1) Do you have freelancing or other experience which has exposed you to multiple people with similar problems? For example, have you implemented the same "$()#% authentication system for a web application 20 times? Package up that one little piece of the puzzle into a scalable way to teach people to do it without needing to have you or someone similarly skilled on their team. Common form factors include ebooks. Sell the ebook. If you want to sell lots of the ebook, start by offering some free incentive to get people to trade you their email address, then send them email about $TOPIC for a while to make them trust you as an authority on it, then ask them to buy your thing. (Note: You don't have to be the world's leading expert on building authentication systems. You've just taken somebody's shilling to do it twenty times, which means that it is likely much, much cheaper for somebody to buy your thing and hand it to his junior developer than it is to pay a similarly-experienced engineer to do that part of the system.)

2) Failing that, talk to businesses. I could give you a vague fact pattern to ask about (a problem which is amenable to a solution with code) but people seem to get hung up on that so I'll give you something really specific: you are looking for a MS Excel spreadsheet which has ever been mailed by Bob to Cindy, had Cindy edit it, and mail it back to Bob. Every time this happens a SaaS app gets its wings. Now go out and find, in the actual physical world, ten firms which have that same darn spreadsheet. Offer to build them a software system which solves the business problem which that spreadsheet represents. Ask if they would pay (pick a number based on how big the firm is) $50 to $250 a month for it. If yes, ask them to commit to buying it when it is ready. If you get 5 commits, build it, sell to them (n.b. you'll lose some commits here), and then start trying to sell it in more scalable Internet-y ways.

3) Failing that, Bingo Card Creator, an app which does everything wrong in terms of business model and market selection, sold ~$1k a month something like 6 months after launch just because I got halfway decent at organic SEO. If you're willing to get good at one generalizable acquisition strategy (SEO, Facebook ads, AdWords, etc etc), with that wind behind you even turkeys can fly. (It often turns out that there are more lucrative options than pushing turkeys around.)

4) Find or create one proprietary data source which is not currently exposed to Google which answers a question that demonstrates commercial intent. Expose that proprietary data source to Google. The federal government has approximately 100,000 CSV files of interesting data which are not helpful to someone asking questions like (not a good example site, but a great example of there-is-an-answer-to-this-buried-in-a-free-CSV) "What is the median salary of mid-career dentists in Topeka, Kansas?"

How you monetize a site like that depends on the specifics of the niche and how savvy you are about it. Lead generation is very lucrative, if the question you're answering tends to suggest near-term commercial intent in something with a liquid market. If you want to make a lot less money in a braindead simple fashion, just slap adsense on it.

Also, I think I alluded to this above, but anybody capable of executing on any of these has ipso facto developed skills which can be employed by Real Companies with Real Budgets to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in marginal revenue. I know you said you want passive options but more active options, like selling consulting, are things that might well fit where you are in life a few years down the road.

I think it would be challenging to duplicate Patrick's extremely low-cost and synergistic SEO strategy with a SAAS offering that was not so text-centric.

Many people have reported to me that variations on it have worked out quite well for them. I mean, yes, you might spend 10X or 100X what BCC does on content creation (~$3k over 8 years), but that's very justifiable for a lot of SaaS businesses.

Other people report to me that they've had substantial success with similar strategies in SaaS.

But I didn't quite realize that going in. That's why I point out how elegantly conducive your product is to Scaleable Content Creation.

SEO is not just about content though. Huge part of Patrick's success comes from link building via his very popular blog and his personal brand, this is the part that I think is harder to replicate.

info@howtofindsaasideas.com

Example: not everyone wants to admit they have problems in their business, so you have to approach the conversation from an indirect angle.

(If you're a HNer, respond to the signup email and I'll give you an extra discount once it comes out.)

That's likely to cost you a few sales - particularly since you're in the "make money online" space, people tend to be a little hesitant to enable foreign code.

I've signed up, btw.

I'm using Launchrock.com btw.

1. "Find or create one proprietary data source"

Any other examples & how do you monetize on this?

2. "you want passive options but more active options, like selling consulting, are things that might well fit"

You're doing a great job at it looking at your year in review, but don't you need an established name with years of blog/material to get these sorts of rates?

