Ask HN: How much passive income do you generate, and from what?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17566891

by franca • 8 years ago

26 14 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

mtmail• 8 years ago

The question comes up regularly but rarely gets traction. And unless it's specific to apps/websites/side-projects half the usual answers are stock market, interest, real-estate.

See 3 months ago (90 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16815842

carlchenet• 8 years ago

I like the previous thread, thanks for the link!

sfkjlkfagfj• 8 years ago

I think most people here are expecting to see passive income from side projects.

Unless you are withdrawing dividends and selling shares for income, it is not passive income. Just good ole regular investing.

And I don't how anyone can consider real estate passive income. It is a business with a lot of downtime but also some serious headaches. I have few properties, most of my tenets are nice. But when you get one bad tenet, it wipes all your goodwill towards any tenet. Then unexpected expenses wipe out years of profit in an instant. Finally, you hope one day the building will be paid off and you will live off rent checks, then you do some calculations and realize that you would have made almost same rent check if you had just invested your down payment in stock market.

stealthcat• 8 years ago

Could depends on what country you live in

trykondev2• 8 years ago

A few months ago I launched my first commercial video game, Omnicube. It's a really hard puzzle game set on a talking cube in space.

After the initial launch sales bump, we've been earning about $400/month.

We launched the game on Steam, Windows Store, and itch.io.

I'd be happy to discuss any aspect of the project in more detail. Here are the links to the store pages for anyone who is interested:

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/800860/Omnicube/

Windows Store: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/omnicube/9njcwkrx4mm...

Itch.io: https://trykon.itch.io/omnicube

eb0la• 8 years ago

Great game :-) Reminds me Sokoban with an evil twist on it.

I guess it would do great on mobile; but I am not sure how easy to port would it be since the screen area is quite big.

Just for curiosity, how many effort did you need to do the levels? I always tought this kind of games were 20% coding, 80% model design. Am I right?

trykondev2• 8 years ago

Thank you! I appreciate the kind words :)

A lot of people have mentioned wanting to see the game on mobile, and I do plan to port it later on this year. You are very much correct in assessing the main issue, which is the fact that it's hard to fit a 14x14 grid (plus the surrounding art) onto a small screen. We're considering things like zooming the camera all the way in on the grid itself, and then re-arranging the buttons to the top and bottom of the screen, or maybe giving the user a control to zoom in and out, but we haven't committed to a solution quite yet.

As far as distribution of effort, I certainly thought the same when I started the game -- I thought I'd just write the code for the mechanics in a few weeks and then spend most of the time refining the puzzles and level balance. To be honest, though, I found the exact opposite to be true -- I spent probably 3-4 weeks designing and perfecting the puzzles, but all the implementation of the mechanics/UI tweaks/transitions took several months. This was probably partly due to the visual style we decided on, though.

The project I'm working on now is much, much simpler visually. Since Omnicube was our first commercial game, we felt a lot of pressure to make it "look like a real game". My thinking now is more biased toward focusing on the content quality and worrying less about what people will think about the professional-ness of the visuals.

marssaxman2• 8 years ago

None. I'm not rich. Is this a normal thing people expect to do now?

HiroshiSan• 8 years ago

What does you being rich have to do with generating passive income?

marssaxman2• 8 years ago

How else would you do it? Don't you need to own some asset from which you can extract rent?

ghosterrific• 8 years ago

Own 2 triplexes.

Generating $500/month net positive cashflow after all expenses, mortgages and get to live for free.

Can retire today and literally be a bum with a $500/month paycheck where the buildings will pay themselves down and be worth over 1.5 million within 20 years.

Instead, I'm choosing to continue working and buy a larger farm/acreage to go off grid and raise animals.

Other passive income:

- small app subscription business making $250/month

- dividend yielding stocks producing about $40/month

- solar array equipment that produces $200/month

My net worth is only about $150k today.... but will steadily climb to about 1.5 Million within 20 years from doing basically nothing.

This is the difference between Rich vs. Wealth.

The Rich spend and have no systems in place to generate income (ie: they have money)

The Wealthy do not have to work, and have systems in place to generate passive income.

I like to think that I'm well on my way to being Wealthy as opposed to my little 'w' wealthy today.

Ps.

- I drive 10+ year old cars in entire life (never spend more than $4k on a car)

- Buy everything on sale, if not used

- wear basic clothes

olgamilevska• 8 years ago

Referral or Partner Program is one of the options of the passive income. In most cases, you get a share from a commision that a person you've referred a product/service to has paid. One of the examples is https://www.crazycall.com/partners?source=news.ycombinator. Your could also do blogging or create youtube videos.

Ask HN: How much passive income do you generate, and from what?

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