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How I Killed My ₹80,000 Passive Income (And Why Traditional Investing is a Trap)

By Kuldeep Singh May 21, 2026 5 min read
The death of passive income in India due to inflation and taxes

I completely killed an ₹80,000 per month passive income stream because of one incredibly stupid reason.

If you read my previous breakdown, you know that one of my games unexpectedly blew up on the Play Store. Almost overnight, it started generating around ₹80,000 to ₹90,000 in pure passive income. It felt like I had made it. But then, I made a fundamental error because I didn't understand the real difference between saving and investing.

Let me explain exactly what went wrong, and why doing what everyone tells you to do might actually be keeping you from getting wealthy.

The Generational Illusion of Investing

As generations change, our investment vehicles change with them.

But look closely, and you'll see one glaring commonality across all three generations: Most people are not investing to get wealthy; they are investing simply to secure their older selves.

The Hard Truth:

Putting your money into mutual funds, SIPs, and index funds will absolutely give you security. It will protect you from inflation. But it will rarely make you rich-rich.

The Fatal Mistake: Starving the Cash Cow

In my case, when the money started rolling in from the game, I did what conventional financial wisdom dictates: I saved all the profits and aggressively invested them into mutual funds and the stock market.

That was the stupid mistake.

Instead of parking that capital into safe 12% returns, I should have reinvested it right back into the source that was generating it.

I could have taken that ₹80,000 and hired extra developers to build out new apps and games faster. But instead, my ego stepped in, and I tried to do everything alone. I have always known the massive leverage of Facebook and Google Ads. I could have easily hired an expert media buyer to scale the game's user acquisition. Instead, I chose to spend my time trying to learn it all myself.

I even bought an iPhone to port the game over to the iOS App Store, but the device just sat there. Inaction is the worst enemy of all. You simply cannot do everything yourself.

The Opportunity Cost: Mutual Funds vs Reinvesting in Business

My Playbook for Founders & Creators

If you are building a digital product, a brand, or an app, and you find yourself in a similar situation, here are the top lessons I learned the hard way:

1. Experiment Aggressively and Double Down

Test everything. Once you find the one thing that works, pour all your energy into it. I am using this exact strategy on Instagram right now. If you scroll back to my older Reels, they were barely scraping 100 to 200 views. But once I found a content direction that resonated, I doubled down on it. Now, those same Reels hit anywhere from 10,000 to 1 Million views.

2. Buy Back Your Time (Take Leverage)

Hire help. Doing it all alone makes you incredibly slow in a market that moves lightning-fast. In almost every business scenario, time is infinitely more valuable than money. Pay for speed.

3. Apply the Law of Natural Selection

You need to detach your emotions from your projects. The five fingers on your hand aren't equal, and neither are your business ventures. If you have three active projects and only one is gaining traction, kill the other two. They are dead weight dragging you down.

4. Don't Ignore Your Winner

This was my ultimate downfall. I assumed my top-performing game was on autopilot and would just keep generating cash. I diverted all my focus and energy into trying to drag my underperforming projects up to its level. The reality? Without focus, updates, and maintenance, my top game slowly bled out and dropped in the rankings. By trying to save the losers, I ended up killing my own champion.

The Takeaway

When you build a machine that prints money, don't take the money out to buy a safe mutual fund. Feed the money back into the machine until it takes over the market.

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Kuldeep Singh - Finance blogger and consumer investigator

About Kuldeep Singh

I believe that knowledge is the ultimate currency. Through Deep Money Minds, I bridge the gap between complex financial concepts and everyday practical technology to help you succeed.