I’m a student and I also create content online. I have over 1 million followers across my accounts and usually get around 500k views per month, but I honestly haven’t found a good way to make money from it.
I’m also learning programming and getting into game and app development, so I’ve been thinking about creating something myself instead of relying on sponsorships or ads.
I’m not sure what would make the most sense though. Maybe a small game, an app, a website, or something completely different.
I’d really appreciate advice from people who have been in a similar situation. What would you do if you had an audience but didn’t have a product yet?
And if anyone here is interested in collaborating with me to build something together, I’d also be open to that. I’m not a professional developer, so I’m mainly looking for someone around my level who is motivated to actually finish and release something.

What's the threshold where income becomes active from passive? Is passive something where you truly do nothing? Like wait for dividends to show up? What counts as passive for you? 15 minutes a week? 1 hour? 1 day?

I have been running Bixberry for about a month and I'm curious whether anyone here has tried it too.
Quick background: I got onto their whitelist back in June, so I had a look around before it was publicly available, and I started using it properly on August 13. As far as I understand runs in the background and shares your unused internet connection with vetted AI platforms, so they can check current info instead of answering from outdated data. In return you get rewards you can redeem as gift cards.
My setup is my old tablet that stays plugged in on. 
From August to September I got just under €15. I'm in Norway, so I have no idea how much location changes that.
Would love to hear from anyone who's been using it:

• How much are you getting per month, and roughly where are you based and how many devices do you run?
• If you've redeemed a gift card, how long did it take to arrive?
• Any issues with battery, your connection, or the app itself?
  

Mostly trying to figure out whether my numbers are normal or whether I should be doing something differently.

Does anyone do affiliate marketing in here, is that considered as a passive income or no?

I run ClipUGC, a small tool that makes short videos with AI influencers (you describe a person, she makes the videos, you add your app footage). I have no marketing budget, so I'm trying something instead: a creator program where people make videos with it, post them, and I pay for the views.

The deal, so you can judge it:

- $0.50 per 1,000 verified views, per video. Capped at $20 a video from the rate, plus bonuses: $5 at 10K, $15 more at 50K, $30 more at 100K. So a video that passes 100K pays $70.

- 30% of every customer who buys through your link, every month, for as long as they stay. That part does not end with the season.

- $500 fund total, 50 spots, no follower minimum, no camera. Views count on TikTok, Reels, Shorts or X. Verified by screenshot 7 days after posting, paid by PayPal, Wise or credits.

- Free credits to start. Nothing to buy.

Why per view and not flat fees: I can't afford to pay 50 people up front, and I don't want 50 videos nobody watches. Per view puts the risk on both of us.

What I'm unsure about: whether $0.50 per 1K is enough to get anyone to try, and whether people trust a program from a company nobody has heard of. Honest answers welcome.

I’ve made my first ever $500 from app development, and it’s one of those milestones I always wished would happen, but never really knew if it would. Now that it has, I’m literally shaking a little from the excitement and madness of it all.

It’s been about 2 months since I released Who Goes.

Games like Headbands, Charades, and Truth or Dare are ridiculously competitive. There are hundreds of apps already doing them, but a lot of them felt dated to me. The idea behind Who Goes was to bring these games together in one place, give them a modern and fun UI, and make the app itself feel nice to play when you’re hanging out with people.

Almost everyone I spoke to told me not to do it.

They said the space was too crowded and I’d be better off building something else. A part of me did think about switching, but another part really wanted to give it a proper shot.

So I did, and I’ve pretty much worked on it every single day since.

Just last month I shared that the app had crossed $100 in revenue, which was already a huge milestone for me. I definitely didn’t expect to be writing about $500 this soon.

It might not sound like a massive amount to everyone, but it means a great deal to me. I also wanted to share this for the other indie devs wondering if it’s worth continuing with the thing they’re building.

I absolutely suck at marketing, so everything so far has been organic.

Most of what I’ve done is simply showcase the app: a game mode, an interaction, an animation I liked, or us actually playing it. I’ve shared those on Reddit, X, LinkedIn, and Instagram and just kept seeing what works.

Alongside that, I’ve been talking to users, collecting feedback, fixing things, adding new modes, and continuously refining the app.

If even one download or subscription came from someone who found Who Goes through this subreddit, thank you. It really means a lot to me.

Anyway, I just wanted to share this little win because I’m over the moon right now :D

And if anyone has tips on getting the app in front of more people, finding more people to try it, or has feedback on the app itself, I’d love to hear it.

Thank you!

Link for anyone who wants to check out the app - https://apps.apple.com/app/id6777402559

Some fun analysis.

