My 'side project' is pretty conventional, but it surprises people to learn how much I've earned from it with very little effort. At least once or twice a week, I use my lunch break to walk to the local thrift store. I look up items on eBay as I browse and buy anything that would net me $20+ (basically to cover my lunch). I stick to the 'hard goods' section (things like electronics, games, DVDs, home appliances, books, etc). I avoid clothing which is difficult to browse quickly, difficult to list and difficult to find comparable items. I also avoid anything that would be unwieldy to carry home or ship.
The first year I started doing this, I grossed about $20000. Last year was bad. Our thrift stores shut down because of Covid. In late June of this year, I started back up slowly because our thrift stores came back. My gross for the last six months is $3,238.63. And again, because of Covid, I've stopped going daily like I was which cut into my fun money.
Last year I bought a brand new pinball machine from my thrift store finds.
Some tips:
If you can go every day, you only have to look at the 'new' stuff which saves lots of time.
The eBay app has a barcode scanner so you can look up anything that's in its original packaging by just scanning it.
Don't pass up anything vintage looking that's still sealed (even if it looks worthless). I sold nearly $100 worth of new in package vintage incandescent bulbs a little while back. I got the lot of them for like $10.
Save all the boxes you have coming to your house in advance of starting this. You can't sell stuff that you can't easily box up and ship.
Never use the post office or UPS/FedEx store. You can get a significant discount through pirateship.com (free to use, offers steep US Postal and UPS discounts) or even eBay's own shipping.
EDIT: A few more tips...
Once you're shipping at least one thing a week, buy a label printer like a Rollo Thermal Printer. It will save you lots of wasted time and energy in printing out, cutting the shipping label to size, taping it to the package securely, etc.
Invest in a good industrial shipping tape gun (not those cheap little plastic ones), get good brand-name shipping tape and a couple of large rolls of bubble wrap... also, start saving the packaging that comes into your house from your online purchases to be reused.
Get a bunch of 'newsprint' packing paper for packing up your stuff.
Basically: don't cheap out on supplies.
Stay organized. I use a set of plastic bins in the basement to store my items once they're listed.
In Florida, estate sales price their stuff such that it is hard to flip. And by estate sale, I'm talking about the companies that come in and price everything, organize the items and are running the cash register.
If it is an estate sale run by the individual owner this is usually good and nothing more than a garage sale where everything is sale including the proverbial kitchen sink.
I recently found pirateship and it is indeed significantly cheaper than retail shipping prices. I told my mom about it and she refused to believe it isn't a scam!
USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc. all charge consumers "retail" prices that have very high profit margin for them. Businesses negotiate significantly lower rates that are closer to the real shipping cost. Pirateship acts as a broker, allowing people to access those lower negotiated rates.
I think a lot of people like the hobbyist collection aspect of DVDs. There's also a pretty significant contingent of people who want access to films that have no (or no consistent) streaming options. Also, lots of films and TV shows that do not have licensed content.
Yep! Definitely look them up when you see them. There are lots of rare and hard to find ones... I focus on things like Criterion, box sets and anything that looks 'odd'. I picked up a five disc Anchor Bay set of WWII movies for $4 and they sold for nearly $15 each.
Don't skip on CDs, VHS, Cassettes or vinyl records! Though be sure to check the condition and that the correct disc is definitely in the case before you buy it.
Vinyl records are difficult to grade, so I would avoid them unless you can play them and reliably grade them OR they're sealed OR the surface on both sides appear immaculate. Sadly, they usually just add to my already overstuffed vinyl collection instead of winding up on eBay.
VHS and audio cassettes are hot right now as well, so if you see some classics, definitely give them a look on eBay before you pass on them. They usually have a barcode.
Typically someone will drop off their whole collection at place, so consider buying items to sell in a 'lot'.
A complete hardback Harry Potter book set is $100+! (usually $2 a piece at my thrift shop)
I almost have a complete set from my many trips to the thrift store, so pick them up when you see them!
I just make sure that I will net $20 before I commit to purchasing an item from the thrift shop. This is:
final eBay sale price
- eBay fees
- shipping // unless you have the buyer pay actual shipping
costs
- the cost I paid for the item
--------------------------------------
my net profit (hopefully more than $20 for my time and effort)
last week this happened:
two refrigerator filters new in package ($3.99 each) - selling on eBay for about $40 each - retail for about $50 each.
My total sale price was $69.95 for both (I undercut the lowest listing by a dollar or so and offered 'free' shipping)
My shipping cost was about $5. My eBay fees were about $10 - they take quite a chunk.
$70 - 25 = $45 profit
I probably could have held onto them longer, charging a higher price and not offering 'free' shipping, but sales have been slow because I haven't been buying much so I made them too good to pass up.
$45 for about 20 minutes of hustle isn't terrible. It took me all of 3 minutes to list them on eBay. I plopped them on my kitchen table, snapped a picture of them, searched for the same item in the 'sold' section of eBay. Clicked 'sell one like this' link, filled in a price, selected a shipping option and clicked 'post'.
Looks like 2021 and earlier, there's a cap of $20,000 before you need to report to IRS using Form 1099-K. Assuming the author is from the US, they may have stayed below this limit and not needed to report. However, beginning in January 2022 the limit is dropping down to $600 before needing to be reported using Form 1099-K.
Yep, I haven’t exceeded the reporting amount yet. Hopefully my tax situation doesn’t get overly complicated. If it does, I may need a new side project.
Probably somewhere around 13,000 I would guess. I haven’t been keeping track as it is still just a fun hobby-ish venture. I enjoy the thrill-of-the-hunt more than the money-making aspect. Though if the tax situation makes it complicated I may have to reconsider. It did net me a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pinball machine!
This is a really cool idea. I don’t live close enough to a thrift shop to justify this on more than a once-a-week basis unfortunately. I might have to start trying this though!
Funnily enough, the digital scale I use for all my shipments was a thrift store find! I don’t know about discount shipping supplies. I sourced nearly 100% of my supplies from Amazon. I did have to invest in some nice vinyl album mailers after adding vinyl records to my repertoire. There is definitely a large up front cost for shipping supplies to avoid using those pack and ship places and their high prices.
As someone who used to have to buy everything secondhand, this makes me sad. I can't tell you how exciting it was to find something that you wanted but knew you couldn't afford going for a reasonable price at the thrift store. I feel like by buying up all of those quality items, you're depriving people in less fortunate situations from experiencing the same sort of happiness.
agreed, this is scummy. thrift and secondhand stores exist to serve a certain underprivileged segment of the population. not to facilitate arbitrage. but to each their own.
I’m on the fence about whether this is scummy. On the one hand, it is diminishing an institution that families like my own relied on to have halfway-decent things for our home. On the other, thrift stores could sell these things themselves and have more revenue to support charitable causes if that’s what they should be doing. I don’t think GP is a scum bag, but when a VC backed iPhone app shows up to gig-economize mass thrift store raiding and selling online I’ll be bothered.
That said, I don’t think “we shouldn’t let everybody shop there then” is meaningful. Means testing is itself expensive and would likely penalize the very people who need thrift stores. Some things depend on the members of a society having a shared sense of what is and isn’t decent. Halloween candy is free but if I organize gangs of kids to empty out every candy bowl and sell it online, Halloween won’t be any fun.
A lot of the quality stuff in thrift stores is bought by professional buyers and resold. I'd guess 90%+, it could be country dependent. It's part of the thrill to find underpriced items and make a good profit. If there are still a lot of bargains to be made at your local thrift stores, expect these bargains to disappear when pro's discover them or when stores discover that they underprice. Whatever is still left as a bargain is simply your niche knowledge advantage.
Same here, though I'm more keen on finding free items on the curb and/or posted on FBMP and CL. I also buy a fair amount from those places as well. We sold a Jeep Wrangler interior carpet set for $175 + shipping that we picked up for free from FBMP.
Right now making about $500/month with $150 going to a 10x10 climate controlled storage unit. At the door going into our unit is a dumpster and we found about 5 huge bags of toys that my wife is going through and listing. We've sold about $30 worth of free stuff from that single dumpster.
In July 2021 I did really well but was going balls to the wall with it and probably made close to $1000 that month. But I got burnt out quick and slowly started getting back into it. My wife has pretty much taken over it as her part- to full-time job (once she gets started on something she can't stop). She has successfully listed about 5 items a day for the past month.
Absolutely correct about the thermal label printer. Bought a brand new one for a fraction of the cost off of FBMP ;-)
I bought a tape gun and wasted more tape than what actually got on the box so ditched that.
Agree with don't skimp on shipping products. Makes life way easier.
I started an OSS project to enable me and my team to receive webhooks at a big co where Ngrok was banned and so was SSH. It works over an HTTP proxy using websockets. One of the requirements I had was for 1st class container support - so it could be run inside a K8s pod and support LoadBalancers for TCP traffic as well as HTTPS. The OSS project was very popular, but drew very little sponsorship. I then pivoted to a commercial license and got some more sign-ups, but not as many as I wanted - companies were happy to pay up front for a one year static license, but individuals and home users were not.
So I introduced a personal tier that was covered for commercial use - inspired by Jetbrains and added a monthly subscription option for it. Both of those actions helped increase usage and signups with personal users. Companies still tend to want to pay for a year.
Even though this is completely self-hosted software, developers seem to like paying for tools monthly. Some abuse this by cancelling the subscription in the months they don't expect to use a tunnel, or opening the software then cancelling the subscription and waiting until the process has to restart before re-subscribing. Not much I can do about this side of it.
