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  • Welcome back to coffee time with your host, the Ex-Google Ex- Facebook TechLead.

  • Today I wanted to talk to you about some of my top tips for

  • generating passive income, as someone who's been running passive income for over the past decade.

  • Throughout the years, I've had passive income businesses that would make just a few dollars a day to

  • thousands of dollars a day and I would find myself wondering: "Why am I even going to work that day if I've already made more

  • than my day job?"

  • And then I remember they've got free breakfast.

  • Now, passive income is this alluring idea where you're making money in your sleep

  • and then when you wake up your work for the day is already done.

  • You've already made your money and you can just continue sleeping and you don't even have to wake up anymore.

  • Many people actually will tell you that passive income is a myth. It doesn't quite happen like that, which is partially true.

  • So I wanted to clarify for you how this actually works and give you my top tips.

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  • So what you need to understand is this type of truly passive income.

  • While it does exist,

  • it usually doesn't make you much.

  • It earns you a few bucks here and there, maybe

  • set up a blog, put up a few

  • affiliate links,

  • let it go. And what really happens is if you were to put in a little bit of effort, right, put in some effort into

  • advertising, marketing and building up whatever passive income you have,

  • You can actually 10x the amount of growth you have.

  • It will almost always be more worthwhile

  • to play somewhat of an active hand in your business, which is why I would think of this more as this concept

  • I like to call "Leveraged Passive Income"

  • It's a hybrid approach between passive and active where you build a vehicle for generating income.

  • You still have to drive the vehicle yourself.

  • You still have to put in some of that work,

  • but the amount of impact the money that you make

  • can actually be multiplied.

  • So for example,

  • if you have a store and you're selling some product, a customer comes in, they make the transaction, they leave.

  • That's 100% active income and you're earning every cent of that.

  • But if the customer comes in and you give them a brochure and you sell something else and you get a commission on that sell,

  • that's affiliate marketing.

  • Then you generate a little bit more income from that.

  • You still have have to do the same work to bring in the customer,

  • but the amount of income that you're generating is now maybe doubled.

  • Now if in addition you get the customer signed up to a mailing list and you start promoting your products and other

  • products to this person over time, then the lifetime value of this customer

  • you've just increased by a lot more.

  • And meanwhile,

  • you haven't put in all that much additional time and effort into getting this stuff set up.

  • What you've done is

  • multiplied the original active income stream that you set up at first.

  • You're leveraging that original customer that you earned through hard work into additional streams of income

  • So for example, if you're running a website, you can cross-promote your other websites and products.

  • You can put in affiliate links and this is an idea that I've been toying with on my YouTube channel as well.

  • If you check the links in the description below, you'll see there's a bunch of other things I'm promoting.

  • Speaking of which, check out techinterviewpro.com,

  • where I will fast track your career and teach you

  • how to pass those coding interviews and land the tech job of your dreams.

  • But what happens is anytime I publish a video

  • or for you,

  • it could be publishing a blog post, launching a new website feature,

  • making a new product.

  • It kickstarts this whole passive income engine where all these additional streams of income start making money.

  • So normally, if I just make one video, I get some advertising revenue and that would just be about it.

  • That's the active income stream.

  • But I've actually multiplied it into all these

  • additional revenue sources and that's what I would encourage you to think about doing as well.

  • Don't think so much about making something a hundred percent passive, where you can just abandon the whole thing and go to sleep

  • But if it's something in-between,

  • if you still have to put in some work,

  • but then you leverage that work to generate additional income streams,

  • I think that's going to be far more effective.

  • Another tip I have for you is to understand that failure may very well be your competitive advantage.

  • You know, these areas of generating passive income is relatively new, unexplored.

  • A lot of people don't understand it and I think a lot of people don't start these things

  • because they're afraid they're going to fail.

  • And yeah, you will.

  • You probably will fail your first few times.

  • But that's okay. Just accept it. Build that into the original cost.

  • You know

  • You may have to try two to three times to come up with something that works.

  • If it were truly easy and mapped out,

  • everybody would be doing it.

  • Passive income, especially making it online, is a relatively new industry enabled through the internet

  • There are so many wacky ideas out there like self-publishing ebooks,

  • selling merchandise,

  • making YouTube videos,

  • Advertising through Facebook and Instagram as launching a Shopify store,

  • selling merchandise on Amazon, making t-shirts

  • and countless other ideas.

  • A lot of these areas people don't understand.

  • And they haven't written books about.

  • It's unmapped and you just have to go out there and

  • explore it and try it and see what works and doesn't and there's going to be failures.

  • It's almost guaranteed

  • you're going to fail.

  • You're going to make mistakes.

  • You're not gonna get it right

  • the first few times.

  • You're gonna lose some money at first here and there, but that's okay!

