Ask HN: How have you made "quick" money before?
I find myself in a unique (not so unique?) situation today: While I am very competent in two valuable areas (web and mobile development), I find myself in a short term and temporary shortage of money, due to the usual hiccups that can happen while providing for a family. While my career is solid, I find myself in deep need for a way to make $1-2k over the next month to pay some bills.
I am pursuing doing some client work on the side, as that's the easiest way to make that kind of money, but projects take time to get started/completed/invoiced/paid. So my question to the very inventive audience on HN is this:
How have you made 'quick' money, through non-traditional means?
103 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] thread8 years ago or so, I ran a little ecommerce site with a wholesale/drop-ship product provided by another company. When I needed extra spending money (being a full-time college student at a private university and no savings), I'd clone my own site. I'd design a new theme for the shopping cart software and sell the same product. I'd advertise it on Google AdWords for a few days to get some orders. Then I'd package that all up and list it on eBay -- a fully functional site with existing customers, a supplier, a known conversion rate, and pre-written ad copy and keyword list for the buyer. These days people use Flippa instead of eBay to sell websites, but it's something you could try as a web dev.
I was in the WP business for a while, with about a quarter million in sales before I sold it off, and did nothing to prevent piracy. It wasn't an issue. Someone pirating the code doesn't hurt me. Anyone that wanted the plugins/themes and had money was going to pay for it, as that's the only way they would get support and updates.
I've experienced this first hand. As a junior web developer at an advertising company, there were plenty of times when my grand schemes for how we could do something for free on WordPress were met with "no, just pay for it".
Plugins or themes could require a lot of trial and error before finding success, and buyers may not come until later. He needs the cash now, so he should go the sure thing and try to find paying customers directly rather than put things up for sale and wait for results that may never come.
If there was a way to make quick money that worked, lots of people would be doing it. With enough people doing it, some people get very good at it and are able to consolidate and raise barriers to entry. So now that previously very attractive thing is slightly less attractive because there's more ramp up required.
Fortunately, you do have valuable skills. Unfortunately, as you point out, even putting those to optimal use requires significant ramp up--you've got to build a name for yourself or you've got to start some kind of consulting company and build a client list. Then suddenly you're in the consulting business. If you just jump into it and take whatever you can get, you'll make significantly less.
It's not even a matter of doing something you'd rather not do--there are tons of people out there that will do things most people don't want to do for very little money--and they do it for a living.
So of those, you could try hitting odesk or elance or any number of freelancing websites to pick up a quick gig--but even that requires a sales pipeline that takes some time to get going. Personally, I'd put it on a credit card if I were in a similar situation, and lacking that, would probably start selling stuff.
If you're capable of cloning the style that their clients seem to choose most of the time your success rate can be rather high, but it can also be very frustrating to do a lot of work and by chance not win any contests.
It's pretty shallow work artistically, and can be a gamble. But you could probably rack up $2000 in a month if you really committed.
http://99designs.com/mobile-app-design/contests
But yeah, promoting the thing is a big part of "the thing", and requires its own strategy.
I've always had a passion for publishing and have tended to build up news sites, blogs, and now e-mail newsletters in the areas I find interesting. So prior to both the course and my screencast, I already had a five figure audience on the right topics and a huge home advantage.
I'll note, however, that this is by no means required, and people in my position frequently become friendly with others with such projects and help them out.
Good things to sell are things that hold value - bikes, rolexes, tools, things like that. Imagine you were burgling your own apartment/house, take the things they would take and sell them.
It's entirely possible to purchase a used mercedes, take decent care of it for 2-3 years, and turn around and resell it for virtually the same price. Ditto many luxury goods - a used rolex can sometimes be turned around for a profit.
You might have to get a little bit more crazy with it than you want to, but I think most people would be suprised how much stuff they don't actually "need".
Every time we received an order on Amazon, we would just take that buyer's information and buy it on the small publisher's website—we essentially took on zero risk and worked a few minutes every time we got an order.
It was a great example of arbitrage. And just like arbitrage, competitors also saw this exploit and the market inefficiency disappeared. Margins were competed away.
Even though it was a temporary window of opportunity, we found an article saying that some people do this kind of work full time (finding obscure books and reselling at a huge markup)!
Quickest 1,000 euros (2500 guilders at the time) I ever made was in a place where they ran a distributed message passing system that had broken down on a busy Monday morning grinding to a halt the shipping brokerages in 50 countries or so.
From walking in to getting the job to walking out again with a for me at the time large sum of money was about 15 minutes. Outsider perspective is worth a lot in times of crisis and if you can spot what the problem is faster than the team that built the thing it certainly won't hurt your reputation.
Of course you could argue that I charged them too little and that I should have made them bleed but I don't like ripping people off. And they did turn into a long term customer after that.
Once you've sold enough stuff, work out how much you need that's left. Can you get that doing a couple of evenings or weekends of part time work?
Poker is a game of skill but it doesn't mean you can't have bad luck.
I play poker when I have $1000 to lose without risk. That's when I can play my best, with detachment from the money and the freedom that provides.