If people are interested, the product is called inlets and is easy to find on the Internet. I also write about my OSS and independent business work each week in a subscription newsletter using GitHub Sponsors (another side project, if you like)
Books I could recommend: Monetizing innovation, Obviously Awesome, 1-Page Marketing Plan & Minimalist Entrepreneur. I'm not affiliated with any of these titles, but consider them core reading for indie devs and for side gigs.
>Some abuse this by cancelling the subscription in the months they don't expect to use a tunnel...
I think I understand how the second case you list would be abuse. If I'm understanding correctly, they're having a tunnel active without a subscription. Is that right?
I don't understand why cancelling a subscription when you know you aren't going to use the service would be considered abuse though. I'm asking as someone who do that without considering it might be abusive until I read your post.
That short notice cancellation flexibility is something I look for in a service, and it enables to sign-up for things I'm unsure of without being tied to them, or I can't afford a commitment to. If there was a minimum contract length, there are services I wouldn't bother with at all.
I generally do it with larger companies though. I look at it as, "I'll pay for what I use, or I won't use your product." (Crunchyroll, the anime streaming with the worst stagnant platform being the example that springs immediately to mind.)
Is there something specific to the way they do it or to the nature of the product? Or is it just a dick move to do specifically to a lone dev or something?
There is pretty much no customer support required - I only received 12 emails about it last year. There have only been a handful of thefts. The vast majority of wallets never get stolen.
Yeah - the whole thing is appengine, fitting fully in the free tier, and getting the html template for that home page working on every browser was the hardest bit. There's no login or anything, and the database is just one record per sale. Wallets are all pregenerated. Checking for theft just involves polling a block-explorer API and sending a mail if anything changed.
Fixing that would require me to figure out how to deploy appengine stuff, now that Google requires you to use a whole new deployment flow, with a credit card required.
Not gonna do that unless something more major breaks...
The iOS app is much newer and much more niche, but it’s starting to break ground.
For now most of the revenue is in macOS but my ultimate goal is to make iOS be my #1 platform in terms of revenue. That’s because, simply, I’d rather offload a lot of marketing and deployment/payment bandwidth to the App Store to focus on the products.
May i ask, if you are avoiding the MAS because of technical restrictions or because of the revenue cut?
I'm also developing a Mac app and did not decide yet on MAS vs. Paddle vs. an application to Setapp.
You have so many of them. How much time do you use for customer support? I'd like to publish multiple apps, but I'm afraid that customer support will take all my time.
Just bought mission control plus (As soon as I read the description, my first reaction was "Take my money", I wouldn't have minded paying 15-20 usd for that but to be fair, 8.99 meant that I just bought blindly instead of doing the free trial). Experience buying on your site is not great:
1. After entering my credit card details, I'm redirected back to your site without any message (I did receive a confirmation email a few minutes later)
2. It's a nitpick, but there's nothing I dislike more than forcing me to convert to my local currency. First the exchange rate is much worse than what my credit card charges, second I lose out on miles.
We're working on Spam Scanner because we weren't happy with rspamd nor SpamAssassin or any other archaic or non-trivial closed-door tech.
See https://spamscanner.net for more!
Don't determine the users language by the country the request is coming from. My browser wants English, despite me being in Germany, so don't show me the German page. The good thing though was that besides the language selector nothing else was translated.
Quick question that I couldn't find in your FAQ: Can you reply to forwarded emails? As in can you communicate back and forth with someone sending emails to an alias?
I've used a free email forwarding service which didn't give me this functionality (maybe this isn't common practice).
I was recently looking for an email forwarding service to use for a few months, initially I was searching Github for a decent OSS project that could do this for me, which is when I found your repo for Forward Email.
The repo code was exactly what I was looking for, but after browsing your site and noticing how open and transparent it all was, I was instantly sold and bought the Enhanced package.
So ultimately, your open source code and business transparency[0] is what convinced me to pay instead of self-host.
It brings in right around $500 a month. It is fun to develop, especially that I can dabble into frontend and UI design which is quite far away from what I'm doing daily.
Interestingly, it used to bring in much more but the heydays of apps are over.
It's kind of shocking though that 1 million downloads equals "only" $500 in ad revenue. I would have expected a much higher value. May I ask what the install base is?
As others said, the active number of downloads is way lower (50k). Even then, I'm pretty bad at marketing and have no idea how to grow it or optimize the monetization.
It seems from 10 ideas 9 doesn't work and even the 10th brings only modest results.
Probably because the user base is by definition pretty small. I never used a graphing calculator and neither see any use for it but those who do use it and know what it is have probably found it already. Seems to me marketing for such a niche product has very fast diminishing returns.
I also have an app. It’s interesting I read here on HN about how it would be nice for companies to not sell private data to 3rd parties. I don’t collect data, yet it seems most people aren’t willing to pay even a few $ for software.
On the other hand, the Ti-89 still selling for >$100.
In my experience, a lot of these paid apps are gold, but discovery is tough. The mainstream, ad supported alternative gets all the eyeballs. Maybe there should be an index of tracking-free software, if there isn’t already.
I started AppMasker (https://appmasker.com) a few months ago. It’s basically a reverse-proxy as a service (using Caddy) and makes adding custom domains to your web app a breeze.
Still working on my marketing pitch so feedback is welcome!
Am using Caddy for this exact use-case at work. Thought it would make a good subscription service, but didn't get around to doing it yet. Well done, GP.
Using Caddy it’s not too hard if you know what you’re doing. But if you have many nodes you’re deploying it’s starts to get more complicated. A lot of people don’t know what they’re doing, however.
I'm a SWE turned diy biologist and among the services I offer is bioprospecting for biotech startups. My most recent client hired me to gather soil samples from different biomes and running assays from my home lab to determine if there are any enzyme-producing organisms of interest.
I'm doing a small enough volume that automation isn't quite needed yet. The process is basically creating a soil dilution, culturing some special media broth and then plating samples the next day. If this small experiment shows promise, there's talk of implementing something like Opentrons.
Glad to hear of your interest in bio! I haven't delve much into the business side, but that is something I'm planning to get into on my YouTube channel and Instagram (both are under EverymanBio).
It's free to use and download with an optional Pro subscription that includes additional features and makes > $500/month.
Key things that have helped the revenue in 2021:
- Released a major new version 3.0 which blocks all YouTube ads and has kicked along sales and improved the conversion rate considerably
- Apple's small business program began this year that only takes a 15% cut instead of 30%
- After a long time developing and updating the app, it now includes most features requested by users, so it's achieved a 4+ star rating on the App Stores
- Downloads were originally weighted heavily towards the macOS version but it is now getting more usage on iOS which is growing the overall sales volume
Yes it's possible to build ad blockers on Safari using the Apple content blocker API. Support was also added for Web extensions in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey.
The web extension support is what enabled us to deploy complete YouTube ad blocking on iOS in Safari – previously it wasn't possible to do this reliably just with the content blocker API.
On iOS, Firefox Focus (a single tab browser) comes with a content blocker. Hush is another good content blocker. Of course, Magic Lasso (free or paid).
I've only experienced the dictatorial context of Chrome on Android, so would never have fathomed something like this would ever pass policy. Hence I didn't quite pay proper attention to the copy on the website, which does note that it works on iOS. Thanks.
How much is the Pro subscription please? I can't see it listed on the homepage, and if I go to the App Store page, the "yearly subscription" is listed multiple times at $30 or $15.
The optional Pro subscription is $US30 p/a (with differing prices in other regions).
There's also the free version of the app which includes ad blocking along with a 1 month free trial of the Pro version available in-app to see if it's useful for you before committing to a full year.
Magic Lasso is what enabled me to finally stop using Chrome on my personal devices and just use Safari. I’ve been a happy (and paying) Magic Lasso user for over a year since I heard you advertise on some Mac podcasts.
I built a board game in 2021 that has been just breaking the cutoff for this post, all I do is mail out a few games a week as we get orders. We do all our own fulfillment to save money. Currently trying to design a real video game. I got lucky with the board game because it targeted a really niche audience (rock climbers) and so we weren't really competing with the full board game market, which is honestly super saturated. I think launching a real video game will require taking a similar strategy, and I have some good ideas for this. If you know how to do 3D modeling and animation and have always wanted to make a game as a side project, send a message.
For anybody thinking of following on this path, I would say it's not really worth it except as a fun hobby. I didn't keep track of hours designing/testing very well but we're almost certainly way below minimum wage on the project. Although I've learned a lot about how to make games which has been really cool. You'll make a lot more money if you don't have to manufacture a real product and deal with the high costs of freight and postal shipping. If anybody is curious you can look up "5.15 climbing card game" on google and you'll find it!
Awesome project. I initially youtube'd you, and there was no mention of your card game. I then startpage'd you and found a kickstarter page with a pretty well-made video... why don't you crosspost your video to youtube? and why don't you get someone to review it?
good point... I'm not sure why we never made the youtube video public. Thanks for bringing it up! This is why I feel like making that first game was good practice, I won't make these mistakes for the second one.
1. Does it have a good rating / breakdown in the BoardGameGeek forums?
2. Does it have a review on YouTube that showcases the main game mechanic?
Ideally, a third party review is always better. The board game community is not a harsh one (it's not like you have oceans of "this game sucks!" reviews -- there is a lot of love for the art) but a third party just seems more... relatable. They are also just trying to have fun.
On a discussion thread like this one, I think there is no shame in providing the homepage URL. Here it is after using your Google hint: https://five15game.com/
Looks like a fun game, I'll pass that on to some climber friends. Curious - where did you get the cards printed at? Working on a card game myself, but have been putting off researching that much after getting overwhelmed with options.
