Ask HN: Fastest route to $2000/mo. cashflow, worry free and conscience clear

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2026080

by jharrison • 16 years ago

90 84 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

In the vein of "You don't need a million dollars..." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025122), I'm wondering what the fastest way to get the effective monthly return on investing a million in a safe, worry free, hands-off investment is. I think that roughly translates to a couple thousand dollars a month depending on where you insert inflation. I included "conscience clear" in the description because I personally would want to be entirely above-board (no "spam viagra ads" and the like).

Just to be clear, I'm not in dire straits or in need of a million dollars. I'm just curious.

Additional clarification: For this purpose I'd like to assume someone doesn't have a million dollars or the prospect of receiving such in a lump sum. How would they go about building up to a cash flow that would be equivalent to having a million dollars in a safe, hands-off investment?

edit: Apparently I don't know the difference between conscious and conscience. Fixed.

JasonPunyon• 16 years ago

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

jharrison4• 16 years ago

My mistake. Thank you for pointing that out.

ezl• 16 years ago

inconceivable!

gregjor• 16 years ago

Conscience is the word you want. And cash flow is not the same thing as income. There's an old Monty Python sketch called "How To Do It" where the explanation of how to get rich is "First, get lots of money."

jharrison4• 16 years ago

Thanks for the correction and clarification.

patio113• 16 years ago

I'd recommend a niche software product, preferably one with recurring revenue, but you could do it with a day or two of consulting if you have skills and contacts.

jharrison4• 16 years ago

Thanks, Patrick. I meant to exclude consulting. I'm thinking of something that happens in your sleep, like a "safe" investment would. Web apps/niche software are where I would lean as well but that's why I'm asking. I'm hoping the collective experience of HN can expose other options.

cvos• 16 years ago

create a niche software product with recurring revenue in a day or 2? Sign me up, i'll take 10!

jharrison4• 16 years ago

To be fair, I didn't clarify a timeline. I'm just curious what HNers think would be the fastest option. Fastest could mean 2 years.

chc2• 16 years ago

I think the parent meant you could make that much money as a consultant in a couple of days, not create a niche software product with recurring revenue.

patio113• 16 years ago

I meant that if you were willing to count a few days a month as "not really working", then you can trivially bill $2k quickly. Otherwise, niche software is an option.

keiferski2• 16 years ago

Make a simple web app that sells for $15 a month. You'll only need to get roughly 150 customers to make $2000. Or change the price and recalculate.

iworkforthem2• 16 years ago

Alternatively, make a simple web app that subscribe for $5 a month, 400 subscribers will get you the same $2k. People are more willingly to spare a $5 change.

keiferski2• 16 years ago

Yup. It just comes down to value, and it depends on the app. Underpricing something that has a lot of value is generally not a great business move. Especially when you intend on adding features later.

But if it's just a simple web app, presumably one that has some similar competition, then $5 may be a better idea.

StavrosK• 16 years ago

Yeah, no they're not.

mmap• 16 years ago

This has a strong element of "build it and they'll come."

It leaves out a large part of the problem of selling something. How will enough interested people discover the "simple web app"? If there are competitors (chances are there will be) and the app's page is in the 12th results page of Google and PPC keywords cost $5 per click, getting enough relevant traffic to ultimately reach 400 subscribers can be quite a lot of hard (and costly) work.

As an indication, if you look at point 5 in this survey http://webappsurvey2009.techcrunch.com/ you will see that ~50% of marketing sites of web apps got 0-1,000 visitors a month.

It can be done but don't just expect to "build it and they will come."

Also, a book that sums up good points about selling a web app (especially if you are a developer) is http://www.startupbook.net/

Good luck!

coffeenut• 16 years ago

Leverage existing equity as collateral and purchase one or several investment properties (very carefully of course). There are some incredible deals to be found right now.

thrashr888• 16 years ago

I may have this opportunity as early as January and would like to be smart about it. I can leverage existing property equity at ~3% APR and I'm sure I can use it wisely to pull in much better than that. Any example ideas? I'm just now starting to look into this.

calbear81• 16 years ago

So I'm not sure if you're asking what are some business investments or you're asking about financial vehicles that can generate $2K/month of cashflow off of $1M of initial investment.

