Comment by davekiss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davekiss | Hacker News Reader

As a solo developer who builds products for a living, I'd caution you to think more about what it is that you actually like to do, rather than what will earn you a quick dollar.

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 issues you point out are completely unrelated to passive income. If I'm in a position where I have to support something just to make sure it brings in the money I require it's not passive. Scale also isn't an issue. If I have 30 users and that makes the money I require it doesn't need to grow more than that.

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.

If you have 1 user you still have to support them, let alone 30.

Google has millions of users and provides zero support for a lot of its products. I've had products generating passive income with ~50000 users and has to answer no more than a couple of support emails a month that required no more than a simple answer.

care to share how you were able to scale your support? Do you have a thorough self-help / faq site that pre-empts most support questions?

Unfortunately the product isn't around anymore so I can't show you anything. However it was an iOS sports app around 4 years ago. It was relatively simple ,mostly just displaying data pulled from various locations online, and displaying data from a local db too. There really wasn't much users needed help with. Any emails I received were usually resolved with a 'check your network/reboot your device' or they were minor bugs which I could fix with a few minutes work and push an update.

"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."

So the point is to get something for nothing? Money without work? Everybody wants that.

So what SaaS product requires little maintenance but nets a few thousand dollars a month? Maybe something like that exists. But creating it would have required considerable investment of time or money, which eliminates the "little to no work" part.

Likewise for selling some physical product. Tons of people are doing this on Amazon. It's not taking them much work. It's also not making them much money.

I think the OP's question just doesn't make much sense. The only reason someone asks about "passive income" is because they want money without working for it. I can think of only two ways to do that. One is to inherit it. One has no control over that. The other is to build up political influence so one can seek rents (in the economic sense.) Even this method requires some work because it requires investment in capital or influence (neither of which is easy.)

Some investors are said to get "passive income" but that's because they got some money in the first place. Plus, they use resources to get more resources. Buffett's income really can't be said to be "passive" when he spends time and talent doing research and analysis.

Yeah one can get "passive income" by putting money in a bank or in stocks or something. Good luck getting decent returns with that...which is why investors are seeking out higher rates of return...which takes work...which, guess what, is not "passive".

In short, "passive income" does not really exist. Unless someone is going to give OP money through inheritance or dumb luck or Powerball, she's going to have to get out and work for it like everyone else.

> So the point is to get something for nothing? Money without work? Everybody wants that.

No, that's not what they're saying, and you should be generous enough to assume that,

What they're saying is that after the initial investment is done, they don't need to do lots of work. They put in the initial effort up front. After that, the income is more or less passive.

As jasonlotito points out I mean that after the initial investment, i.e the creation of the product or system, you will generate money with little to no involvement. You're likely going to have a few hours work a month with most passive income streams but the point is, after development, you generate money without focusing on it. For example: I created a simple iOS app that netted ~50k users. It generated about £1k per month and the only work I needed to do on it was answer a few emails a month. You pointed out in your comment the example of people selling physical products on Amazon. I know several people making the majority of their income, passively, from that. So your 'it's also not making them much money' comment, which you failed to back up, is wrong. It's possible. For most people passive income doesn't need to be very much, just a nice little supplement to their salary. For others it can be their entire income and more than enough to live on.

"Passive income" refers to business ideas that aren't good enough to pursue full-time, but can be implemented during low-value time since revenue is made via hands-off transactions (ad clicks, ECommerce digital downloads, etc.) The maintenance work required is a small variable cost of sustaining the revenue.

Just wanted to say that I really enjoyed your presentation. Definitely inspired me to think hard about what I actually like doing instead of just trying to build something that I think I can sell for a few bucks.

I've created multiple web apps/plugins that I wasn't really passionate about, and after the initial rush of launching something wore off my interest in the project waned. I found that when a new bug or feature request popped up, I became less and less motivated to actually fix the issue or implement that new feature.

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