Ask HN: Sub-$1000/mo passive income in 30 days?
I'm a university student trying to pay off debt and save for a few specific goals.
My rent, groceries, and utilities are paid monthly out of my college fund, leaving me with roughly $500 to earn on my own each month to cover debt servicing, cell phone, car payment, and entertainment.
I do freelance work, but I'd like to reduce the amount of time I spend on it as I'll be taking 18 units next semester and I don't want to jeopardize my GPA (currently a 3.9!)
I'm a proficient programmer. Based on what I've read, that should be enough to generate a small amount of passive income given a setup time of right now to January 26th, when the semester starts.
What would you suggest? What can be set up with that kind of lead time to generate just $500-$1000/month?
Once I get some ideas, I will keep HN apprised of my progress.
Published in 2010, this chronicle by @beatpanda details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $1000/mo.
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
Look into some of the Envato websites, CodeCanyon springs to mind as you say you're a proficient programmer. I actually reduce my overhead by using CodeCanyon snippets and GraphicRiver designs where possible and I know a lot of other developers that do that too. It allows me to sell affordable websites without sacrificing my time and money and you can benefit from that. Don't re-do the stuff already there, but think up some simple, but often-needed snippets to sell and you could be onto a small income. Probably not enough to allow for $500 a month, but it's a start. Mobile Apps probably make more if they become popular, but there's a lot more time involved and with Apple, a $99 up-front charge to become a member of their developer's community.
Mobile apps -- huge audience and very limited scope of the apps. Take the next best idea, get a designer for a few hours for design and images, spend a week or two on development and put it into the Appstore. It's a lot of fun too! I further recommend releasing for both iPhone and Android -- once you have the idea, the algorithms and the design, it takes very little extra effort to reach the other platform.
For one of the first steps: register a domain, setup email and a wordpress with a nice theme, start blogging and have all your future apps be part of your 'business'. You can flexibly expand from there.
Check out http://www.kreci.net/ for some ideas. He's posted on HN about his experiences quitting his job (in Poland, I think), and various ways to earn over $1000/mo online. He had success with iStockPhoto (still earning a few hundred per month), website flipping, and more recently Android app development (which has eclipsed all other money making efforts).
look into building a web-app, cloud-based way of doing something you don't see already. Something as simple as a word count site app, or something as complex as a VLSM-CIDR calculator are good options. Think about what you would need to live completely on the internet with no local apps, in fact, try it! What's missing that you need. Build it.
When I hear passive income on HN, patio11's blog comes to mind - http://www.kalzumeus.com/
Just reading his blog should hopefully give you some ideas.