Thank you!

http://catalog.data.gov/dataset?groups=consumer9350

The very first data set is health insurance estimates broken down by zip code. There's a super-lucrative market for you, but that one might be a bit competitive for you trying to crack it in 2013. Let's see, scroll down a few results...

ftp://ftp.cfda.gov/datagov/programs-full-datagov.csv

That's a full listing of government programs which are designed to give people money. You could transform that opaque, disorganized CSV file into an easier-to-consume .org site to educate people on how to apply for government grants, right? And you could run ads on that site, right? (I think it is likely that the type of ads you'll get on that specific site would be scummy as heck, but there's another 75,000 CSV files listed on data.gov, so do a bit more searching and find a better one.)

1b) Assuming you have picked good questions to answer, you monetize by connecting people who have demonstrable interest in spending money to people they can spend that money with. That could be directly with you, if you have a product which answers their needs. It could be with other folks, via selling leads. It could just be with Big Daddy G, by putting AdSense on the site, bankrolled by people who have the business model that you haven't implemented yet.

2) I actually wound down the consulting business. Long story, but short version is that I want to focus more on my own stuff. Having years of material and successes I could point to certainly helped me land gigs, but way back in the day, the only thing I had going for me was that BCC appeared to work and I could explain why. If you hypothetically had a successful side project, that can probably be parlayed into "I could do something like this for you, where it will be substantially more effective because it will take advantage of the X, Y, and Z advantages your business has that mine didn't."

This.

If you have a side project that's bringing in, say, $5000/year, and you do a few things to it such that it's now bringing in $5250/year, you've boosted revenue by 5%.

Now, go find a prospective client with a business bringing in $5MM/year, and explain to them how what you will do for them has the potential to increase revenue by $250k/year. Sure, it might not scale 1:1, but boosting it by even $100k/year should justify paying you, oh, $50k for the engagement.

That's how I (unenthusiastically) described my job as a Java developer in the first decade of the 21st century. Not sure if by now all Excel sheets have been "consolidated". In any case mobile apps seem to be the current wave.

Pardon me while I wipe tears from my eyes.

Not only are there plenty of spreadsheets still wandering about, but I wouldn't be surprised if many decade-old Java applications have reverted to spreadsheets, formally or under the table. ("Officially we have this website, but since the website guy left the company John actually tracks the definitive list of receivables in this Excel doc we keep on this shared drive; it crashes less often and it makes it easier for us to hand-build the new-format reports that have been required since 2010.")

Spreadsheets are actually great: Far more flexible and useful in the hands of "non-programmers" than any other software I've seen. I can't imagine spreadsheet-based prototypes vanishing from the earth anytime soon, though in the places I work for there is a noticeable tendency for the things to migrate from Excel into Google Docs.

That's basically Spreadsheets in the Cloud. They are upgrading to modern cloud-based software ☺

Although I admit I have no idea how it could be possible to create a bug free Excel sheet. It's funny that people avoid programming like the plague but somehow manage to produce Excel sheets, which seems to be a million times harder.

In other words, you will run out of inefficient business processes to help refactor sometime significantly after the heat death of the universe.

An audience is a more valuable asset than a product. Once you have an audience you can launch anything you want.

The other problem is that if you solve a problem well, it's actually extremely hard to avoid the business scaling. Once the revenue goes past 1k/month, it'll carry on going, and few people can bring themselves to remove purchase links.

I know that's essentially what you're asking, but my answer would be no, it's unlikely that you can find a model that fits exactly the criteria you have.

I notice many people posting ideas, rather than low-maintenance ideas.

Have you tried negotiating tax forms, outsourcing (ha) customer support, maintaining a partially hacked-together codebase, or even having legal documents written that cost an entire month's salary?

There are a great many unsexy things that need doing when you run your own business, which regular jobs shield you from (my next 8 weeks' task list is currently averaging 300 items) - that's the trade-off. And then there's the 12-hour days you'll put in for months, while setting it up...

PS: it's so worth it.

I have an ebook out there that I haven't touched for about 2 years. I check the email address associated with it about once every three months. It's still selling.

However, you are absolutely right - maintainance and support can turn a passive product into something Not Passive At All. It's something to watch out for very carefully if you genuinely want passive income.

See: apps that are 2-3+ years old, still collecting $$$ without updates.

Its a steep learning curve but if you are willing to learn, it can be very profitable.

Like you, I can code confidently so during my morning commute I would read books about trading and economics. In the evening I would play with bits of code interfacing with broker API's. Within 3 months I had a working bot that automatically traded away as I slept and went about my day job (passive enough for you?).