  • As long as you limit your risks, don't let it get you down,

  • learn from those failures,

  • it's going to all build up to become

  • competitive advantages for you.

  • Almost any time I've made serious amounts of money,

  • it has been through writing a trend

  • You have to keep yourself open to

  • opportunities, keep an open mind

  • and chase those ideas when you see them.

  • These days, if you were to just start selling t-shirts,

  • when people have been selling t-shirts for centuries,

  • it's not likely you're going to see some runaway overnight success business here,

  • unless you have some competitive advantage that nobody else thought about

  • or there's some trend that you're writing enabled through technology.

  • It's funny that for me, I don't consider myself to be particularly ambitious or a hard worker.

  • Rather, I see opportunities for success.

  • I know this then and then I feel that success chose me.

  • I need to just go after that idea and pursue it and see what I can make of it

  • because I see a clear money-making opportunity sometimes.

  • And I just think: "I should probably try that idea.

  • I really should.

  • I need to make some time to give it a go."

  • Because I'm not going to be satisfied until

  • I can see whether this idea works or not and half the time it doesn't work,

  • but the other half is succeeds.

  • And a lot of people, they don't pursue their online businesses,

  • their passive income streams,

  • because they think they first need to learn how to do coding.

  • They need to make some website that has order processing and it needs to be automated and scalable.

  • My tip for you is don't worry about automating it yet.

  • You can do all the order processing by hand.

  • You can set up a blog or a website,

  • throw in some PayPal buttons,

  • put in some Google forms for order processing if you want.

  • And just launch it, see how it does.

  • Every evening,

  • maybe you'll have to go through and do a bunch of manual processing by yourself,

  • administrative tasks.

  • And that's okay,

  • but over time what you can do is figure out what can be automated and just automate that later.

  • You can do it through coding, hire programmers.

  • Or simply just hire people to do the order processing for you.

  • If you remember when Facebook first launched their "virtual assistant",

  • they ended up just hiring a bunch of normal people to be on the back and answering people's questions.

  • And then they tried to use some machine learning to automate some of it.

  • But it doesn't need to be a hundred percent automated through computers and code.

  • It can just be a manual process where you hire some normal people.

  • That's considered automation too, actually.

  • Just hiring other people to do stuff.

  • Now as you're working on this passive income stream,

  • I recommend that you don't talk about it.

  • And there are a number of reasons.

  • Number One: I know that when I was starting out this YouTube channel for the longest time,

  • a lot of people were hating on me.

  • Friends and family, they tell me this was silly.

  • I even shut down the channel at one point.

  • And this has been a recurring theme in my life.

  • Several years ago,

  • I was making those silly Facebook apps and games

  • and the fact of the matter is people just don't understand the business

  • It's a relatively new area

  • and people are going to be more inclined to go towards the active income streams that they're used to

  • where you go into work,

  • you get paid thirty bucks an hour or so.

  • No more, no less.

  • That is purely active income.

  • If you don't go to work, you don't get paid.

  • There's just going to be a lot of pushback from people who don't understand it.

  • As well as their "crabs in a bucket" mentality

  • where people try to pull you down to where they are.

  • Not to mention, there have been studies to show that

  • if you start talking about an accomplishment,

  • then you lose motivation for that

  • because you feel that you've already accomplished it in your head.

  • Even though you haven't actually finished the project,

  • just by telling other people

  • by that you feel that you've accomplished something and you start losing motivation

  • So just do the grind.

  • And then my last and final tip is:

  • Rather than inventing your own brand new idea,

  • which you can do if you like,

  • I would encourage you to perhaps iterate on other people's ideas

  • So take a look at what's working out there and you don't necessarily want to copy the idea,

  • but you can take it and put your own spin on it and then make it even better.

  • And this is one of the tried-and-true paths to success.

  • Just take a look at what's working out there and make it better

  • In product teams,

  • we refer to this as either a zero to one product, where you're inventing something new.

  • And usually there's a bunch of risk in this because you don't even know if it's going to work,

  • there's no product market fit

  • or you can do a one to two product where you take a product that's already there

  • and you just iterate on that and make it better

  • So if you're starting out and want to de-risk the

  • situation a little,

  • take a look at people operating in the same space that you might want to be

  • and really study their products.

  • Take a look at what they're doing

  • why is it working and think about how you can put your own spin on it

  • Make it your own because we all have something we can bring to this world

  • All right

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  • So there you have it. Overall I think it's not so much about truly passive income as it is about leveraged income.

  • Let me know your top tips on generating passive income.

  • If you liked the video give it a like and subscribe and I'll see you next time. Thanks. Bye

Welcome back to coffee time with your host, the Ex-Google Ex- Facebook TechLead.

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