8 ms·
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
- yboris 6y agoI released Video Hub App almost 3 years ago and have been adding features over time. It's a project of love, and I give $3.50 of every purchase ($5) to charity, so the income isn't the main point. This year I averaged about 100 sales per month. https://videohubapp.com/ https://videohubapp.com/ - browse, search, and organize your videos (PC, Mac, Linux) GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
- dhruvkar 6y agoI invested in 4 industrial real estate projects over the last 1 year. They currently net me ~2500 a month. 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.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoGreat cash on cash return.
- dsizzle 6y agoHow did you find the investment group?
- dhruvkar 6y agoPure luck. 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.)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- natchy 6y agoI have a cookie delivery company[1] that I started with my sister. It’s doing well but I personally only take out $50k/yr. completely supplemental to my main job. [1]: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/166-sam-eaton-of-crave-cookie https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/166-sam-eaton-of-crave-...
- wikibob 6y agoThis is incredible. Bravo. What are the future plans for the local business and the software?
- natchy 6y agoThanks. Plan is to add a few more delivery hubs but with drive-thru attached. The 2nd location is launching in the next month or 2. Not really planning on anything with the software. This is not my primary job so don't put a lot of time into it.
- shuckles 6y agoInteresting to compare with a very similar business and a different outcome: https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/23/cookie-startup-fails-to-rise/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/23/cookie-startup-fails-to-ri...
- karimtr 6y agoCame across your IH a few months ago. Those revenues are incredible for a local cookie company with a single kitchen. Well done!
- senorsmile 6y agoMy wife has been in recipe development for a couple of years to start something very similar. We are just in the cottage license approval phase. I can only hope we will have a fraction of your success. Would you be willing to answer a couple of questions?
- winrid 6y agohttps://fastcomments.com https://fastcomments.com Started Jan 2020, looks like will be at 4.5k ARR by end of year.
- XCSme 6y agoDoesn't $350 per month for a basic comment section sound pretty insane?
- winrid 6y agoHow many thousands do you think Disqus charges its enterprise customers? Also, remember marketing, some tiers exist to get you to buy others. 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.
- twillin 6y agoA few years ago I started a niche healthcare case management SaaS. While I sometimes add new features, upgrade software, or fix bugs, it mostly runs itself. There's currently a handful of clients each paying ~$8k annually.
- mariushn 6y agoDo you have (or need) certifications such as HIPAA?
- philshem 6y agoBefore the pandemic I wrote a scraper for web-based data related to crowds and put the code on GitHub with a permissive license. At the start of the pandemic here in Europe I posted a Tweet with an interesting dataviz based on the scraped data - and someone who saw that Tweet is paying me to run a customized scraper for the past 9 months.
- k__ 6y agoWrote a book a few years ago. Still make between $10 and $50 a month.
- mtlynch 6y agohttps://isitketo.org https://isitketo.org 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/ https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/04/ [1] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/07/ https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/07/
- topicseed 6y agoAre you interested in selling your Keto site?
- sushshshsh 6y agoI'll code you a competitor for much less than that person would charge, if they are even willing to sell :)
- altdatathrow 6y agothey want the traffic and recurring revenue, they don't care about the site
- sushshshsh 6y agoHow'd that work out for fox when they bought myspace?
- altdatathrow 6y ago
- bob1029 6y agoTo me, passive means little or no ongoing time investment. If we are looking at "best" in terms of revenue, then dividends from investing in the stock market are by far the best source of passive income I can imagine. 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.
- duedl0r 6y agoHow did you earn the money to invest?
- bob1029 6y agoIncome from my job. No side projects pulling in cash (yet). Getting close on a few though. Hoping I can post something far more interesting here next year when this question comes around again.
- hpkuarg 6y agoThe next few years will be a very interesting time in global markets, so whichever way it goes, I'm sure you'll have something to write about. ;-)
- nostromo 6y agoI looked into this (and even implemented it for a time) but by every analysis it was better to ignore dividends and instead focus on total return. If you want monthly income, just draw down the assets monthly. 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.