One option during this down market is to purchase rental property, you'll have to do some digging but the most depressed markets are 70% off of their peaks and most pros will tell you it won't drop much more than that (but it's not ZERO risk). You need to crunch the numbers and then renovate and find tenants but I know of a few small investors that own 15-20 rental properties and can generate ~10% margins monthly and you have the potential upside of property appreciation.

If you don't want to deal too much with getting hands on and managing a business, it's conceivable to be pretty low-risk to go with high dividend / low growth blue chip stocks. For example, AT&T is at $29/share right now. It's been paying $.42/share per quarter so about $1.60/year. It'll move around a bit but assume that they won't get screwed when the iPhone goes multi-carrier, you are talking about $1M for 34,483 shares which will pay $13,793/quarter in dividends alone which is $4,597 per month. Assume 40% taxation rate and you're $2,758 post taxes. You can use any finance site to screen for companies with high dividend yields. Keep in mind that high dividend usually means low risk of stock price movement but there is still risk.

whalesalad2• 16 years ago

I made about 10k off sales from a WordPress theme over the course of about a year. Not that much money, but it's a GREAT feeling to wake up in the morning and see money in your account. I'd be walking through the mall with my girlfriend at the time and tell her, "just sold a premium copy! want ice cream?" Very, very motivating. It gets to the point that you get a "taking-candy-from-a-baby" feeling that leads you to really try and improve your product day-after-day, to keep your initial customers happy, and to get more sales.

So, I agree that a niche software product you're actually passionate about will help. I happened to be in a fortunate position where a demand existed for a one-off product I had created a while back, all I had to do was fill the void. Customers were already looking to me for it. I feel like a total fucking idiot for not doing it sooner. I could have made probably 3x the money, just guestimating. Find something that inspires you personally, because that is what will push you to completing it.

I got laid off from a startup position that was caving in. I had a small severance to live off of, and had always wanted to build this idea. Unfortunately while at the startup I was also working on a second one on the side (death, I know) so I never really had time to do anything but those two things. Getting laid off was perfect. I sprinted as hard as I possibly could for 3 weeks, designing, coding, and building a sale site with a mini activation server. It was loads of fun. It was also very exciting to look back on those three weeks and realize that I had done a great job making the right decision when hit with a small road block. Asking myself things like, "Where does this fit with the 80/20 rule? Can I launch this feature in a second update a week later? Do I need it at all? Oh, wait, these two features can easily be combined into one. The technology behind the two won't be nearly as cool, but users will probably prefer it." All of that, I feel, is what lead to my success. Getting the product out as soon as possible, without cutting any essential corners. We've all heard it before, but living it was great. I guess I pretty much built my own "nano" startup.

Damnit, now I want to do it again.

petervandijck• 16 years ago

"Nano startup". Like that.

iworkforthem2• 16 years ago

I love this term!

rms• 16 years ago

I get similar emails throughout the day and while it might be healthy for me to get the continuous stream of positive reward, sometimes it is demotivating to me. I start the day by waking up in the afternoon and checking my email, and I've already generated my wealth for the day without doing anything.

jrockway• 16 years ago

This is significantly less demotivating than working your ass off for a year with the promise of a promotion and a raise, only to be told that you won't be getting a promotion or raise at the end of the year.

This happened to me today and I totally understand why people want to go the startup route. Ever hour invested into your startup is an hour that gets you closer to where you want to be.

petercooper2• 16 years ago

I had that happen to me for most of 2008.

A couple of "route finder" reviews posts on an old personal blog of mine suddenly did well on Google and, as was the trend, I had Adsense on my site. Just from those few posts, I earned between $2000-$5000 most months of that year (with one stray month just shy of $10000) and did little "real" work that year. In 2009, Google penalized the blog because I got greedy and started running "text link ads" on the front page (dumb idea). Traffic crashed and the income stream disappeared.

