It may be passive or active or maintenance mode of income. Just something created by you and your sole passion that have worked out for quite some time and maybe still going on.
Same. The amount of overhead involved in any side hustle is just too high compared to getting stuff done as an employee. even volunteering as anything but unskilled labor is a hassle.
Replying to remind myself to check back here, because I agree with giaour and I'm curious where the misunderstanding is.
Being an employee is simple - do (good-enough-to-not-get-fired) work, get paid. Entrepreneurship requires you to identify a target market, figure out a product that would work for it, create that product, market it, actually sell it, ship it, do the associated financial admin, and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm not thinking of. The amount of potential gain-per-effort is higher than in employment - but the amount of work you have to go through in order to get to that point is also higher.
Yep! To contract, I have to find clients, solicit project work, write invoices, keep after clients for payment; in general, I have to do all the extroverted business shit I became a software developer to avoid doing.
As an employee, I can work on problems I identify, invest time in mentoring colleagues, spend time building a skill that will be of long term but not immediate benefit to my employer, etc: stuff nobody would pay a contractor to do.
Depends on how much you want to do it. If you wanna do full time consulting, sure that's the case.
But a part-time consulting gig on the side, when you've been working for 10+ years and have a solid network? In that case, you can often find opportunities in your network, if you're looking.
Basically, if anyone you know is taking a C-level position in a funded startup, for example, they might very often need help with all sorts of different things and would be willing to pay.
Similarly, any time someone reaches out on linkedin with a job, tell that you're happily employed on not planning on moving, but that you would be interested in helping them on a part-time consulting basis. Done.
if faamng salary is supposedly that high, that's like a shocker, and probably massive hyperbole, unless something bizarre happened over the last 5 years.
that said, total comp could be pretty high like that quite plausibly.
It's not hyperbole, although prior to 2022, getting $400k total compensation as a senior meant working at a handful of companies, even ones like Google and Microsoft weren't paying out that much unless it was through stock appreciation.
They won’t steal it but they will float it to their networks for validation and if any of them are looking to pick something up and run with it, now they’ve got the same idea from a known-quantity team.
It may happen but the benefits of being secretive are lower than the benefits of sharing an idea and getting constructive feedback. One of the earliest fallacies I learned as an entrepreneur is that ideas need to be protected lest someone "steal" them or "beat me to the punch." It's just not true.
The benefits of sharing an idea and getting feedback far far far outweigh the minuscule risk that sharing an idea will spark a competitor that will end up outcompeting me.
Now - having said that - posting your ideas in detail on a public thread on Hacker News doesn't necessarily have the same benefits, so I can see the hesitation ;)
Yeah there is a level of paranoia that can be problematically isolating.
In my experience it really depends on the type of idea, the other types of validation you already have, and your existing relationship to the funding network.
The more moonshot the idea, the more validation you can get outside of funding pitches, and the less cozy your relationship with the (well-networked) money, the more risk you get from sharing.
Many of these companies will pitch the big-picture what and why but not disclose the how, which is the magic. On the other hand, if the what and why are all the value and you share them before you’ve at least somewhat captured them then you risk giving away the opportunity, because the how is just what you’re asking for: the resources.
not really... because you WANT people to hear about your income streams, because that's how you get more income from them.
there are a bajillion worthwhile business ideas... they're a dime a dozen (and that's paying too much). The problem is IMPLEMENTING them, which essentially no-one ever bothers too.
way more folks who hear you idea will say "shit, i wanna use that" than "i'm going to spend a year of my life making an app to compete with that, and then another year marketing it and...."
I don't want to get rich quick - I just want a simple, easy, low-effort, scalable and actionable method of generating wealth each month without working. ;-)
Aside from my full time career as a programmer, the best side income stream I've built has been my book I wrote[0] to help software engineers develop the soft-skills that are necessary to reach a senior level position.
I spent 4 years on and off writing and preparing the book for publication, and it's been bringing in a steady stream of income since it was published in October 2022.
Not a huge income generator (around $19,000 total over the last 5 years), but the pose research, networking, booking sessions, actually doing the modeling, and reporting on / posting the artwork from my sessions on my social media is pretty much a "sole passion" for me.
Yes! The human body has the potential to do a tremendous variety of poses.
To keep it interesting for me and my artists, I regularly scan the Instagram posters I follow, as well as other sources (like classical art sites), and save interesting ones I'd like to try.
Then I run a slideshow of the poses on my home TV. I'll take a moment to look as I pass by while doing chores, or I'll spend some dedicated time actually doing the poses for timed intervals.
My cofounder and I have bootstrapped two software products that are generating revenue today with minimal involvement on our side.
The first product is a B2B onboarding platform. This product generates approx. $100k/year.
Our second product is a microsaas that turns google drive folders into a hosted, searchable wiki with one click. This product is making $2k/month.
Both products require minimum support and continue to sustain themselves.
One thing to note is that we did work full time on both of these products for like 1.5 years during the pandemic. At the time, it was definitely not the best income stream we had created but became so after we both got "real" jobs again.
Great landing page. Did you create that yourselves? The one thing I seem to struggle with is creating a nice looking landing page - it's just not something I'm good at. If you used a third party, any chance you'd say who that was?
Co-founder here. We originally made the landing page in Webflow. This worked ok but had some negative SEO benefits because our main app was forced to be on a subdomain.
We remade the page using a Tailwind template, which coincided with migrating our app to Tailwind. I highly recommend just using a template unless you are a designer, plenty of free or low cost ones out there. I like these: https://cruip.com/
Most important thing is having a good CTA, value props, and testimonials. Took us a lot of work to refine these.
We also worked with a graphic designer to make the art assets / logo / etc. I'm sure she would be happy to have more clients, DM me (see bio) for info.