My last $1000 with no job? It's time to think about food and shelter and a new job -- any old job will do. I made a decision in my mid-20s that I would never again sponge off my parents or friends, that for me, I'd outgrown that. So no way would I risk my last $1k.
But, of course, YMMV.
In particular sleep studies can pay thousands of dollars (in exchange for living in a lab for a week or two) but the lead time might be too long for you, eg https://sleep.med.harvard.edu/research/recruitment
Also, you might try being a provider on services like Exec, Lyft, or Taskrabbit.
The first was a pick up/drop off job that consisted of me picking up some rental items and dropping them off about 30 minutes outside Boston ($25). The second was ordering an iced latte at Starbucks and literally delivering it a block away ($14!). Both times the mobile app failed (iPhone 4S, iOS 6) in two different ways. For the first task it failed multiple times when I tried to mark the task as complete-not such a big deal since the task was done. The fail during the second task was critical-it would not let me login to view where the drop-off location was and the email confirmation confusingly showed the start and end location as the same address (Starbucks). I had to call the person who submitted the task to verify drop-off location and explain that the app had failed. They weren't irritated but I could see why me calling might be disruptive since they made this task to avoid leaving the building and walking a block.
Those sort of really simple (meaning ~2 steps) tasks seem to be few and far between. Many tasks such as, "Go shopping for me at IKEA," turn out to be much more involved when you read the details and find out the task includes assembling the furniture on-site.
For me it was more about trying out the interface on really basic tasks than making money but perhaps more complicated tasks would be something you'd be willing to do. Another important note is that the taskrabbit application is not too quick of a turnaround. I think it took nearly two weeks before I was approved.
I also pickup quick projects: $500-$2000 projects that can be completed on the side in under a week.
Hit up Craigslist. (assuming you're in an area where this is relevant) Not always the highest quality work, but you'll find a lot of quick $$ things there.
Basically technology is really confusing to a lot of people, many of whom will gladly pay for someone to explain to them in small words what they need to do.
You could be in for major problems if it becomes a habit, though. Take on debt only if it is a one-time, nonrecurring expense that you can pay back in a short time, not if it's a problem of income not meeting expenditures. And work on building up an emergency fund so you can be your own banker next time.
(FWIW: I served as "banker" when my sister moved out and got her own place, because she'd never worked before and didn't have money for 1st months rent + security deposit. She paid me back with interest 3 months later, although the "interest" was only that she paid for my half of our dad's father's day gift and bought me some sheet music.)
I was in much the same situation as the OP some time ago, when credit card companies wouldn't touch me because I was new to the country and had no credit rating. I called my bank and got a £1000 line of credit in 10 minutes, presumably on the back of them seeing a fairly substantial salary hit the account every month.
You can find them (particularly at credit unions) but they're not, to my understanding, as common in the US as in commonwealth countries.
Many people fall into the two extremes: they either borrow too much, or they are so afraid of debt that they never borrow at all. People on HN are a bit more paranoid and tend to be the latter.
A vendor recently told me he had taken out a short term bank loan based on my company's purchase order.
If you think about it, this is one of the more solid conceivable bases for a loan. I suspect many of those who may not normally rely on bank credit could still pull such a thing off.
Restaurants are particularly good candidates.
I also paid my rent for several months while unemployed by offering to do work on my landlord's other properties. In fact, me and one of my other housemates were "employed" this way until we found more lucrative work.
Tutoring other people in web development has also paid my bills at times.
Enter programming competitions, app hackathons, that sort of thing. The kind that are typically one whole 24h day, or perhaps an entire weekend, and offer decent prizes to the top few teams.
Now, I'll grant you that this might not be suitable for a number of reasons. The main one being that you sound like you need this money ASAP and perhaps there simply aren't any good contests this weekend. However, they certainly meet your criteria for being earned "in a relatively short time frame" since you're not working more than a few days and potentially collecting a 4+ figure check. You also (obviously) need some solid chops, but you mentioned that you're "very competent" at web and mobile development, and those are the hottest areas so that's a good start.
Some random examples of contests and competitions that I've been involved with recently include Mozilla Ignite [1], The Great Canadian Appathon [2], and a bunch of other low-key contests with smaller payoffs, often aimed at students. I'm linking to the prize pages just to show you that it can be very lucrative :).
So get out there and give it a shot. At worst you make no money but meet a bunch of awesome people, and they usually present opportunities of their own.
[1] https://blog.mozillaignite.org/2012/09/ideation-winners/
[2] http://greatcanadianappathon.com/prizes.php
There are more complicated answers, but they strike me as a perverse sort of poverty tourism. You have such astoundingly better options than poor people. Use them.
But on the other hand, it has some advantages, like potentially growing your client base and building a reputation so you can make more on those sites when you need to in the future. And sometimes time is all you have.
And it can make more economic sense than selling hardware, even if the hardware seems nonessential. Selling an oldish iPad now and buying a new one in six months is much more expensive than holding onto the old one for another year and a half. Hardware depreciates rapidly, so in theory, you could do well by selling an old iPad and then buying the same model used, later on if you need it. In practice, people usually don't do that.