Fast forward 6 months with a couple of hours coding a week refining my algorithms, my bots earned me more than double what I made in my day job that whole year.

I actually ran 2 different bots with a few variations of each (for different brokers).

My first bot was an arbitrage bot running on different markets, USD, GBP and AUD. There is still huge opportunity to make money using arbitrage as I've not seen many people do it well. The trouble comes from transferring the funds between brokers, there is often a cost incurred that you must consider and price into any profit equation. @skarmklart, yes the payoff compared to the trading volume is small, but it is low risk and almost guaranteed profit.

I ran the arb bots for a few months and made around $15,000 after which I decided to step it up a level. (I started with $100)

Trading and investments always consist of a balance between risk and return. The risk for arbitrage is very low, and so the return is also low (but consistent). The return for technical analysis trading is much greater but the risks are also larger.

My second bot was programmed to take advantage of technical analysis. I realised that in the bitcoin world it is actually much simpler than people lead you to believe. I set up a database to capture price feeds, then used some free technical analysis tools to produce buy and sell signals automatically. I then plugged the signal feed into my trading api (which I wrote from my original bot) to execute my orders.

Here's some useful links: http://ta-lib.org

Books: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator gives you an insight into trading psychology

Market Wizards (there are 3 books in this series): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_Wizards

The whole Bitcoin world is about to become a lot less fun soon. I'll miss the early days (even as I work daily to usher in the next phase).

That sounds interesting but do you think it's doable for someone without a business degree or something like that? I mean... I am fascinated by everything that's related to bitcoin but I never felt like I could do anything about that because the learning curve is just too steep. I studied sociology so I have some statistical data analysis background but I always felt that competing with guys who major in Economics would be like hobby cyclist trying to beat pros at Tour de France.

Could you please share some more info about your previous experience with trading, your educational background and anything that you think is important? It would be tremendously interesting to me.

I've tried it, and even extended it to support a certain Swedish exchange, but it seems to me the pay off is small and the unreliability of the exchanges means it's not true arbitrage.

And don't be put off by the hundreds of bots on MtGox, most of them are harmless and from 12 year old script kiddies placing hundreds of tiny ~0.01 btc orders for fun.

Sometimes when you set up a simple codestack on Heroku or Parse or similar, it would be great to be able to specify a web hook that should be called repeatedly just to run maintenance code, summarize scores, clean up logs etc. If you have root access you can set up cron but this is not always the case, and I think it would be possible to build a SaaS that people feel is easier to use and more flexible than cron. I would easily pay a few dollars a month for a simple reliable cron service. Reliability is key, your service needs to never ever fail.

Then that sounds like it need a serious full time commitment. The OP seems to be looking for a specific category of ideas that require minimal maintenance, rather than any ideas.

One free daily cron, others paid on request (please use the contact form).

500 subscriber crons per day. We use it for in-house and client projects so have an interest in reliability ;-)

Accounts/dashboard/self-service will be added if/when needed (currently email does the trick).

All comments appreciated.

http://cronless.com

It's the first one I found that I liked and was reliable. It's very modestly priced as well.

I wouldn't suggest this for passive income however, as cron is a very low cost, value added type product. It's difficult to charge much for it stand-alone. You'd want to bundle a suite of services, like ping / uptime, cron, etc etc. into one.

Marketing is by far the hardest part!

If you're saving / hosting the layouts, in which users can come back and create new ones or alter old ones, it jives nicely with charging on a recurring basis.

Throw in another service or two on top of what you already do, and the value proposition just keeps going up.

New = risky. Risky = bad if you're just looking for income.

One of the biggest lightbulb moments I ever had in online business was when I realised that if I saw a whole bunch of competitors in a given niche, that meant there was definitely profit to be made there.

By "very boring" I mean: necessary for a certain line of business and not well addressed by current competitors and not inherently interesting to work on and full of ugly gotchas and corner cases.

In general, solutions to these problems will be very profitable because they represent untapped markets. The only difficulties are: finding a problem sufficiently boring, and how much of it you can tolerate before it crushes your soul.

Imagine you had a magic formula to create businesses that make $5,000/month and only take up 10 hours/week of your time. Wave that wand once and you have a $60k salary and a thoroughly leisure class lifestyle. Wave it twice and you're living quite nicely without really breaking a sweat. Most of us stopped there.

Notice that every time you use your magic formula, you take away another chunk of your free time. By the time you've done it four times, you've got a full time job.