It auto-pops up a sign in link to Google when I visited it on Firefox, and it looks like it does the same on Chrome except Chrome blocks the pop up. Definitely fix that because I got a real sketchy feeling when it asked me to sign in upon immediately entering the page, not even clicking anything.
I think there was an update either at google or firefox recently because a ton of websites have started behaving like this for me seemingly out of the blue.
I didn’t do cold calling though maybe I should have. Instead, I trawled LinkedIn and used tools like hunter.io to find email addresses and then cold emailed folks.
Fwiw, Apollo.io seems to do a good job surfacing contact info as well.
I agree that it's the best bit of life. But how on earth you manage to find a crying baby that decides to wake you up in the middle of the night relaxing is beyond me :)
Its ok. They don't want to admit reality. I ahve 3 kids (one is a baby) and I love them to death but crying baby is never fun and certainly not relaxing and I am happy to admit that.
True true. And after they learn to walk you got about two weeks and the learn how to run and then you’re chasing them for 5 years. Mine are 13 and 10 and it’s pretty nice atm. The 10 year old still thinks I hang the moon and the 13 year old is just enough of a smart ass to make me laugh.
hahaha so true. I have a 9 year old, 8 year old and 5 months old (I know I know. Diaper days are back again). The 9 year old already talks like she is 13 and the 8 year usually follows her and well, the 5 month old. Baby doing baby things :)
Same! Except my wife quit her money-making job to take care of our kids full-time. I go to work, come home, and spend time with my family. Every Friday my employer deposits about $1,500 in my account, which represents an income stream of about $6,800/mo, not to mention paying for my health insurance and putting about $100 in my 401k. All I have to do is show up for about 40 hours Monday through Friday.
For a side hustle, we bought a home around 2015 for $125k. We've paid off about $70k of the 2.8% 15-year mortgage and property taxes at $1100/mo, it's now estimated to be worth about $330k. That represents an income stream equivalent to about $2200/mo due to that asset's value rising at about 15% per year. If it wasn't for the fact that I live here, I'd be divesting a lot of my investment in that obvious bubble ASAP. Similarly, my parents built my childhood home nearby in '96 for about $80k, their property is now worth about $750k, you do the math.
I dont think so because they were able to live in the property while it gained value, so they didn't need to spend on other accommodations. Alternative living costs would factor in towards the decision to sell and what they can get with that value today, but im not seeing how it reduces the earnings.
You would need to subtract the YOY property taxes and maintenence costs (with inflation) to get actual net earnings, though
What is the point of unrealized gains if you can never realize them (spend them)?
One use case is being able to borrow more against the increased value, but I do not think that it is a good idea for 99% of people to use their primary residence as leverage.
Congratulations on buying your house in 2015, it would be difficult to buy such a property at that price today without some large concessions on location or quality of the home.
However, I do agree with the sentiment of your post. It's a lot easier to live below your means as a way to grow income rather than to stretch yourself to try to make extra money externally. 40 hours at a well played, balanced job with low living expenses is truly a great path.
When I do the math, I do not consider my primary residence to be of any numerical value since I do not want to live anywhere else. And even if I did want to live somewhere else, I would have to account for the costs of acquiring a new similar residence, which in a similarly desirable area would have risen just the same in price.
And assuming I needed to live somewhere else, it would likely be because something undesirable has happened to the whole area, so the price at that point would be much lower than whatever it is at times before then.
You're probably right, on looking up the details it's actually $120 per weekly paycheck, matched by my employer, so it's not so bad as the estimated $100, especially if you assumed that was monthly, but that's still not on-track for my retirement target. I also haven't poured much into the Roth since my eldest was born. But kids are expensive...
(Also, I see I also need to use more of that ~4 weeks of vacation I've saved...)
For almost my entire marriage, my wife has either been at home with our kids or trying to get a teaching job in a saturated market. When she has worked, it was never a big contributor to our income.
She'll be joining the workforce full-time in the next 6-9 months in a new field. I'm psyched for a pretty significant boost to our overall income that we've never had before.
Exercising options in a startup that I was convinced wasn't going anywhere but had great tech, and would be a decent acquisition within a year or two.
Turns out, they shook off both their doldrums and their VC-fueled overambition and started throwing off cash. The first dividend check alone quadrupled my investment cost, and they're still going strong.
My partner and I created a very successful business in the UK out of selling mushroom grow kits and microscopy spores.
We didn’t think there would be any market here because there weren’t any UK shops doing it. Then a couple of years later it took off and growing mushrooms became cool.
In this time we learned how to run a webshop and navigate an industry where every payment processor dropped us - to the point where we only accept cash, bank transfer and crypto.
Our Woocommerce shop was built on pure passion for mushrooms and a crazy late night idea. The kinds you usually just leave as an idea. Now it has consumed our lives and we have multiple employees.
Our business continues to grow with recent months bringing in around £60K/month in revenue.
I had never known what it was like going to a supermarket and not having to add the cost of everything in my head. But with the money, I learned the most valuable lesson - it could all go tomorrow and I would be totally fine with it.
We sell products which are related to all things mushrooms. There’s equipment, supplies you name it. Our grow kits are for growing shiitake, lion’s mane, king oyster or just about any gourmet mushroom which is legal to grow. Our microscopy spores are a product which are strictly sold for microscopy use. We love mushrooms and all things about them. But illegality is a red line, whether immoral or not.
We spent a long time analysing the terms and conditions and we couldn’t find anything that applied to our business. Asking directly where we broke terms was no hope, because none of which they cited applied to us either.
We wouldn’t go back to card payments if we could. We save a fortune by paying 0% processing fees, have more control and are protected by a regulated UK bank instead of companies like Stripe or PayPal. We are very lucky!
