From time to time, I curate all of the best posts from this subreddit (and from other social media) and summarize it here for you.

We are officially in the final 3 months of the year! There has never been a better time to start your passive income journey. There is much more noise, but man are there also a lot more opportunities! And don't forget - it's almost a requirement that you fail a few times before you succeed so just get started and don't worry about being perfect.

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Here is the best passive income content from the past few months.

Passive Income Stories & Ideas

Renting washers and dryers for $60 to $85 a month (TikTok): A 23-year-old in Utah wanted a rental that works year-round and stays put, so he rents washer and dryer sets: "it stays in their house… just a very, very niche rental." His first install was a fourplex in November 2023, on a non-binding contract he printed from Google Docs. He put half his life savings in, moved billing to Stripe subscriptions, bought $30,000 of sets wholesale, and had about 35 installed within two months, roughly $2,400 a month.

Editor note: This is what I was referring to in this article about renting things people can't easily quit. There are lots of variables you need to make sure to get right (buying the right machines, attracting the right customers, setting the right price, maintenance plan, etc), but once you have it dialed in, it's a great way to make money.

He tweeted his notes-app ideas once a day for 30 days and made $8,000 (TikTok): He left Google 18 months ago and calls himself "the idea guy" who quits everything within three months. He started posting one tweet a day from his notes app, about 15 minutes a day, and finished the month at 2,000 followers and $8,000, mostly from people and tech companies who wanted to pay him for posts and work. This month a startup paid him $42,000 for 12 weekly tweets, and a small app he launched to his followers makes about $5,000 a month.

Editor note: Remember this is self-reported, but small, concentrated audiences in business and tech can pay more than big general ones. The niche you are in matters.

A $400 Mac mini, a coffee shop, and a $2,100 install (X): Someone buys a Mac mini, installs an AI agent that runs entirely offline on it for a coffee shop in under an hour, charges $2,100, then adds a $100 to $150 monthly support retainer. "Not a company that scales to a billion dollars, obviously, but a solo operator clearing a few thousand a month from local installs."

Got my first $500 for my little party game in 2 months (Reddit): A party app that bundles games like Headbands, Charades and Truth or Dare with a cleaner design. Everyone told him the space was too crowded; it crossed $100 last month and $500 now.

Insightful comment: "That 1405 new customers is a much bigger number than the revenue suggests, you've got something people actually want to keep playing"

Editor note: Don't automatically skip verticals that seem crowded. Lots of competitors is also a validation signal. It means there are customers willing to pay.

Slow grind starting to pay off (Reddit): An unemployed CS graduate, two years into job hunting, has been building apps he'd want to use himself. A party game app he built for game nights with friends started earning this year after he followed trending formats like imposter, guess the song and would you rather.

Editor note: Certainly promoting their own app here, but it is a good example of building simple things that can be successful.

Made my first $56 on the App Store this month (+66%) (Reddit): A chanting and mala-counter app, two months after launch, in a niche with hundreds of competitors. He built it because the existing ones were full of loud casino ads and clunky interfaces.

Helpful comment: "The one-time unlock instead of a subscription is exactly why you're seeing conversions, people are so tired of renting software for basic stuff"

Editor note: Another example of a simple app making money. A lot of people (myself included) tend to overcomplicate things, when sometimes the simplest thing can be the best path.

I manually studied 30,600 iOS apps making $20k to $100k a month (X): Only about 1.7% of App Store apps make $20,000 a month or more. His advice is to pick problems people already spend money on every day, like losing weight, sleeping better or screen-time addiction, and use Cal AI as the example: photograph your food, get the calories.

Editor note: Really just promoting his own tool here, but it is good research and advice.

What Real People Make

Levelsio passed $10M a year in revenue plus investment gains (X): His businesses bring in a steady $200K to $250K a month at about 94.5% profit. He invested the profit, mostly in simple S&P 500 ETFs plus a few lucky bets like Nvidia in 2022, and for about a year his investment returns have passed his business revenue. He's upfront that most of the gains are unrealized: "keep that with a big grain of salt!"

Editor note: Most don't make close to that, but I love the principle of taking income from active work and investing it into passive income. "Spend less -> lower costs -> more profit -> more money saved -> more money to invest."