That's the reason most of us are smart enough not to build $1,000,000/month worth of micro businesses. If that's the sort of money you'd prefer to make, you'll need to find another way to get it. But don't knock the magic formula. It works really well. You'd be doing yourself a disservice to believe otherwise.

> I have 1-2 hours daily that I can spend on any project/activity that will, after some work, generate $1000/per month net in passive income.

$1000/28days at lets say 1.5hours = $23 per hour.

So I'm guessing they are not wanting to do the 1-2 hours per day once it's up and running, because $23/hour is not passive income.

Everything from AdWords to Uber is just "people replicating the idea" into $1M+/month.

http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/how-i-traveled-for...

2. Create a solution that people are willing to pay for.

3. Sell it.

Tune out everything else. Ignore the gurus. Focus on the important things only and just do it. Tune out HN, tune out everything.

I would look into doing paid mobile apps. But you still need to have 1-3 nailed.

Definitely read PG's startup ideas article. You don't just sit down one day and think of startup ideas. It will come to you naturally because you will experience the problem. Any other way (other than partnering up with a problem experiencer) will yield fluff.

Start off with a service you provide manually. If you get a good response, turn it into a tool or software that automates it in exchange for a monthly fee.

Stop looking for "easy get rich quick" ideas and find the annoying, difficult stuff that people want to offload from their task list. That's where the money is.

I have no experience banking in Vietnam but what he said certainly applies to both China and Thailand, if you stick to the largest banks (ICBC and Construction Bank in China are both probably safer than any US bank - Bangkok Bank, Bank of Ayudhya (owned by GE) and Siam Commercial are all rock solid in Thailand - along with HSBC in both countries). Singapore and Hong Kong are both also extremely safe places to bank and very foreigner friendly.

Source: Lived over there for 6+ years. Still bank with all of those banks, more or less doing exactly what he suggested. In China I earn 3.5% on my RMB term deposits + appreciation vs the dollar, which is almost as predictable as the interest. Personally, I prefer that to 0.1% at Wells Fargo.

A number of expats here that had planned on living comfortably off the interest of their Vietnamese bank deposits are now scrambling to come up with a plan B.

Developers like myself have a tendency to reinvent the wheel, as in, solve problems like online team chat over and over again. Because that's what we know first hand and are comfortable with.

The webapp for online marketeers I'm currently building, with feedback from a friend in the industry, caters to a bit of a niche but I'll probably have far greater success with it because that niche is quite underserved. I would never had thought of that particular idea had I not wondered off outside my comfort zone and talked to people in other areas.

I don't expect my project to become a passive income stream. It'll take work. But maybe the same method can be applied to find a problem which has a trivial, low-maintenance solution.

It's highly unlikely you'd make $1000/mo on a single ebook, but if you write several, the trickle from each adds up.

It may be better to search for something that can be started small but that you can eventually scale.

Once a product is good enough for people to start signing up for and using, it often doesn't require much more development work. As long as people can find it, more people will sign up than cancel in any given month.

"Passive" is a really good way to describe the experience of owning one of these little businesses, once you've dialed things in so that the support workload is measured in hours/month and you're firing up the IDE maybe twice in a heavy month.

Just curious: what if a new competitor moves in? Or is does that not happen often?

I got to the conclusion that the answer should be in the immaculate white hat area and i am focusing on building software in that area.

Also, i dont think that100% passive is even possible, but you could reach a level where your product gets you enough income so that you become an entrepreneur

[1] http://www.amazon.ca/The-Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuo...

1. I desperately want to be able to send a link to somebody and have them be able to book a N-minute meeting on my calendar (CalDav) without any further interaction. I have spent probably several hours trying out products, all of which suck. I currently spend $30/month on a tool that really doesn't even work.

2. The enterprise IM (CampFire, HipChat, etc.) is pretty well done at this point, but the "group chat for the somewhat public" space isn't. If I am supporting an open-source project the only game in town is IRC, which is hard to use for people who need support. If I want to have a permanent chatroom with 15 software developers that I know socially and allow people to drop in, there's no system for that.

Is actually quite easy to use..

2. Like iffyuva said, I believe HipChat has that option. As does Campfire. The thing is maybe those groups aren't willing to pay for such a solution?

Actually I think they want to pay more. At least I do. HipChat charges $2/user; I would pay $5 or $10.

