Using coding skills to make passive income

This is what I call meta advice.<p>He makes most of the money now from persuading others starting a passive income side gig, for which he coincidentally has a starter pack to sale. While this might be a reliable income, it is in no means a template for other people to start a successful passive income business with a working business idea.

Here&#x27;s an off-the-cuff summary:<p>First you have to make space in your life for it. You need long blocks of time for deep work.<p>The first idea you pick is unlikely to work, so pick something and start moving. Many of the best products come out of working on something else.<p>When building, optimize for speed. Try to get something out in the world as quickly as possible and iterate from there.<p>Pick a tech stack you&#x27;re familiar with, that you&#x27;ll be fastest in.<p>Try to spend half your time on marketing&#x2F;sales, even if you hate it.<p>The most important skill you can have is resiliance. Not giving up is the best path to success. This is hard because there is so much uncertainty in this career path.<p>It&#x27;s worth it! The autonomy and freedom are unmatched by any other career.

When my life was falling apart and I was trying to fix my relationship with my ex she dictated that we spend &#x27;quality&#x27; time together which meant watching horrible reality TV while she was on insta on her phone.<p>Out of mind numbing boredom I made a system for SEO spam websites during this time. I would take expiring domain names (so names someone had gone to the trouble to research but been unable to make work) parse out keywords and lookup popularity for them, lookup ad rates for them, and spit out names to buy and make a SEO spam site for (goal was 300 websites making $1 a day or $100k a year), or good names to domain squat. If a domain turned out bunk I threw my link-spam-network software on it to provide linkbacks to my money&#x2F;new sites. I made around 30k profit a year plus another $5k selling domain names doing this before life fell further apart and it rotted on the vine. I was really tempted to sell it as a package but could never bring myself that low even deep in addiction. Plus Google started cracking down on that trash.<p>I still think the concept of 300 somethings (though please not SEO spam) that make a dollar a day is viable for us here though because we&#x27;re in the unique position where the creation&#x2F;maintenance is just a matter of our spare time since we can do the specs&#x2F;design&#x2F;coding&#x2F;administration&#x2F;maintenance&#x2F;etc ourselves. It seems like there are still people doing this. Look at new car model forums. Everytime a new car models is released there&#x27;s a rush to create discussion forums for that model with people hoping Google blesses theirs so they can add it to their portfolio of money maker car model forums. Maybe the secret sauce is forcing yourself to watch reality TV until your mind rebels and says &#x27;fine, grab me the laptop and we&#x27;ll make mind numbingly boring software products as that is at least better than watching this&#x27;.<p>Edit: To clarify this wasn&#x27;t my income source this was just what I did while being forced to watch &#x27;The Kardashians&#x27; for bonding time.

Using your coding skills: 1) make hello-world-ish portfolio 2) sell courses how to make money using coding skills 3) PROFIT

Reading this, it feels much more like &quot;using coding skills to make income&quot;. It&#x27;s a great description of one person&#x27;s journey, but &quot;work hard for a decade, continue to work at a healthy lighter pace after&quot; isn&#x27;t really passive income in my mind.<p>And I&#x27;m not sure it beats, e.g., work hard and save hard at tech company for a decade, then use the invested surplus as passive income to work lightly thereafter. At least, not in the general case.

Good timing with this submission as I started selling commercial use software licenses using a subscription model this year (Jan 2025) and I&#x27;m amazed that 6 people have already signed up and paid for a license.<p>The text-based tech internet has become incredibly hostile to people sharing their work over the past decade, so a few years ago I decided to try and engage people through YouTube instead and I think this has been a decision that has really paid off. For people interested in pursuing something like this I&#x27;d definitely recommend trying out video format communication over blog posts and articles if the latter aren&#x27;t doing well for you.<p>I have done a lot of &quot;building in public&quot; on YouTube over the past few years and have built up a really solid product that people have been actively asking me to release a commercial license for so that they can use it at work. I feel pretty good about things right now!

If anyone has trouble focusing on personal projects at home, I&#x27;ve found Focusmate (www.focusmate.com) to be very handy. You hop on a scheduled google-meets style video call with someone random, and then just work. You talk very briefly at the beginning to tell each other what you&#x27;re working on and then you both mute yourselves for 25 - 75 minutes.<p>It&#x27;s weird, I&#x27;ve found it really ticks my brain into productivity mode.

One part of me is itching to do it. Another part of me can&#x27;t let it go that I can&#x27;t beat leetcode interviews. I&#x27;m quite close, I think I can do it.<p>I guess it&#x27;s an ego thing. But not fully though is it? Earning a couple of years of FAANG money opens one up to then just travel the world. I&#x27;m from the EU but will make the switch to the US in about a year from now (marriage). So from that perspective, I just don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s strategic. When you have $300K in the bank and you just go to SE asia, you also have &quot;no schedule&quot; etc.<p>That should be doable with FAANG. I do feel this path delivers more impact though as life becomes a bit more like a game and you&#x27;re creating your own quests. You&#x27;re solving things that you are quick enough at to solve but also things that you find important or just simply fun.<p>Man, I&#x27;m torn. Both take quite a bit of a time investment. I&#x27;m not sure how I can monetize a &quot;leetcode with me&quot; type of thing. If there was still a market for that, I might do that to start both things off at the same time. Maybe I should just become a Twitch streamer :&#x27;) But I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;d pay off. I guess it wouldn&#x27;t hurt to try.

