Ask HN: Best passive income method for a solo developer?

1. Create a course or ebook plus screencasts. Charge a lot (e.g., $199 for the highest tier that includes everything in a bundle). Typical income range: $2K - $100K.

2. Create an ebook. Charge a lot (e.g., $49). Typical income range: $2K - $50K.

3. Write a book for a high-royalty publisher (e.g., PragPub). Typical income range: $10K-100K.

4. Create a SaaS product that solves a consumer or business problem in a given niche. Typical income range: $0 - $1M per year (mostly the $0 end though).

5. Create a mobile game. Typical income range: $5 - $100K (the majority below $10K).

6. Create a blog and leverage affiliate commissions and ads. Typical income range: $5 - $1,000 per month.

7. Create a template or plugin for a popular platform (e.g., WordPress). Typical income range: $100 - $100K a year.

All require work. Some will be more passive than others after your initial outlay of work (3 being the most passive).

How good are you at marketing? Because for software we have Market > Marketing > Design > Code.

My suggestion is to go for 1, 2, 3, or 4. Four is the most challenging among these 4 options and the least likely to succeed. But if it does, there isn't much of a cap in terms of how much money it can make.

Plus you get to hone your development and business skills further. Not to mention that you get to pick your own stack so you can experiment with new languages, frameworks, and technologies of your choosing if that floats your boat.

In general, I would recommend spending your spare time doing what excites you the most. Does the idea of a web side project excite you more than writing a book? If so, go for that.

My other suggestion is to create many micro-launches. Create small projects. Many of them. Stuff that you can launch in 1-3 months. See what sticks. Kill what doesn't. You'll end up with multiple revenue streams. $500/mo quasi-passive income here and there adds up quickly.

On top of that, passive income suggests that you make it and then collect money with no work for ... 1+ years? Games generally make all their income in the first 1-4 weeks and so are unlikely to turn into passive income

I read the side project/passive income posts and have built projects that have failed because there is no market

I am wondering if it is easier to launch in a proven market and get a small portion of the pie rather than create a new idea that might end up not working out.

Launched a few niche blogs which are monetized through Adsense, Amazon affiliate and a bunch of other networks. Had spent time in keyword research, content production and some SEO / marketing. Now I revisit the sites every few months for updates.

#1 and #2 always fancy me and I may write ebook or create course on Python, something that I am taking up these days.

I wanted to provide ballpark figures to give a general idea. Some are from personal experience, othes from friends and people I have helped, and others from general industry knowledge.

I'm thinking of self-publishing a book on a somewhat technical topic that's trending upwards at the moment, so this advice is most helpful and timely.

The other two requires a lot of marketing and business development more than programming. The HN posts about side projects make it look like it's as easy as `git push heroku master` and 'post on HN', but it's not. The successful ones are outliers rather than the norm. Don't get me wrong, you'll also learn a lot while writing your own game/SaaS. Finishing a game/SaaS on its own is a big achievement no matter how small, but you did ask for a "Best passive income method".

I think writing a technical book could be very enjoyable for me. I'm good at explaining technical stuff, or so I'm told.

But I have absolutely no idea with the profile above what I could possibly write a book about that adds to the state of the art. "Wafer Database Schema Design For Dummies"?

0 income. Not the best business plan eh?

did they self-publish or went with some known publisher? what kind of money can you make on ebooks?

My former boss self-published a book on Leanpub. For the "known publisher", I'm a little acquainted with the author of "Docker High Performance" (Packt).

For the leanpub one, it was organically easy to get the word out through local meetups and clients. Packt reached out to the "Docker High Performance" guy, he reviewed a few books for them then they emailed him.

> What kind money can you make on ebooks?

For the people I mentioned, I can't say. But if you do get a good book out with a good following you can hit Nathan Barry's numbers:

- http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-stats/

- http://nathanbarry.com/designing-web-applications-2nd-editio...

Especially GUI guides are ratcher simple. There are no really good resources for Direct3D or OpenGL, WGL. It's like learning architecture by looking at bricks and not at finished buildings. This is also the reason why people recommend working on open-source projects, because this is where the real thing happens. But I would say it's intimidating experience. There should be something in the middle.

(And it would be nice if there was a mentoring site where you could pick a language, pick your level, and be mached either with a person/team to work on something together or with a mentor who could just guide you twice a week. Say, you pay 100 bucks for registration, and the website owner gets $10, and the mentor $90. Even if you get a couple of "students" it's still a safier bet than much more risky SaaS/e-book business. And how to start it - make a web site about one language that is your stronges and focus on that. If you get others interested in mentoring, check their stack and then expand the offering. If you have 10 deals a month, there will be 100 passive bucks more to your name. Has anyone tried that? And to get the initial traction combine it with some publishing, blog, some language-specific, industry-informed (not necessary programing problems, but project-management, team integration, tasks division, feedback, code reviewing), problems that would prove your expertise.