Bro, you're selling drugs on a "for science only!!!!" basis that is purely a fig leaf. IDK the controlled substance laws around Psilocybin but this is definitely a gray area at least.
Well, I googled the phrase "microscopy spores" and the first hit was a webpage that first defines the term to mean "observe under a microscope" then warns customers that the cultivation of psychoactive mushrooms is illegal in many places in the world. So at the very least, your competitors are pretty much implying that one _could_ use "microscopy spores" for cultivation, and I imagine the majority of customers are expecting to do so.
And hey, maybe you in particular have cracked the code in how to ship spores in syringes that only inject into slides and not say, a prepared cultivation point. But I am 0 percent surprised payment processors noped out.
Since forever. There are a few reasons why - one is cultural the other is risk. On the cultural side industries that are "controversial" tend to be avoided. Payment processors don't like to be associated with porn, gambling, drugs etc. because of potential negative PR. If you're a payment processor and trying to land big conservative clients, having press about how you support the porn industry doesn't do you any favors.
The other side is risk, meaning industries that have an above average chargeback (fraud) rate. Many times these industries overlap - porn for instance. Lots of stolen credit card numbers are used to by porn, but also legitimate purchases can easily end up as a chargeback. The classic example is that someone buys porn on their credit card and then their partner finds out. Instead of admitting they bought porn, they claim someone must have stolen their credit card to save face.
I’d upvote this if I could. Chargebacks aren’t impossible after paying via bank transfer - it might be called another name, but it has been done before to us by a scammer (but we can dispute and fight it). And one time after a customer added an extra 0 to their transfer and immediately tried to get their bank to claw it back without contacting us.
But we basically never had issues with chargebacks. Even when we used PayPal and Stripe for two years, we only had two chargebacks and we disputed one of them and won through PayPal as we proved it was fraudulent.
Maybe. When Shopify blocked us, the representative kept insinuating that the microscopy spore syringes we sell could be injected into the arm. This was in 2019. It’s absolutely absurd but that was what we were up against.
It’s a high risk industry, no doubt there have been plenty of scammers out there but the fact we sell magic mushroom spores for the microscope is enough to be alienated by every card processor and their insurers.
It’s fine though, we make it work - it hasn’t stopped our growth and we’ve amassed enough trust from customers to pay via the other methods!
*Edid: Shopify, not PayPal said that about spores into the arm, not Stripe!
This is one of those business ideas that I must have had around the same time, but never pursued because I was studying; figured engineering would make me more more than selling mushroom growing kits and spores ever would.
I had a large setup in my shed for a few years. Lots of labor getting the substrate boiled and bagged, but once that was done it was easy. Figured that surely there was legs to selling the means of production directly to consumers instead. Who could have guessed it would take off like it has. Now you can even find the grow kits in TK Max and the like as Christmas presents. The market seems pretty saturated now so I'm sure the boat has long sail for me. I'm glad it's worked out for you, if not a little envious.
Ah, for a second there I thought psilocybin mushrooms were legal in UK (as they are/were in NL) and I would have really wanted to buy one of your kits. Maybe if the laws change feel free to let us know ;)
If the laws change, feel free to let us know too - we would love making ten-fold the sales by producing and selling magic mushroom grow kits! ;)
But in all seriousness, psilocybin was banned in 2005 in the UK. We have only sold products which were to be used to help cultivate psilocybin mushrooms to one single customer - an organisation with a special license to do so provided by the Home Office in the UK.
No, that’s not us. We teach customers from the ground up how to cultivate using sterile spawn, whereas they sell pre-colonised substrate where much of the process has already been done :)
I had partnering with a marketing agency for awhile doing implementation of their designs in WordPress. After a few years of clients breaking their sites doing upgrades and other ad-hoc questions/enhancement requests coming via email, I got tired of sending $100-200 invoices, so I started selling "WordPress Maintenance" as a product. It's not fun or sexy, but don't underestimate the number of organizations willing to pay $3K/year to be able to email you for advice, install plugins, add custom post types, and keep things up to date. I've got ~12 clients now (started with 4 in 2017) and it's an "easy" $30K every year.
FWIW, I work exclusively with local clients. Local clients, in my experience, are more willing to pay more to local people.
Anyone providing professional services should have liability insurance.
Furthermore, unless a service provider has been acting negligently or has given some sort of guarantee like "With my services, your WordPress instance won't be hacked.", they usually can't be held responsible for actions and outcomes that are out of their control.
Specifically, I believe you are looking for E&O (errors and omissions) insurance. Make a mistake doing something, or mistakenly not do something, and it will cover your liability up to whatever coverage you buy.
As you say, willful negligence, malicious acts, false advertising and fraud are of course not covered.
For kicks I once saved a local company I was working at about $30k by installing a wordpress caching plugin.
Their website went down when they got some international attention, and the consultants they hired designed a "solution" which involved big dedicated machines to host their (essentially text+image) wordpress site. The site wasn't my job at all, but when I overheard the price (and read their engineering plan) I asked for admin access and told them 10mins later to fire the consultants.
The director of engineering (an awesome guy) advised that I register a business and not use my name, then he hired me under pseudonym as their new consultant and I billed them at twice the rate they were paying me during the day for a few hours here and there at night (in retrospect, a total steal for them as I was an intern..)
Ya most fun workplace due to it being basically 15 best friends who've worked together for many years. Even the CEO was their buddy from college.
Now I'm in big tech and while it's astronomically better for my career, I absolutely loathe it socially. Not sure it's worth it (holistically), and look forward to someday joining a local medium sized company with average achievers + personalities.