I eventually got the penalty lifted but by then a lot of people had figured out that ranking highly for the names of the top route finders was a goldmine and now my posts are on page 2 rather than in the top 5 results and make rather little.

Interesting while it lasted but the work I'm doing now to produce an income feels more rewarding than checking Adsense 20 times a day ;-)

OmarTv• 16 years ago

wow... teach me... (not sarcastic just newbie)

pclark2• 16 years ago

Where do you sell your Wordpress theme?

whalesalad2• 16 years ago

http://whalesalad.com/tasty

Original price was $29, and there was a Premium variant for $49. Eventually the source that was pushing so many customers to my site stopped using the theme herself, and my traffic/sales died substantially. I figured, "It had a good run, time to move on) so lowered the price to capture more of the trailing edge.

Kilimanjaro7• 16 years ago

I just coded http://boog.me over the weekend hoping it may generate some revenue while running unattended.

If it brings at least $100 a month, I'll work on nine more sites like that to make a grand.

andy_boot• 16 years ago

I dont know if you're joking or not. But how is that going to generate revenue? I mean the site is cool and useful and all. But its just anoth http://mailinator.com/ clone.

Kilimanjaro7• 16 years ago

Yes it is a mailinator clone. I hope to provide a better service with more features like auto-forward, private inboxes and stuff like that.

Ad revenue. Mailinator claims they get a million emails a day, that's a lot of money in ad revenue. My goal is to dethrone mailinator as the de facto temp email provider.

run4yourlives2• 16 years ago

And Pepsi is just a coke clone...

maguay• 16 years ago

Actually, bringing in $100/month from a website, even a blog, isn't too hard, but does take persistence and time.

gonvaled• 16 years ago

Could it be possible to get some info on how you built that site? Frameworks, technologies, tools, ... I am new to this, and trying to learn a bit.

Kilimanjaro7• 16 years ago

It is really simple since the core of the project is just a catchall email account and a cron job to purge emails after 24 hours. The hard part I am still working on is decoding emails, 7bits or 8bits, UTF8, ISO-*, etc. and handling attachments.

All built using AppEngine, python, webapp and notepad2.

chubs3• 16 years ago

Seems like the common thread here is to 'start a web app, charge a recurring fee'...

Any suggestions for such an app that people here would find useful and willing to pay, say, $10 a month for, that would be small enough to be developed by one guy? I can't think of any ideas off the top of my head.

rhizome2• 16 years ago

A better to-do list. Seriously.

YuriNiyazov• 16 years ago

whats wrong with remember the milk?

chc2• 16 years ago

Seriously? Surely you can't be serious about needing yet another to-do list app. That sounds like asking for another abandoned Rails blog engine.

mrbogle• 16 years ago

workflowy? Gmail tasks?

chubs3• 16 years ago

My best idea in this vein is a multi-user todo list for small companies, where people can assign todos to each other, and mark their own todos as depending on someone else. That way you could always see what you need to get done, that isn't being blocked by someone else.

omarchowdhury• 16 years ago

Only procrastinators would ask for a better to-do list software. If you must get something done, you'll get it done.

coffeejunk• 16 years ago

have you checked https://the-deadline.appspot.com ?

edit: they are one of the HackFwd startups

HeyLaughingBoy• 16 years ago

Suggestion: forget about what people here would buy. Figure out what people who can't program would buy.

Poster above says "to do lists" and I agree enough that a To Do list was #1 on my "list of software product ideas" before I started the current one.

What's wrong with RememberTheMilk? Once you figure that out you'll know what to build!

nl• 16 years ago

I can't think of any ideas off the top of my head.

Seriously?!

So you work in a company? Do they use Excel to track some kind of business critical process? There's your $10/month business...