The real problem is that tools designed for companies consolidate the billing. If I start a chat for my local user group then I am on the hook socially to upgrade my plan to let new people join. If I am successful in cultivating a useful chat then essentially I am punished for it, and the punishment grows without bound. One of the groups I participate in has over a thousand members.

Meanwhile I would be happy to pay for a friend or three, with the understanding that the other 997 people who may want to join need to pay their own way. And with mostly individual accounts you can probably ask for significantly more per user than HipChat can.

And the effort to get people to sign up might be effectively free if you funnel part of the license fee back to the organization who no longer needs to pass the hat around for pizza money or whatever. This may create regulatory problems, but if we're just talking about the customer acquisition equation, there are a lot of awkward situations where somebody forgot to bring cash that I would very happily roll into a monthly debit to forget about.

My company consists of: me and the guy sitting a few feet from me. If I wanted to schedule a meeting with that person, Exchange would be a poor improvement on the existing solution of turning my head.

What tool are you using right now? Google Calendar's fine for me at the moment but I'm always looking for options.

Recently I've been working on https://www.emlipo.com which was scrutinized by HN for essentially being "little code nobody would pay for". So I've not really wanted to work on that now.

Still, there will be something out there I'm sure.

By the way, the demo is currently offline. I'm currently at work, but shall try to get it back on.

It took me a while to understand at first. I think the key word that's missing from your tag line is 'address' as it currently says 'verifies that an e-mail exists'

I immediately thought that was referring to searching for a specific e-mail message in an inbox.

I think the name would stick in mind better if the gmail envelope letter M was removed to make the name easier to read. I read it the first few times as Emplio not EmLIPO. It's only when I saw it written outside of the logo I realised.

I tested the demo but it didn't work (maybe too many requests have been going through it?) I tried on mobile Safari and IE 10. Both times I typed in an address, hit the button and the page just refreshed with no result. EDIT: Just seen your comment re: the demo being offline.

The navigation links at the top are very pale and tough to see (that maybe just browser related)

This could easily bring in some decent income for you. I think you just need to target it towards it's main benefit - reducing spam. The word spam isn't used on your home page at all.

HNers may have said it's 'little code' - if it's so simple then why doesn't it already exist? When something like that is packaged as a service with good documentation it's valuable. Perhaps you should increase prices. You may want to consider a forum manager / blogger level with a simplified integration process and instead of throttling on a per hour basis, could they have X number of api requests available pcm. Most people know the signup numbers to their site but can't control how they are spaced out. Good luck!

[0] http://i.imgur.com/VHYGbSd.png

Too low? That's a great sign too! In regards to higher-volume packages, I most certainly agree, however we want to ensure we're able to handle the potential volume of requests so far.

What do you think about the limits and throttles for each package?

My previous startup generates many times more passive income than $1k/mo, and I did it the "hard" way by building the product first, then try to sell to customers. Also, don’t underestimate support costs.

Finally, keep in mind that you'll probably have to start an actual business in order to open a business bank account to collect money, and you'll have all the fees and legal obligations that goes along with owning a business, so your $1k/mo can easily turn into $500/mo after all that jazz.

Edit: I'll also add to stay away from targeting consumers directly, and instead go after businesses. Much easier to charge $199/mo to a real estate broker than $9/mo to Joe Consumer. The former won't blink an eye for a truly useful service, whereas you'll get overwhelmed with support issues on the latter.

On that subject, stay away from "free" plans, unless you really need freemium marketing - the support for free users is usually the most.

Disclaimer: if interest rates rise you will be unable to reclaim your principal but, generally speaking, this income stream should be pretty safe for the foreseeable future. And of course, $1000 a month today is not going to be as much in the future if inflation returns to 3%.

It's not a question of if rates will rise. They're going to rise a lot, because every day that goes by the cost of artificially suppressing rates gets more expensive (which is why the Fed has had to keep expanding their QE program). Equal but opposite reaction, is what will occur, conceptually. To the extent they've created hyper cheap money, is the extent to which money will be expensive, sooner than later I'd argue.

The bond bubble is nearing an end. If the Fed wishes to continue it, it's going to cost trillions worth of new inflation, setting up a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. The era of cheap money is over.

If you want to earn a return on your $200k, wait for the inevitable disaster that follows these insane central bank policies. Swoop in with your pile of cash and pick up dirt cheap assets after the next crash. Or go after yield as rates skyrocket in the next five years.