Depends on scale. For our initial play-testing I bought a bunch of plastic card sleeves and regular playing cards, and then printed out the 3"x5" game cards on my home printer. The playing cards are to make the card sleeves stiff and this way you can really quickly swap out your cards while play testing.
For prototyping the box and the demo copies we tried a few different print shops that operate in the US. The easiest by far is the game crafter, their website lets you upload and proof your cards through a web portal and I found that to be really good for not making mistakes. Unfortunately their quality is lower because the print runs are so small and the cost is pretty high.
If you get to large scale production (>500 copies) you can start getting things printed for reasonable cost. You can work with a chinese manufacturer directly (a bit risky for a first time project) or use one of the US intermediaries. Panda games is probably the best option there, but their minimum run is 2000.
Thanks for the information and details! Yeah, we're using blank poker cards now and just drawing on them for play testing and that has worked well. I'll check out Game Crafter as a next step as I want some nicer sets to send to friends to help play test.
I really like the idea of games for a niche audience. Does your game lend itself to being a "print & play" game? I launched a Print & Play version of my (very) niche game[0] because I didn't (yet) want to deal with the physical manufacturing and it's been a pretty good experience. Have you written about your journey on creating or manufacturing the game?
In early 2022, I'm going to manufacture a small number of the game using The Game Crafter (it's more than just cards), but the whole idea of manufacturing 500 copies and the logistics of shipping are daunting.
My clone of OhLife called https://ahhlife.com has been making over $500 per month for years now. Daily journal, handled by replying to a prompt email. Marketing is all word of mouth and an occasional mention like this one on HN. Server costs are stable, no maintenance or new features needed, and only a few customer service requests per year.
750words is probably my favorite side-hustle success story that's also a journaling tool. They grew dynamically to about 10-15k users, about a year later monetized for $5 a mo. after growing to nearly 70k users. Incredibly simple and the money is sort of unbelievable as well.
I’m playing with a side project idea that requires sending scheduled emails like this.
Would you be willing to briefly discuss what you use for scheduled emails? My plan so far is to just save email schedules into a DB table with a time stamp they’re due and have a cron job that frequently checks it, but I haven’t gotten a chance to test the scalability and performance of this.
I figure since people are posting things making many times the $500/mo threshold, I should post something making many times less. :)
It's actually pretty cool to just wait a few months and come back to a stash of money. Bought a Quest 2 the other day and didn't give it much thought, partly because of little eggs like this.
The effort to grow it is pretty high relative to the returns, but it's also a lot more "sticky." Normal profit streams dry up if you ignore them, whereas I've had my band of faithful patrons for a long time now. People just like supporting those doing work that resonates with them.
I just visited your website, and had fun in the "small internet" sense. Thanks :)
I was very surprised your pages had a .gmi extension but were actually normal html. Then I figured your "memex" engine probably automatically translates gemini content to html and doesn't bother changing the extension (which in retrospect is more of a feature than a bug). Very nice.
I noticed your search engine is not available on gemini. Any plans for that? The spirit of the search engine is a perfect fit for the gemini ecosystem!
Yeah, the memex straddles both protocols, and the urls are the same save for the protocol. It's essentially a single user wiki based on git and gemtext.
The search engine is available on Gemini, just not at that address. Try gemini://marginalia.nu/search
I think I used to have it on the front page, must have fallen off. That, or I removed it because it would confuse HTTP visitors.
I'm planning a bit of a navigation overhaul soon. Right now it's very hard to find all the various projects I'm running anywhere other than at https://www.marginalia.nu/
My little hardware book, Computer Engineering for Babies launched on Kickstarter a few months ago and blew my mind by raising almost $250k. It’s a simple book with buttons and LEDs to demonstrate different logic gates.
I just shipped out the first batch of books a week ago and now waiting for the next batch of books. It’s gotten pretty demanding pretty quickly but I’m really excited about it. I’m hoping I can soon employ my little sister to manage all the shipping. She’s been an Amazon driver for the last 2 years and I think she’d appreciate a change of pace.
Looks so cool! Do you have any blog or writing to share on the actual process of producing the physical books, which are very customised? I.e. this isn't something someone could fulfill using Amazon's publishing service.
That’s on my todo list. The tldr is that I designed the circuit myself and just started messaging people on alibaba, and that’s how I found my PCBA shop and my book manufacturer.
Kudos for providing jobs. If I were to create a successful company, making others busy doing something nicer than what they would otherwise have given themselves would be the greatest accomplishment I could think of, professionally. But starting with oneself on exactly that is not a bad starting point, at all.
Their parents have no interest in turning their kids into programmers (to my great dismay!) but this looks like something they'll have a blast with anyway.
Honestly, I don't see how "for babies" could be trademarked since it's a literal phrase describing the product. "For Dummies" is not used literally.
That's not to say generic words / phrases cannot be trademarked. Just look at Apple. However, trademarks for a generic term must be very limited in scope initially. If the brand obtains substantial recognition, then a broader trademark may be granted. These broader trademarks are typically reserved for household names. Even Apple had trademark issues when they entered the music industry due to Apple Records.
> Honestly, I don't see how "for babies" could be trademarked since it's a literal phrase describing the product. "For Dummies" is not used literally.
Neither is "For Babies" specific to the series I am describing. The book series is not for babies, as far as I am aware, very few, if any, babies are capable of reading, let alone fully understanding stories that are read to them.
"For Dummies" effectively means using laypersons language to convey complex topics more easily. Not, as you said, to literally mean the readers are of low-intelligence.
Likewise, "For Babies" effectively means using language, images, and story telling to convey complex topics more easily to young children, not just for literal babies.
I saw a TikTok of your book another day, & saved it. Would love this for my future kid.
How do you manage sakes tax collection & other stuff like shipping & such? Assuming you are in US. Do you use Shopify or Etsy or dome online one? Did u apply for a seller's permit to deposit sales tax? If manually, how do you calculate sales tax, because its based on buyer's address right?
I haven’t spent much time on sales tax yet, but I do know there are Shopify plugins (tax jar being the one that comes to mind). I’m currently in Squarespace but don’t love it, and will probably swap to Shopify soon.
It adds more complexity to relationships, but it can also keep families/friends closer because they have more shared goals.
There are some cultures where family businesses, where most members of the family work and participate, are the norm. Quite a huge population of people operate that way.
I would be interested to hear other founders' first-hand experience with this.
In my experience, hiring my younger cousin for occasional work during school/uni breaks has been great, but involving close friends looking for work has been disastrous 3 out of 3 times.
My parents worked with my grand parents before taking over the business and I have occasionally worked with them through the years. You don’t really hire family members. They join you in the family business. It’s a different dynamic but I t doesn’t really cause issue because the family business has always been a part of our family life. The frontier between personal life and work is very blurry but that’s nothing unusual for SME owners.
There's a huge difference between bringing your children into the family business (presumably also preparing them to inherit it) and employing your sister to work for you at your business.
In my parents business it has been a disaster 100/100 times. All friendships all family relations have been completely destroyed by them trying to run a business together. I know it's just an anecdote, but yeah, I'd be careful.
>There are some cultures where family businesses, where most members of the family work and participate, are the norm. Quite a huge population of people operate that way.
Yes. Among Indian comunities, Gujaratis (particularly the Patel sub-community who own the majority of US motels, the Ambanis - Reliance group, big) and the Marwaris (some big Indian businessmen among them, like the Birlas, Ruias, Goenkas), are examples of this.
Possibly Kashmiris (handicrafts shops), Punjabis and Sikhs (auto parts shops, dhabas, etc.), Bunts (a Karnataka sub-community, Udupi restaurants), and Chettiars (gold and jewelry shops, money-lending, trading abroad) too.
And I am only writing about those I know about. There could be others too.
I'm an author. I write books of science projects you can perform on your loved ones.
For each of my four books, I got paid a decent advance. One of the books has been quite successful and has earned back its advance, so I now get royalty checks. An audiobook deal and half a dozen foreign-rights deals have sweetened the pot.
It's not what I would call a passive income method, however, because a lot of work goes into it, even years after publication.
If you are considering writing a book, I'd highly suggest finding a literary agent. Worth every penny of their 15% commission.
What’s the work that goes into one of your books years after publication?
Or, since you mentioned your advance, I assume you have traditionally published. In that case I thought your publisher would handle all the operational issues, eg marketing.
Or do you mean the work goes not into the older books but into drafting and editing the newer ones?
Yes, for all four books, I got book deals with traditional publishers.
A small number of top-tier authors -- those whose books are virtually guaranteed to be bestsellers from day 1 -- tend to have marketing and publicity teams that will continue to be active well after publication.
But for midlist authors like myself, the publisher will do a marketing/publicity push around your publication date, but after a few months, it tends to die out. Which is not to say that they won't seize a good opportunity if it presents itself. But generally it's the author who's setting up their events after that point and figuring out other creative ways to spread awareness of their book, e.g. writing regular blog posts to maintain their brand.
I own 4 shares in the S&P 500. I developed trading strategies to sell my shares and buy them back at key points using Fibonacci retracements. Best business ever. And if I leave it it still makes money.
I’m nowhere near $500/month but learning to trade simply has taken me years and I’m very proud of my smol accomplishment.
I am working on a program to backtest it. Honestly, I still have much to learn. I do things visually. So I take the little fib retracement chart tool in trading view and make the anchor at the beginning of a price movement and align the lines to the closing prices of significant support/resistance (defined mathematically as any 5 bars such that the the middle bar has the lowest low or highest high in like pyramid form.) If I see at least 3 lines of the fib retracement align, I consider the market to be demonstrating that pattern and I make a bet the market will reverse when it hits the highest fib line. This is much easier to see btw and I have a website where I’m going to write this out if you’re interested: https://seanneilan.com/ I have corresponding Python code that automates this strategy too that I intend to post once it’s ready.
