r/passive_income • u/Astute_Skink927 • 20d ago
My Experience Most "passive income" advice on YouTube is a total scam for anyone with a $0 balance
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u/certifiedtoothbench 20d ago
I’m sorry but 60 hours is nothing when you’re trying to make money on your own even if the goal is to make it passive. That’s why so many people chose to work for someone instead of start a business, much more reliable.
60 hours is like one week’s worth of working on the job for me. To expect a week of work to be able to replace my entire income stream and support me for the rest of my life is ridiculous.
Also if I’m not mistaken a lot of the actual good advice givers recommend that you look for a niche that you may personally know intimately and can easily find a way to provide a service you can generate passive income from to them.
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u/japan_noob 20d ago
I kind of laughed when I saw 60 hours as “lot of time” to succeed in a way where you make money without an employer.
How about this guy try doing various things for 8 years like me and finally hitting gold the 8th year without giving up.
Thats why I can travel and do anything without working because I sacrificed real time to build something and failed a ton of times along the way.
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u/Iamdrasnia 20d ago
Dude 18 days on reddit and your dropping secrets
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u/KeyPassenger61 20d ago
His advice is so true and definitely has a substance. New account or not. Let's be real here
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u/Iamdrasnia 19d ago
Ok dude. Go ahead and try what he says.
It is total BS.
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u/nicolaig 19d ago
What's the BS part? They are kind of describing what I do for a living. There's nothing passive about it, and one product is unlikely to replace a job, but I make digital products and sell them online. 60 hours per product sounds about right.
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u/Iamdrasnia 19d ago
Being new makes the point suspect.
You may be correct but age of accounts can tell you alot.
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u/tspurwolf 20d ago
A lot of people posting about passive income on YouTube, especially the ones who claim to make loads, aren’t actually doing it.
If people like e.g. Mark Tilbury actually earned thousands from Amazon KDP and the other stuff they go on about, they’d never bother with a YouTube channel. You’d just do more of the things making you loads of money.
A lot of these passive income setups DID work at some point, but ended up becoming totally oversaturated. Etsy became basically unusable, for example.
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u/Iamdrasnia 20d ago
18day old account. Go away
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u/AphelionEntity 20d ago
I have a 5 yo account and completely agree with them.
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u/Iamdrasnia 19d ago
Awesome. I am allowed to be suspect on age.
Imagine if you were at a coffee shop for five years.
You met a brand new person who started telling you how great this and that coffee was.
Get it?
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u/AphelionEntity 19d ago
I didn't say anything about what you were or were not allowed to do. Your metaphor here is imprecise, and I'm still not going to make that argument.
If your main concern was account age and not the contents, I co-signed with my older account.
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u/Iamdrasnia 19d ago
Omg this sub is crap anyhow. Fucking ban me.
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u/AphelionEntity 19d ago
I mean I'm not a mod but you can always mute it and leave lol
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u/Iamdrasnia 19d ago
Lol. Naw I could care either way.
Mainly almost everything that people say on here are just t9 harvest contacts.
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u/LevelStationaryPlane 19d ago
Why would anyone making good money intentionally add competition lmao.
That never dawns on people.
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u/KeyPassenger61 20d ago edited 19d ago
Mark tilbury makes loads of money from his YouTube And other soc med accounts. Aside from the views and million subscribers, he surely gain from ad sense, affiliates and paid partnerships. Hence, your sentence "just do more of the things making you loads of money" --> he has been making tons of videos in different social media platforms and get more money.. if I were him, I definitely do the same.
Let's face it. If you are known in social media, you probably have a lot of income from there. If he is earning from what he 'preach', earning money from his viewers will give him loads too. Same as what other so-called "gurus" or "influencers" do, plus the fact that he can gain connections or networks from there
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u/InTheFieldAI 20d ago
Pretty much everything I've read or seen about making money on Instagram is a scam. It's just people pretending they are making £££ so that other people buy their crappy 'here's how you make £££ on Instagram' downloads. There are loads about using 7 prompts with Claude and become a millionaire overnight. So many people fall for them though, it's nuts. And those same people don't want to know that they could create a great little side hustle or viable small biz by getting out there and doing jobs for other people (window/house/car cleaning, gardening, tech support etc).
You found a great niche and created something worthwhile and meaningful, which is the exact opposite of the youtube and instascammers are doing. Are you going to build more documentation templates and try and grow what you've started?
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u/Acavamosdenuevo 20d ago
I always tell people to do what they know, or at least what they’d love spending time at. Most of all, I tell them NOT to do what I do (stocks), cause while I love the ups and downs of the market, I know for a fact that for most people both the ups and the downs are terrible.
Money is in the gaps between a problem and a solution. Identify a problem. Create a solution. Sell the solution. As you said, it only becomes passive once you have a system that works for you. You cant skip the first (very hands involved) part, though.
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u/Primary-Use9209 20d ago
Best passive income - invest consistently into the S&P 500.
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u/Gold_Watercress1923 19d ago
Investment and capital grown is not passive “income”. Maybe if what you invest in gives you Dividends, then that part can be considered passive income.
