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 I 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/ - browse, search, and organize your videos (PC, Mac, Linux) The link in your GitHub page to purchase your app point to a 404.
"This software is available for $5.00 through videohubapp.com" It's a very nice app! Thank you! Fixed :) I 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-... Interesting to compare with a very similar business and a different outcome: https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/23/cookie-startup-fails-to-ri... My 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? This is incredible. Bravo. What are the future plans for the local business and the software? Thanks. 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. Came across your IH a few months ago. Those revenues are incredible for a local cookie company with a single kitchen. Well done! Not 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 [2] https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2019/bike-bells-with-axidra... I thought you should know: your Etsy link is returning a blank page for me. How do you promote the product? Is it organically on etsy only? This is brilliant. Kudos on a beautiful idea ! To 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. I 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. I agree with this position - I am not running a pure value-oriented portfolio. It is very nearly a 50/50 blend between value/growth at the moment. Only ~25% of my portfolio represents investments explicitly for purposes of driving dividend income (REITs). I say 2.9% as a "safe" figure in context of investments that are more-or-less idle without all the stress (i.e. holding a bunch of TSLA is not always fun). In reality, my total portfolio is more than doubled YTD, but I wouldn't publish that as a typical figure. I prefer the other side of that trade. Losing a grand or two a month for a year and then making 100k is lots of fun. How are these fees so low? Is there anything stopping you from taking the money and investing into index funds? I feel like I must be missing something. The most conservative investment options I know of all have >1% expected returns. Many brokers, including IBKR, set their interest rate to be a small increase over the federal interest rate. 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. Worth noting: the implied interest rates on other forms of leverage (futures especially) are probably lower still. And though using long-term in-the-money call options might be a bit more expensive, they have the nice quality of having limited downside. If the underlying tanks hard you won't be forced to sell, and you might even still have some extrinsic value. Where are you getting margin fees less than 1%? Per year? They said IBKR. Margin rates here: https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=1595 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. How did you earn the money to invest? Income 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. The 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. ;-) 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] Are you interested in selling your Keto site? Not really. I find it fun to own it and watch what happens to it, so I likely value it much higher than its real market value. 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. Happy to chat if you change your mind! I'll code you a competitor for much less than that person would charge, if they are even willing to sell :) I assume that this was a tongue in cheek comment, but in case it wasn’t... 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. Why would someone pay a 4x multiple on a site that probably wont be making anything 4 years from now? (4x being a rough estimate of the buying price). That's 40 grand that could be used on traffic to the new site Hmmmm... 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. they want the traffic and recurring revenue, they don't care about the site How'd that work out for fox when they bought myspace? Well if we're going to ignore all of the variables in this manner it seems to be doing them super well, they're still in business! comparing multimillion dollar sites with niche sites is pointless Despite the failure, I'm guessing somewhat better than if they had hired you to make a clone? Why does Covid drop traffic for a content site about keto? I'm guessing just a shift in priorities. People felt panicked when COVID hit, and I imagine for most of them, learning about a new diet wasn't the most important thing. 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. Stress eating? I bet fewer people are dieting right now than last year. I started a niche YouTube channel on Python for Stock and Crypto Trading, very beginner level: 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. How long does it take you to make a video, and how often do you release? Surprised to see you here. I really enjoyed your videos and they got me back into Python. Thank you. Just 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. Some 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. What is the revenue split between YouTube ad revenue, donations and affiliate links if I may ask? String of free sudoku sites ad supported have been earning $1000+/month steadily since 2005: https://www.samurai-sudoku.com https://www.fiendishsudoku.com Oooh nice, I started playing a lot of Sudoku sometime during the pandemic after I got addicted to Cracking the Cryptic :) Where does that $1000+/month come from? Likely the ads alongside the games Roughly $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. When 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 :) If you had any amount of money to buy stocks in March you will have made a killing. To what extent is this sustainable? Given this is a very strange year, extending into the markets, it is a very legit question to ask about sustainability. As I think about converting to full time trading in 2021, I ask myself this same question. 