No hate. But just remember that when you think that something is a good BUY, the other side (the seller) think that it is a good SELL. Hence, before trading in the stock market (or in any other market which is a zero sum game, e.g. used cars, NFT), you must be sure that you have more information than the seller.
Of course. Part of the fun is also considering why a trade will go the wrong way too. There are infinite scenarios and part of trading is sketching why scenario X's probabililty is more likely than scenario Y's probability. And this can all be a wash when the completely unexpected happens too.
Ofcourse, if you are not trading, or buy a company stock and hope to get dividends than there is no transaction and hence it is not zero sum. But if you are trading it is zero sum.
I think that trading is ultimately a creative endeavor and no matter how one trades whether it's based on phases of the moon or insider information, one needs to know when they are entering and exiting the market. Trading is an incredibly fun and creative endeavor and as long as one takes the time to precisely define what they are doing, it is great <3
Trading algorithms are often implemented in Python/Pandas so learning hackerrank problems about stacks/queues can make one better at implementing trading algorithms. Some hackerrank problems involve hashes which are verified empirically which calculus. Studying calculus can lead to better understanding of the black-scholes theorem and brownian motion.
There's even an aesthetic nature to really good trades which can lead down an interesting path on gestalt theory and composition. Drawing charts is an art form too. Check out https://www.tradingview.com/u/tntsunrise/ for examples of minimalism in the stock market.
A previous commentor on this topic wrote that I'm studying tea leaves but what if for fun I wrote an image processing algorithm that processed the position of tea leaves in a cup and traded small amounts based on that?
Even something like moving averages has applications in programming language theory. It's easier to implement a moving average in a stateful rather than functional way. It's fun to figure out faster ways of cranking out new algorithms to trade markets which leads to better productivity. Markets move really fast. Old algorithms quickly become outdated.
As long as one does not make huge risks (that aren't well thought out), one can trade based on whatever their imagination leads them to. Anything can be tried and systematically backtested. Most traders won't think outside the box but it's so much more fun when you do.
There's so much synergy between math, computer science, betting strategies, art, drawing, data science and visual theory. Everything one studies in trading can lead to 10 insights in other areas. It's just a genuinely fun topic that can lead to a lifetime of happiness.
I lost about $3k doing algo crypto trading (all of that to fees - without fees I made money! aha) but learned a ton about different programming concepts and had a lot of fun.
That's awesome! :) That sounds like an amazing experience. I bet you learned a lot! And 3k is enough to make it memorable but not enough to go into massive debt or anything like that. And sure it's a loss but nobody goes into this trying to lose money. (AFAIK)
I will also admit I am perhaps overconfident about my strategy. It accurately lined up to when the omicron announcement happened and then I sold my shares in the market and bought them back once I "felt" the market had finished pricing in the information. So I have half a strategy right now. My buy back strat is not great but my timing to short the S&P 500 was absolutely impeccable. And that's why I'm inspired to work on this now.
Do you know of any studies or articles that shows why backtesting actually works or is useful? I have been reading up on automated and systematic trading, but I do not yet understand how backtesting gives one anything more than warm fuzzies.
For backtesting to work, wouldn't one need to re-run (i.e., playback and not simulate) all inputs from what the real data was (instrument pricing, the weather, social media sentiment, whatever) at a time resolution finer than what your algorithm operates on? If so, that's a massive amount of data that may even be impossible to get.
I'm not sure. I haven't found much on whether or not backtesting works in general. It definitely has its caveats. I think it really depends on what you're backtesting.
Backtesting definitely reveals ways in which trading algorithms can fail though. It can reveal more scenarios than one would initially consider which is super helpful.
Evidence-Based Technical Analysis is a starting point (book), but iirc it was able to show most common indicators aren't able to reject the null hypothesis.
I've actively bought and sold since 2012. In that time span however, I've probably only placed like 10-20 trades over 10 years. I spend wayyy more time studying than trading. This is also a hobby and I did many other things in the meantime like studying portrait drawing, I started/sold a digital agency: https://buildthis.com/. So it wasn't actively trading. I once spent 8 months studying soybean futures after work only to wind up shorting the dow jones on a recommendation which netted me a couple grand in 30 minutes. If you think about that, that's a very small amount of money to make over 8 months. So I'm not exactly making a lot of money.
But, at the end of the day, I have not lost money. I have only made money even though it is a TINY TINY amount. I'm talking like dollars.
The difference is quantitative finance uses mathematical models where-as when 'technical analysis' is talked about in the (youtube)stock market it generally refers to opening up mspaint and using the line draw tool to 'find patterns.'
I tend to think this is true. I also tend to think that enough people trade based on technical trends that it should be possible to make money by predicting their behavior.
But it may not be possible for mere mortals to do this — perhaps all the profit is sucked up by HFTs with supercomputers.
A lot of people trade based on technical indicators and there's plenty of simple strategies based around moving averages that aren't complex.
In my hometown of Chicago, a lot of people used to be employed in the pits at the CBO market making. (Basically being around to take the opposite end of a trade and making small profits by selling/buying at better prices.) But those jobs were eliminated by HFTs. HFTs absolutely sucked up a ton of profits. All the traders I spoke to who had traded in the 80's, 90's and 00's said that trading got much much harder from the years 2005-2010.
Retail traders still have the ability to take speculative risk and buy/hold. It just takes a lot of time.
In my 11th year doing Hacker Newsletter (https://hacker newsletter.com). Still enjoy putting it together each week and recently launched a daily version.
I built a free reverse geocoding api about 4 years ago ( https://api.3geonames.org ) Usage grew steadily sometimes crashing the server. So I loaded the software on GCP and AWS Marketplaces. Those needing a dedicated api launched their own servers for a fee. It has made an average pf $500 a month since I made those machine images available on https://3geonames.org/api about 2 years ago.
Yes, of course you can use it. The API is free, does not require an api key. The only issue is when many use it and the server crashes. It runs on a t2.micro free tier EC2 instance.
I created an enhanced multilingual T9 keyboard[1][2] for iOS in 2014 to play around with Swift. It's been doing 600$ on average since then, still going strong. Still use it everyday myself and can't live without it
Thank you for this. My dad has poor vision and clings to his failing t9 flip phone. He likes the flexibility of the iPhone but is concerned about the keyboard, it seems like this might be the solution he’s looking for
Interesting! I hope it can work out well for him - would love to hear about his experience if he gives it a shot. I've gotten good feedback from low vision and blind users, but I've also done my best trying to support VoiceOver in the most optimal way. If he uses VoiceOver, be sure to enable "Direct Touch Typing" in VoiceOver>Typing>Typing Style. Also be sure to go through the tutorials as that should give him the best start.
I mine cryptocurrency and make about $110/day. I have two L3++s, an AvalonMiner 1246, six RTX 3080s, an RTX 3090 and a couple older cards. It more than pays for the mortgage, and after electricity (residential rate) my profit is about $100/day.
I also have the GPUs in a grow tent (designed for growing marijuana) with an 8 inch in-line fan hooked up to the supply of my home’s HVAC system. I’m heating my whole house with cryptocurrency and saving about $80-100 per month on gas (furnace has been off all winter).
Pretty typical $0.1/kWH (on average, there are peaks and valleys like everywhere else). A lot of folks overestimate the actual power cost. Sure I’m pulling about 24A at 240V from the wall (over 6 kW) which costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $320/month. But the actual BTC I receive is worth over $3000/month assuming I sell it as I get it.
What’s super nice about mining is that it’s quite resilient to market trends. For example if crypto crashes 50% the number of transactions on the blockchain skyrockets (everyone either buying the dip or panic selling) which results in more cryptocurrency actually received from mining. The value of the coin can go down, but I get more of it.
As a passive revenue stream it’s actually quite beautiful. Just don’t forget to pay taxes!
I hate what you do (the very idea of all those KWs going to solve sudokus to get monopoly money) but at the same respect you. In the end if someone buys, why not sell.
The people in my house use space heaters in their rooms. 1500 watts of electricity produces 1500 watts of heat whether you do it via a space heater or a computer.
The only way OP's method is worse is the capital costs of the processors. The energy spent on the actual heating is converted with 100% efficient either way.
You could say I’m “wasting energy” for “monopoly money”, but that monopoly money gets converted to fiat dollars, which I use to pay taxes and feed my family passively while I’m at my actual job, or sleeping. If instead of mining I were to work a labour intensive job as a side-gig, moonlighting, driving there, how much more or less energy would that “waste” on gas? At least I’m recycling my exhaust heat into heat for my home and not using the natural gas line of my house in the winter.
You’re not wrong, and I’m not saying other actual side jobs waste more energy necessarily, but the gap may not be as large as you think.
Oh I’m sure I’ve spent a non-trivial amount of time total on maintenance, trial and error, watching videos, reading, etc. The thing is it’s my hobby, I have fun doing that stuff. I work with my hands and use my brain, and the output is money. It’s pretty great!
This is a common opinion but I think many miss the purpose of proof of work. You get compensated for making the network more resilient. Other systems do this to a lesser extent with a combination of proof of stake and validated, but at a tradeoff of being less decentralized. Ultimately this is a necessary cost for developing the technology, and cryptocurrency & tokenization are necessary to facilitate a more decentralized internet. It’s unfortunate this has begun to take off while we are still in the process of transitioning to green energy, but that will happen soon and generally speaking miners are doing it faster than the rest of the economy. Negative environmental impacts of crypto are because of bad government energy policy, not the technology itself.