This is why buying a bond fund at a deep discount (these are at 10% discount as we speak) provides a nice cushion for all cases except the catastrophic "yields rise quickly" scenario. If you are worried about that, you should be setting aside some cash to try to time the market.

However, your premise requires a world in which nothing can truly be known for certain and all outcomes are equally likely. Such is not the case; not even remotely the case.

Rates cannot stay at 0% for the next 10 years, the math involved won't allow for that scenario. The Fed is already having their hand forced right now, as is easily demonstrated by the huge spike in bond yields, oil being at $100, housing and stock prices skyrocketing due to asset inflation generated intentionally by the Fed (as they openly said they wanted to have happen). It's a repeat of the last asset bubbles they brewed, and for exactly the same reasons, only this time it's 100% intentional. The clock is rapidly running out on their fraudulent game. They're already being wedged between a rock and a hard place; continue the policies of cheap money, and assets go so high they rip the economy apart upon implosion, again; stop the policies, and the economy implodes instantly. Rates skyrocket either way, as the bond buyers begin demanding higher yields to compensate for worsening inflation with continued QE; or rates skyrocket as the Fed stops QE and stops artificially holding down rates.

You might as well claim that rates can stay at 0% forever, or for 1,000 years, or for 100 years. Again, your position requires the premise that all outcomes are equally possible, and that is not true.

It's obvious the era of cheap money is ending. The era of expensive money is about to begin, as it must by the basic laws of economics (which is in fact a science, despite the many witch doctors in the field).

If you buy a 10% discounted tax free bond fund (a taxable equivalent of a 9% yield currently) that has medium duration (~6 years) then you are fairly well cushioned from gradually rising yields, as the fund turns over and moves into higher yield bonds your distributions should increase. In other words, all of your fears are not hidden, secret, insider knowledge, but are largely getting priced in at this point.

The biggest risk with long-term CEF muni bond holdings is not interest rate risk (since you don't have to sell them, you have a 10% cushion, they have moderate duration, and a large enough spike in yields to really impair your principal is a pretty low probability outcome. but again: you don't have to sell them.) The real risk is inflation risk. And this is what I said in the Disclaimer:, which you seemed to not read. Also, your viewpoint seems to indicate the best assets to hold are gold and cash, and the cash side of your portfolio is going to be exposed to the same inflation risk as your bond coupons. There's also risk of default, but you can find national funds that are well diversified, etc, so this doesn't seem to serious a concern either.

edit: Also, one thing you are overlooking is that if the shit hits the fan, there is a lot of greedy, borrowed money in equities right now, both people chasing dividend yield and people chasing capital gains now that we're in a bull market, thanks to the Fed's bubble, that will head for the exits. It will go where it always goes: government backed fixed income and money markets. This will cause downward pressure on yields in the scenario where Fed moves cause a panic in the stock market, even though ironically the Fed doesn't even buy equities, it only buys bonds.

For more of an income play I'd look at IGR (yields more than 6%, trades at a 7.5% discount currently).

Another one I'm watching is "O".

Risks: Prices can swing wildly due to any number of reasons. Rising interest rates can depress real estate prices in the near term. Income should stay fairly stable though in my opinion, so I'm taking the long term view and try not to obsess about daily price volatility. I wouldn't put more than 5-10% of my capital into REITs.

Though I still have some exposure to the sector through other funds like AWP and SDIV.

There are other bargains out there now too, because of fears of the Fed tapering down QE, anything that yields >5% got hit hard in the recent weeks. Even foreign, emerging market bonds. ESD for example trades at a 7% discount and yields 7.5% at the moment.

For research, Morningstar is a good starting point: http://cef.morningstar.com/quote?t=esd

Most will require your board to hook into their ERP system, which is run by a database. The idea it's not new but existing solutions are over-complicated or expensive.

Build a few templates and run them in browser (HTML 5, Java Scrip, CSS, database connector, and a scripting language), get them to look good/attractive (I know it's not easy, but hey... it's not that difficult either).

I believe most companies will be happy to just invest in a LCD screen, an Android device and your labor - to have the boards displayed on the factory floor or at reception (they can also run presentation slides).

As a bonus you can manage the systems remotely - for servicing after installation or changes, if required (another source of income).

I know that this is not a really "passive" income idea, but if you get passionate about it, I think that it has the potential of turning out nice. I have build one of this boards for my work place, and I am thinking of putting this into action.

