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Ask HN: Ideas on creating passive income streams
32 points by mraza007 on June 28, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 47 comments
What are some ideas as developer where I can turn my skill into passive income. I write blogs but I’m not sure if its a good idea to monetize it


I made a course on a small topic which is keyword research/SEO related and hosted on Udemy. It took me a week to create the whole thing since then I haven't done anything except answering a few questions of the students.

It's 99% passive. I am making around $150 per month.

This is the simple method I followed (CPSO)

Customer => Problem => Solution => Offer

1.) find a topic with enough interest (customer finding activity)

2.) identify a single problem in that topic (Problem finding activity)

3.) provide a clear cut solution to the problem Make sure they get a result by the end of it. Record your screen showing the solution without any fluff. (Solution providing activity)

4) Create a compelling offer and present to the customer (Make a compelling offer activity)

For the last part (offer), I created a video which is almost 45 minutes long and taught nearly 90% of the course. There's no need to buy if you watch the intro video which is free to preview on the course.

It's doing well.

Watch the preview video, and you are good to go—no need to buy it. But if you want to support an honest creator, then please consider purchasing the course using the following link. Many thanks.

https://www.udemy.com/course/keyword-golden-ratio-formula-fi...


The course looks very phenomenal I might buy it since SEO is really important as it gets you to the right audience


Thank you for your kind comments. I am looking forward to see you there.


I'm a designer-turned-developer and created a nice-looking solitaire card game website: https://online-solitaire.com/. It's making me around $1500 a month.

My approach was to find a nice of apps that where already popular and then see if I could make it better.


Wonderful site. Thank you.

I have a question. So how do you deal with sites which deliver the same content as you? Like, say you come across another site which also delivers playing card games like yours, would you go after it legally or something? Or have you faced issues where you have been told you are plagiarizing the game from another place?

Pardon my ignorance. I am unfamiliar when it comes to this kind of knowledge.


It's a beautiful game, but I wonder what part of the game is monetized? Thanks!


Thanks a lot :-). Hit me up at contact@online-solitaire.com if you have any suggestions or feedback for the site.

After 5 games or so, ads will start to appear. Just normal sidebar ads. I've made it so people won't be blasted with ads the very first time they enter the site, so they'll get the "optimal" experience to start with.


That’s phenomenal with that kind of money you can easily travel and live in countries like Bali Thailand and etc . Even afford good lifestyle there


I'm curious, what ads service you're running? As far as I know, Google Adsense doesn't allow web apps.


I looked at the site and there doesn't seem to be ads. How much does it cost to host?


Sorry for the confusion. Forgot to mention they only appear after a while. After you've played 5 games (if I remember correctly) they'll start to appear.

I think I spend about $60 a month hosting it. My biggest expense right now is Moz which is $100/month.


Any tips on becoming a developer turned designer? I'd be interested in that.


Just realized that my first answer might not be the most helpful :-P. If you're still interested in becoming better at design, it's all about learning-by-doing. Much like development.

I spend a lot of time on https://dribbble.com/ when I initially started designing and that's often where I go to find inspiration these days as well.

Besides that, I'd suggest to doing as many design-related projects as possible. They don't have to be big. They just need to force you to go through the process of going from thought to an actual design. A lot of people practice design by re-designing already existing apps.

The tool of the trade nowadays, when it comes to websites and apps at least, is https://www.sketch.com/, which I can highly recommend.

Hope that helped a bit more.


Ah, this helps quite a bit. I sometimes take a stab at UI/icon/character design with Sketch. What helped me a lot was https://bezier.method.ac/ and redrawing characters from Headspace. I've also used Figma here and there.

So your tips are quite helpful since I've never tried to start from a blank canvas. Also, dribble.com is a really cool tip.

Thanks! :D


That's a tough one. One suggestion would be "don't". Most companies want either one or the other. I'm not a brilliant developer or a brilliant designer, which makes it hard for me to find my role in bigger companies.

On the other hand I can make things like https://online-solitaire.com/ and https://habitualapp.io/ as a one-man operation.


Honestly i love that Since as a one man operation you are owning the entire process compared to working for a company where things are done by other people too both have its pros and cons


Me too. I wish I had a solid role.


How is it earning money? I don't see any ads or premium versions for sale.


Sorry for the confusion. They appear after about 5 games. It's just normal sidebar ads.


How many visitors per month do you have?