- mtmail 6y agoAlso an older (February) 2020 thread with 4 answers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22379662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22379662
- TMWNN 6y ago$5100 in sales (about 30% profit) in three days via dropshipping a popular, hard-to-find videogame-related accessory over Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
- moepstar 6y agoBeing interested in VG, now you have me curious - what is/was it?
- nathias 6y agoI put all my savings in crypto.
- politelemon 6y agoAssuming you're not joking, doesn't its volatility make you nervous? Would you consider spreading out your savings instead, example, a bit of property, a bit of index funds, a bit of pension?
- nathias 6y agoI don't have enough of savings to be nervous about them or to consider anything else.
- Darmody 6y agoI could say this is my case too. Back when I bought I didn't invest everything I had but now I burned almost all my savings with no income so what I have in crypto is worth more than what I have in my bank. Sadly I didn't sell when I could make x12 profit as I didn't expect it to drop as much as it did. Now I'd lose money selling so I'll leave it there and forget about it.
- andersthue 6y agoI made a watermarking software 10 years ago, still makes 1000$ every month, with almost zero work. http://watermark-image.com http://watermark-image.com :)
- ghaff 6y agoNot bad. I see many people who mention a SaaS, books, a website, etc. and a lot of the time it doesn't look all that passive for the typically small amount of income it brings in. Nothing wrong with any of these things of course. They're just not really a passive income stream. Of course, very few things are truly passive, especially things that have minimal risk to the original capital.
- andersthue 6y agoIt was more work 5 years ago, doing 5-6-7k$ These days it is a few minutes a few times a week, doing support.
- pillefitz 6y agoVery cool! How did you get started, knew there could be a market and finally reached your customers?
- andersthue 6y agoI needed it myself, and the other pieces of sw did not work proper, then spent 3 years of spending a few hours every evening promoting it, posting it to forums, etc. (And a little time prorgramming, but promoting it took waaay more time)
- Glench 6y agoI made a few hundred bucks licensing my Fuzzyset.js library: https://github.com/Glench/fuzzyset.js#license https://github.com/Glench/fuzzyset.js#license
- throwaway32417 6y agoIt seems licensezero.com is shutting down, does that impact your license? Do you still consider fuzzyset.js as open-source?
- Glench 6y agoThe creator of licensezero said that as long as I'm still making money, he'll still run licensezero, so that's useful, though I may transition to his new thing once it gets going.
- fimdomeio 6y agoNot really passive but almost. I sell bicycle bells on etsy[1]. It started with a friend that had the idea and later left the project. Initially I joined mostly because I was interested in finding a technical solution for how to print them. 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 https://www.etsy.com/shop/gunaPT [2] https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2019/bike-bells-with-axidraw/ https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2019/bike-bells-with-axidra...
- inetsee 6y agoI thought you should know: your Etsy link is returning a blank page for me.
- dahx4Eev 6y agoHow do you promote the product? Is it organically on etsy only?
- alltakendamned 6y agoThis is brilliant. Kudos on a beautiful idea !
- larrykubin 6y agoI started a niche YouTube channel on Python for Stock and Crypto Trading, very beginner level: https://youtube.com/parttimelarry 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.
- michael_vo 6y agoHow long does it take you to make a video, and how often do you release?
- anmolparashar 6y agoJust my 2¢: For better results, change the channel name to something relevant to what you are doing and start adding relevant (to the video) information in the video descriptions.
- obligatorydev 6y agoSome people might get a stronger emotional attachment to his channel because his name is unique and personal. Versus just another channel called "CodingStocks" or some bs like that.
- mkranjec 6y agoSurprised to see you here. I really enjoyed your videos and they got me back into Python. Thank you.
- jakecopp 6y agoWhat is the revenue split between YouTube ad revenue, donations and affiliate links if I may ask?
- xwdv 6y agoSelling weekly covered calls on stocks in my equities portfolio, 2k per week, super passive.
- franklampard 6y agoMind sharing your strategy? Very OTM calls? What type of stocks?