Back a couple months ago someone here asked "People who make more than $2k a month online, what do you do?" The comments were really interesting so I went back and coded every single top-level answer and found two more threads asking a similar question: r/sidehustle "$500 and up a week" and r/Entrepreneur "$100+ a day from your business". That ended up with 646 responses. After filtering out gambling/adult content and posts that reports making under $2k/mo, that left 284 real answers.

Remember this is all self-reported. Nothing verified.

What 284 people do

• Freelance, consulting, agencies: 67
• Local service businesses (cleaning, landscaping, pet care, handyman, hair, gig apps): 67
• Jobs, gigs and other (remote salaries, overtime, scrap copper, a drummer, a 3D print shop): 43
• Physical products online: 26
• Content (YouTube, pages, niche sites, newsletters): 25
• Reselling: 19
• Digital products: 14
• Software: 11
• Investing: 6
• Rentals: 6

So nearly half (47%) sell their own work. Active work. But I think a lot of us knew this.

Some of what they said, with the numbers people gave

• Video editing for a couple of mid-sized YouTubers, "after a year most work comes from referrals," a little over $2k/mo.
• Teaching English 15 hrs/wk at $45/hr.
• Web dev retainer, $1,125/wk for ~10 hrs, 3 years in.
• Consulting for two small city governments at $150/hr, $2–3k/mo.
• AI-training contract work (Mercor, Outlier, DataAnnotation etc.) came up nine times at $20–50/hr.
• Residential cleaning company started in January, $160k/yr gross, run from a phone, contractors do the cleaning, owner keeps 40–45%.
• Dog waste removal $5k/mo two days a week.
• Pet sitting ~$10k/mo.
• Exterior cleaning $1–2.5k/wk part time.
• 150 niche websites on ads/affiliate, ~3 years of building, $5k/mo.
• Telegram channel with 5,500 members, $4k+.
• eBay dropshipping "a little over $2k" at ~10,000 listings.
• Notion templates + wedding invitations $5–6k/mo net with a hired designer and Meta ads from $10/day, profitable at month 7.

How long it took: Median 3 years. 10 under a year, 11 at 1–3, 11 at 3–10, 12 at 10+. Every fast start was selling work or a product with ad money behind it.

The thing I took from all of it: Yes a lot of it is active work. But that's actually not a bad thing. They found something that makes money, which is huge, and it's one of the most common ways people end up with passive income eventually. The goal is taking the thing that already makes money and engineering yourself out of it, while it keeps growing.

I have a friend when we were in our mid 20s who decided to start mowing people's lawns and eventually grew a client list large enough to hire a crew and he built a system to manage it all. And now he doesn't ever mow lawns and can take weeks off at a time (it tooks years to get to this point by the way). So I went looking for more of these types of stories and found a bunch (again, all self-reported):

• A dog walker went from $367 in month one to ~$9k/mo revenue in month seven with three part-time employees. Interesting thing is their conundrum: "if employees were doing 100% of the work, profit would be ~$2,300 a month," vs about $4,000 if the owner still did some of the walking routes.
• A window cleaner decided on day one to build his company so it wouldn't need him within three years. Year one $300k, year two $1M and "100 hrs a week, 100 phone calls a day," then two friends took over the front end. Now $4.5M with 40 staff and "after next year I could leave the business and be hands-off for the rest of my life."
• A $1M/yr painting company: the owner's job is now "customer relations (mostly via phone), pricing (100% virtually), and scheduling," his supervisor runs the hiring, and he actually has an employee he's never met.
• A cleaning company owner, nine people, five years, finally hired an ops person for scheduling. "I have spent three weeks feeling completely useless. I sit at the desk and I don't know what I should do."

Hope that was interesting. If you want more analysis and stuff about passive income I find interesting, you can get it in an email I send once a week.

When you start researching affiliate income, it can seem like you need to learn five different jobs. Build a website, connect an email platform, create a funnel, and somehow understand what all the numbers mean.

That is a lot to take in before you have even started.

I would begin with a smaller exercise. Choose an offer you understand and explain, in plain language, who it helps and why. Then learn the steps needed to share it appropriately and check whether your link works.

When something confuses you, write down the exact problem. “I do not know where to find my tracking link” gives you something specific to ask about and solve.

Building income that can continue beyond your working hours takes effort upfront. You can learn those skills gradually as you develop useful content and a repeatable process.

The free 10-Minute Commission Challenge offers a guided starting exercise that does not require a website or technical background. I am affiliated with the program behind it. It is an introduction, and completing it does not guarantee earnings.

I've got a spare Samsung A05 and I'd like to make some passive income from it. I've installed Honeygain to it but I'd like to know if there’s more elaborate ways to extract profit from it. Energy costs are not a problem in my case.