20 years of buying last year's best S&P 500 stock (TikTok): Each year he put $1,000 into the previous year's top-performing S&P 500 stock and $1,000 into the index. The $20,000 in winners grew to $357,000 versus $105,000 for the index, and the pick beat the index in 11 of 20 years. But Apple and Nvidia produced $230,000 of it on their own, and the Tesla pick for 2021 shrank to $15.

Editor note: A few huge winners carried the bulk of the gains. Note this is a concentration risk (you're betting on one single stock every year). Most people would have quit after the bad years.

9 months, 935 code commits, $800+. Here's why "passive" didn't happen (Reddit): An indie habit app. "The REVENUE is passive… The BUSINESS is not." One-time purchases made 57% of revenue and beat subscriptions, ads underperformed, app directories sent almost nothing, and his busiest month was month nine.

Insightful comment: "the directory stat is brutal but tracks with my experience. one decent launch placement did more than 13 directories combined"

Editor note: Building the app is one part (and easier than ever thanks to AI). Getting people to see it is another part that usually takes a lot of active work.

Reality Check

The "passive income" obsession is weird (Reddit): His argument: a lot of people don't actually want passive income, and almost every stream, blogging, affiliate marketing, digital products, YouTube, needed a ridiculous amount of work before it became remotely passive.

Helpful comment: "In reality you work like crazy for maybe a year or two before seeing anything, and even then it's not really passive cause you still gotta maintain it."

Editor note: It does take a ton of work to make passive income succeed. And yes, maintenance is required for most of them. But what you end up with is a valuable asset you've built (or bought) that works for you 24/7, even when you're sleeping, vacationing, or spending time with family. How much money that generates is up to you.

I fail more than others (TikTok): He lists famous failure rates, Angry Birds as Rovio's 52nd game, Dyson's 5,126 prototypes, J.K. Rowling's 12 rejections, then says over 90% of his own videos never made meaningful money. He reports $1 million in sales in August from TikTok Shop affiliate content.

Editor note: Again, keep in mind sales is not profit (or commissions in this case), but I've always loved this quote and stand by it: "I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." - Michael Jordan

Quick Hits

• A just-okay situation can keep you stuck longer than a bad one → TikTok
• Joe Lonsdale on Peter Thiel: effort is convex, and 90% focus beats 80% by more than you'd think (I love this one!) → TikTok
• Tolstoy on long-term goals: forget the destination and cover twenty-five miles today → X
• Fail more: Sinatra, Babe Ruth and Picasso's hit rates → TikTok
• "An idiot in motion will go further than a genius at rest" → TikTok
• Film a week of content in one hour: 10 hooks in 10 minutes, then batch film → TikTok
• Fall in love with the system, not the goal → TikTok
• Rule number one is launch → TikTok
• Wealth is owning assets that pay you → TikTok
• Six questions to answer before $1M in annual revenue → TikTok
• "I made $29,000 last month on social media": add value first → TikTok
• A one-page playbook for building authority in a niche in 45 minutes a week → X

Take Action

That's it for this edition. Almost everything that worked this month started small and active: one washer and dryer install, one app making $56, one tweet a day. The passive part came later and only for the people who kept going long enough to figure it out.

Keep going. You can do it.

glhfbbq

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Past Episodes Archive: https://www.passivepiggie.com/articles

TLDR: Not Another Coaching Program - an update to a coaching program that costs $2,980 and will teach you how to rent little websites for extra money passively AFTER some upfront work. 

I posted about this a couple years ago and thought I'd post an update (see updated interview here). It looked like a really good program then and since then it's proven even more to be a very solid path to earning passive income. In fact, I went the extra mile and interviewed one of the students who is averaging $30k/mo (see it here).

If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's a method where you build and rent out websites to local companies. The core engine of it is SEO (I’ve done SEM/SEO for 20+ years). The program is legit and the methodology is sound. Their private community is still active with lots of rich discussions. This is a GREAT program most people can succeed at. The only caveat I would give is if you just aren’t good with the Internet (like you have trouble setting up your gmail or a facebook page) this might be tough for you.

And because it's always one of the first questions, NO - this is not sponsored - they did not pay for this - I don't care if you buy it or don't. I created this sub 13 years ago and with all of the spam in this space, I just want to spotlight ones that I think are truly legitimate. I'll spotlight others as I find them.

So with that, here’s their pitch… 
--

Hey, it’s Shiv and Kyle from NotAnotherCoachingProgram.com. 