That's awesome! I'm still in undergrad and naturally I want that big FAANG+ payday, but, I think building a company or just working with people I really like would be much nicer. But now that you've seen both sides, do you see your self moving?
Yes, waiting for a promotion and maybe some stock vesting, then I can't wait to move.
As much as I love money, I'm financially stable enough. Going to force myself to prioritize other things. Good luck.
Yeah, my dad left a very very lucrative SWE role to work as an entry level NASA employee because he loves Space so much. Honestly, he seems pretty happy with the shift.
That's surely the case for everybody? I can't imagine bothering to go to work for less money than I'm making in the evenings/weekends - why not do the 'side hustle' full time instead, or use the time for something new, or family, or whatever.
This year, just like I did for the past 10, I invested all my paycheck savings into VTI/VXUS despite suffering 6 figures unrealized losses from them. I plan on doing the same next year, and for as long as I am employed/have disposable income. Every spare dollar I find, outside of my emergency fund, gets immediately invested.
Investing if like being a batter where you get to choose when to swing and have an unlimited number of pitches. Just wait for that slow easy one, and hit a home run.
-- poorly paraphrased Buffett quote
Not the GP, but I would say yes. I am 51, and I have seen a few economic boom and bust cycles.
I think you can almost boil it down to: if you think civilization will collapse, then do not buy stocks. If you think it will still be around, buy stocks. Things might look bad over the next few years, but I think things will get better after a while.
I earned back my advance after about five years and have been receiving royalty checks ever since.
This year, it surpassed 100,000 copies sold.
Just a little note for other would-be authors ... it's never been easier to self-publish -- but getting a book deal with a traditional publisher still has substantial upsides, particularly on the distribution side. There are exceptions (e.g. if you expect digital versions to constitute the vast majority of sales). But by and large, you're better off getting a book deal if you can.
Details are in my bio, but it's a pop-science book for new parents. It got a big publicity boost when Parents magazine ran excerpts, and a gigantic publicity boost when "The Big Bang Theory" wrote an episode where my book was a central plot element.
Hah! I saw your comment and was intrigued since I have been looking for a Christmas present for my brother and his 7-month old son. Then I looked at your bio and realised it was the book I'd bought for him last Christmas.
I love the BBT show, well the early seasons more than the later ones, but still it's an amazing feat to featured in a world-wide blockbuster loved by geeks :-)
ps. Most pharmacy university students were closely familiar with the show, there was an abundance of references during classes.
If you don’t mind sharing, what do the advance and royalty terms look like for a first time author? And how many copies does it take to “break even” on the advance?
> In the Penguin Random House/S&S antitrust trial it was revealed that out of 58,000 trade titles published per year, half of those titles sell fewer than one dozen books.
Which also had some discussion on HN, where some people suggested that it was somewhat true, while others explored other aspects of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32794673
But even the article itself refers to more claims like that, with many suggesting that in writing, like many other industries, there will be a few very successful books/projects, and many that will fall by the wayside (honestly, I'd say the same about most things, from making SaaS products, to game development and art/music). Here's a humbling article that someone wrote: https://hughhowey.com/most-books-dont-sell/
I guess what I'm trying to say here: don't write a book hoping to earn a lot of money. Write a book because you find the experience interesting or fun, and just because you want to write (and publish) a book.
Being able to go work everyday and exchange labor for money. When the pay/shit factor starts going in the wrong direction, getting another job.
When the company disappears from under me, calling people in my network and finding someplace else that will give me money for my skillset and experience.
There is way too much emphasis on trying to find a “side hustle” and starting a company when the best statistical path forward for most developers is to “grind LeetCode and work for a $techCompany” (tm r/cscareerquestions)
I’m old enough and experienced enough to make FAANG money without having to jump through those hoops. But I still give that advice to anyone in the field.
Out of curiosity, what industry do you work in that doesn't require the leetcode hoops but still pays as well as FAANG? Or is it just due to your experience and network?
I was a long time (18 year) journeyman enterprise software developer until 2014 by trade.
I then started getting “architect” type jobs as far as responsibility. Where I was brought in when the companies needed to mature their processes. But I was still hands on.
I belatedly discovered the “cloud” in 2017 and in 2018 I was hired at a startup where the then new CTO wanted to be cloud native and was envisioning pivoting the company to selling micro services to support large health care companies apps and websites (that came in handy post Covid). I led the efforts.
Two years later a recruiter called me from Amazon Retail about a software developer position. I had no interest in either working for any large company as a software developer or doing the leetCode monkey dance at 46.
We kept talking and she suggested that I apply for a role in AWS Professional Services consulting in “application modernization” - full stack app dev + cloud + “Devops” + a lot of customer facing/presentation responsibilities.
The rest is history.
I don’t recommend this statistically unlikely route to anyone. 99% of developers should “grind leetCode” and get a good at coding interviews.
Working for small companies, I just happen to have experience from pre-sales all the way to implementation down the stack to cloud infrastructure. Not bragging, I’m just old /s.
I'm a mechanical engineer (satellites currently, launch vehicles and satellite payloads previously).
On the side I sell budget star tracking astrophotography mounts I designed and build in my basement. I also do a few consulting gigs each year. These efforts combined bring in an extra ~25k annually. My plan is to develop two more space-related products, hire a tech, and transition to more of an oversight and design role rather than the one guy running the whole thing.
For the record I don't think most people should do this, it is not a balanced life to work this much, generally speaking. But for me it's a worthy discomfort to relieve financial pressures from student debt and being the only breadwinner of a young family. Plus it's fun stuff, I get to design cool products which is what I do for fun anyway, I just usually stop at the level of prototype when it's just for me. ;)
When I started my "gig", I just kind of threw it out there. I fairly quickly started getting a lot of orders every week. Over time I had a few really good regular customers, my orders were about half from them and half from random one-offs.