- xwdv 6y agoThe market is on an uptrend, so I go for OTM calls maybe about no more than 10% above the current price. If I get assigned then I just buy back my position anyway, a little loss of profit, but most of the time these calls are expiring worthless and I keep the premiums. Could probably make more money getting calls closer to the money, but I don't want the hassle really. It's amazing that people will consistently pay me money for the chance to buy my stocks at the end of the week.
- jerry80 6y agoYou could get even more passive by just investing in a buy-write index ETF. e.g. PBP or QYLD.
- xwdv 6y agoNo thanks, I will keep stocks myself and write my own calls while flipping a bird at those indexes. Why would I want to miss out on the gains for the underlying?
- jerry80 6y agoThose indexes implement the strategy that you're talking about. I don't understand what you mean by "miss out on the gains for the underlying."
- 6y ago
- codq 6y agohttps://www.babyrocknyc.com/ https://www.babyrocknyc.com/ 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.
- heavy_239823 6y agoI made €73k from a Chrome Extension. [1] Went down twice in the last year so I had to spend some time on that. 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/ https://beebs.io/ [2] https://tillypay.com/blog/how-to-monetise-a-chrome-extension/ https://tillypay.com/blog/how-to-monetise-a-chrome-extension...
- kerupian 6y agoHey there! This is really nice. I enjoyed reading your article. I am curious how do you monetize beebs? Do you get paid from publisher and TV shows or any other source? I couldn't find article on Indie Hackers about it.
- seanwilson 6y agoHow did you migrate your existing paying customers? I went with https://paddle.com/ https://paddle.com/ for my paid Chrome extension (https://www.checkbot.io/ 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.
- enos_feedler 6y agoWhen the lockdowns started happening in March, I began trading the stock market. My YTD realized gains is equal to my base salary. About 140k. I am proud of all the trading I did. Living on the west coast it also turned me into a morning person, where market opens at 6:30am. Good side effect :)
- HNJE 6y agoAmazing, and congratulations! Did you have significant prior experience with trading or did you start from scratch in March?
- enos_feedler 6y agoNo significant experience. I was just holding the stock that I had earned through my job. I was the person who would check their company stock every day because I had all my money in it but wouldn't care to do anything with it. When the market was tanking I sold it all for cash and then said "now let's make this grow into more than we started with this year". That was the beginning of trading.
- GGfpc 6y agoHow did you learn? I do index funds, but I'd like to trade a bit for fun
- enos_feedler 6y agoI am the kind of person that just learns by doing. I hear the word "call option" and I start chasing down what it means. I start buying them just to touch and feel the mechanics of how they work. I am a hands on learner who just plays with things. I want to build intuition. If I get stuck or having recurring thoughts/pains about something I will look on Google/youtube to get to the bottom of it, but it takes time and practice to arrive at these questions. 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.
- 6y ago
- EliRivers 6y agoThe stock market has had a ridiculous year. 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).
- ghaff 6y agoYeah, this has been a good year so far. I actually pulled a decent chunk of money out early on. I'd have been better off not doing so though it probably helped me sleep better through some of the swings. And, even so, it's been a good year with almost entirely passive investing. 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.
- EliRivers 6y agoit probably helped me sleep better through some of the swings. 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.
- durnygbur 6y agoBuying stocks in the dips this year. Passive income hope-to-be in the following years.
- DVassallo 6y agoI sell two products on Gumroad. One is an ebook about AWS, and the other is a 1.5hr video about building on audience. 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=21 https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1333888186762678274?s=2...
- rexreed 6y agoCool. It looks like ad spend and affiliates really kicked things up a notch. Any advice on sane advertising spend strategies? Also which affiliates worked best?
- DVassallo 6y agoI only had some success with paid ads on reddit targeting r/aws, and it only lasted 3 months between March and June when competition was very low and I could get CPC rates around $0.10. From July onwards, I couldn't find availability for CPCs below $0.35 and that meant ads weren't profitable anymore. So I stopped. You can see more detail in the last graph over here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-made-210-822-selling-a-pdf-and-a-video-on-the-internet-028d5b0a2c https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-made-210-822-selling... 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 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 https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1333889974362488833
- rexreed 6y agoThanks! This is awesome detail
- krishnanunnir 6y agoHey! I have been following you on twitter. Your tweets are very insightful. 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?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- leet_thow 6y agoThe newish JEPI etf offers a 10% yield and monthly payments. I tend to buy it as part of my dollar cost averaging strategy when markets seem overheated that week.
