from Hacker News

How do you fail to make money passively? (Passive Income)

by fogonthedowns on 9/27/13, 9:13 PM with 7 comments

• by smartician on 9/27/13, 10:08 PM

  To learn Android development, I created a simple vocabulary learning app, a mash-up of iSpeech, Google voice recognition, and even some Instagram thrown in. There was some interest, despite zero marketing (currently > 20k total installs), and I was approaching $200/month in ad income.

  Then Google disabled my Adsense account because of "invalid click activity", which also meant my Admob account was gone, since they're now linked. I moved to a combination of other ad networks, but ad revenue was slashed to a quarter of its former glory. Appeals to Google were fruitless, and to this day I have no idea why exactly I was banned.

  For my next app, I'll probably avoid the "free with ads" model.

• by jonaphin on 9/27/13, 9:18 PM

  Instimage.com here.

  We haven't "failed" yet. But we're dying slowly. No one cares for Instimage, and there's no money backing it up.

  No Investors, no angels, just a bootstrap and no boot.

  Reminds me of companies that call themselves "startups" for 10 years...

  Shouldn't one start-up then get moving?

• by fogonthedowns on 9/27/13, 9:15 PM

  Let me get the ball rolling. My first app was called Barcoden. It generated barcodes for science labs. The debt crisis and cuts to schools ensued. Total sales: zero dollars.

• by AtTheLast on 9/27/13, 10:20 PM

  We built a SAAS product that would allow merchants to build their own coupon landing page or coupon site. It never got any traction. It was a super niche product and none of us wanted to go around selling it. We spent a year building it and simply lost interest in the product as more time elapsed. We should have taken a step back from the project after a few months and realized that it wasn't worth our time to continue working on it.

• by pdenya on 9/27/13, 9:38 PM

  http://inspecthq.com/ - clipboard and camera replacement for construction/inspection companies. Had a large (enterprise level) company interested for almost 2 years before we gave up.

• by coopdog on 9/29/13, 11:29 AM

  I built a tool for visual interpretation of test results against requirements. It was pretty cool and I'm sure large engineering companies would use it if they knew they needed it.

  I learned that you should go niche, but find a niche with a problem that customers KNOW they have. Otherwise you have to educate them before even having the chance so closing a sale, which is too expensive.

  I'm backing up and making simpler tools for the domain, this one could become an advanced feature for big enterprise.

• by cprncus on 9/28/13, 2:42 AM

  I have been working on a desktop application--not yet ready--since the Bush administration.