I get around 600k pageviews a month. So A LOT of returning visitors.


cool! I opened it just to check it out and ended playing my first solitaire game in (probably) a decade.


Haha... I hope you enjoyed it. Hit me up at contact@online-solitaire.com if you have any suggestions or feedback for the site :-).


nice work, well done, fun to play, is your revenue all just from your sidebar ads?


Yup... if you have any ideas for other potential revenue streams, let me know :-).


Sell custom decks of cards.


Interesting idea :-). Have you seen something similar done somewhere else?


What does passive income mean to you? Is it passive income when a YouTuber gets paid whenever someone views a video, but spends hundreds of hours making great content and building an audience? Is SaaS MRR passive income after you've spent hundreds or thousands of hours building a product and acquiring customers? Is it passive income when an author receives royalties after spending months writing, publishing, and marketing a book? Is advertising revenue passive income after you've spent hundreds of hours writing blog posts and building an audience?

If you want to leverage your time to make money when you sleep, you need to do the work to acquire income producing assets.

Here's some ways you could monetize your skills as a developer:

- Provide value for free (blog posts, code, videos, whatever) to grow an audience, then sell courses or paid content to that audience.

- Create open source software that other people need, then sell training videos on how to use it.

- Build an audience for your blog, and join a developer/tech focused advertising network.


> Create open source software that other people need, then sell training videos on how to use it.

Please don't do this, I personally hate this motivation for Open Source development.

The incentive of the project developer is not aligned with the user. The developer has the incentive to make the software complex and unintuitive, so that people require training to use it.

Any proposed changes to make the project easier to configure, threaten the income of the developer and will probably not be considered...

Monetisation is extremely hard to get right in open-source software.


Even better, don’t write the software at all. Just sell training for popular open-source software. Could offer a cut of sales to developer in exchange for advertising the training on the GitHub.


Agreed monetization is really hard on open source software


That’s a great advice I have been blogging since two years now and I’m afraid if I monetize that people will stop reading it as I know devs hate seeing ads


baseline suggestion for truly passive income is invest in the stock market: do dev work for people in exchange for money --> invest the money in the stock market (e.g. low cost passive index funds) --> expect roughly 5% real return on capital invested for long term buy & hold stock investment


Historically you could count on 5-7%. The outlook for the market over the next 10 years is an annual return of 3-5% (Vanguard). Just wanted to throw that out there to elaborate on the 5% number you put out.


I have been thinking about it do you know how can i get started I’m just scared what if i make the wrong investment


Look into Financial Independence and 4% Safe withdrawal rate. Also look up lazy portfolio.


build a dating app that doesn't charge for reading messages from other users.

Make it 1 dollar a month. let us talk to each other. Keep our profile there for years without us having to take an action. if somebody finds me and wants to talk to me - I want to get an email about it. I don't understand why such a simple app (browse, filter, message, get notifications) has to cost 10/15 bucks a month. make it 10 a year.


I have seen people doing that but I’m afraid people below 18 might start using that


Sites like https://www.indiehackers.com/interviews/page/1 are full of examples on what has been done. You can't do the same idea twice usually, but you can spot lots of patterns there.


Figure out a way to make money from a hobby. It’s not passive but it can be no net effort.

I like to make wordclocks. I like the process of figuring out better manufacturing processes. Some people buy them. Win win situation.

I don’t sell many, but enough to pay for my cnc.


Is selling something on Etsy ever a good idea? How to know if there is demand?


It can be. It's not passive income since you have to make and ship the items.

If you see other items similar to yours, then there is likely demand. If you don't, then you could experiment by making a few and listing them.


Thanks. I was thinking of selling wooden benches but would the shipping be ridiculous? Are there any shipping hacks to keep it affordable?


This shipping hack may apply, or it may not.

Search for a local warehouse that provides order fulfillment services and see if you can have them ship your benches.

A place like that ships enough packages they can usually get lower shipping rates than other businesses. I own a company like that in Ohio. With my rates it costs perhaps $30 to ship a gaming PC to California... for an individual it might cost $75.


Not really. You can work with the shipping companies to get the rates lowered if you're shipping as a small business instead of an individual, but it won't help much.

You might be better off selling them at craft shows or selling on consignment through a local small business.


Doesn't Etsy let you sell digital products too? That could be passive, isn't it?


I'm not sure. That would be good though.




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