- twblalock 6y agoSimply refusing to sell any of my stock during the downturn. Clearly, many people did sell. Sometimes the biggest wins come from knowing what the pitfalls are and avoiding them.
- Rinum 6y agoI made a simple SQL card game and launched it on Kickstarter. Not exactly passive while developing, but from now on it should be. Not bringing in too much, just a few K this year so far. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rinum/rows-and-tables-the-sql-card-game https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rinum/rows-and-tables-t...
- batmaniam 6y agoHow did you find manufacturers for printing the physical cards/boxes? And why did you only price it at $100, doesn't most manufacturers require a base number of printing, like 1000 boxes?
- jborak 6y agohttps://packetriot.com https://packetriot.com Provides HTTP/S and TCP tunneling and is a comprehensive alternative to ngrok. I started it in Jan 2019. $4.3k ARR in 2020.
- turtleofdeath 6y agoRoughly $350/mo at this point, and I’d love to 10x it this coming year. I have an Etsy business that I set up last year that doesn’t require much input from me and uses third party fulfillment. I average about 30 sales per month including the holiday season and about $10/order profit. Dividend stocks currently pay around $50/mo, which buys more stock every time (DRIP), so that should increase nicely over the next 30-40 years. I also buy more on a regular basis, but that does take some effort/research on my part. I’ll leave out stock, bond and mutual fund growth on its own since that’s not really income per se. I’m also working on a YouTube channel that I just started last month. It doesn’t even have 10 subscribers but I do point people to product recommendations, which has already gotten me a $45 referral payout. Could be a fluke, but I’m in it for the long term, so we shall see.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- optimiz3 6y agoBegin long TSLA (since 2013), and trading options around the core position.
- Invictus0 6y agoHow much have you made?
- atestu 6y agohttps://www.satelliteframes.com/ https://www.satelliteframes.com/ - Affordable framed satellite photos I just started this site a couple months ago and made my first sale last week (from an unknown customer). It's just a matter of finding public domain, high quality satellite photos!
- jakecopp 6y agoYour site is wonderful, congrats on the sale! I'm thinking of setting up a site for selling some prints of photos I've taken. How did you implement the billing/manufacturing/shipping? Thanks!
- danfang 6y agoI built a niche site dedicated to professional e-sports streamers (mainly focused on League of Legends). https://prostreams.gg https://prostreams.gg It just launched a few weeks ago, but is on track for ~300K page views / month. The top 5% of users spend over 8 hours / week watching content. Looking to grow the site first, then monetize through affiliates and advertising.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dave333 6y agoString of free sudoku sites ad supported have been earning $1000+/month steadily since 2005: https://www.samurai-sudoku.com https://www.samurai-sudoku.com https://www.fiendishsudoku.com https://www.fiendishsudoku.com https://www.sudokuhints.com https://www.sudokuhints.com https://www.extremesudoku.info https://www.extremesudoku.info https://www.easysudoku.org https://www.easysudoku.org https://www.sudukopuzzles.org https://www.sudukopuzzles.org https://www.sudokuprintables.org https://www.sudokuprintables.org
- bestouff 6y agoProbably a bit offtopic, but I just sold a land I bought 15 years ago with the intent to build a house with my now ex. Very good ROI.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tluyben2 6y agoCrypto (btc). Hard to beat the returns on that this year.
- saradhi 6y agoI started a SaaS service [1], in Aug 2019, to extract tables from images and scanned PDFs. Launched with a post on hacker news. I added couple of contractors who share the development on-demand. Last month, for the first time, we hit 10K users, no paid advertising, hitting 170K requests per month. Not expecting to cash out any profits now, investing them in the development. Now, I'm dealing B2B contracts and taking customizations for the businesses. The goal is to hit at least 3K in profit by next year end. Also, releasing a light weight version of the current published version as a new SaaS [2] at low cost. [1]: https://extracttable.com https://extracttable.com [2]: https://imagetoexcel.com https://imagetoexcel.com
- tikkotikki 6y agoLooking at your post history tells me that you took another person’s open source software and trying selling it as pro version without credit. Why did you do that? Do you have any ethical sense when building or selling software?