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way: 

This course costs $2,980, lifetime access. I realize you might not have that much; or maybe you’d saw off your own arm before dropping that kinda cash on a coaching program. I get it. Feel free to bounce now so I don’t waste your time. 

We teach you how to build, rank, and rent out itty-bitty websites to small businesses wanting more customers. Aka, local SEO. Not new. Not sexy. But tried and true. 

Why teach? Because the money is great, obviously. But also, there’s endless niche/city combo’s, and a community means more help ranking sites and closing deals. 

Downsides? There’s a few. It’s not instant money. SEO takes time (Maybe 2-6 Months). Also, some business owners may not see the value or can’t handle more leads. Some are just annoying to deal with. Others will stop paying after a few months, for whatever reason. Overall, though, it’s still pretty awesome. 

Each site has overhead of about $20-$30 per month. But the lowest we typically rent the sites out for is $500 per month. Pretty solid ROI. 

Assuming I haven’t scared you off yet, let’s go through some FAQs. 

How does this work? 

1- Pick an easy local niche to get leads for. “Spray Foam Insulation Carlsbad, California,” for example. 

2- Make a small, simple website and optimize it for relevant search terms.

3- Get it ranked in Google, Bing, Apple Maps, and AI tools like ChatGPT.

4- Add a local phone number that can track and forward every call that comes in. 

5- Hit up some Spray Foam Insulation companies in Carlsbad (to stick with this hypothetical example) and offer them free leads for a week. When someone agrees, route the leads to them. We or some of our hungry students can do the outreach for you if it’s not your thing. 

6- After a week of the free leads doing all the selling for you, tell them, “It’ll be $850/month to keep ‘em coming.” Or whatever our custom pricing tool says is fair for that niche and city. Yes, we can close them, too, if that part sounds too scary (It’s not). But, it will cost you. 

7- This is when it becomes truly passive because the site is ranked, the phone number is auto-forwarding to your client and all you have to do after that is run their credit card every month. If you priced the site right, you’ll never have to speak with your client again because they’ll forget they’re even paying you. 

8- Now rinse and repeat.

Hmm. Are you sure this is legit? 

Well, put it this way: 

Uber, Airbnb, Alibaba, Angi, Zillow, Thumbtack, and Apartments.com all use the same model. 

Connect buyer with seller, take a sliver to deliver. We just do it on a granular level. So yeah. Not only is it legitimate, it’s actually kinda brilliant. 

Who’s this for? 

Anyone, anywhere, any background, as long as you have some ambition, grit, and of course, basic computer skills. NO CODING INVOLVED. 

We use drag and drop website builders like Weebly & SitePanda so zero previous web design experience is needed. 

The more time you can devote to it, the better. But if you’re not in a rush, take your time and build up your digital real estate empire over time. 

Everything’s done online - So no, you do not have to do this in your own city. Nor do you have to meet anyone in person - unless you want to. 

How much does the course cost?

Like I said, our coaching program is $2,980 - Lifetime Access to the course material and private Facebook Group. 

Then, to run the business, you’re looking at less than $30 per month per website. (Which covers your domain, hosting, local tracking number, and research software.) 

Chump change considering the potential. 

How much does an average site make? 

$600/month is a safe estimate. 

Most of ours do $1,000 to $2,000/month. Sometimes more. 

Yeah, but, for how long? 

For as long as you own the site. 

No different than renting out houses or apartments, right? 

And if someone stops paying, same thing - you just find a new “tenant.” 

Click a few buttons, reroute the leads to them, keep collecting checks. 

Dead serious… 

I made a site 5 years ago that’s been paying me $1,000 a month the entire time. That’s $60,000 and counting! 

You could hand these off to your kids one day. 

How much work is involved? 

A good amount in the beginning and then hardly any once the website is built, ranked, and you’ve partnered with a business. 

You could make a site in a day. 

Then ask others in our group for some backlinks (which are like votes in the SEO process). 

From there, it’ll take a few weeks to a few months to jump to page 1, depending on your niche and city. 

In the meantime, go make more.

Soon, you’ll have emails and calls trickling in. 

Leverage those leads to close a deal… and then it’s basically mailbox money from there. Okay, how soon will I make money with this? 

Anywhere from one month to six months after starting, depending on a number of factors like: 

1- How well you selected your niche & city. We prefer low-hanging fruit - the search terms with very weak SEO competition. 

2- Your ability to trust the process, not overcomplicate things and just follow the exact steps taught. 