If you don't like that, then try one of these: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=I+need+a+program+that+*

rmc• 16 years ago

Read about patio11. He made a webapp to make bingo cards online.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/

chubs3• 16 years ago

Make a few iphone / ipad apps? Start an ebay business?

jraines• 16 years ago

Take a few hours to scan the "recently sold" listings on flippa.com and you will have a few answers to that question.

slindstr• 16 years ago

Be wary of the more expensive sites that sell - something seems fishy about selling a wordpress blog with no revenue, no page rank, and no site stats attached to the auction.

I recently asked a question about this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2000924

HN gave me a lot of great insight to Flippa

robryan• 16 years ago

Usually if something is easy, fast and worry free to get to that kind of wage, which is very comfortable living in the vast majority of locations, there are probably many people attempting to do said thing.

Really you need to leverage some kind of skills to go after something either outside the low hanging fruit, or create something that people wouldn't have considered to have a good enough market. Of course there is an element of luck, if you can make some apps and get them to take off, the mobile ad market seems to be like the early web advertising at the moment, probably returning above the mark. Something like this for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1870960

Kilimanjaro7• 16 years ago

The fastest route would be an iPad app. Make an ABC book for kids about animals, or fruits, or things, with big pics and nice visuals. Kids love them, parents love them, instant winner.

code_duck• 16 years ago

What a great publishing environment! Love this tip.

prawn• 16 years ago

Make a kids book with some interactivity. e.g., about a family picnic, but with little ants or bugs invading the story space. The child has to move the food around to escape the ants, squish them (might not go down well with many parents) or brush aside the bugs, etc.

feint• 16 years ago

I take a multi stream approach to the problem. Half my income comes from a web app I built (task.fm) and the other half from my personal site - I just review the books I read and products I use and earn through affiliate commissions. A couple of pages on my personal site make over $500 a month in commissions, because they are highly targeted (first result in Google).

rishi2• 16 years ago

The fastest way to $2k/mo in your own business is a lot of hard work.

lessthanideal• 16 years ago

What you're really looking for is a product. I'll even wager you are probably looking for a product that requires minimal unit production and distribution costs. That puts you in a class of products that are electronic, or products that you can convert from an electronic representation to a physical one and have a supplier to deal with those physical challenges (like shipping) for you. People often forget the 2nd option, but it's there.

A short list of items that meet this qualification: software, writing (books, novellas, blogs, etc.), digital art, digital photography, music (original), sound of other types (background sounds that can be used in the production of music, for example), designs/instructions (for building something) and a probably a bunch of other stuff. If I missed a big one, please reply to this post with it. You should also be looking for free resources online that you can leverage. Are there free services that you can leverage to make your business easier to manage? Can you do some work (collection or processing) of some freely available data that might give it additional value which you can then extract through sales or in some other way?

Because your goal is to make a living and give yourself some extra freedom, you don't have to overengineer this. This isn't your masterpiece. It doesn't have to be pretty or break new ground necessarily. Don't chrome plate it if you're writing software for it or to support it.

Frankly, I just started taking advantage of this type of business and I feel almost guilty. The code isn't that great. The idea isn't that great. It's not something to write home about in terms of engineering a solution. But it makes me money even if I don't touch it for a month at a time. I'm not living off this business yet, but I am seeing good growth and I see a virtually infinite path to expanding the digitally based offerings of the business (more offerings = more money).

cheald2• 16 years ago

Create a product and sell subscriptions. Even at a low price point, if you offer something people are willing to pay for on a recurring basis, you'll end up with a steady and growing income stream. Niche products work here - find an itch in a niche market you participate in, scratch it, and then charge other people to have you scratch the itch for them.

I've done side/hobby projects of both the ad-driven and subscription-driven flavors, and the subscription-driven stuff gets a lot more profitable a lot faster. It does incur additional stress, because you have direct paying customers to take care of, but depending on the nature of the product, it might not need that much support. On the flip side, it's friggin' amazing to watch payments come in on a daily basis, then look back in a week and realize that you've got your rent paid for.

jaywalker• 16 years ago

Perhaps, "a money machine" is a better word than "hands-off investment."

Ask HN: Fastest route to $2000/mo. cashflow, worry free and conscience clear

Related Stories