- saradhi 6y agoThat was the wrong assumption, as we released a library that imitates to be a pro version from the contributors of open sourcem We sorted it out by unpublishing the library. That's nothing to do with their tech in backend. Feel free to make comparisons on the output quality.
- dahx4Eev 6y agoWhich OSS?
- catacombs 6y agoTabula
- mcrittenden 6y agoI make about $400-500 per month on https://shortkeys.app https://shortkeys.app - a browser extension for custom keyboard shortcuts to do all kinds of stuff.
- ApolloRising 6y agoLooks really useful, I'm buying it already.
- ApolloRising 6y agoJust a heads up I bought the extension and then tried it on Brave Browser, keep getting Failed Needs Authorization message when it tries to install.
- mcrittenden 6y agoAh yeah sorry, Brave doesn't support paid extensions. It's a known issue with the browser. I usually direct Brave users to download a release package directly: https://github.com/mikecrittenden/shortkeys/releases https://github.com/mikecrittenden/shortkeys/releases Feel free to shoot me an email (in my profile) with your order number and I'm happy to refund you.
- ApolloRising 6y agoIts no problem, i got it working from the repo, don't need a refund, it saved enough mouse clicks for me today to make me happy! I have carpal tunnel and this made a difference today. You may want to include a template of hotkeys that people use or create a default set to get people going.
- olodolo 6y agoI make about $200/month with olodolo.com but it’s not completely passive as I need to manually handle things like disputes and refunds. I’d say maybe 2h/month.
- LoveMortuus 6y agoI have four passive incomes, I guess ^^ I'm from Slovenia, Europe, so I don't know if there work outside of Europe, which is also why I'm proud of them, because it's actually quite hard to find investment platforms outside of USA! Firstly, stocks, combination of growth and dividend with reinvesting dividend yields. Found a blue chip company that grows weed which was very funny to me, so I decided to buy some of the stock, by now it has grown my ~250%, which is pretty nice and even more funny because the stock is _high_ Secondly, crypto mining, I do this because I have access to _free_ electricity and internet, thus all profits are mine. Thirdly, crypto earned from mining I transfer into BlockFi, which isn't insured in anyway, but it does work like a saving account where BTC has a yearly interest of ~6%, other crypto currencies have more and some have less, you can also set that the interest is paid in any other crypto currency. Fourthly, one that I'm probably most proud of, Quanloop, they are a lending company but us _investors_ work kinda like a buffer for them so it's not directly us that are loaning the money. On Quanloop I have a yearly growth of ~15.6% with monthly payouts, they also pay you what you have lost due to inflation and what you had to pay for income tax. It's really amazing. Here's my referral link: bit.ly/InvestLove If you deposit 0.01€ or more you'll get 5€ reward, but if you want to avoid that, you can just Google Quanloop and do it that way. I don't work for Quanloop, I just really find them interesting. Fifthly, while currently not active I do plan on putting money onto it and that's Iban Wallet, it's a saving account that pays out interest every day, which seems very interesting to me!
- seanwilson 6y agoI run a paid Chrome extension that I'm still working on: https://www.checkbot.io/ https://www.checkbot.io/ > Checkbot is a Chrome extension that tests 100s of pages at a time to find critical SEO, speed and security problems before your users do. Test unlimited sites as often as you want including local development sites to stop critical issues going live. Glad I didn't rely on the Chrome Web Store payment system they deprecated a few months ago. :) Felt predictable they were going to throw in the towel with it since it was lacking obvious features and the support forums always had complaints about it breaking.