PS: One difficult project you could explore is business processing modelling - there are a couple of different standards, such as BPMN. The project would be to create one program (like Bizagi) in which you can design processes in different notations, smoothly (that's the most difficult) convert between them, and then integrate with industry class software such as Appian, IBM BPM, Amodit, SharePoint, Alfresco etc. It's a million dollar project, but f* hard to solve.

You also could aggregate content from reddit subs into a site, or clone ThisIsWhyImBroke.com -- but automate it via scraper/etc... and focus your effort more on marketing using social media. In that case make money off affiliate commissions.

You also could write a course for everything to do with Wordpress --from setting up a domain to finding a host, etc---and promote your own hosting service in the book -- signup as a reseller for hosting services and start a small hosting business. Too many clients is obviously a drain on time/resources to provide support but 100-1000 clients could bring in 3k per month and take roughly 9-10 hours per week to support, and you can even hire someone to help with that on a part-time basis. If you only do support via ticket you'll save time as well. -- This was actually my plan, but I've been working too hard at my day-job to focus much energy on this.

In the big picture, some activity is eventually required, it's just a matter of time - books fall from favour, patents are superceded, even banks can go, well, bankrupt. So it's a question of degree, and of how much return.

Of your suggestions, SaaS requires a lot of ongoing work. Most books and games have hit or fad-like popularity - so a low chance of on-going income after you are done.

Your "niche" idea is the best of the three - but it's completely dependent on finding a niche that is under-served, and will continue to be under-serves. That way, the income can continue for as long as the technical niche exists (it eventually will be superceded, and perhaps the surrounding ecosystem also swept away). The downside is you generally can't make much money this way - but you didn't ask for that, so it's fine. Remember the saying "you won't get rich writing books".

So the tricky bit is choosing the niche with these market characteristics AND that is personally easy/interesting/attractive to you and not to others.

BTW: I wrote a couple of chapters for a book, got a decent advance on royalties, and IIRC about $4 royalities after that (most books don't "eat out their advance"). This was on a technical topic, but not really niche.

A word on passive income: I succeeded in this with a software product... but discovered that my life became about invoices, negotiating license terms and international taxation law. I was so much happier actively developing!

Since you'll end up doing something, I now think active income has a lot going for it! [Of course, you're only requesting some passive income, so this may not occur.]

So if you can find a niche, and improve the UI/UX on existing apps, then there is definitely scope to make some "passive" income on the App Store. I put passive in quotes as anything you do will require upfront time and effort and also some ongoing support/updates.

In my case I spent a few months (evenings/weekends) building the app and now spend a few hours each month either responding to support emails or fixing bugs/releasing small updates.

Don't underestimate time for sales and marketing; whatever you decide to do will require some form of promotion/marketing and getting the message out there that you have built something. I regularly update a Twitter account for the app as well as maintain a website showcasing the product.

Good luck in whatever you do.

[edit to mention sales/marketing].

You don't want to be put in a position where you have to support something that requires you to perform tasks that you don't enjoy (eg. a particular niche, writing blog content) just to make sure it brings in that extra $nK a month.

You might also face the anti-scale issue - what if you do end up getting your first 30 users, but it never really grows more than that?

You are now in a position to either believe in your product and push on it without knowing that this is as big as it will get, or, have to face the process of killing off something that 30 people now depend on in their workflow.

If you're interested in more of this stuff, I give a talk on my story of going from full time to solo product dev and have a video of available below. Quality isn't great, but the audio and content is worthwhile.

http://davekiss.com/through-the-backyard-shortcuts-for-selli...

Good luck!

The point of passive income is that it makes you what you want with little to no work. So for example a SaaS product that doesn't require too much maintenance (a couple hours per week) netting you a few thousand $ per month. Or outside of software a physical product that you source and then sell using drop shipping so that people purchase products from you without you ever getting involved.

Don't know if the same approach would work today with falling ads revenue, but having something that is completely free to use has the advantage that there is no customer support and no stress.

The gold was used as a replacement, because I'm not from US, and it worked well for Russia, giving average yearly 48,9% compared to 24,4%, 31,5%, 28,1% for stocks, bonds and gold for 1997-2009 period.

Though of course market demand is also key in creating a successful ebook or SaaS product. Of the ideas that you have for ebooks, SaaS products, and games, which has the biggest unmet market demand?

Some ideas I've had are:

* Website templates (i.e WordPress). Downside: Will require constant maintenance to stay up to date with latest versions, bug free, and, secure

* Apps. Downside: Very competitive field

* Very NICHE apps.