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!). Thanks for sharing that. Please don't get me wrong by the way, I do wish you luck and success in your new endeavor. I posed my question above, because a lot of people lose their hats by making some gains buying low during market crashes and then thinking they've got this thing figured out. Sure! Yes, the one thing I am trying not to do is fall into this trap. Constantly telling myself I have nothing figured out and I need to figure it out the right way. Attributing everything to luck. Congrats! Just be careful and don't quit your day job. Buying leaps on almost anything that dipped in march (and has since recovered) payed out 60-100% returns, and that's not likely to happen again anytime soon. I did quit my day job :) I didn't do it because I think I can replace the income, but just realized I was very unsatisfied with my day job. I absolutely love the day to day of trading and investing. I'll figure out something. 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 trade for fun as well. I am doing it with a rather small account, but if you feel like having a conversational partner from time to time feel free to email me. Amazing, and congratulations! Did you have significant prior experience with trading or did you start from scratch in March? No 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. I will follow up on these questions later today to explain more what I did. Stay tuned :) What is your trading strategy? Just curious about the general approach you have. Take all of my cash and break it into units/chunks. The size of the chunk should be the biggest size you can make it such that I wouldn't even raise an eyebrow to lose a whole chunk. I make decisions to invest/divest 1, 3 or 3 chunks at a time. When I decide to make a move I divide a chunk into about 5 parts and try to dollar cost average into a position. The time scale for the dollar cost averaging depends a lot of the events/contexts surrounding the trade. 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. How did you learn? I do index funds, but I'd like to trade a bit for fun I 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. Just want to add for anyone who comes after reading this, I think these types of recommendations are tied strongly to personality. If you have a similar personality, then take this advice. If you're more risk adverse, more anxious, more prone to depression, then it's possible that this advice is harmful. Obviously poster didn't intend any harm but it's hard to caveat everything with "this may not apply to you." Just be careful - some people have the resources and personality to learn "hands on" and some people would do much better with a lot more intellectual understanding or with a supportive community or with some other available resource. Know yourself. Also bought EFTsvwhen the market went down. Huge gains.... What resources did you use to learn how to do this? Lots of Google searches that landed on Investopedia. Huge props to that site :P I subscribed to a bunch of things like Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal. I would say Seeking Alpha was probably the best value for money. It just gave me ideas for how to think like an investor/trader. Most of my research and learning wasn't in the mechanics of trading but building up mental models for how things might play out and thinking about risk. I spent a lot of time just watching and observing the markets without tacking action. I 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! I 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=2... Hey! 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? The sharp rise in April was primarily because I released my 2nd product. It's much more clear in this graph: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1333888959399690241 Not sure if the pandemic helped; likely did a bit. Cool. 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? I 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... 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 Thanks! This is awesome detail The 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). Yeah, 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. it 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. Before 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. Started Jan 2020, looks like will be at 4.5k ARR by end of year. Doesn't $350 per month for a basic comment section sound pretty insane? How many thousands do you think Disqus charges its enterprise customers? Also, remember marketing, some tiers exist to get you to buy others. Still, I have had companies on that tier. :) And it's not basic, FastComments has a lot more features than the competition, like live commenting and such. I provide direct development and customization support, we support automated migrations from major providers, and it's reliable, covered with around a hundred E2E test suites that run periodically in production. It also has an "enterprise" multi-user/role system and SSO integration. I made a watermarking software 10 years ago, still makes 1000$ every month, with almost zero work. :) Not 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. It was more work 5 years ago, doing 5-6-7k$ These days it is a few minutes a few times a week, doing support. Very cool! How did you get started, knew there could be a market and finally reached your customers? I 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) Simply 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. 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! Your 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! I built a niche site dedicated to professional e-sports streamers (mainly focused on League of Legends). 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. I 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] [2] https://tillypay.com/blog/how-to-monetise-a-chrome-extension... How did you migrate your existing paying customers? 