As far as it being “Monopoly money”, >40% of US dollars were created since the start of the pandemic. Yes, there’s a lot of technical details there and most of that money isn’t “in circulation” and many would argue that the way this is being done shouldn’t be inflationary, but it’s never been done at this scale and we do have the worst inflation in 40 years so it may be a contributing factor. Contrast this with Bitcoin which has a fixed known supply, or other crypto currencies or tokens which may exist primarily for their utility, and IMO “Monopoly money” isn’t a fair characterization. Even BTC which has little in terms of “utility” can be used to move money equivalent to billions of dollars a far lower cost than the traditional financial system so it has its advantages.
At least blockchain related technologies enable new use cases, IMO it would be more fair to blame something like Electron and inefficient web technology replacements for native apps for being inefficient and wasting energy. But I wouldn’t do that either, it’s silly. The people making software don’t control energy policy and that’s the real issue.
I was looking into just getting a 3060 Ti for starting on my main CPU, do you recommend that or going for whatever gets a bigger hashing rate in one unit like the 3080 or 90 it seems, they are hard to get!
I would personally aim for non-LHR cards like the founders edition 3080 which is hard to find these days, or any 3090. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter what cards you buy, what matters is your ROI. For example at MSRP a 3090 can pay for itself in six months (or whatever it works out to these days) but at scalper prices that ROI time is more like a year. In the world of ASIC mining a year ROI is actually not bad at all because the big industrial ASICs can last 5-10 years. Then you have helium miners (HNT) that can ROI in 3-4 months. It’s all about the ROI.
Maybe a new 3090ti if I can snatch one at MSRP, but don't have the money anymore for it...
Was also looking into filecoin mining, but requires lots of HW (would have to buy at least a graphic card, 64gb ram, and lots of disks lol) and you've to pledge/stake money too for each block or tb committed to serve...
Looks like a hassle but high returns, so anyone with more budget than me and enough technical chops, might be inclined to look into that! Just saying
Thanks for all the info, got me into a lot of research, for now I'll keep on the build camp
Can you ELI5 how making small amounts of money in crypto works? I thought it was a "winner take all" kind of arrangement where whomever solves the "puzzle" (for lack of a better word) first gets all the bitcoin as a reward, until the next block is up and ready to be solved. You're talking about making $100 a day - a very tiny fraction of one bitcoin - how does that work?
Barely anyone mines alone. You join a mining-pool, so your hashrate gets added to that pools hashrate. When the pool finds the next block, everyone gets a share proportional to their contributed hashrate
You can contribute mining power to a large network of miners and get a percentage of the profits. They are called mining pools. These exist for virtually all currencies. Here's a list for bitcoin: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/pools/
Bitcoin is highly divisible. When I say $100/day what I really mean is something around 0.0016 BTC per day. This number fluctuates a lot so it’s best to look at the average over a week or month.
The best way to learn IMO is to try it yourself with your gaming computer. I personally use a platform called NiceHash (not sponsored, nor am I advocating for them, there are alternatives) which pays out in Bitcoin. Try it out yourself, depending on your GPU you could be making $3-10 per day. Run it for a month or two, or longer. Transfer that Bitcoin to an exchange of your choice (Coinbase, crypto dot com, etc.) and sell it for cash. Then use that cash to buy more hardware (or beer).
Back in the early times, 'solo mining' was trying to find actual block target values and would yield the full reward, winner takes all. Mining pools were invented, that aggregate a whole bunch of miners all working on the same thing. Although there is only one true winner a block, the rewards are shared among all the miners, prorata their submitted hash rate. Care was taken by miners not to use one big pool, and keep the number of blocks produced to be <50% to any one pool. Came close a few times over the years!
The pool accepts 'shares' of 'close but not quite' values to prove that the client is actually doing work.
Then, you had the emergence of marketplaces of hash power -- you could bid on or sell a specific number of hashes a second for a given time. The highest bidder would be able to point your mining hardware at their choice of pool with their payout credentials.
One of the problems I have been thinking about, people can still solo mine when they have lots of capital to buy hardware. Now, most crypto miners are using pools that reward them for their hashrate. However, there are only a handful of pools that the majority of miners use, which means centralization.
It is in the interests of the miners to prevent a situation where one pool takes a majority of the hash rate. Miners will migrate to smaller pools if one is getting too big.
- Where is the heat going? Are you exhausting it out the window? Are you going to burn your house down?
- How are you distributing power? Are you using a PDU and a 240V 30A breaker or are you maxing out several 15A 120V lines?
- Is the humidity dropping rapidly to dangerous levels, risking shock? Are you going to fry that brand new $10,000 ASIC miner because you dried out the air too much?
- Did you short out the GPU pins removing a GPU from the socket? Did you just cost yourself thousands of dollars?
Safety is important not just for yourself and family but you need the hardware to actually survive. If you have a bunch of 3090s that just finally reached ROI 9 or 10 months in but the cards themselves just died, you’ve effectively broken even after all that effort.
Surprisingly GPUs are quite resilient so long as you’re not massively overheating them, and you open them up every now and then to replace the thermal paste and perhaps thermal pads. I have a monitor visible at all times that displays all the temperatures, and I have one eye on a humidistat making sure I don’t suddenly drop below 30% relative humidity on an unseasonably dry day.
There are lots of resources available. If you’ve ever built your own PC you already have like 80% of the knowledge you need.
Thanks. This is actually what has put me off doing it. I don’t want an unsafe thing in my house! Also its the type of engineering problem i hate most - one where you meed to monitor 24/7 and all sorts of things can give you down time, but you cant really make it perfect because that would be too expensive.
I started small, let things pay for themselves before buying more. My initial investment was about $10,000, and that was just for a handful of GPUs, some parts like motherboards and CPUs, an electrician for the 240V 30A line, PDU, etc. Once I made that money back I slowly bought more. My most recent purchase has been the AvalonMiner which will pay for itself in another six months or so. If I include the revenue from all the mining hardware though, the AvalonMiner will be paid for much sooner. It’s funny how that works :)
Risk? There are folks doing just what you describe. Everyones capital and risk levels vary and so you get miners on gaming rigs with single gpu all the way to those buying fuking coal power plants. Where would you land?
That’s the plan! But I’m already at 80% maxed out on a 30A 240V breaker. Sure I could add more breakers, but I really don’t want to turn my basement into an industrial mining zone (not to mention the HOA might have a thing or two to say). I’ve already used some soundproofing (Rockwool) in the room that all the mining equipment is in, the noise is real!
Also I need more airflow, I’m exhausting extra heat out a small basement window. If I want to expand I need to consider intake fans from a second window to keep airflow moving seamlessly.
I’m in a peculiar position where if I lease out a warehouse for $3000/month I literally deplete all the profit and break even until I expand more. I’m not sure where to go from here, suggestions welcome! So far the best plan I have is just wait until I can afford a bigger house with a big backyard, so I can build a mining shed out there.
My ASICs mine Bitcoin directly, while my GPUs mine Ethereum but I'm paid in Bitcoin, which is a function of NiceHash. More often than not mining Ethereum directly using something like HiveOS is more profitable, but I opt for NiceHash because the convenience is more valuable to me than the fractional benefit of mining Ethereum directly. Also, I personally would rather hold Bitcoin. But that is just me.
In terms of ETH2, it is already quite profitable to mine ERGO or RVN or other proof-of-work GPU mineable coin algorithms (search for "what to mine" in your preferred search engine). The biggest question is, when ETH2 comes (whenever that is) will the profitability of ERGO and RVN increase or decrease with the influx of miners? Sure difficulty will spike massively, but in my opinion it is also likely that the value of these cryptocurrencies spike as well, however proportional.
The truth is no one really knows. I have an idea, but I could be wrong.
Thanks for the excellent response! I love nicehash and have been using it on a little 1080ti rig myself.
I'll probably stick with what they recommend once ETH changes. It does seem probable that the values of the new favorites will spike a bit once everyone jumps on board.
Do you think bitcoin-only asic miners are still a viable thing to set up as an ongoing thing? I feel like asic miners are currently a risky investment due to their nature of being linked to certain currencies.
I recently bought a house in Canada that's heated with all electric baseboards, I am not looking forward to my electricity bill. I'd love to partner with an experienced miner who was willing to pay for the rigs up front and do a lot of the fetch-and-carry in exchange for the waste heat. I have no doubt there are plenty of other homeowners who'd feel the same way. Waste heat's a valuable resource, at least for half the year.
For me the question is how to get comfortable with the mining software stack and the pooling services. I poked at it a bit earlier this year and, possibly just due to my own paranoia, I felt like I needed to take a shower afterwards. I don't know why, I just felt like there was no ground truth from which to build a framework of trust in the tooling and the services and I was suspicious of everything.
In the world of cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency mining you really have to wade through the mounds of sh%# and scammers. In terms of trustworthy sources here are a few trusted YouTubers that are very experienced, they taught me a lot about mining, mining safety, and general crypto knowledge: ChumpChangeXD, Red Fox Crypto, Red Panda Mining, brandon coin, Son of a Tech.
That’s a $30,000 rig at least. So 300 days of mining before you just break even. I’m sure that in 300 days it will only be able to mine a fraction of what it does now due to increasing difficulty. I’m not seeing how this truly works out.
You are grossly overestimating the depreciation of mining hardware. It’s pretty common to have well maintained mining rigs and farms that last several years. Also, it’s a common strategy to sell mining hardware at or near ROI time to essentially double your initial investment.
