You can categorise the shapes of these curves. In a really dysfunctional company, the amount of labour your need per unit will increase as volume increases. A good example of this might be some bus companies where the cost per rider increases as the number of riders increase -- you get popular and you go out of business.

Consulting companies tend to have a linear relationship. The more you sell, the more you have to do. However, the per unit cost doesn't really change based on volume. Manufacturing companies tend to have a less than linear relationship. The per unit cost decreases with volume. You get the "efficiency of scale".

With computers we can create services with a very nearly constant relationship between volume and labour. In other words, I do the work once and then there is no other cost to increase sales. Of course, from a business perspective, this is ideal. You do the work and then you can scale the business without having to invest more money.

The thing I dislike about the term "passive income" is that it implies that you are getting free money. It's not true. For this kind of constant cost business, you've front loaded the costs. The first one costs as much as the first million. In fact, you may be in the red for a very long time (or forever... "Any side projects, Games, OSS" ;-) ). For this reason, I'd much prefer (the infinitely less catchy) term "front loaded business". I guess it will never catch on, but I wish we could discuss this topic without having to always derail into get rich quick and "living the dream of money without work" schemes.

Yes we get it. Stop fussing about the terminology.

All of the order processing and fulfillment is handled automatically.

I do no marketing or advertisement beyond social media.

It's pretty nice. Sometimes I sell meme shirts that generate $3k in a month if I'm feeling particularly clever.

I was able to bootstrap this business for like $12 for a domain name and a free trial of Shopify which gave me enough runway to scale.

Been doing this for over a year, I still basically do nothing.

https://odomojuli.store/

- Recharged - $2720 / month. I write a briefing once a morning about the technology industry, about 350 people pay to receive it + sponsor something without advertising or nonsense tech stories. Still growing! https://char.gd/recharged

- Write Together (new project, but hey) - $1,200 / month. I built a platform for learning to Write with others, based around building habits/streaks. https://writetogether.space

Now the thing is, both of these require maintenance, but not like a full-time job: I push code, write on them, etc. But they're not fully passive, so it's quite a specific difference -- still wouldn't trade working on them for anything, however.

I have about $200k spread thoughout some index funds and individual stocks that all pay dividends in my post tax accounts. I reinvest all that income and the taxes are kind of annoying to deal with, but’s it’s better than nothing.

I also have a high yield savings account. A big chunk of my total cash is tied up here because I’d rather stay liquid. I think the rate is now 2% annual or just north of. It gets me $300 a month. I just save it and let it grow, aside from taxes on the interest.

I made about $13k off it, which sounds good but was really only about $20/hour.

Hoping to grow it quite a bit this year and then start offloading tasks. I don’t know if I can ever get it truly passive, but that’s the dream.

I rent them both out I pay a management company to handle maintenance. I screen tenants myself, and so far I've been lucky getting tenants who stay for fairly long periods. I clear about 5K/month after maintenance fees, taxes and insurance. Its very little work.

Originally started as a T-shirt company specializing in dog puns but expanded a couple years in. The T-shirts are all printed and fulfilled by a US company and I have the pet supply inventory at my house so it’s quick to ship. Not entirely passive but only takes about 5-10 hours each week.

Been gaining momentum recently so it’s been an increasingly better income source.

https://www.casualfuriday.com

Other than that, a few games I've published generate ~$100 a year without input from me. Everything else requires at least a little bit of my time on a regular basis and I wouldn't count it as passive.

Disclaimer: it's a side-project, but not passive. Writing high-quality analyses is extremely time consuming (30-500 hours each) for ourselves, and our analysts - but it pays off in compound terms. I personally worked only on weekends for 4 months on this.

Before that, I was at MIT, UBS bank and McKinsey. Currently, I'm also looking for additional CTO co-founder opportunities globally (I'm co-located in SF and Switzerland) - please reach out to jakobm@mit.edu if you want to launch an own online product or course in a matter of days, and reiterate at an insane speed (only if you have a solid pitch or massive online followership, OR: if you know sb. who has such, there's a HUGE finder's fee of several 10k USD).

Https://accidentallyfasting.com

I don’t know, maybe that kind of “passive income” is no longer cool or desirable.

Every form of passive income requires periodic blips of input, but the magnitude and frequency of those blips could vary a lot depending on the business. There’s some forms of passive income that are really like part-time jobs or require a full-time job worth of effort to launch something. These don’t seem very passive to me.

I see people preach on the internet how they found some golden opportunity that lead to raking in thousands of dollars on a monthly basis with minimal oversight. I’m sure instances of this exist, but frankly I think there’s a lot that is still unsaid about what was required to pull it off. There’s a group of people that are instead looking for the snake oil fountain that allows someone to live like their retired in their 30s but without doing any work. This is no longer “passive income”, and is instead just another “what’s the easiest way to become rich” search. The reality is that identifying and executing a high-ROI opportunity that recurring brings in money with low input is not as easy as following an A->B->C guide or else every market entrant would have like a 90% success rate and everyone would already be doing it.

If people genuinely want passive income, then financial investments or monetizing hobbies (to the extent it’s still enjoyable) seem like a good place to start for providing a good lifestyle/income balance.