To find problems, do searches on google, yahoo answers, and twitter. Look at the bureau of labor job outlook handbook online and see which parts of each job could be eased with software, or whether online marketplaces could be created (taxi drivers -> uber, hotel desk clerks -> airbnb). Also, each section of craigslist is potentially a online marketplace.

Grab data and build recommendation systems. Movie, music, book, stock/currency prediction, photo, video, blog, vacation, sentiment, patents, similar people (from facebook/twitter/blogs).

Programmatically generate data visualizations and put them on youtube, slap ads on.

Build control systems for drones to automate transportation/photography/surveillance/games. Look at the academic research and commercialize it. Drones that can play catch games, deliver orders to tables, do photography for functions/weddings, do surveillance of perimeters of offices/homes.

One reasonable way to cut spending is to sell your car if you have financed it, and buy a car you can afford to pay cash for. Financing is a huge drain on your cash.

If you have a skill that is valuable, you're far better off leveraging into that, for the returns are massive by comparison to the puny returns in stock indices. If you can earn just 10% every year in stocks, you're a wizard that should be working on Wall Street earning millions.

It's radically easier to invest $100 into hosting ($10 or $20 / month at digital ocean), build a service, and make $1,000 a month (a huge return on the invested capital) - than to earn a mere 10% per year in stocks.

$1,000 / month = $12,000 per year. To put together $12k per year from stocks, at a 10% return (which is a great return per year historically), you'd need $120,000 in capital to begin with.

Scenario 1) you need $120k in cash to put to work in stocks to yield just $1,000 per month average in new capital, assuming a great historical return (and assuming you don't get demolished by a market down turn). And if you're riding dividends, you're going to be hard pressed to consistently yield 10% every year even from the best dividend investments (such as public trusts, real estate vehicles etc).

Scenario 2) invest $20 per month into a hosting account at digital ocean and build a service that yields $1k per month in income.

#1 is silly compared to #2

But the stocks can happen with no effort from my side. Just invest in some fund and let it ride. Building a service that will make $1k/mo isn't "racially easier", it would take many hours of work to accomplish which means I can't be using that valuable time for something else more interesting.

It's not a quick way to wealth, but it works, and does not require any particular cleverness nor much of any work.

A business is a business; the amount of labor you'll have to put into it will be proportional to the supply and demand that exists in that specific market.

Sorry, but there's no free lunch.

Also, while I sort of agree about the "no such thing as passive income" point, I think he just means 1-2 hours a week level passive.

Some pointers for an MVP I think might be sensible: Model stock arrival and product ordering as Poisson point process with probability based on recent data Combine with sales data & length of ordering cycle to reach suggested quantity per order (you could make suggestions to account for covering variations in customer ordering based on standard deviations)

I'm thinking of doing this myself for my business but really not finding the time to get it done!

For a small ecommerce retailer, you don't want much like that; maybe I've missed it but there seems to be a gap for the Basecamp of this niche. A shopify plugin might be a good way to get standardised i/o rather than adapting to proprietary systems

Someone posted a good article about finding niches in the app store recently. Something simple that satisfies an unmet need could earn decent ad money.

If you made an app to substitute for either one and charged a few bucks for it, you'll make passive revenues for a long time. Not only that, you'll be loved by crackberry users the world over.

Seriously, how many business types subscribe to Audible and to Evernote? And people are looking for more secure communications. It's an incredible opportunity.

I've heard one anecdote about a guy who knows a guy who bought a very simple iOS app for 10K, did some marketing on FB and made like 20K within a month.

I'm more interested in any experience from the developer perspective selling apps on a marketplace like this. I've also heard the new iOS makes this easier to do.

I personally made $100K+ with this approach and it works like a charm.

If you want to be sold a "passive income mega business", go and have a look at Blackhat World, the scummiest place on the internet.

However, there are a number of reasons to believe assets are extremely over priced and yields are not compensating investors for the risk they are taking.

Anyway stop wasting your life on stuff would be my tip.

Or

Learn to cook well(healthy and tasty) over a few months, it'll save you money and health costs. Great tax free not wasting money passive habit to pick up.

Edit: Weakness - language. Solution get a bi-lingual friend who can suggest a non English success story. This in reverse http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-29/the-germany-...

It's not cheating if you're merely getting your fair share :)

Alternately, you could create your own crypto-currency and get chumps to bid it up.

Buy some oregano and try to sell it as marijuana.

If all else fails, you could try doing some actual work.