Coincidentally my GPUs have not only paid for themselves and then some, but I could sell them used now for more than I bought them for. I’m lucky in that respect.
It shouldn’t really matter, my understanding is that generally you’re running software that automatically mines the most profitable coin for a pool and get your profits in BTC. So as long as there is demand for GPU miners for something there’s profit to be made.
My 3080 paid for itself, but I stopped once I hit that threshold due to the ethical concerns I have about the negative environmental impact of proof-of-work mining.
The community is not very trustworthy, but the software is actually really straightforward once you figure it out yourself.
> Checkbot for Chrome finds SEO, speed and security problems before your website visitors do. Test 100s of pages at a time for broken links, duplicate content, missing titles, invalid HTML/CSS/JavaScript, insecure pages, redirect chains and more.
I started working on it for myself to help automate common checks I was having to do manually when working on websites. I wanted something that checks many pages at once, works on localhost as you develop, and will let you scan again after you've made changes to see if you've fixed problems.
Homechart (https://homechart.app) is my solution to "app fatigue": too many productivity apps (todos, calendar, recipes, shopping, budget, etc), no integrations, few self hosted, painful monetization.
Take every personal productivity app and put it into an all in one, integrated experience. Available for free (self-hosted container) or in the cloud. No ads, written in Go/Typescript.
I look at working on Homechart as slowly whittling (coding) a large piece of wood (backlog) into a finished product. Thankfully the piece of wood grows in size every month, I really enjoy the whittling aspect. The thought of selling it or bringing in corporate processes (product managers, sprints, etc) would kill my enjoyment of working on it.
API server written in Go talking to PostgreSQL with an in memory cache (Go ttlcache library is awesome) or Redis. Frontend is Mithril/Typescript, uses capacitor for the Android/iOS apps.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 492 ms ] threadThe first year I started doing this, I grossed about $20000. Last year was bad. Our thrift stores shut down because of Covid. In late June of this year, I started back up slowly because our thrift stores came back. My gross for the last six months is $3,238.63. And again, because of Covid, I've stopped going daily like I was which cut into my fun money.
Last year I bought a brand new pinball machine from my thrift store finds.
Some tips:
If you can go every day, you only have to look at the 'new' stuff which saves lots of time.
The eBay app has a barcode scanner so you can look up anything that's in its original packaging by just scanning it.
Don't pass up anything vintage looking that's still sealed (even if it looks worthless). I sold nearly $100 worth of new in package vintage incandescent bulbs a little while back. I got the lot of them for like $10.
Save all the boxes you have coming to your house in advance of starting this. You can't sell stuff that you can't easily box up and ship.
Never use the post office or UPS/FedEx store. You can get a significant discount through pirateship.com (free to use, offers steep US Postal and UPS discounts) or even eBay's own shipping.
EDIT: A few more tips...
Once you're shipping at least one thing a week, buy a label printer like a Rollo Thermal Printer. It will save you lots of wasted time and energy in printing out, cutting the shipping label to size, taping it to the package securely, etc.
Invest in a good industrial shipping tape gun (not those cheap little plastic ones), get good brand-name shipping tape and a couple of large rolls of bubble wrap... also, start saving the packaging that comes into your house from your online purchases to be reused.
Get a bunch of 'newsprint' packing paper for packing up your stuff.
Basically: don't cheap out on supplies.
Stay organized. I use a set of plastic bins in the basement to store my items once they're listed.
If it is an estate sale run by the individual owner this is usually good and nothing more than a garage sale where everything is sale including the proverbial kitchen sink.
Don't skip on CDs, VHS, Cassettes or vinyl records! Though be sure to check the condition and that the correct disc is definitely in the case before you buy it.
Vinyl records are difficult to grade, so I would avoid them unless you can play them and reliably grade them OR they're sealed OR the surface on both sides appear immaculate. Sadly, they usually just add to my already overstuffed vinyl collection instead of winding up on eBay.
VHS and audio cassettes are hot right now as well, so if you see some classics, definitely give them a look on eBay before you pass on them. They usually have a barcode.
Typically someone will drop off their whole collection at place, so consider buying items to sell in a 'lot'.
A complete hardback Harry Potter book set is $100+! (usually $2 a piece at my thrift shop) I almost have a complete set from my many trips to the thrift store, so pick them up when you see them!
two refrigerator filters new in package ($3.99 each) - selling on eBay for about $40 each - retail for about $50 each. My total sale price was $69.95 for both (I undercut the lowest listing by a dollar or so and offered 'free' shipping)
My shipping cost was about $5. My eBay fees were about $10 - they take quite a chunk. $70 - 25 = $45 profit
I probably could have held onto them longer, charging a higher price and not offering 'free' shipping, but sales have been slow because I haven't been buying much so I made them too good to pass up.
$45 for about 20 minutes of hustle isn't terrible. It took me all of 3 minutes to list them on eBay. I plopped them on my kitchen table, snapped a picture of them, searched for the same item in the 'sold' section of eBay. Clicked 'sell one like this' link, filled in a price, selected a shipping option and clicked 'post'.
What was the net?
That said, I don’t think “we shouldn’t let everybody shop there then” is meaningful. Means testing is itself expensive and would likely penalize the very people who need thrift stores. Some things depend on the members of a society having a shared sense of what is and isn’t decent. Halloween candy is free but if I organize gangs of kids to empty out every candy bowl and sell it online, Halloween won’t be any fun.
If it can be scalped, it will be. I'm not sure if the people who like to say "free market" would consider this a negative or a positive.
Right now making about $500/month with $150 going to a 10x10 climate controlled storage unit. At the door going into our unit is a dumpster and we found about 5 huge bags of toys that my wife is going through and listing. We've sold about $30 worth of free stuff from that single dumpster.
In July 2021 I did really well but was going balls to the wall with it and probably made close to $1000 that month. But I got burnt out quick and slowly started getting back into it. My wife has pretty much taken over it as her part- to full-time job (once she gets started on something she can't stop). She has successfully listed about 5 items a day for the past month.
Absolutely correct about the thermal label printer. Bought a brand new one for a fraction of the cost off of FBMP ;-)
I bought a tape gun and wasted more tape than what actually got on the box so ditched that.
Agree with don't skimp on shipping products. Makes life way easier.
So I introduced a personal tier that was covered for commercial use - inspired by Jetbrains and added a monthly subscription option for it. Both of those actions helped increase usage and signups with personal users. Companies still tend to want to pay for a year.
Even though this is completely self-hosted software, developers seem to like paying for tools monthly. Some abuse this by cancelling the subscription in the months they don't expect to use a tunnel, or opening the software then cancelling the subscription and waiting until the process has to restart before re-subscribing. Not much I can do about this side of it.
If people are interested, the product is called inlets and is easy to find on the Internet. I also write about my OSS and independent business work each week in a subscription newsletter using GitHub Sponsors (another side project, if you like)
Books I could recommend: Monetizing innovation, Obviously Awesome, 1-Page Marketing Plan & Minimalist Entrepreneur. I'm not affiliated with any of these titles, but consider them core reading for indie devs and for side gigs.
Project is honeslty cool, we really liked it except the limits of inlets free tier compared to inlets pro tier.
In our use case going for zerotier / tailscale made more sense.
See the FAQ for a comparison vs a VPN: https://docs.inlets.dev/reference/faq/
https://inlets.dev
And the docs:
https://docs.inlets.dev
Subscription only, companies can buy a static licenses if required.
I think I understand how the second case you list would be abuse. If I'm understanding correctly, they're having a tunnel active without a subscription. Is that right?
I don't understand why cancelling a subscription when you know you aren't going to use the service would be considered abuse though. I'm asking as someone who do that without considering it might be abusive until I read your post.
That short notice cancellation flexibility is something I look for in a service, and it enables to sign-up for things I'm unsure of without being tied to them, or I can't afford a commitment to. If there was a minimum contract length, there are services I wouldn't bother with at all.
I generally do it with larger companies though. I look at it as, "I'll pay for what I use, or I won't use your product." (Crunchyroll, the anime streaming with the worst stagnant platform being the example that springs immediately to mind.)
Is there something specific to the way they do it or to the nature of the product? Or is it just a dick move to do specifically to a lone dev or something?
Basically we find the top rated products and summarize why people might like them.
It's nothing too fancy, and I got into it mostly to see if I could do it without investing more than 1 day a week into it and outsourcing the rest.
I'm more focused on my main thing right now (marketing agency) so the side project's been pretty stagnant.
It's really not THAT difficult to make $500 per month if you invest your nights and weekends into making it happen.
how do you get it ranked so it shows up in google search?
This is brilliant.
Yeah - the whole thing is appengine, fitting fully in the free tier, and getting the html template for that home page working on every browser was the hardest bit. There's no login or anything, and the database is just one record per sale. Wallets are all pregenerated. Checking for theft just involves polling a block-explorer API and sending a mail if anything changed.
> ServerBaitThief.com retains ownership of the wallet contents at all times.
(wrong domain name)
Not gonna do that unless something more major breaks...
I’m at $4k/month and revenue is growing.
I do iOS consulting as well, but I’m inching closer to going indie full time.
For now most of the revenue is in macOS but my ultimate goal is to make iOS be my #1 platform in terms of revenue. That’s because, simply, I’d rather offload a lot of marketing and deployment/payment bandwidth to the App Store to focus on the products.
1. After entering my credit card details, I'm redirected back to your site without any message (I did receive a confirmation email a few minutes later)
2. It's a nitpick, but there's nothing I dislike more than forcing me to convert to my local currency. First the exchange rate is much worse than what my credit card charges, second I lose out on miles.