A couple years into it I started reading in the forums about changes to the search algorithm and how it was hammering people and killing their existing gigs. It was all speculation since it's not transparent. Shortly after that, I started to notice the random one off orders completely stopped. I was still getting orders from my regulars, but over time their business started to drop off. A lot of those customers were using my services to fulfill orders on their own gigs (lots of whiteboard animation videos, things like that). So I imagine some of them also dropped off due to the algorithm and I went with it.
When they were gone, it was over. I'm left with a gig with over 500 completed orders with a perfect 5 star rating, that never gets seen by anyone.
There isn't much in the way of SEO you can do - you have your gig description and you can add some keywords. There is a system for buying ads - I tried that out, but it didn't lead to any clicks.
My fiancee sells self-made art somewhat successfully for the last 9 months. I contribute by managing communication with buyers through FB Marketplace, Craigslist, and while we tried Etsy, it didn't do that well. We specifically target the mid-range market which means we price below top artists on Etsy/Instagram, but above cheap prints and generic Ikea style art.
It definitely requires a lot of physical work on her part and our spare bedroom is basically a pile of canvas, paint, plaster, and other supplies, but it has generated over $10,000 in revenue. We could optimize more and she could make prints of some of her better paintings, but she does it for fun and most of the money she uses for shopping (and I spend my share on triathlon gear!)
I've recently been considering building a Shopify app(product renting) but I can't figure out if there is a demand. A similar app has <10 reviews. Do you have any advice?
I have businesses which gave me a taxable income of $4 million. Mostly passive. All of them are tech businesses. Started off with a few foundational ideas I came up with through trial and error over 10 years.
I won't give away the exact niches but they are in the universal, evergreen problems: wealth, health and love.
I charge really high around $300 per month. That way you cut through the b.s. and it is clear you are delivering value or not.
Also helps with the marketing as I can get more per customer than I spend on acquiring them.
Usually saas businesses all seem to charge really low like $10 / month for some reason. That is a mistake in my opinion.
There are lot of wealthy people in the world for whom $300 and even higher is nothing if it totally solves a problem.
I also provide human customer support because of that high price point so they like it if they have a problem.
Then I hired managers for each business who manage it for me and now it is almost a replicable model that I can use when starting any business.
Thanks for sharing. Seems like you've found your product-market fit!
I do agree that many SaaS services are underpriced (and many overpriced). SaaS entrepreneurs should take a bit more risk and try pricing their products at the higher end - even if its for an experimental duration.
That site's awesome. Simple focused product. It's clear what it does. It's clear what it costs.
only thing i'd suggest is that you add more examples of what where people can put those QR codes. I think most folks in the US don't "get" QR codes, or how they could benefit from them. Also it'd be good google food.
probably a description of how easy it is to scan them on iOS and android. I think a bunch of folks still don't know it's built into the phone apps.
When I was in college I sold discarded text books on half.com. This isn’t my best income stream, but in many ways it was my favorite.
After the Spring 2000 semester, I noticed that the bookstores had junk book bins. Students would dump into the bins any books that the bookstore would not buy back. Anyone was welcome to rummage through the bin and if they found something interesting they could keep it.
The bookstores wouldn’t buy books back if they knew that a new version had been released. They of course wanted to avoid being stuck with useless inventory. I wondered if these books had residual value elsewhere. I collected a few and took them home and started looking up them up on half.com. Sure enough, all of them had listings and lots of them were listed for 10’s of dollars!
For the next few days I made a continuous circuit around all the bookstores, loading my car with any books I found in the bins, and dumping them in my living room. At night I would list the day’s haul. Because my inventory was free, I always listed $1 lower than the cheapest listing.
I now had an inventory of several thousand books and a very irritated set of roommates, including my future wife. All I had to do was sit back and wait for classes to start somewhere in the world where one of these books might still be in use.
Within a week orders started to roll in. Soon I was heading to the post office daily with a huge load of books. Things would quiet down whenever a there was a lull in sessions starting. I’d replenish inventory as the various summer sessions completed.
Fall semester generated a huge bump sales and I was able to get a huge inventory of books when the semester ended. Unfortunately that proved to be the last semester of junk book bins. The stores got wise to what the kid in the beat up Honda was up to and started collecting the junk books for themselves.
I continued to sell what books I had and that went on for the rest of the time I was in school. After graduation my wife demanded that I chuck the rest. She’d had enough of random stacks of old textbooks.
Somebody stole my calculus textbook and sold it to the bookstore. This textbook cost over USD 200 new iirc. I would have probably paid the thief more than what the bookstore paid them for my used book.
to me it sounds like they were serving the interest of poor students by distributing cheap books to where there was demand. Otherwise those books could have been left in the bin gathering dust
that's interesting, so different locales around the world would operate on different editions. So in the locale you picked up where the old editions were useless they found a home elsewhere in the world. Cool stuff.
I used to sell on half.com . My dad was a college professor and would get free sample textbooks from the publishers that wanted him to consider them for his classes. He'd give them to me to sell
But my most memorable sale was to see the name of a classmate on my half.com portal. I just handed him the book in class one day instead of having to take it to the post office.
I'd also buy deeply discounted old editions from the school bookstore to resell. They still had resale value because not all schools would update to the latest book right away.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 336 ms ] threadMuch better than hustling a few different freelance/contracts/side hustles for me at this point in my life.
Being an employee is simple - do (good-enough-to-not-get-fired) work, get paid. Entrepreneurship requires you to identify a target market, figure out a product that would work for it, create that product, market it, actually sell it, ship it, do the associated financial admin, and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm not thinking of. The amount of potential gain-per-effort is higher than in employment - but the amount of work you have to go through in order to get to that point is also higher.
