Udemy

I made a course on Udemy on how to make complete web applications without writing code using APEX. Link and free coupons: https://www.udemy.com/create-web-apps-with-apex-5/?couponCod...

Expenses: $100 for a nice microphone (not necessary) but didn't want to record a bunch and have it be garbage $100 for Screenflow (to do video editing). 20 hours time (split across a couple of weekends

Profit: I've made $1405 on it so far. It is almost completely passive income.

Proof: http://i.imgur.com/sexsrzK.png?1

If you know any of the topics in the Hot Topics list and can do desktop recording, maybe you should think about teaching others and making some side money while doing it. Best of all, the Udemy community is awesome. They are very supportive of each other.

https://teach.udemy.com/course-creation/hot-topic-courses/

Ebay crawler

A year. I was spending way too much time on eBay, so I wrote something for myself that would scrape the web pages and use a kill list to filter out the junk. I wanted a better UI to add words to the kill list and realised I could make money via the eBay affiliate program.

So I took two months off between contracts and wrote the first version of AuctionSieve - http://auctionsieve.com

There was a D&D forum, the Acaeum where a bunch of people started using it and giving feedback. It was making me money from day 1 but it probably took about a year to repay that 2 months of time investment.

It's now been 13 years(!) and it still makes me money - not enough to live off (the payout calculations from eBay have changed several times) but a nice chunk of change. And I only have to occasionally prod it. And add the occasional new feature.

Inovices

I've worked over a year on https://www.boxfactura.com/ which is a special email service for invoices in Mexico.

It has been profitable since January after quite some legwork, on the technical side as well as the sales and persuation side.

reply by emilioolivares 1 day ago

Hey man, I'm also from Mexico but currently live in NY. This is pretty awesome. How did you manage to get traction with small businesses? Would love to chat if you have time, my email is emilioolivares, I use Google email.

reply by rsoto 1 day ago

Hey, Emilio! Sure, I'll send you an email, however, I'd like to keep the answer to your question on the public side, if you don't mind. It has been quite a ride to get traction, mostly the first clients signed up after talking to them about their issues with their invoices and expenses--once they're interested, we begin the education process. The other sources are a mix of everything. One of our services is a platform in which our client's vendors can upload invoices so they can manage them. We get some information on several businesses, both small and big so we can begin to offer our solution. This particular product might be the best source for viral growth, as one client can introduce 10 or 20 new users on our platform. We also have a relatively successful side project on a related field [1], which has several hundred hits daily. There's an ad there, there might be some optimization on both the ad and the landing, but we're still trying to figure that out. Finally, our focus has been towards explaining the product, as there's nothing like it on the market (actually there are, but they're small and having the same difficulties we have). Once they sign up, our onboarding process is focused on one point: send your first invoice. As we saw many of the new signups not completing this step (or the previous 2), we set up an email communication strategy for each one of the steps, with our contact information in each email. I've blogged a bit [2] about it.

Now that we're sure our product is helpful for the businesses, we just started promoting heavily with a sales force.

I hope that answered your question!

1: http://isrmatic.com/ 2: http://www.therror.com/weblog/2016/mar/como_el_email_marketi...

Ghost themes

http://www.gtheme.io/ I run GTheme.io for 2 years and now ramen profitable. Current site running with minimal management. The site selling premium ghost.org theme.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11898992