Site: https://forwardemail.net
Open Startup: https://forwardemail.net/open-startup
How it works is fully documented here: https://github.com/ladjs/i18n#i18nmiddlewarectx-next
1) Check URL (e.g. if /de or /de/ then it's a de locale - as long as de is a supported locale)
2) Use the custom function (if provided by the detectLocale parameter) for locale detection
3) Check the "locale" cookie value (or whatever the cookie option is defined as)
4) Check Accept-Language header
Regarding nothing being translated, there was an issue with our locales folder sync and that's being resolved soon!
The error was “could not decode raw data”
I've used a free email forwarding service which didn't give me this functionality (maybe this isn't common practice).
So ultimately, your open source code and business transparency[0] is what convinced me to pay instead of self-host.
Thank you for making it.
[0] https://forwardemail.net/en/open-startup
It brings in right around $500 a month. It is fun to develop, especially that I can dabble into frontend and UI design which is quite far away from what I'm doing daily.
Interestingly, it used to bring in much more but the heydays of apps are over.
It's kind of shocking though that 1 million downloads equals "only" $500 in ad revenue. I would have expected a much higher value. May I ask what the install base is?
Makes perfect sense really... especially considering it's so easy to assume "downloads" = "users"...
It seems from 10 ideas 9 doesn't work and even the 10th brings only modest results.
On the other hand, the Ti-89 still selling for >$100.
Still working on my marketing pitch so feedback is welcome!
For custom domains, no. With https, yes.
Am using Caddy for this exact use-case at work. Thought it would make a good subscription service, but didn't get around to doing it yet. Well done, GP.
It's free to use and download with an optional Pro subscription that includes additional features and makes > $500/month.
Key things that have helped the revenue in 2021:
- Released a major new version 3.0 which blocks all YouTube ads and has kicked along sales and improved the conversion rate considerably
- Apple's small business program began this year that only takes a 15% cut instead of 30%
- After a long time developing and updating the app, it now includes most features requested by users, so it's achieved a 4+ star rating on the App Stores
- Downloads were originally weighted heavily towards the macOS version but it is now getting more usage on iOS which is growing the overall sales volume
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/get-extensions-iphab0...
The web extension support is what enabled us to deploy complete YouTube ad blocking on iOS in Safari – previously it wasn't possible to do this reliably just with the content blocker API.
On iOS, Firefox Focus (a single tab browser) comes with a content blocker. Hush is another good content blocker. Of course, Magic Lasso (free or paid).
And wow.
There's also the free version of the app which includes ad blocking along with a 1 month free trial of the Pro version available in-app to see if it's useful for you before committing to a full year.
Thank you for building this awesome product
For anybody thinking of following on this path, I would say it's not really worth it except as a fun hobby. I didn't keep track of hours designing/testing very well but we're almost certainly way below minimum wage on the project. Although I've learned a lot about how to make games which has been really cool. You'll make a lot more money if you don't have to manufacture a real product and deal with the high costs of freight and postal shipping. If anybody is curious you can look up "5.15 climbing card game" on google and you'll find it!
1. Does it have a good rating / breakdown in the BoardGameGeek forums?
2. Does it have a review on YouTube that showcases the main game mechanic?
Ideally, a third party review is always better. The board game community is not a harsh one (it's not like you have oceans of "this game sucks!" reviews -- there is a lot of love for the art) but a third party just seems more... relatable. They are also just trying to have fun.
Keep up the good work!
For prototyping the box and the demo copies we tried a few different print shops that operate in the US. The easiest by far is the game crafter, their website lets you upload and proof your cards through a web portal and I found that to be really good for not making mistakes. Unfortunately their quality is lower because the print runs are so small and the cost is pretty high.
If you get to large scale production (>500 copies) you can start getting things printed for reasonable cost. You can work with a chinese manufacturer directly (a bit risky for a first time project) or use one of the US intermediaries. Panda games is probably the best option there, but their minimum run is 2000.
In early 2022, I'm going to manufacture a small number of the game using The Game Crafter (it's more than just cards), but the whole idea of manufacturing 500 copies and the logistics of shipping are daunting.
[0] https://jitterted.podia.com/print-and-play-version-of-jitter...
Would you be willing to briefly discuss what you use for scheduled emails? My plan so far is to just save email schedules into a DB table with a time stamp they’re due and have a cron job that frequently checks it, but I haven’t gotten a chance to test the scalability and performance of this.
I figure since people are posting things making many times the $500/mo threshold, I should post something making many times less. :)
It's actually pretty cool to just wait a few months and come back to a stash of money. Bought a Quest 2 the other day and didn't give it much thought, partly because of little eggs like this.
The effort to grow it is pretty high relative to the returns, but it's also a lot more "sticky." Normal profit streams dry up if you ignore them, whereas I've had my band of faithful patrons for a long time now. People just like supporting those doing work that resonates with them.
Hardware investment is about $4-5k, plus a few hundred hours of development time.
It was never intended as a means of getting rich though, so I am very grateful for the support.
Well done, hope it makes you more some day.
I was very surprised your pages had a .gmi extension but were actually normal html. Then I figured your "memex" engine probably automatically translates gemini content to html and doesn't bother changing the extension (which in retrospect is more of a feature than a bug). Very nice.
I noticed your search engine is not available on gemini. Any plans for that? The spirit of the search engine is a perfect fit for the gemini ecosystem!
The search engine is available on Gemini, just not at that address. Try gemini://marginalia.nu/search
Maybe put a link to this search url somewhere on the main page, specifically for gemini visitors?
There's no indication at all that this url exists when browsing your pages.
I'm planning a bit of a navigation overhaul soon. Right now it's very hard to find all the various projects I'm running anywhere other than at https://www.marginalia.nu/
I just shipped out the first batch of books a week ago and now waiting for the next batch of books. It’s gotten pretty demanding pretty quickly but I’m really excited about it. I’m hoping I can soon employ my little sister to manage all the shipping. She’s been an Amazon driver for the last 2 years and I think she’d appreciate a change of pace.
Very much looking forward to it. Great work!
Congratulations!
Now, provenance may still be an issue...
Their parents have no interest in turning their kids into programmers (to my great dismay!) but this looks like something they'll have a blast with anyway.
I mean, can anyone write a "For Dummies" book?
To clarify there is a series called XXXX For Babies.
Honestly, I don't see how "for babies" could be trademarked since it's a literal phrase describing the product. "For Dummies" is not used literally.
That's not to say generic words / phrases cannot be trademarked. Just look at Apple. However, trademarks for a generic term must be very limited in scope initially. If the brand obtains substantial recognition, then a broader trademark may be granted. These broader trademarks are typically reserved for household names. Even Apple had trademark issues when they entered the music industry due to Apple Records.
Neither is "For Babies" specific to the series I am describing. The book series is not for babies, as far as I am aware, very few, if any, babies are capable of reading, let alone fully understanding stories that are read to them.
"For Dummies" effectively means using laypersons language to convey complex topics more easily. Not, as you said, to literally mean the readers are of low-intelligence.
Likewise, "For Babies" effectively means using language, images, and story telling to convey complex topics more easily to young children, not just for literal babies.
How do you manage sakes tax collection & other stuff like shipping & such? Assuming you are in US. Do you use Shopify or Etsy or dome online one? Did u apply for a seller's permit to deposit sales tax? If manually, how do you calculate sales tax, because its based on buyer's address right?
Now sitting at 3.7m views.
Be careful about this. It changes the dynamic you have, and can cause issues if you hire non-family in future. Same applies for close friends.
There are some cultures where family businesses, where most members of the family work and participate, are the norm. Quite a huge population of people operate that way.
In my experience, hiring my younger cousin for occasional work during school/uni breaks has been great, but involving close friends looking for work has been disastrous 3 out of 3 times.
Yes. Among Indian comunities, Gujaratis (particularly the Patel sub-community who own the majority of US motels, the Ambanis - Reliance group, big) and the Marwaris (some big Indian businessmen among them, like the Birlas, Ruias, Goenkas), are examples of this.
Possibly Kashmiris (handicrafts shops), Punjabis and Sikhs (auto parts shops, dhabas, etc.), Bunts (a Karnataka sub-community, Udupi restaurants), and Chettiars (gold and jewelry shops, money-lending, trading abroad) too.
And I am only writing about those I know about. There could be others too.
For each of my four books, I got paid a decent advance. One of the books has been quite successful and has earned back its advance, so I now get royalty checks. An audiobook deal and half a dozen foreign-rights deals have sweetened the pot.
It's not what I would call a passive income method, however, because a lot of work goes into it, even years after publication.
If you are considering writing a book, I'd highly suggest finding a literary agent. Worth every penny of their 15% commission.
What’s the work that goes into one of your books years after publication?
Or, since you mentioned your advance, I assume you have traditionally published. In that case I thought your publisher would handle all the operational issues, eg marketing.
Or do you mean the work goes not into the older books but into drafting and editing the newer ones?
A small number of top-tier authors -- those whose books are virtually guaranteed to be bestsellers from day 1 -- tend to have marketing and publicity teams that will continue to be active well after publication.
But for midlist authors like myself, the publisher will do a marketing/publicity push around your publication date, but after a few months, it tends to die out. Which is not to say that they won't seize a good opportunity if it presents itself. But generally it's the author who's setting up their events after that point and figuring out other creative ways to spread awareness of their book, e.g. writing regular blog posts to maintain their brand.
I’m nowhere near $500/month but learning to trade simply has taken me years and I’m very proud of my smol accomplishment.
None of these are zero sum games. Especially stock market. Stock market is not a zero sum game at all. https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/72945/is-the-stock...
