Sure, a lot of these people were just buying hype from these "get rich from drop shipping!" influencers, just like a million other suckers who got dollar signs in their eyes with real estate schemes, pyramid sale schemes, yada yada, a tale as old as time. I don't think this "passive income" trap is really anything new, and I don't think it was some unique thing that "ate a generation of entrepreneurs", as if that trap didn't exist then instead we'd see all these successful people.

Instead, what I think has drastically changed over the past 40 years or so is the ability of a solopreneur to make real money. Just look at all the posts on HN asking about how much people make on their side gigs. You rarely see anything more than a couple hundred bucks a month. There are notable exceptions, but unfortunately a lot of those notable exceptions are scammy, spammy business models. It's just simply much harder as a small/smaller business to make money and compete with the big boys. Wealth inequality doesn't just apply to people, but also companies. For example, in the past many entrepreneurial types may have started retail stores, while now it's incredibly difficult to compete with the likes of Amazon et al. I read an article recently that the number of public companies has halved compared to a few decades ago. The Wilshire 5000 stock index, for example, actually only includes about 3400-3700 companies now.

The author is acting like it hasn't always been this way. But it always has.

There have always been people who felt the allure of the get rich quick scheme. Its always been true that if they just spent the same effort on doing things properly they would probably make it but instead they bounce from one stupid scheme to the next.

Often its combined with some ideology about how the normal world is full of suckers and they are going to escape by not playing the game. Fraudsters love to target people who want to pull one over on the world. They are easy to manipulate so they usually fall for it when presented with an opportunity too good to be true.

The article, with a couple details about the specific examples changed could have probably been written in victorian times.

Quite the opposite for me. I'd like to have freedom to work on things I want to work on without "paying rent", "paying medical bills", or "short term profitability" being a constraint.

It was enormously influential and was likely involved in every one of these failed entrepreneur's ventures

This discussion reads like 'staying inside from 2019-2022 changed social structures' without saying COVID once

> What actually makes money hasn't changed. You find something people need. You get good at providing it. You charge a fair price and you keep showing up even when it's tedious and even when you don't want to. You build relationships over years. You build reputation over years.

You can make money doing this, yes--but most people who are really rich don't. There are lots of ways to game the system that don't involve the kinds of wacky things the article talks about.

This also ruined Reddit as the source for this research. Before social media growth hackers figured out how to run campaigns on Reddit (around three years ago feels right, though I'm sure it's been happening at a smaller scale for a lot longer), you could type "best $THING site:reddit.com" and be fairly sure that you'll get a discussion about really good products amongst actual people. Nowadays, you can be fairly sure that most of the discussion is astroturfing, with some of it being completely AI-generated.

This is also ruining my _other_ use case for Reddit: finding good places to eat in my favorite cities recommended by locals that live there.

> podcast hosts interviewing each other in an endless circle of mutual promotion where everyone claimed to make $30K/month

It's always $30k/mo _revenue_. Never profit. We don't talk about profit.

The author apparently never read Tim Ferriss’ The 4 hour work week which not only whiteboarded some of the described schemes 20 years ago, but also had an illustration of a hammock suspended between two palm trees on the cover.

That was the dream: Set up a system, live on a beach.

- The productivity gang, if everyone is so productive and so well organised then what are the outcomes of this productivity?

- Self help - if self help books are solving real problems then where is the need to buy multiple self help books?

- The course trap - if someone is already earning millions dollars where is the need for him to sell $699 course

These are some questions I would ask myself regularly, there is nothing right or wrong because end of the everyone has to servive.

Calling it “ambition” is generous IMO. Passive income chasers always give “desperation” more than “ambition”. I also feel a bit weird about mourning “a diverted generation of entrepreneurs”, personally I feel like this generational obsession with entrepreneurship almost forcibly led to the dropshipping scams we see today. In a world where everyone is constantly trying to get some side project off the ground of course some folks are going to pursue the shortcut version of that.

While that isn’t always true, honesty is a great defense against being enlisted in scams that promise easy money.

One thing the author does NOT see, however, is that the local folks doing all the hard work like mowing lawns, building furniture, etc. are in absolute panic over "AI" because their niche little lawn mowing/car washing/house cleaning business has been determined to be irrelevant by ChatGPT, etc. Oh and before you ask, there are folks claiming they can solve that exact thing, and those hard working folks are buying those products, hoping it will solve their downtrend in internet leads.

I like the sound of a "rent seeking social parasite" trap.

As the Mikado says in the eponymous Gilbert & Sullivan opera:

"something humorous, but lingering, with either boiling oil or melted lead."

That was before I became old enough (as I am now) to live off my superannuation and pension, which is also "passive income" but joy of joys, not a side gig. I'm not in denial about where my pension income comes from. It's other people's labour. That's what I'm invested in.

Sure, these people could have "worked" for their money, self-employed or as a "wagey in a cagey", but the whole point was that they didn't want to do it.

How would you approach someone to help them out of it? Don't think I can just throw them this article and say "you're wrong".

dividends and treasury bonds give passive earnings, you need capital. the "passive income" savants did not and do not have capital.

case in point: it should not be noteworthy that the author's friend was "$800 in the hole", it should be such a rounding error that it couldn't be any of Joan's concern. And honestly, it probably isn't and Joan put an obsessive amount of weight into an off-comment.

