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lead thanks tech lead today I wanted to
talk about passive income and about how
I'm generating about $40,000 per year
just on site income and this is income
where I'm basically just not doing
anything I'm just sitting around and
each day I'm getting about low over $100
just for doing nothing now I wanted to
talk about this video not actually
because I think it's important for
software engineers to build additional
site income streams I would say that
even $40,000 per year isn't really going
to be that meaningful necessarily but
but I would say it's a very fun happy to
have it can help you get deeper into
software engineering as you're building
these side projects it can help build up
your resume and what I hope to do is
tell you about the ways that I generate
aside the income and I'm not really sure
if all of these are going to be
completely useful for you because it may
be difficult to replicate what I've done
but it can help inspire you maybe give
you some ideas so for me most of my side
income comes from for projects that I'm
doing now the first one is this
photography software that I created it's
called pan elapsed 360 comm check it out
it is for time-lapse photographers and
this project is a very niche project
that I began when there was a big
time-lapse boom like there were time
lapses all over YouTube and I was into
time lapses as well and people needed a
way to add special effects to these time
lapses to process the time lapses and
there weren't many good time lapse
software's so I looked
into it there was one software that was
retailing for over $200 and I thought
you know that's really expensive and
that I could build something better not
the software I built did two things the
first thing it would do was it would
allow you to add motion to your time
lapses using actually perspective
correct math and this involved really
understanding the math behind lenses
like a 24 millimeter camera what does
that actually mean in terms of field of
view and what's like a hundred
millimeter camera and this was very fun
for me to learn and figure out and find
the exact math behind it and I also
applied some of my computer graphics
skills to get this going
I built the software using Adobe
ActionScript which is like Flash
technology now it's pretty funny because
ActionScript is not a very popular
language these days but the great thing
about it was it was cross-platform
across Windows and Apple and I wanted to
make sure that the software I wrote
could target both platforms and they
needed to be desktop software because I
didn't want users to have to upload
their photos just together processed on
like some web software so I've looked
around for the appropriate technology
for this and I could have chosen either
Java or Adobe AIR ActionScript and I
really wasn't keen on getting back into
Java and it seemed to me that
ActionScript and Flash technology could
be something interesting it's something
that I had already been doing a bit of
and I was able to just build out the
software pretty quickly it took like two
weeks or so to build out I noticed at
the time that a lot of time-lapse
photographers were try to add motion to
their time lapses using very expensive
hardware rigs that would be based on
timers and it was slowly like rotate the
head and I realized that you didn't
really need these Hardware timers and
rotational motorized heads to do other
stuff like you could do with or in
software using perspective correction
and just a bit of math and image
distortion there was a very small niche
messageboard community of time-lapse
photographers I was part of it and I
knew that if I built a software I could
just go there announce it and everybody
would see that message so that's exactly
what I did and we
then the first day or two of me
launching the software I was already
getting like five hundred dollars every
day in sales over the years I continued
to build up features into the software
another big feature was allowing you to
capture time lapses across sunset or
sunrise when the scene exposure would
change quickly and and for this I would
use math to calculate the exposure of a
scene based on the exposure triangle
which is based on aperture ISO and
shutter speed and using these three
pieces you're able to calculate how
bright a scene is and then interpret
what Brenton is each frame should be as
the cameras changing exposure quickly to
try to capture the scene I also added
some other interesting features like I
had the support to do fish eye time
lapses which is a very unique and
strange effect and it literally took me
like a month to work out the
calculations for how to do a fisheye
projection and then build like fisheye
geometry into the program so I'm not
sure if this was that well-received so
I'm I don't know if it was a really good
use of my time to spend the whole month
building out this feature but it was
really fun for me to do at least and I
had to get into like GPU shaders to
actually do it so I had to teach myself
that stuff anyway the software something
that I'm still maintaining these days I
sell it for a pretty high price about
$80 a piece and I think that's actually
a very worthwhile price and also I just
think that the economics is that for
desktop software you can just charge
more and I was pretty happy that I did
not make this like an iPhone app where
the standard is every app needs to be
like $1 or $5 like like here's an app
time selling for $80 but I still managed
to make about one sell every day and it
also helped when our managers to
translate the whole web site into
Japanese and the software became quite
popular in Japan as well so that's one
side project there's another side
project that I've been running for the
past 10 years or so it's called human
pets comm it's kind of a social network
and this was very popular back in the
day like there were 2 million users and
it was generating like
$2,000 everyday or something for a while
these days
the website has lost a lot of popularity
from its heyday it's still pushing out
about say $100 per month and the way it
generates money is generally through
memberships take off these shoes so I
feel like I probably should be charging
more for membership I charge like 6
dollars for a monthly membership which
is probably too low when you become a
member you gain a bunch of additional
features and another great thing about
