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Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

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Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#121
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting recommendation of flipmine. I buy in to the idea of what they're selling - used goods arbitrage - they're just selling another form of a "get rich scheme". Follow the money. If this niche were so great then the proprietors would keep this software platform to themselves to identify the opportunities and perform the work. Instead, they "offer" you the opportunity while they take in a $39 monthly fee for th…

I mean SaaS probably requires a lot less time... and scales a bit more than doing it as a business.

Exactly! So you should start a SaaS company and get the hell away from spending monthly fees to find your next time consuming manual sale.

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge market of people who want to purchase managed hosting, not be responsible for their own servers. Think of the customers (such as WordPress developers) of any traditional hosting company like DreamHost. The purpose of HostLaunch is to make it extremely easy to start your own managed hosting business to sell web hosting services in that same market.

I don’t get it. What’s your edge? You basically have no control over anything. Why would the customer go with jsamuel hosting rather than ornornor hosting if we’re Both reselling exactly the same thing? Or why not stay with dreamhost for that matter? What’s the reseller’s edge in that case? Anything goes wrong you have to wait on DO to sort it out. And price wise you can’t do anything that anyone else can’t get from…

Managed hosting is much more than what DO does, I suppose. They offer services like setting up a Wordpress, emails, nameservers, etc. for people who don't want or don't know how to. You sell customer service basically, you talk to people on the phone, usually works better within your local community.

Edit: and I suppose HostLaunch's edge is to get all the hassle of setting up that business out of the way so you can focus on customer service instead of plumbing servers together.

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#123
post #66

Have they considered teaching their skills online for money? If they worked in a call center, they probably know how to deal with some really hard things. I'd love to learn how they have patience when dealing with angry customers. At http://joinstream.io , we're building a super easy way to host a monetized livestream using Zoom. We generate a marketing page for you, handle billing, attendee management, and notificat…

This is cool! What tech/service are you using to handle accepting payments & paying out to event creators? To my knowledge you can't use stripe for things like this (though maybe I'm wrong)

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#124
post #52

Get rid of old stuff on ebay/cl/fb marketplace. Or buy stuff from ebay/cl/fb marketplace and sell on Amazon. and plugging a friend: https://www.flipmine.com/ scrapes arbitrage opportunities b/w ebay and amazon.

Interesting recommendation of flipmine. I buy in to the idea of what they're selling - used goods arbitrage - they're just selling another form of a "get rich scheme". Follow the money. If this niche were so great then the proprietors would keep this software platform to themselves to identify the opportunities and perform the work. Instead, they "offer" you the opportunity while they take in a $39 monthly fee for th…

I tend to agree, but I'm not sure that the buyers are suckers. Technically the people who sell pickaxes to gold miners are in way better shape than the gold mine owners. But we can't have 100% pickaxe salesman, someone actually has to mine the gold.

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#125
post #106
post #50

There is shortage of 3D printing filament because of virus, so I've been creating filament and selling it. https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho... This activity also help recycle waste plastic. Production cost of filament is $7.5 per 5kg and filament roll has 850 gram filament and can be sold for $20-30 per spool It's trivial to get the quality right. You can sell rolls on Amazon, eBay and Ets…

I don’t think someone working at a call center has the technical aptitude and financial resources to source and build there own extrusion machine.

Hard times can make hard people. You don't know what someone is capable of until they're backed against a wall. I was a computer repair man until my parent's divorce and the 2008 market collapse which forced me into a CS degree.

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#126
post #72

Unless you're desperate for cash, the most effective way to raise your income level is to learn a new skill while updating your resume and networking in that field. Position yourself for the post-pandemic economy. ie. tech.

Any recommendations for someone with a background in logic controls and light IT (industrial background)? What is actually worth investing your time in?

iOT, networking, cisco certified anything (resume builder).

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#127
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess this varies by state. (IANAL.)

What state do you think does? High-regulation states like MA and CA don't, and it would very much surprise me if others did. (I'm also not a lawyer.)

Sorry, I was unclear. I was guessing that low-regulation states might allow watching the kids of more than one family.

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#128
post #50

There is shortage of 3D printing filament because of virus, so I've been creating filament and selling it. https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho... This activity also help recycle waste plastic. Production cost of filament is $7.5 per 5kg and filament roll has 850 gram filament and can be sold for $20-30 per spool It's trivial to get the quality right. You can sell rolls on Amazon, eBay and Ets…

> It's trivial to get the quality right.

Is it really? I've looked into this a good bit myself and it seems that many who have tried this have trouble keeping the diameter consistent.

I suspect that if it really was trivial, then you'd think just about any commercial supplier could get it right, there's a lot of junk filament out there. Maybe you are just very good at it; +-0.02 is pretty good even by commercial standards. The entire first page of Amazon best sellers are +-0.03 or +-0.05.

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#129

Learn programming while doing something like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, etc. delivery in the mean time. Then start applying for roles.

"Learn to program"

People are still repeating this meme?

But seriously while Uber and other companies are laying off thousands it's probably one of the worst times to try to enter the market as a new SWE.

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#130
post #58
post #12

The best way to start generating income is to change your mindset. Instead of asking other people, all of whom have found their own specialized niche that will never be applicable to anyone else, step away from the computer and look around. Just in the past week I have heard from so many friends that are looking for good people. They never post stuff on job sites - it's way more trouble than its worth. They ask aroun…

Asking on HN is the same (or better, given audience size) as looking around and talking to people. It’s also not helpful to say “there’s an abundance of opportunity” without any examples.

It's not the same, because HN users don't have local knowledge. People here mention landscaping, but that wouldn't make much sense where I live, for example (lawns are relatively rare). Locality is a crucial factor in the labour market.
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