As an employee, I can work on problems I identify, invest time in mentoring colleagues, spend time building a skill that will be of long term but not immediate benefit to my employer, etc: stuff nobody would pay a contractor to do.
But a part-time consulting gig on the side, when you've been working for 10+ years and have a solid network? In that case, you can often find opportunities in your network, if you're looking.
Basically, if anyone you know is taking a C-level position in a funded startup, for example, they might very often need help with all sorts of different things and would be willing to pay.
Similarly, any time someone reaches out on linkedin with a job, tell that you're happily employed on not planning on moving, but that you would be interested in helping them on a part-time consulting basis. Done.
S&p dividend indices are 2.54%, utility indexed 2.85%
It absolutely happens.
The benefits of sharing an idea and getting feedback far far far outweigh the minuscule risk that sharing an idea will spark a competitor that will end up outcompeting me.
Now - having said that - posting your ideas in detail on a public thread on Hacker News doesn't necessarily have the same benefits, so I can see the hesitation ;)
In my experience it really depends on the type of idea, the other types of validation you already have, and your existing relationship to the funding network.
The more moonshot the idea, the more validation you can get outside of funding pitches, and the less cozy your relationship with the (well-networked) money, the more risk you get from sharing.
Many of these companies will pitch the big-picture what and why but not disclose the how, which is the magic. On the other hand, if the what and why are all the value and you share them before you’ve at least somewhat captured them then you risk giving away the opportunity, because the how is just what you’re asking for: the resources.
there are a bajillion worthwhile business ideas... they're a dime a dozen (and that's paying too much). The problem is IMPLEMENTING them, which essentially no-one ever bothers too.
way more folks who hear you idea will say "shit, i wanna use that" than "i'm going to spend a year of my life making an app to compete with that, and then another year marketing it and...."
Can you list a few of the best ones for me?
I spent 4 years on and off writing and preparing the book for publication, and it's been bringing in a steady stream of income since it was published in October 2022.
[0]: https://www.holloway.com/b/junior-to-senior
Not a huge income generator (around $19,000 total over the last 5 years), but the pose research, networking, booking sessions, actually doing the modeling, and reporting on / posting the artwork from my sessions on my social media is pretty much a "sole passion" for me.
https://sites.google.com/view/brian-life-model/home
To keep it interesting for me and my artists, I regularly scan the Instagram posters I follow, as well as other sources (like classical art sites), and save interesting ones I'd like to try.
Then I run a slideshow of the poses on my home TV. I'll take a moment to look as I pass by while doing chores, or I'll spend some dedicated time actually doing the poses for timed intervals.
The first product is a B2B onboarding platform. This product generates approx. $100k/year.
Our second product is a microsaas that turns google drive folders into a hosted, searchable wiki with one click. This product is making $2k/month.
Both products require minimum support and continue to sustain themselves.
One thing to note is that we did work full time on both of these products for like 1.5 years during the pandemic. At the time, it was definitely not the best income stream we had created but became so after we both got "real" jobs again.
Please let me know if you have any feedback on it!
We remade the page using a Tailwind template, which coincided with migrating our app to Tailwind. I highly recommend just using a template unless you are a designer, plenty of free or low cost ones out there. I like these: https://cruip.com/
Most important thing is having a good CTA, value props, and testimonials. Took us a lot of work to refine these.
We also worked with a graphic designer to make the art assets / logo / etc. I'm sure she would be happy to have more clients, DM me (see bio) for info.
For Kbee, I actually wrote up our journey here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/our-journey-from-idea-to-p...
Would love to know what you think and if you have any follow up questions :)
Fwiw, Apollo.io seems to do a good job surfacing contact info as well.
For a side hustle, we bought a home around 2015 for $125k. We've paid off about $70k of the 2.8% 15-year mortgage and property taxes at $1100/mo, it's now estimated to be worth about $330k. That represents an income stream equivalent to about $2200/mo due to that asset's value rising at about 15% per year. If it wasn't for the fact that I live here, I'd be divesting a lot of my investment in that obvious bubble ASAP. Similarly, my parents built my childhood home nearby in '96 for about $80k, their property is now worth about $750k, you do the math.
You would need to subtract the YOY property taxes and maintenence costs (with inflation) to get actual net earnings, though
One use case is being able to borrow more against the increased value, but I do not think that it is a good idea for 99% of people to use their primary residence as leverage.
However, I do agree with the sentiment of your post. It's a lot easier to live below your means as a way to grow income rather than to stretch yourself to try to make extra money externally. 40 hours at a well played, balanced job with low living expenses is truly a great path.
And assuming I needed to live somewhere else, it would likely be because something undesirable has happened to the whole area, so the price at that point would be much lower than whatever it is at times before then.
(Also, I see I also need to use more of that ~4 weeks of vacation I've saved...)
She'll be joining the workforce full-time in the next 6-9 months in a new field. I'm psyched for a pretty significant boost to our overall income that we've never had before.
Turns out, they shook off both their doldrums and their VC-fueled overambition and started throwing off cash. The first dividend check alone quadrupled my investment cost, and they're still going strong.
In other words, they converted their startup into what is sometimes known as a "small business".
We didn’t think there would be any market here because there weren’t any UK shops doing it. Then a couple of years later it took off and growing mushrooms became cool.
In this time we learned how to run a webshop and navigate an industry where every payment processor dropped us - to the point where we only accept cash, bank transfer and crypto.
Our Woocommerce shop was built on pure passion for mushrooms and a crazy late night idea. The kinds you usually just leave as an idea. Now it has consumed our lives and we have multiple employees.
