value for agencies, you can often get them to agree to an arrangement which sounds like "$X per account you rep". Mental comparison for you: what's the largest agency you count as a client paying you? Would $250 times the number of accounts they rep be a substantially larger number than that? They probably make substantially more than that.
My brother works at a PPC agency. Typical client: a company you've never heard of in Chicago which does, without loss of generality, weatherproofing. They have a PPC budget of $IT_WOULD_BLOW_YOUR_MINDS_HN. Like many PPC companies, they charge (WLoG) 20% of spend every month. $250 doesn't make that account meaningfully lucrative and if you give them 1 extra conversion a month to brag about it's net profitable for the client.
I am aware of other marketing software companies which get into very cozy relationships with their favorite marketing agencies, to the tune of four to five figure checks monthly. That would, presumably, lift your average from $70 to an even happier number.
Bonus points: if you do it right, you can pitch this as a straight moneymaker to the agency, on some model like "You add a line-item to all your invoices of +$500 for $FOO_SOFT, so after we get our cut, that's $12,500 that your agency grosses which is totally free money to you."
I'm sure it sent you a good one or two customers too! :)
I've been a subscriber for roughly 6 months and am very happy with the service.
Yo'uve
Btw the product looks awesome.
I think the biggest value proposition Improvely offers is the Click Fraud reports/reporting and alerts.
I couldn't find a page on the site letting me know how much technical skill I'd require to implement this.
Once I have 200 or so products up there I will do some much more interesting stuff with it.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fourth-dimension/id50420...
It blows my mind that people still find out about this app and happily buy it every day even though it occupies such a small geeky niche.
Then launched a card game which is a decent success..
Would you feel comfortable telling us the number of sales in 2013?
In 2013 it made $3900, or $325/month, and seems to be holding at that rate of income. The only work I did on the app in 2013 was about two days making it work correctly on iOS 7.
It's not huge money, but it's far more than my expectations, which were on the order of $500 total over the lifetime of the app.
I posted a breakdown of the first three months of reviews here: http://www.fourthdimensionapp.com/first_three_months/
My next app is a two-player Tetris/Scrabble mashup: http://fiascoapp.com/b
My expectations for the word puzzle game are either $300,000, or zero. The wave function has yet to collapse.
Kudos anyway, great idea and looks like a great execution as well!
Outsource the outsourcement... Interact with top-level outsourcer once per week... he interacts with low-level outsourcer daily.
Profit.
doesn't it undermine consumer confidence in their business?
Original source: http://www.verizonenterprise.com/security/blog/index.xml?pos...
I'm not a chicken. You're a turkey!
I would rather be actively working on something that challenges me, than have my brain rot away.
I've even tried working on side projects while at my day job and it doesn't work out because it's difficult to really devote focus to something that isn't related to your job.
I'm now working on several iOS (http://james.brooks.so/contare-my-first-ios-app/) applications (paid) however I do intend to offer free versions with iAds.
I've also got an Android app on the Play Store that's made me a few quid; https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jbrooksuk....
Apart from my iOS applications now, I intend to develop some SaaS apps that I can use to generate some more income.
For the specific example of buying apartments in Oslo to rent out, sensible analysis will show that this gives a worse risk-adjusted return than other options (e.g. the stock market). But hey, go right ahead. It's not my money ;)
If you believe in long term economic stability, then go ahead and invest in stocks. We don't. And now we know at least we'll have a place to live.
When economy is stable, realty prices grow; when economy is shaky, realty prices fall but slower than stocks. Stocks are more liquid on the other hand.
The real problem in your situation is that these people are able to rent flats for sub-market prices. But it's not your problem. Your problem is that you don't have enough realty supply. And/or more people who want to live in interesting city than interesting cities of Switzerland can house.
The latter seems to become a major problem in most countries.
(b) Switzerland is crazy expensive. So you can probably make megabucks renting out property there.
I'd say my time - which was evenings after work - investment was around 3-4 days initially and then fulfilling orders is simply writing a customers address and posting the stickers - which if the demand was bigger I'd probably outsource.
It's been great. I've learnt a shit tonne & the conversations it started has given me an idea for a similar product which I'll be focusing on very soon!
My main win was cold-emailing tech blogs. I got featured on BoingBoing - http://boingboing.net/2013/08/12/stickonspy-sticker-reminder... - through emailing and also managed to sell directly to Cory ;).
http://zervaas.biz/escapianet/
Probably make 2-3 sales/yr which is always a nice surprise. It comes up first when you Google "escapianet php"
I also wrote a PHP book in 2007. I still get royalty cheques, although they've almost approached 0 - the last quarter was about $30 ;)
Most of my income now is from app sales.
https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments
Edit: autocorrect correction
Also if you did happen to do it for Laravel 4, I'd buy it ;).
The framework creator (Taylor Otwell) has an excellent book on leanpub and there is an amazing video guide site (laracasts.com) which is better than I have seen for anything (check out the free vids for an idea of quality).
It is "passive" in the sense that I respond to the occasional e-mail (once a month), update the data once a year, and add another calculator when I feel like it.
A few years back, I was in the same position with another (online casual gaming) website, that I sold for 2.5x the yearly revenue. Looking back, I should probably have kept that site as well.
Pro tip: quality content beats SEO in the long run. Be the tortoise.
2) Helping my artistic friends selling their products. If you want to sell designer products, you can sign up here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dmyfzRwBbpcKAyRplHs0i2RMqsC...
Gotten hugely popular in Norway. Released a revamped iOS 7 version to the US last week (?). Things are going slow over there. Not even reached 1000 downloads.
Traffic always spike during 23:00 - 03:00 when kids should be sleeping... 99% of users lurk and browse reddit/9gag/imgur some contribute (no account needed for browsing).
Link for the lazy: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lolipop-funny-images-gifs/id...
App runs barely any hosting cost, and this generates a nice little passive income. I have an admin panel to turn on more ads, but as of now I would rather grow with as little intrusive ads as possible. When, and if I turn on more intrusive ads, users can purchase a "pro badge" to get rid of ads. (turned off now).
Best side effect is that I have gotten a LOT better at obj-c development since I started playing with it, and now run a small mobile development company that actually pays the bills. Learn while you play :)
We have a tor hidden service for anonymous submissions. We offer free service for whistleblowers, that want to stay anonymous (and can't pay us).
What percentage are paid users versus free anonymous submissions? How long have you been in business? What are you profits like? Thanks
In terms of pricing, I just priced it by what I thought was fair. I do refuse people though, since like I said I wouldn't host for more than a week or so per month (I don't want this turning into a job, but it's the easiest money anyone can make if they have a spare room).
I added adds from multiple sources (mopub, admob etc) and in app purchases.
For the paid app: In the top months (2 years ago) I made around 800 euro. But it dropped to 90 euro per month currently. For in app purchases: I am making 30 euro per month currently. For ads: Making about 200 euro per month currently.
Initially I was not aware of pirated versions. I even had my app translated to chinese because I thought it would be a huge market. But after I did that, i noticed Google Play is not active there, and all paid apps are free in china.... Pirated versions.
I tried to prevent pirated versions of my app by performing code obfuscation, but probably it was still easy to crack.
Are you planning an iOS version?