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 |
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.
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
Even though by that time... with inflation and all that, you'll still break even.
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.
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.
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?
There's also not a whole lot of places you can learn that from :/ All the crap SEO gurus are selling is outdated as heck.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
> 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.
Provides HTTP/S and TCP tunneling and is a comprehensive alternative to ngrok. I started it in Jan 2019. $4.3k ARR in 2020.
Feel free to shoot me an email (in my profile) with your order number and I'm happy to refund you.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rinum/rows-and-tables-t...
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.
https://videohubapp.com/ - browse, search, and organize your videos (PC, Mac, Linux)
[1]: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/166-sam-eaton-of-crave-...
Would you be willing to answer a couple of questions?
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!
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...
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.
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]
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.
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.
https://www.samurai-sudoku.com
https://www.fiendishsudoku.com
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.
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!
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
:)
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.
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!
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!
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.
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]
[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.
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.)
I wrote about it here: https://lachlan-miller.me/musings/reflecting-on-a-year-of-co...
Still make between $10 and $50 a month.
It's amazing that people will consistently pay me money for the chance to buy my stocks at the end of the week.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.