Our business continues to grow with recent months bringing in around £60K/month in revenue.
I had never known what it was like going to a supermarket and not having to add the cost of everything in my head. But with the money, I learned the most valuable lesson - it could all go tomorrow and I would be totally fine with it.
We wouldn’t go back to card payments if we could. We save a fortune by paying 0% processing fees, have more control and are protected by a regulated UK bank instead of companies like Stripe or PayPal. We are very lucky!
And hey, maybe you in particular have cracked the code in how to ship spores in syringes that only inject into slides and not say, a prepared cultivation point. But I am 0 percent surprised payment processors noped out.
The other side is risk, meaning industries that have an above average chargeback (fraud) rate. Many times these industries overlap - porn for instance. Lots of stolen credit card numbers are used to by porn, but also legitimate purchases can easily end up as a chargeback. The classic example is that someone buys porn on their credit card and then their partner finds out. Instead of admitting they bought porn, they claim someone must have stolen their credit card to save face.
But we basically never had issues with chargebacks. Even when we used PayPal and Stripe for two years, we only had two chargebacks and we disputed one of them and won through PayPal as we proved it was fraudulent.
It’s a high risk industry, no doubt there have been plenty of scammers out there but the fact we sell magic mushroom spores for the microscope is enough to be alienated by every card processor and their insurers.
It’s fine though, we make it work - it hasn’t stopped our growth and we’ve amassed enough trust from customers to pay via the other methods!
*Edid: Shopify, not PayPal said that about spores into the arm, not Stripe!
I'm guessing the former since payment processors kept dropping you?
I had a large setup in my shed for a few years. Lots of labor getting the substrate boiled and bagged, but once that was done it was easy. Figured that surely there was legs to selling the means of production directly to consumers instead. Who could have guessed it would take off like it has. Now you can even find the grow kits in TK Max and the like as Christmas presents. The market seems pretty saturated now so I'm sure the boat has long sail for me. I'm glad it's worked out for you, if not a little envious.
But in all seriousness, psilocybin was banned in 2005 in the UK. We have only sold products which were to be used to help cultivate psilocybin mushrooms to one single customer - an organisation with a special license to do so provided by the Home Office in the UK.
FWIW, I work exclusively with local clients. Local clients, in my experience, are more willing to pay more to local people.
Furthermore, unless a service provider has been acting negligently or has given some sort of guarantee like "With my services, your WordPress instance won't be hacked.", they usually can't be held responsible for actions and outcomes that are out of their control.
As you say, willful negligence, malicious acts, false advertising and fraud are of course not covered.
Their website went down when they got some international attention, and the consultants they hired designed a "solution" which involved big dedicated machines to host their (essentially text+image) wordpress site. The site wasn't my job at all, but when I overheard the price (and read their engineering plan) I asked for admin access and told them 10mins later to fire the consultants.
The director of engineering (an awesome guy) advised that I register a business and not use my name, then he hired me under pseudonym as their new consultant and I billed them at twice the rate they were paying me during the day for a few hours here and there at night (in retrospect, a total steal for them as I was an intern..)
Now I'm in big tech and while it's astronomically better for my career, I absolutely loathe it socially. Not sure it's worth it (holistically), and look forward to someday joining a local medium sized company with average achievers + personalities.
I've got a couple high level questions for someone more seasoned than I.
Could I email you?
So 10 then :)
Most satisfying: my investment portfolio of passive index funds
Career investments have a higher ROI than side hustles for me.
This year, just like I did for the past 10, I invested all my paycheck savings into VTI/VXUS despite suffering 6 figures unrealized losses from them. I plan on doing the same next year, and for as long as I am employed/have disposable income. Every spare dollar I find, outside of my emergency fund, gets immediately invested.
I think you can almost boil it down to: if you think civilization will collapse, then do not buy stocks. If you think it will still be around, buy stocks. Things might look bad over the next few years, but I think things will get better after a while.
I earned back my advance after about five years and have been receiving royalty checks ever since.
This year, it surpassed 100,000 copies sold.
Just a little note for other would-be authors ... it's never been easier to self-publish -- but getting a book deal with a traditional publisher still has substantial upsides, particularly on the distribution side. There are exceptions (e.g. if you expect digital versions to constitute the vast majority of sales). But by and large, you're better off getting a book deal if you can.
Thanks, it's such a great book!
ps. Most pharmacy university students were closely familiar with the show, there was an abundance of references during classes.
This might work for some writers and books, but not for others.
There was this one Tweet that went into detail about what some trial documents revealed about a particular publisher: https://twitter.com/aprilhenrybooks/status/15662306587665039...
> In the Penguin Random House/S&S antitrust trial it was revealed that out of 58,000 trade titles published per year, half of those titles sell fewer than one dozen books.
There were also articles that disagreed with the claim: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...
Which also had some discussion on HN, where some people suggested that it was somewhat true, while others explored other aspects of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32794673
But even the article itself refers to more claims like that, with many suggesting that in writing, like many other industries, there will be a few very successful books/projects, and many that will fall by the wayside (honestly, I'd say the same about most things, from making SaaS products, to game development and art/music). Here's a humbling article that someone wrote: https://hughhowey.com/most-books-dont-sell/
I guess what I'm trying to say here: don't write a book hoping to earn a lot of money. Write a book because you find the experience interesting or fun, and just because you want to write (and publish) a book.
When the company disappears from under me, calling people in my network and finding someplace else that will give me money for my skillset and experience.
There is way too much emphasis on trying to find a “side hustle” and starting a company when the best statistical path forward for most developers is to “grind LeetCode and work for a $techCompany” (tm r/cscareerquestions)
I’m old enough and experienced enough to make FAANG money without having to jump through those hoops. But I still give that advice to anyone in the field.