This last point, is what I think would be really useful. For example, there's a sync for Fitbit / Apple Health. The guy who made it, has made two different apps, one for each direction, and they both cost $7 each. If you want to sync FROM Fitbit to Apple Health, that's $7. The other direction? Another $7. This app does it well and because it's such a niche thing - only for Fitbit and Android users who want their data into Apple Health or from Apple Health, it seems to work.

The problem here is finding these niche areas where there's a void to fill - these apps are so simple because it's basically just 2 UI controls (to/from date, and a button) and then two API calls.

I'm now trying to think of these things whenever I end up in a situation where I felt "damn, other people must want this too, why is there no simple app that does this?"

You will have like 3 installs per month. I made niche website that used 7 people in it's peak, now only 1~2.

It won't get you much passive income, if the topic is very niche. If it is more popular, there's bigger competition, so you have to be lucky.

I wrote a technical book (ebook + paperback) in veeery niche technical topic (and it's the only book on this topic on the market), got one-time moderate paycheck from the publisher and that was it. If the book gets me any passive income it will be just a few buck a month, not earlier than in 2-3 years (when the book will be obsolete anyway...)

What I earned was invaluable experience and some insight into how I work and how I can improve it, but that's it.

But when it comes to starting my own thing, I just get stuck - unsure what to start at. I used to blog based on unique problems, and have pretty much given up on it as its not that passively-rewarding unless one likes doing keyword based blogs. It does help getting more work which I don't want as of now.

And when you have it, how long could it be sold, until the technical thing is outdated?

A SaaS must be updated from time to time, bugs must be fixed ....

A mobile web based game is much work too.

A 100% passive income is really hard to find. Do something you like and try to sell parts of it (ebook, blog, saas, game, whatever).

I have an old account at Zazzle.com where I throw up funny sayings and designs from time to time (I'm not a designer).

It nets about $100/year from royalties and is completely passive.

I've met other people who make 10x that (they are designers).

My stuff lives in the Zazzle store. Just like in all the other marketplaces.

For certain items to do optimize the keywords and headlines to make them a little "click-baitish" :-)

All said, I've been thinking of making a script to auto-tweet and post to certain places, but that takes real work.

Depending on where you are you can get 5% - 15% ROI/year, and if you pay someone else to manage it, it'll be very little work.

Compared to creating something from scratch and selling it, this is much more likely to pay off, and most likely requires less work up front.

- Not everyone wants to lock themselves into long term mortgages, renting keeps their future options open

- Getting a deposit together for some is tricky

- Risk-adverse attitudes to getting mortgages after 2008

- Outside the US and the English speaking world, renting is quite popular, perhaps the default option, e.g. continental Europe. Therefore the demand is quite high for renting and lower for buying

The real question is, why aren't banks and hedge funds moving into this area, using their clout to access cheap financing and then buying attractive properties en mass and renting them out. This would take advantage of the current low interest rate environment.

- The banks earn interest on these mortgages.

- The landlords foot the first $deposit of losses on a bad choice.

- The banks don't have to pay legal fees or stamp duty during the transaction.

- The banks don't have to hire scouts to find suitable properties, or management fees to run them.

I'd say they're probably doing quite well out of it.

Yes, that was implicitly part of my question :)

- Look for a famous template

- Rewrite it in bootstrap

- Get it approved

As of 2016, the front-end ecosystem has grown big. Material Design and other UI/UX innovations (fancy modals, fancy sidebars, scrolling animations, etc.). This causes the market/buyers to look for themes that will allow them to look like the next AirBNB or Google. Theme marketplaces are looking for bootstrap/foundation templates jacked full with these javascript libraries and fancy stuff, increasing the barrier to entry for stuff to get approved.

Here was my experience writing a template last year:

I spent 2 months of weekends and weeknights to scout out the competition and worked on an admin theme. Made it with fancy charts, animations and a few javascript libraries embedded in that the market would probably want. I proceed to try and get it approved. Then, I found out I'll have to fight through other big agencies that crank out these themes like pancakes for a living while they price it 20-30% lower than mine. These agencies also sell these themes in other marketplaces that make them very popular choices over others since they can support customizations and what not.

When he started on Upwork, he earned maybe less than $5 an hour for his work. Last time I talked with him, he completed lots of projects and he managed to increase his rate to $25 an hour. I think in the future he'll be able to ask even more from his clients, since his customers are generally happy with his work and keep giving him more work.

Of course, in many places in the work $25 an hour is still very little money and it takes a lot of effort to get there. But if one can manage to move to another country, it could be worthwhile. Certainly in Thailand one can easily live from $25 an hour, even when only working a few hours a day.

Technical book - sounds like it might get out of date quickly so perhaps also not passive

This gets asked a lot on hn you might benefit going through the search.