3- How willing you are to reach out to business owners to offer them free leads and then ask for money. 

From there, it’s just focus, execution, and consistency. 

If you do your part, no reason you can’t have a handful of websites generating leads within the first month. 

And then you start landing clients in month two… 

And by month three? You’ve got a G-Wagon parked outside your new mansion, and you hardly ever run into your live-in servants, which is nice. 

(I’m joking.) 

How many of these can I have? 

As many as you can comfortably manage. 

No business is infinitely scalable though. Eventually you’ll need a team to go bigger and bigger. Anything below 20 clients is 98% passive. But 20 clients is easily $15k to $25k a month. 

As you grow to 40 and 50 clients, you’ll have some credit cards that decline that you have to follow up with and you have higher odds of needy clients who want to ask you questions. 

But this is something you can do as a one-person operation and easily get to 10, 20, maybe 30 rental sites with minimal maintenance if any at all.

Don’t most businesses already have a website? 

Yes, and if they happen to be at the top of the search results, they probably don’t need us. But for the vast majority, who’re buried back on page 4 of Google, it’s a different story. Their website is a digital dust collector. 

Whereas, yours? Will be a cash factory churning out profits… that’ll make the amount they’re paying you seem like pennies in a wishing well. 

Plus, you can structure deals to remove risk. 

So instead of a flat monthly fee, they could pay you $5 per phone call or 10% of booked business that comes through your site, for instance. 

Boom. How can they lose? 

Wait, why wouldn’t they just do this themselves? 

Most simply don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to nerd-out on this stuff, even if it is a game-changer for their business. 

And remember, for every dollar they throw your way, they’re making that back several times over. 

So most of ‘em are more than cool with it. 

Won’t it get saturated if you tell everyone? 

Not gonna be an issue. 

Why? 

Because you would have to multiply every type of local business by every city on this big blue planet - and then go do this in however many millions of niches that would be - before you could say it’s cooked. 

And we’re a looong ways from that. 

Why do I need a course? Can’t I figure this out myself?

Sure, anyone can figure anything out on their own with the internet and AI. But you’ll be banging your head against the wall for a year and most people don’t have that type of stamina before making a single dollar. 

You may think, “Can’t I just have AI build me a site and tell me how to rank it?”

Sure you can try. But if you’ve used AI enough, you’ll learn that it gets things wrong a lot and you could be 6 months into a project and nothing is working.

We teach you how to use AI for some of it, but you have to be really careful. Most AI tools watermark their content (look up SynthID if you don’t believe me) amongst other things. 

We have 10+ years of experience doing this. We know the exact Do’s and Don'ts.

Plus Google isn’t going to jeopardize their $4 trillion dollar business over people mass-spamming sites with AI SEO (I don’t care WHAT Google’s says on the matter - they change their stance constantly).

The biggest value here is our community. Because over 2,200+ people have paid $2,980 to join, you get access to a super high quality vetted group of students who are doing this exact same business model. 

Students constantly share tips, techniques, niches, and opportunities that have been crazy profitable for them, and since what one student is doing in Foster City, California (for example) isn’t competing with a site you’re building in let’s say Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, people don’t feel scared sharing their latest and greatest techniques with the group.

And lastly: it’s LIFETIME access, we constantly improve, update, and add strategies to help make your business owners get more customers. The more customers they get, the more passive income you get. Win-win.

We lay out the exact step by step process that we have used over and over again. Our repeat student successes within 6 months reassures us that we have our training nailed down. 

Are there any renewal fees or mandatory purchases from us? 

No further purchases from our program are required, but we do offer some outsourcing services:

1 - If you want our team to build you a fully optimized site, that’ll run ya $300 per site. 

2 - If you want to use our proprietary software to build your site, that’ll run you a $25 platform fee plus $7.50 fee per site per month. 

3 - If you want to use our proprietary phone software, depending on usage, that’ll run you ~$7.50 per month per number. 

Let’s be clear though, if you want to use another website builder or other phone number service, be our guest. It won’t hurt you at all. 

Fine. Can I see some examples? 

Thought you’d never ask. 

Visit NotAnotherCoachingProgram.com for a bunch of case studies and interviews with current students. 

At the bottom of that page is a link to our calendar if you ever think you’d like to join. Either way, appreciate you reading this. 

You’ll be talking to either Shiv, Kyle, or Alexandria. All of us have done six/seven figures a year in this business model.

Shiv & Kyle