this that added was that you could buy
or give to memberships to other people
so a lot of people will be doing that
because often people seem to treat
others better than they may treat
themselves I also run some Adsense on
the site the ads don't really make much
money it's like $60 a month but this
site has been operational for the past
ten years or so and it's just been
spilling additional income for me the
whole time so that's great the third
project was a set of iPhone games web
RPG apps really where people could just
progress a character through a game and
there would be levels a storyline to
push the player through many items to
collect monsters to fight and you just
click buttons and kind of move your
character through I think the key to
this was there was a storyline that was
just very engrossing for it to player
and the other thing was I had high
limits for purchases like you could buy
items that were like $20 in the game
there's a statistic that 90% of your
income will come from the top 10% of
players for in the game and those
players are concerned with their whales
they're basically people who have either
a lot of money or don't mind spending a
lot of money on gaming and so I think
that was one mistake I made with my
first website which was unlimited so
that you can only pay a maximum of about
6 dollars per month for membership and
after that it didn't matter how much you
loved the app or game it was kept at
that amount and what I wish I did was
add higher
thresholds for spending now the fourth
project I did was very interesting and
this was actually photography and you
can sell stock photography or stock
videos now stuff photography doesn't pay
very well because it's so cheap like one
photo the most you could get is like 25
cents or something like my best selling
photo was a photo of the Brooklyn Bridge
a New York just happens to sell very
well because it's so iconic and this
photo
so about 1,500 copies and each copy was
a dollar so me just standing there
taking one shot with that was like a
fifteen hundred dollar shot right there
with video it's even better because each
video you can sell for about $50 a piece
or so and these days I think people are
looking really for 4k video like they
need to be extremely high quality my
videos that I sold really well were
videos of Japan there was actually the
shrine called fushimi inari in kyoto
with a bunch of red gates this was
actually relatively unknown when I
visited and there were very few people
but it's funny that now if you go
there's tons of people and I think it's
because I helped popularize it you know
I had this video and sold over a
thousand copies of this video and
usually it's travel agencies that buy
these videos and then they use these to
try to sell that that's a nation tours
packages and they take tours there so
it's kind of shame now that this place
is now completely overrun with tours and
I probably helped contribute to that
mess and then I also did videos of
Iceland the ice caves and Northern
Lights and each of these videos
generally brought in like $1,000 so in
the end my photography work brought in
about twenty thousand dollars over four
or five years or so the other great
thing about the photography work was I
actually got sponsorships so I was able
to work with a selling company and they
offered us $10,000 catamarans and
sailboats in exotic locations like the
Bahamas or Phuket and we were able to
just take these sailboats around and
this was kind of unique because I
knew how to sell and I'm a photographer
so as I was able to take week-long
sailing vacations in the exotic areas
worthy lodging and that boat would be
free so it was pretty great when you add
it all together we're looking at about
thirty six hundred dollars a month or
forty K a year and the great thing about
citing income like this business income
is that you can actually deduct expenses
on this so if you buy a laptop you can
deduct against that anything i buy that
may have some business purpose would be
like about thirty percent off or
something like that
now one funny consequence of this is i
don't actually do much github open
source contributions because a lot of
what I work on
I sell like I wanted to be commercial
software so I don't actually want to
open source things so one time I had to
recruit her asked me like hey what's
your github and I was like I don't do
open source you know I actually make
money from her projects and they're just
like that yeah that's I would say though
that another way I generate a lot of
site income so to say is I just live
with my parents that's saving me like at
least $3,000 per month on rent and the
funny thing about this is you calculate
that as post-tax income so it's
equivalent to about 4 K per month in
income you might earn at a job that's
like 48 K savings right there's so I
don't know what I'm gonna do with all
this money I'm saving but maybe I'll
give it to my kid or something like that
so the last thing one says when I look
for a project there's a few things I'm
looking for so the first thing to look
for is timing like why now and
everything I've done that has succeeded
I think there was a reason that timing
made sense like like there were certain
trends in user behavior or technology
that signified that it was at that
moment that it would be ripe for some
project to succeed the other thing is I
look for things that are scalable so
running a restaurant I think is not very
scalable it's I think what you're really
looking for our scenarios were you can
affect far more many people and that's
usually done through the internet and
that gets the last thing is using coding
to automate these systems such that you
don't have to do anything and then the
system just automatically takes care
itself that's when it becomes really
passive but yeah that's pretty much how
I've been looking at generally the
inside income I think in the whole
scheme of things it's not much compared
to say the salary that a software
engineer is able to generate but I think
it's really fun sometimes you're
actually able to strike gold in certain
areas and make a lot but there than that
I think it just makes the Hobby
that much more interesting and overall
just push your craft to a higher level
no matter what you're doing so there you
have it
that'll do it for me if you liked the
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bye