- corobo 6y agoThe Cloudflare stock I grabbed to test out US stock trades on my pension app is up 300% so that wasn't a bad shout
- mattbgates 6y agoBought a ton of TSLA when it split, like 115 shares, and held on to it, despite knowing it dropped insanely, but patience paid off. Made this in a single day: https://bit.ly/3gg3US1 https://bit.ly/3gg3US1 I highly recommend that if you can, you put your money to work for you. This is just a rare occurrence, but as an investor of 10 years so far, just by putting about $5k into the stock market each year, into a few good stocks, whether technology, food, or something else -- do your research, and let your money make its own money. You'll also want to maximize your 401k at least to your employer's contribution, but if you can go up to 10% or more, you'll be doing your older self a huge favor. And if they ever get cryogenics working, freeze yourself for a thousand years. This will probably happen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JwkaLt9pf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JwkaLt9pf8 Even though by that time... with inflation and all that, you'll still break even.
- cybercraft1 6y agoWe asked our developers and managers from Cybercraft https://cybercraftinc.com/company https://cybercraftinc.com/company to answer this question. It's banal but the main source of the passive income for them in 2020 was the property. Also, they use banking deposites and invest in cryptocurrency.
- JacobSuperslav 6y agome and my partner own several "niche sites". over 100k income in 2020. monetized with Mediavine and Amazon affiliate, but we're moving in the direction of pure ads slowly - Amazon is getting worse every year. these are pretty much passive(in my case), my assistant handles all the content outsourcing, and I just check the analytics and make decisions once in a while. I also sell premade specialized turnkey niche sites to people in the industry on places like /r/entrepreneur, /r/juststart, and my own site and this made me around 140k this year. i also do some consulting and work with automation, but that's not really passive at all. i specialize in python and selenium. I quit my 9-5 several years ago and retired to a very low cost of living area.
- xcubic 6y agoWould you go into more detail about this? How much do you invest in content? How do you pick niches? What those the turnkey niches site have in terms of content, custom theme, domain?
- JacobSuperslav 6y agoNiches - We work in some pretty broad major niches like "yoga". We just identify ones where the players are a few years behind and try to produce better content. My wife's main yoga blog is outranking yogajournal.com for many keywords, a major publication with a print magazine and a team of writers. You just need to be really good with SEO and know how to create great content -- and that's the really difficult part. There's also not a whole lot of places you can learn that from :/ All the crap SEO gurus are selling is outdated as heck. Also they all sell you shortcuts - because shortcuts are sexy, but the reality is shortcuts don't work for marketing/content creation. I have literally never seen an SEO course/blog that I would approve of... In my case the knowledge came from working at a digital agency, and then building my own sites. The first 2 years were tough. The turnkey sites offer a great .com domain in a niche that I think is good, a special theme created by me that is designed for speed/caching and displaying ads well. The content is just starter/filler so the site gets some traction in Google (we age the sites 1+ year before selling them). Unfortunately all sites are currently sold out (fortunately for me, I guess). Ever want to talk/brainstorm, and I'm not looking to charge anything, send me an email to jacob@superslav.com
- alain34 6y agohttps://www.bankaccoountchecker.com https://www.bankaccoountchecker.com Pretty passive as validation rules are fairly static, and I have automated data source import and refresh. Around £900 MRR Existing customers have asked about other validation types like email which I might offer under a new site.
- mod 6y agoYou typo'ed the URL
- lmiller1990 6y agoI made some income from content creation. I made 2 courses about Vue.js and wrote 1 book, for a total of around 7K USD. Not exactly passive, but I'm still really happy with my progress. I wrote about it here: https://lachlan-miller.me/musings/reflecting-on-a-year-of-content-creation https://lachlan-miller.me/musings/reflecting-on-a-year-of-co...
- sixQuarks 6y agoTSLA investment had been the best passive income for me
- amaurymartiny 6y agoI built an open-source email verification API: [link redacted]. It checks if an email exists without sending any email. I released the open-source lib some years ago, and built a Saas only this year in April. It started generating revenue (~$100MRR) since September, and I'm not really touching it anymore.
- XCSme 6y agoI sell a self-hosted web analytics platform[0] and earned around $15k this year. Not really passive as I quit my job to work on it (mostly updates so far), so I hope that with some marketing in 2021 I will at least 10x that number. [0]: https://www.usertrack.net https://www.usertrack.net