Ofcourse, if you are not trading, or buy a company stock and hope to get dividends than there is no transaction and hence it is not zero sum. But if you are trading it is zero sum.
Trading algorithms are often implemented in Python/Pandas so learning hackerrank problems about stacks/queues can make one better at implementing trading algorithms. Some hackerrank problems involve hashes which are verified empirically which calculus. Studying calculus can lead to better understanding of the black-scholes theorem and brownian motion.
There's even an aesthetic nature to really good trades which can lead down an interesting path on gestalt theory and composition. Drawing charts is an art form too. Check out https://www.tradingview.com/u/tntsunrise/ for examples of minimalism in the stock market.
A previous commentor on this topic wrote that I'm studying tea leaves but what if for fun I wrote an image processing algorithm that processed the position of tea leaves in a cup and traded small amounts based on that?
Even something like moving averages has applications in programming language theory. It's easier to implement a moving average in a stateful rather than functional way. It's fun to figure out faster ways of cranking out new algorithms to trade markets which leads to better productivity. Markets move really fast. Old algorithms quickly become outdated.
As long as one does not make huge risks (that aren't well thought out), one can trade based on whatever their imagination leads them to. Anything can be tried and systematically backtested. Most traders won't think outside the box but it's so much more fun when you do.
There's so much synergy between math, computer science, betting strategies, art, drawing, data science and visual theory. Everything one studies in trading can lead to 10 insights in other areas. It's just a genuinely fun topic that can lead to a lifetime of happiness.
For backtesting to work, wouldn't one need to re-run (i.e., playback and not simulate) all inputs from what the real data was (instrument pricing, the weather, social media sentiment, whatever) at a time resolution finer than what your algorithm operates on? If so, that's a massive amount of data that may even be impossible to get.
Backtesting definitely reveals ways in which trading algorithms can fail though. It can reveal more scenarios than one would initially consider which is super helpful.
But, at the end of the day, I have not lost money. I have only made money even though it is a TINY TINY amount. I'm talking like dollars.
But it may not be possible for mere mortals to do this — perhaps all the profit is sucked up by HFTs with supercomputers.
In my hometown of Chicago, a lot of people used to be employed in the pits at the CBO market making. (Basically being around to take the opposite end of a trade and making small profits by selling/buying at better prices.) But those jobs were eliminated by HFTs. HFTs absolutely sucked up a ton of profits. All the traders I spoke to who had traded in the 80's, 90's and 00's said that trading got much much harder from the years 2005-2010.
Retail traders still have the ability to take speculative risk and buy/hold. It just takes a lot of time.
https://automations.io
Workflows + playbooks + iPaaS + task management
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/typenine-ultimate-t9-style-k... [2] https://medium.com/porsager/a-better-iphone-typing-experienc...
I also have the GPUs in a grow tent (designed for growing marijuana) with an 8 inch in-line fan hooked up to the supply of my home’s HVAC system. I’m heating my whole house with cryptocurrency and saving about $80-100 per month on gas (furnace has been off all winter).
Can I ask what your power costs are? The problem is that in high population centers in the US, electricity costs make it not economical.
What’s super nice about mining is that it’s quite resilient to market trends. For example if crypto crashes 50% the number of transactions on the blockchain skyrockets (everyone either buying the dip or panic selling) which results in more cryptocurrency actually received from mining. The value of the coin can go down, but I get more of it.
As a passive revenue stream it’s actually quite beautiful. Just don’t forget to pay taxes!
I am all for the further decentralization of this technology and hope others can profit from this also!
The only way OP's method is worse is the capital costs of the processors. The energy spent on the actual heating is converted with 100% efficient either way.
Here's a neat video about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto
My house is from the 1800s and only has heating for the kitchen/dining room/living room.
You’re not wrong, and I’m not saying other actual side jobs waste more energy necessarily, but the gap may not be as large as you think.
(hours spent on research, hardware acquisition, setup, and maintenance) / (net profit, after accounting for hardware depreciation and obsolescence)
As far as it being “Monopoly money”, >40% of US dollars were created since the start of the pandemic. Yes, there’s a lot of technical details there and most of that money isn’t “in circulation” and many would argue that the way this is being done shouldn’t be inflationary, but it’s never been done at this scale and we do have the worst inflation in 40 years so it may be a contributing factor. Contrast this with Bitcoin which has a fixed known supply, or other crypto currencies or tokens which may exist primarily for their utility, and IMO “Monopoly money” isn’t a fair characterization. Even BTC which has little in terms of “utility” can be used to move money equivalent to billions of dollars a far lower cost than the traditional financial system so it has its advantages.
At least blockchain related technologies enable new use cases, IMO it would be more fair to blame something like Electron and inefficient web technology replacements for native apps for being inefficient and wasting energy. But I wouldn’t do that either, it’s silly. The people making software don’t control energy policy and that’s the real issue.
Thanks!
Maybe a new 3090ti if I can snatch one at MSRP, but don't have the money anymore for it...
Was also looking into filecoin mining, but requires lots of HW (would have to buy at least a graphic card, 64gb ram, and lots of disks lol) and you've to pledge/stake money too for each block or tb committed to serve...
Looks like a hassle but high returns, so anyone with more budget than me and enough technical chops, might be inclined to look into that! Just saying
Thanks for all the info, got me into a lot of research, for now I'll keep on the build camp
The best way to learn IMO is to try it yourself with your gaming computer. I personally use a platform called NiceHash (not sponsored, nor am I advocating for them, there are alternatives) which pays out in Bitcoin. Try it out yourself, depending on your GPU you could be making $3-10 per day. Run it for a month or two, or longer. Transfer that Bitcoin to an exchange of your choice (Coinbase, crypto dot com, etc.) and sell it for cash. Then use that cash to buy more hardware (or beer).
The pool accepts 'shares' of 'close but not quite' values to prove that the client is actually doing work. Then, you had the emergence of marketplaces of hash power -- you could bid on or sell a specific number of hashes a second for a given time. The highest bidder would be able to point your mining hardware at their choice of pool with their payout credentials.
It is in the interests of the miners to prevent a situation where one pool takes a majority of the hash rate. Miners will migrate to smaller pools if one is getting too big.
- Where is the heat going? Are you exhausting it out the window? Are you going to burn your house down? - How are you distributing power? Are you using a PDU and a 240V 30A breaker or are you maxing out several 15A 120V lines? - Is the humidity dropping rapidly to dangerous levels, risking shock? Are you going to fry that brand new $10,000 ASIC miner because you dried out the air too much? - Did you short out the GPU pins removing a GPU from the socket? Did you just cost yourself thousands of dollars?
Safety is important not just for yourself and family but you need the hardware to actually survive. If you have a bunch of 3090s that just finally reached ROI 9 or 10 months in but the cards themselves just died, you’ve effectively broken even after all that effort.
Surprisingly GPUs are quite resilient so long as you’re not massively overheating them, and you open them up every now and then to replace the thermal paste and perhaps thermal pads. I have a monitor visible at all times that displays all the temperatures, and I have one eye on a humidistat making sure I don’t suddenly drop below 30% relative humidity on an unseasonably dry day.
There are lots of resources available. If you’ve ever built your own PC you already have like 80% of the knowledge you need.
I saw a similar post where the poster was making a decent amount but wasn’t yet profitable because of $30k in startup costs.
Also I need more airflow, I’m exhausting extra heat out a small basement window. If I want to expand I need to consider intake fans from a second window to keep airflow moving seamlessly.
I’m in a peculiar position where if I lease out a warehouse for $3000/month I literally deplete all the profit and break even until I expand more. I’m not sure where to go from here, suggestions welcome! So far the best plan I have is just wait until I can afford a bigger house with a big backyard, so I can build a mining shed out there.
In terms of ETH2, it is already quite profitable to mine ERGO or RVN or other proof-of-work GPU mineable coin algorithms (search for "what to mine" in your preferred search engine). The biggest question is, when ETH2 comes (whenever that is) will the profitability of ERGO and RVN increase or decrease with the influx of miners? Sure difficulty will spike massively, but in my opinion it is also likely that the value of these cryptocurrencies spike as well, however proportional.
The truth is no one really knows. I have an idea, but I could be wrong.
I'll probably stick with what they recommend once ETH changes. It does seem probable that the values of the new favorites will spike a bit once everyone jumps on board.
Do you think bitcoin-only asic miners are still a viable thing to set up as an ongoing thing? I feel like asic miners are currently a risky investment due to their nature of being linked to certain currencies.
Coincidentally my GPUs have not only paid for themselves and then some, but I could sell them used now for more than I bought them for. I’m lucky in that respect.
The community is not very trustworthy, but the software is actually really straightforward once you figure it out yourself.
https://www.checkbot.io/
> Checkbot for Chrome finds SEO, speed and security problems before your website visitors do. Test 100s of pages at a time for broken links, duplicate content, missing titles, invalid HTML/CSS/JavaScript, insecure pages, redirect chains and more.
I started working on it for myself to help automate common checks I was having to do manually when working on websites. I wanted something that checks many pages at once, works on localhost as you develop, and will let you scan again after you've made changes to see if you've fixed problems.
Take every personal productivity app and put it into an all in one, integrated experience. Available for free (self-hosted container) or in the cloud. No ads, written in Go/Typescript.
I look at working on Homechart as slowly whittling (coding) a large piece of wood (backlog) into a finished product. Thankfully the piece of wood grows in size every month, I really enjoy the whittling aspect. The thought of selling it or bringing in corporate processes (product managers, sprints, etc) would kill my enjoyment of working on it.