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Ask HN: Are there 'dumb' ways to make money as a developer in your spare time?

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Re: Ask HN: Are there 'dumb' ways to make money as a developer in your spare time?

#41

Post by rexreed »

beambot wrote: post #5

Focus on cutting unnecessary expenses... As that serves double duty: saves that $100 and simultaneously reduces the savings burden to retire. As for "dumb" things you can do: cook more at home, pregame before going out, do activities that are cheap or free (eg bike rides instead of theaters), bike more instead of driving everywhere, read library books, etc (The benefit of these over "do consulting" answers also lies…

The OP is trying to save for retirement, when I think he's assuming he will have zero income. Slashing expenses and living frugally is always a good idea. But if you're trying to save up a nest egg, you can't cut your way to savings.

Re: Ask HN: Are there 'dumb' ways to make money as a developer in your spare time?

#42

Post by rexreed »

Run a monthly tech meetup. Find a sponsor. Make sure you're getting at least $100+ more in sponsorship than your costs (in your case, maybe 2-3 sponsors @ $200 each per month). It's as easy as it looks. If you have connections to potential sponsors, even better.

Re: Ask HN: Are there 'dumb' ways to make money as a developer in your spare time?

#44

Post by morgante »

Contracting is by far the most efficient way to make money in your spare time as a developer. Make sure it's okay with your employer, but you can generally find plenty of small projects to do (~5-10 hours a week) which will bring in a large amount of extra savings.

Re: Ask HN: Are there 'dumb' ways to make money as a developer in your spare time?

#45

Post by Godel_unicode »

xeonoex wrote: post #33

On this topic, I've always wondered how profitable it is to develop a site meant to make ad money. People love to talk about their interesting, cutting edge projects on HN, but no one talks about making websites whose main purpose is ad revenue. The web is littered with clickbait sites and sites that just make money off of Amazon affiliate links. The people that create them usually don't share their revenue, although…

I can't speak for other niches, but the travel and personal finance crowd have a large number of such sites. Given that they always appear to start as "one dude's thoughts on travel" and turn into multiple people writing for the site, I think the answer to your question is, "you can make money at it".

From your question, I think you already knowthe reason you don't hear about it on here. An Amazon affiliate powered blog doesn't have to be written in Haskell, use microservices, invent some new AI technique, and Change The World™ with a self-driving basic income. It just makes money with well-understood technologies and business models.

Re: Ask HN: Are there 'dumb' ways to make money as a developer in your spare time?

#46

Post by csallen »

xeonoex wrote: post #33

On this topic, I've always wondered how profitable it is to develop a site meant to make ad money. People love to talk about their interesting, cutting edge projects on HN, but no one talks about making websites whose main purpose is ad revenue. The web is littered with clickbait sites and sites that just make money off of Amazon affiliate links. The people that create them usually don't share their revenue, although…

I make a decent amount of money from ad revenue for Indie Hackers every month. You can see a breakdown of my traffic and revenue stats for January in this blog post: https://www.indiehackers.com/blog/month-in-review-2017-01. After focusing on this type of revenue for about 3-4 months, here are my takeaways:

* If you're going to use affiliate links, e.g. Amazon, then you really need the content on your site to appeal to people who have an intent to buy. For example, nobody really comes to Indie Hackers to buy hosting, so affiliate links for hosting companies don't do well. However, people come to learn more about building profitable online businesses, so links to websites and books and other educational resources in that area get lots of clicks. (This is true of any business, really: understand your customer and provide what they want, not what you want to sell.)

* I haven't tried Google Adsense, because I find the ads ugly. But I do use BuySellAds, and the revenue isn't great. I make something like $1 per 1000 visits. It probably doesn't help that ad-blockers tend to block these ads (unless you render them server-side).

* If your audience fits into a valuable niche, individual advertisers are often willing to pay quite a lot for some real estate. Of course, this requires some manual upfront outreach on your part, but it's easier to do than it sounds. I've had 20 minute phone calls that resulted in $1000 or $2000 ad buys.

EDIT: Also, if you're going to run a content site, create a newsletter that visitors can subscribe to. Make sure it goes out at least twice a month, so people don't forget who you are and unsubscribe. (You can completely automate it if you don't want to spend time maintaining it.) Newsletters are valuable real estate for ad revenue, and they also help you build an audience that you can potentially sell to if you ever create a product in the future. In fact, a newsletter can be your entire business: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13630163

Re: Ask HN: Are there 'dumb' ways to make money as a developer in your spare time?

#47

Post by morgante »

loeg wrote: post #16
kejaed wrote: post #2

Another side of the coin is at $100/week that's $5k a year. What if you 'worked on your career' and got a $5k raise? Do that once and that $5k will be there every year from that point on.

At what point does that stop panning out, though? My pay is somewhat above average and management is unlikely to give me a big raise going forward without a promotion. (And at my work the next promotion would be a sort of 'team lead' position, which I'm uninterested in.) I guess that was just a long winded way of saying: I understand where this is coming from, but in some situations the logical next step may actually…

If a raise is truly unfeasible, it's time to look for another job.

Re: Ask HN: Are there 'dumb' ways to make money as a developer in your spare time?

#49

Post by sametmax »

bsvalley wrote: post #35

If it would be easy to make $100 per month, then it would be easy to repeat the process 1000 times and become rich. There's no such things as easy when it comes to making money. You'd have to put time and energy into it.

Generalization doesn't help.

Define "easy". For me it's relative. Some stuff are easier than others. There is not an "absolute" easy. My job is 100x easier than most jobs I know. But I know many people making more money with less effort doing other tasks that are not necessarily jobs.

Then of course morality and legality enter in the equation. Very often, making something illegal or immoral increase the ratio pay/effort in your favor. E.G: spam or drugs.

Re: Ask HN: Are there 'dumb' ways to make money as a developer in your spare time?

#50

Post by lukewrites »

mathgeek wrote: post #3

One classic example would be to spend time teaching others. Whether this is generating an online course or tutoring/teaching in person, $100 a week is a pretty realistic goal if you're willing to spend the time. Still, it's probably a more efficient use of time to either work towards a better paying career move for long term income, or just cut expenses.

Good suggestion. It's pretty easy to get $100/wk for one to two hours of tutoring. Figure you'll need a few months of earning less hourly to (a) learn how to teach and (b) build a reputation. Once you've got an idea of what you're doing, you can make a good amount with little effort. I do some CS tutoring on the side. I don't prep, and the hour with the kids is generally enjoyable. Easy hundred bucks.

While one-to-one teaching/tutoring probably isn't much a career boost, it can be rewarding in other ways.

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