I then started getting “architect” type jobs as far as responsibility. Where I was brought in when the companies needed to mature their processes. But I was still hands on.
I belatedly discovered the “cloud” in 2017 and in 2018 I was hired at a startup where the then new CTO wanted to be cloud native and was envisioning pivoting the company to selling micro services to support large health care companies apps and websites (that came in handy post Covid). I led the efforts.
Two years later a recruiter called me from Amazon Retail about a software developer position. I had no interest in either working for any large company as a software developer or doing the leetCode monkey dance at 46.
We kept talking and she suggested that I apply for a role in AWS Professional Services consulting in “application modernization” - full stack app dev + cloud + “Devops” + a lot of customer facing/presentation responsibilities.
The rest is history.
I don’t recommend this statistically unlikely route to anyone. 99% of developers should “grind leetCode” and get a good at coding interviews.
Working for small companies, I just happen to have experience from pre-sales all the way to implementation down the stack to cloud infrastructure. Not bragging, I’m just old /s.
On the side I sell budget star tracking astrophotography mounts I designed and build in my basement. I also do a few consulting gigs each year. These efforts combined bring in an extra ~25k annually. My plan is to develop two more space-related products, hire a tech, and transition to more of an oversight and design role rather than the one guy running the whole thing.
For the record I don't think most people should do this, it is not a balanced life to work this much, generally speaking. But for me it's a worthy discomfort to relieve financial pressures from student debt and being the only breadwinner of a young family. Plus it's fun stuff, I get to design cool products which is what I do for fun anyway, I just usually stop at the level of prototype when it's just for me. ;)
A couple years into it I started reading in the forums about changes to the search algorithm and how it was hammering people and killing their existing gigs. It was all speculation since it's not transparent. Shortly after that, I started to notice the random one off orders completely stopped. I was still getting orders from my regulars, but over time their business started to drop off. A lot of those customers were using my services to fulfill orders on their own gigs (lots of whiteboard animation videos, things like that). So I imagine some of them also dropped off due to the algorithm and I went with it.
When they were gone, it was over. I'm left with a gig with over 500 completed orders with a perfect 5 star rating, that never gets seen by anyone.
There isn't much in the way of SEO you can do - you have your gig description and you can add some keywords. There is a system for buying ads - I tried that out, but it didn't lead to any clicks.
So if you're not getting orders with what seems like a very strong rating, who is?
It definitely requires a lot of physical work on her part and our spare bedroom is basically a pile of canvas, paint, plaster, and other supplies, but it has generated over $10,000 in revenue. We could optimize more and she could make prints of some of her better paintings, but she does it for fun and most of the money she uses for shopping (and I spend my share on triathlon gear!)
Current income at 80k/year with relatively low maintenance. I have a full time job as a software engineer on the side.
You can also do a 7 day trial of SEMRush and do some competitive research on the app’s domain.
See if they’re ranking for any keywords/how much search traffic the keywords have.
I charge really high around $300 per month. That way you cut through the b.s. and it is clear you are delivering value or not. Also helps with the marketing as I can get more per customer than I spend on acquiring them.
Usually saas businesses all seem to charge really low like $10 / month for some reason. That is a mistake in my opinion.
There are lot of wealthy people in the world for whom $300 and even higher is nothing if it totally solves a problem.
I also provide human customer support because of that high price point so they like it if they have a problem.
Then I hired managers for each business who manage it for me and now it is almost a replicable model that I can use when starting any business.
I do agree that many SaaS services are underpriced (and many overpriced). SaaS entrepreneurs should take a bit more risk and try pricing their products at the higher end - even if its for an experimental duration.
It does not bring in a whole lot, but I like having a side hustle.
only thing i'd suggest is that you add more examples of what where people can put those QR codes. I think most folks in the US don't "get" QR codes, or how they could benefit from them. Also it'd be good google food.
probably a description of how easy it is to scan them on iOS and android. I think a bunch of folks still don't know it's built into the phone apps.
After the Spring 2000 semester, I noticed that the bookstores had junk book bins. Students would dump into the bins any books that the bookstore would not buy back. Anyone was welcome to rummage through the bin and if they found something interesting they could keep it.
The bookstores wouldn’t buy books back if they knew that a new version had been released. They of course wanted to avoid being stuck with useless inventory. I wondered if these books had residual value elsewhere. I collected a few and took them home and started looking up them up on half.com. Sure enough, all of them had listings and lots of them were listed for 10’s of dollars!
For the next few days I made a continuous circuit around all the bookstores, loading my car with any books I found in the bins, and dumping them in my living room. At night I would list the day’s haul. Because my inventory was free, I always listed $1 lower than the cheapest listing.
I now had an inventory of several thousand books and a very irritated set of roommates, including my future wife. All I had to do was sit back and wait for classes to start somewhere in the world where one of these books might still be in use.
Within a week orders started to roll in. Soon I was heading to the post office daily with a huge load of books. Things would quiet down whenever a there was a lull in sessions starting. I’d replenish inventory as the various summer sessions completed.
Fall semester generated a huge bump sales and I was able to get a huge inventory of books when the semester ended. Unfortunately that proved to be the last semester of junk book bins. The stores got wise to what the kid in the beat up Honda was up to and started collecting the junk books for themselves.
I continued to sell what books I had and that went on for the rest of the time I was in school. After graduation my wife demanded that I chuck the rest. She’d had enough of random stacks of old textbooks.
But my most memorable sale was to see the name of a classmate on my half.com portal. I just handed him the book in class one day instead of having to take it to the post office.
I'd also buy deeply discounted old editions from the school bookstore to resell. They still had resale value because not all schools would update to the latest book right away.