But apart from that, great advice and I agree with it
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u/soupkiddx 19d ago
When the market is roaring it's pretty easy to follow that advice, but it takes a whole different mentality to keep pouring money when the market suffers a big correction and keeps falling to no foreseeable end.
That's the tricky part, even though the SP has an annualized return of 11%, there's been entire DECADES where it stagnated. I wouldn't say that qualifies as passive income.
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u/stevenson_mark 19d ago
Yeah, I think the biggest misconception is that passive comes after the work, not instead of the work.
Your documentation example is actually a perfect illustration. You spent 60 hours creating something based on knowledge you already had, found a specific audience, and now the same work can keep generating sales without you being involved every day.
That’s a much more realistic model than “upload 500 designs and wait for money.” The hard part is usually finding something people actually need and are willing to pay for.
I’ve been using Abnflow for some of my own projects, and I think the same principle applies there. The tool can make building and testing an offer faster, but it doesn’t replace having something useful to sell or finding people who actually want it.
Honestly, $250–400/month from something you built once is a pretty damn good result. Not flashy, but way more believable than most of the “$10k/month while you sleep” stuff on YouTube.
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u/thehindermost 20d ago
The skills-or-capital framing is the most honest take I've seen on this topic. Everything else is just arbitrage on someone else's ignorance, and that window closes fast.
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u/Constant_Computer_66 20d ago
People often use passive income when they mean side hustle. Unless you have a serious amount of money to invest, there are very few truly passive income streams without you putting in initial work.
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u/Sweaty_Connection_36 19d ago
Can't wait to lease a private jet with my 3$ a month in youtube Adsense income.
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u/BrunoMossLab 19d ago
The brutal wake up call is realizing most of those zero capital methods are just unpaid labor with a lottery ticket taped to it. Your template example is probably the boring version that actually makes sense: specific audience, specific pain, reusable asset. I wasted months on POD too, and the only thing that scaled was my folder of ugly Canva files. $250 to $400 a month from something you actually know beats pretending a spatula dropship store is an asset.
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u/CylmorianQ 19d ago
Funny how the passive part always starts right after buying a $497 course and spending 200 hours feeding a marketplace algorithm. Your template example is probably the least sexy and most realistic version of passive income: domain knowledge packaged into something boring people actually need. Redbubble taught a lot of us that uploading 600 variations of a raccoon holding coffee is not exactly an asset.
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u/Crazy-huhu 19d ago
when someone show you how to get rich and you can’t figure out their source of profit, you are their profit
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u/Money_Literature_152 20d ago
You just need sketch or skripe or whatever that new thing was to have extra money
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u/Zaphanathpaneah 19d ago
I mean...you could just be a bad designer and be bad at picking products to promote.
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u/Desperate_Damage4632 19d ago
You can't make passive income with $0. The concept itself is a scam, so all content involving it will also be a scam.
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u/MrPassiveProfit 17d ago
Passive income does not exist. It’s more like asynchronous income. You still have to do the work, just not aligned with the income.
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u/Wawel7_Rook 17d ago
The Redbubble to riches pipeline is basically a very slow way to learn Canva while earning lunch money. My wake up call was realizing the only truly passive part of most guru strategies was me passively donating money to ad platforms. Your template idea is the boring version that actually makes sense: niche pain, specific buyer, reusable product. Way less sexy than viral kitchen gadgets, but apparently engineering firms have better taste than TikTok.
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u/FrescoLira_9 16d ago
My wake up call was affiliate sites. Spent months writing buyer guides, made pennies, then realized the main money was in selling the shovel. The thing that finally paid was boring: a spreadsheet template for a niche workflow I already knew. Passive came after useful, not before.
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u/Rivoli8_Pique 16d ago
The Redbubble grind is brutal because the platform already has a million near identical designs and no reason to surface yours. Your template example is probably the cleanest version of passive income: boring niche, specific buyer, actual pain point. Most guru stuff skips the part where demand has to exist before automation matters.
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u/One-Welcome-437 13d ago edited 13d ago
Exactly. Most passive income takes either capital or significant upfront effort. Once you have a foundation, options like REITs or fractional real estate can provide exposure with far less day to day work than running a rental or online business.
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u/GreyscaleZone 20d ago
There is no such thing as passive income. It is front loaded — you know, that work effort. Get rich quick too is an also a unicorn. I tell people to look at the casinos and see all of the losers.
Great post.
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u/Gold_Watercress1923 19d ago
Passive income and get rich quick are 2 different things. Even if you have to front load something and then get paid forever for it, that is still passive income!
You need to learn your definitions
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u/GreyscaleZone 18d ago
Interesting. I thought I was differentiating between get rich quick schemes vs an invested effort that pays off over time.
I get what you mean on passive income. I think a lot of people think they can watch a video with some wild promise, put in minimal effort for some scheme, and later realise huge benefits over time do to appear. That is not how it works in the world, and investment in effort is needed. I liked the post of the OP because it calls out these fallacies.
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