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. Hey 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. I 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. How did you find the investment group? Pure 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.) Great cash on cash return. I 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-co... I made a few hundred bucks licensing my Fuzzyset.js library: https://github.com/Glench/fuzzyset.js#license It seems licensezero.com is shutting down, does that impact your license? Do you still consider fuzzyset.js as open-source? The 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. Wrote a book a few years ago. Still make between $10 and $50 a month. Did you self publish or go the traditional route? Small publisher. So something in between. Selling weekly covered calls on stocks in my equities portfolio, 2k per week, super passive. Mind sharing your strategy? Very OTM calls? What type of stocks? The 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. Is there a book or learning source you recommend? I don't have any books specifically for options, I learned options through random online courses, and read other general books about investment and stock trading. 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. Thanks for the answer, it is a believable number, I'm up 30% and have only a moderately aggressive portfolio. I went in at near the bottom and just figured it would recover and could shop cheap. You could get even more passive by just investing in a buy-write index ETF. e.g. PBP or QYLD. No 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? Those 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." Am I missing something? If I invest in those indexes I’m not investing in the stocks I actually want to own. Do you look for high IV or low IV contracts? I look for high IV in stocks whose patterns I've become familiar with overtime to get a real sense if it will actually hit a certain strike. I have stocks that I know are prone to selling off at certain resistance points just by watching them do it repeatedly, but some options buyers may not know that since. So I profit off knowledge asymmetry and am comfortable with the high IV. 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. Are you worried about missing out on a big upswing? Not really, if the calls get assigned it means I made a ton of profit from holding the stock anyway, I can deal with a little bit of loss. The biggest shit-your-pants upswing that happened in a short period of time was TWLO, I did eventually get back in and went on to make more money though. It sounds good. I just can’t wrap my brain around it. 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. Don’t let it get that far. If the stock is ripping up and you think it’s going to assign then you buy back the call (for a loss) and roll out to a new covered call at a higher price and further away. 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. With how much capital? 309k in that portfolio. 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. Buying stocks in the dips this year. Passive income hope-to-be in the following years. $5100 in sales (about 30% profit) in three days via dropshipping a popular, hard-to-find videogame-related accessory over Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Being interested in VG, now you have me curious - what is/was it? Bought 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 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. Begin long TSLA (since 2013), and trading options around the core position. How much have you made? 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. You typo'ed the URL I 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. Looking 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? That 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. Which OSS? Tabula me 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. Would 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? Niches - 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 I run a paid Chrome extension that I'm still working on: 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. A 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. Do you have (or need) certifications such as HIPAA? Fortunately no specific certifications are required. So it was mostly writing policies and ensuring best practices that met HIPAA controls in the beginning. Thanks. I own https://juvmed.com/ let me know if you'd like to partner. Provides HTTP/S and TCP tunneling and is a comprehensive alternative to ngrok. I started it in Jan 2019. $4.3k ARR in 2020. I make about $400-500 per month on https://shortkeys.app - a browser extension for custom keyboard shortcuts to do all kinds of stuff. Just 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. Ah 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 Feel free to shoot me an email (in my profile) with your order number and I'm happy to refund you. Its 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. Looks really useful, I'm buying it already. Also an older (February) 2020 thread with 4 answers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22379662 I 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. The 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. I 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-t... How 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? Probably 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. 15 years is a looong time, though. Can you compare your returns with having put everything into ETFs or even some kind of bonds way back? I sold 2.6 times the price I paid to buy it. I have no idea how much ETFs would have given me in that time span. I 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. The Cloudflare stock I grabbed to test out US stock trades on my pension app is up 300% so that wasn't a bad shout I 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. Crypto (btc). Hard to beat the returns on that this year. TSLA investment had been the best passive income for me I put all my savings in crypto. I 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. Assuming 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? I don't have enough of savings to be nervous about them or to consider anything else.