$800,000 in treasuries, on the other hand, now you have passive income - only ~$37,000/yr - but enough to live like a royalty in South East Asia for the next 30 years, passively, followed by getting all $800,000 back.

Class inequality aside, throwing darts at the wall and seeing what sticks isn't a bad business strategy, and you really don't need to be passionate about any particular business idea to collect income.

I hope Joan's friends found something that worked from them. For me its just stay employed so I can accumulate capital for the side projects. Sometimes side projects become bigger than the employment, but my businesses are just expeditions, not forever projects.

I've never watched dropshipping influencers but I did sell some of my own electronics on eBay and noticed some opportunities in the process. Sometimes I put up identical listings as someone else's at a wildly inflated price, and people would buy from me because it seemed more serious. I would buy from the cheaper ad and put my own buyer's address in the shipping destination. Never seeing the product. Not scalable as I think its against the one of the terms, but you can do it between marketplaces too.

A more hasty fellow might have flagged this post as self-advertisement without necessary tags.

Passive income is from rental properties, mutual funds and (my dream) a rich uncle's trust fund.

I started a business like this, but it wasn't passive. I shipped everything to my office before inspecting and shipping product out.

It lasted almost 10 years with 1 million annual revenue.

It was not passive.

the piece ive been thinking about though is the distinction between extractive info-products and compiled info-products. the affiliate blog churning out blender reviews someone never touched is extractive. but a furniture maker who writes a book about furniture making, from 20 years of doing it, isnt really "passive income" even if the book sells while they sleep. its just consulting-at-scale. the work was front-loaded, not absent.

the trap as she frames it is when the book comes first and the 20 years of experience never happens. when the product IS the meta-product about how to make the product. thats the ouroboros she nails.

fwiw im currently 4 days into a 30-day experiment shipping public work daily before asking anyone to pay for a compiled version. its painful in a way the "passive" framing cant accommodate, which is probably a sign its real. the people who sold "passive" never had to live through the days where nothing happens.

What some devs usually fall for ( not by watching some youtube video, but by falling into the idea organically on their own as a kind of emergent behaviour ) is doing the minimal effort of a saas, like a template of the necessary part without adding the actual value.

The way this most often presents itself is a payment proxy, think about the minimal requirements for any software service, it charges money, so that's where they start, a stripe account, maybe an LLC, payment links or payment tables, they can now charge money. Then they make a frontend, a website, of any kind, this comes first, not to serve some kind of need, a landing page, and the actual product is a landing page as well, use react as well because that's the thing you do.

Finally, what is computing, it has something to do with data, so let users upload some images or videos, then you let them charge users for it. Bam, you have now reached the same app SaaS that millions of indie devs developed, like a patreon thing, an OnlyFans if you allow that shit, a gumroad. A host that allows uploaders to charge money.

If you don't even want to go through the hassle of hosting the images or content, you can just let the users upload a link, and charge for that

Must be thousands of these Linktree, campsite, taplink, patreon, cafecito, matecito, tecito.

The dropshipping thing is similar to this but it has a physical component, the idea of a business is just the minimal core, a caricature conception of what a business is, you buy a thing, and you sell it for more.

I do disagree that all sub$100 blenders are the same, though. But still! The main reason restaurants use Vitamix blenders is that they are so much safer when blending burning hot stuff, like soups. When you turn off a normal blender, you’re fairly likely to create an air bubble that pops a little later, sending drops of very hot liquid into the face/eyes of the operator. A Vitamix, if you turn it off correctly, does not create the bubble. This is irrelevant for most home users, including me. So I don’t have one.

I knew a few guys like that in crypto too, before crypto came along and they got into that, this guy told me he’d written a twitter app, it was a bot that pumped gold at some influencers command. Spurred me to write an app though.

I personally made it happen by working a FAANG SWE job for 13 years, not getting sidetracked by the startup cult, saving and investing 70% of my after tax income, etc. And no I didn't get into crypto, but I still managed to make it with conventional investments.

In fact, I chose to pursue a career in the tech industry in order to pursue financial independence in the first place. Because I knew back then (circa 2005) all the tech Kool aid was BS. That "don't be evil" was just a facade. And time has proven me right and my haters wrong, those who thought it was unethical for me to place wealth building ahead of career building.

It's been four years since I've been out of a job. Now I'm creating more passion oriented content. I'm never bored.

I just upped my retirement contribution and decided that the big evil BigCos can do all the value creating and the finance middle men can have their take.

I guess that's the reason everyone does the slumlord or VRBO thing.

They'll keep existing as long as the root cause that creates them (massive wealth inequality in general and the growing delta between productivity and wages) exists, so probably until our financial systems fully collapse in about 2032.

Were these the people who were really going to do anything substantive anyway? Or just the shortcut-taking types?

Ah, the story of a generation

I now work in high level education in one of the top universities in that field in Europe and so I am in touch with many of his generational peers. Sadly I can't help but recognize this a significant trend, within some students (luckily a minority) thst has emerged in the past 5 years. As if they want to do the thing without actually doing the thing. Like a musician who wants to be a musician, but despises spending time on playing or rehearsing actual music.

I am not entirely sure what it is all about, but I could imagine both the internet and a certain US president has shaped the idea that appearance is the only thing that matters, while substance is for losers and suckers.