Looking at your portfolio, one could argue that to succeed you need to try a lot of different projects some of which you maybe have no personal interest in.<p>I think some people would not be comfortable with this and rather take a steady paycheck from Big Corp while working on 1-2 darling projects at home.

&gt; First you have to make space in your life for it. You need long blocks of time for deep work.<p>This is the obstacle to EVERYTHING in my life. It&#x27;s very chaotic, which causes a lot of stress and has led to decreasing performance.<p>I try so hard to clean up, to improve things. To try to proactively get ahead of stuff. It never seems to be enough. Something happens I cannot prepare for, or in trying to save and be efficient something goes wrong I cannot afford. My whole plan, saving AND getting things done has now blown up. I no longer have one, I now have three problems and I have also lost&#x2F;wasted a day. Tomorrow I have four problems, plus I am aware of this dynamic and unable to escape it so technically 5?<p>This compounds over time.<p>How do you escape this failure loop?<p>tl;dr: the &quot;being poor is expensive&quot; trap, how escape when so burned out you are struggling to tread water?<p>It&#x27;s not just money, it&#x27;s attention span. It&#x27;s the ability to set my mind to something and accomplish what I set out. Having that muscle atrophy and tear has been traumatic and I am struggling to find emotional or medical interventions worth the effort.

How is “spending my free time coding after I get off work instead of spending time exercising, spending time with friends and family, traveling, hobbies, etc”, “passive income”?

I want to believe.<p>But is this really still possible in todays world?<p>Isn&#x27;t there competition from the thousands of software devs laid off in last couple years. They can all make apps.<p>Just like the Flappy Bird guy. Sure, it was big hit, but so easy to have a hundred knock offs within a week.

I’ve been wanting to do this for years but I’m still trying to figure out how to get started.<p>My skills are more in algorithm development (statistical signal processing, machine learning) and electronics than web coding though, so it’s probably not as easy as just making a simple website that does something slightly useful.

Knowing how to code can have very useful local applications, which reduces your competition. Of course it may not immediately scale in the same way but leveraging connections and local know how is an angle that tends to go under-explored at least in the online narrative, is my observation.

Good post! I think the gradual transition you were able to do from salary -&gt; consulting -&gt; software products is very important and not the norm (mainly being able to keep part of your salary while doing some consulting on the side). The only people I&#x27;ve seen able to do that are VPs or C-suite.<p>I&#x27;m below those rungs. So I&#x27;m quitting my job to go &quot;all in&quot; on the consulting. (But I&#x27;ve been prepping and will make sure things line up so I can hit the ground running.)<p>All of this is to say, I think that transition either during or after salary work is the super important part that I see everyone gloss over.<p>My goal is to make a fraction of my salary with consulting for the first couple years, focus just on that, and eventually shift my focus to software products.

Cool article. I feel like a lot of these &#x27;passive income&#x27; things though are just &#x27;X purchaces diffused over time until the market niche is saturated&#x27;; hence the need to keep making new sites&#x2F;products

This is what I want to do ultimately, but I&#x27;m at a sort of crossroads. I have a good job, a consulting side gig, a good family, and 0 hours for my own ambitions. Several years ago I made about 20k on a solo project, so I know I&#x27;m capable. I just need to be able to focus on my dream instead of someone else&#x27;s. Lately I&#x27;ve landed on &#x27;it will happen when it needs to&#x27;, but I also worry that I&#x27;m plateaued and will wish I&#x27;d risked it earlier.

I wonder how LLMs will impact this industry.<p>10 years ago, when I was chasing this - I&#x27;d look for proven business models. Find some small startup &#x2F; company that sells some software or service, try to figure out what they did and how they did it, then spend time getting into the domain, tech, and what have you. It was a lot of work, and took time.<p>If I do it now, I have the luxury of simply asking my LLM of choice to give me a run-down, and what I need to do. Hell, I&#x27;ve even experimented and gotten a LLM to dish up a working MVP in a single day, which I can iterate on.

I will try to dig up some concrete numbers but for vast majority of people they make more money lifetime from working and saving some of that money and then investing that. So IMO for people in software the correct way for passive income is earning a lot actively working so you can have passive income from investments portfolio

Dimagi became successful?!? Awesome! I also worked there as a third person, though I don&#x27;t think overlapping with you. :)<p>Congrats on living the dream, I tried, failed at that 5 years ago (&quot;maybe i can just sell <i>my</i> coding directly...&quot;) though I probably gave up too quickly.<p>Nice article!

Unpopular opinion: truly &quot;passive&quot; income should be impossible, because this means someone is working hard but not receiving their compensation.<p>EDIT: of course unless it&#x27;s the robots that do all the work, but then it&#x27;s not really passive...

I still want to do this 9 years later I still haven&#x27;t made something. Still working for someone else. Going to get out of debt first then work on it again, I want to be able to sleep&#x2F;wake whenever.

Coffezilla already covered this exact topic four years ago[0].<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CWMAOzH20mY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CWMAOzH20mY</a>

Blatant self-promotion, and a post history of primarily self-promotion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;submitted?id=czue">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;submitted?id=czue</a>