Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#441

Post by astura » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 11:32 PM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #133

electricslpnsld wrote: post #54

For the past few years I've been buying, renovating, and selling small-ish houses. My dad was a contractor growing up so I picked up most of the necessary skills helping him out during middle and high school. I mostly work on weekends and holidays which makes it a bit slow going, but I've made a reasonable amount of money. Even if the money was worse I would still probably do it, I really enjoy both the physical aspe…

Would it make more sense to rent them out rather than sell?

Being a landlord has a totally different skillset...

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#442

Post by swimfar » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 11:33 PM UTC

holoduke wrote: post #230

grecy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. A friend buys and restores old Porsche 911s. He will pay anything for custom made parts that are rare as hens teeth. As an example there is a housing around the main cooling fan that seems to be titanium or aluminum or something very exotic. [1] A company does sell a replacement, which he paid a fortune for, which had garbage tolerances and we spent weeks modifying it until it fit more or less well enough. I su…

I am into older Maserati's. Own a couple of them. I do a lot of manufacturing myself. 3d printing, cncing. The problem is that whenever I design a replacement panel, wishbones or various other stuff and try to sell them commercialy I will get sued by the original Maserati company. On a low scale it's fine, but you will never get a living out of it. The only parts which are in a gray area are rims, exhausts, filters,…

Similarly, a German-based company started producing replica Mercedes 300 SL bodies but they were shutdown and the bodies had to be crushed. Although, this isn't quite the same, because the bodies weren't used as replacement parts to keep existing cars on the road.

https://mercedesheritage.com/classic-mb-culture/mercedes-ben...

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#443

Post by mro_master » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 11:33 PM UTC

opportune wrote: post #434

mro_master wrote: post #431

I perform data cleansing of excel spreadsheets and sometimes convince them to develop basic CRUD apps to take the place of excel. Depending on the project and the feeling I get about the depth of their budget I charge: per row based on the transformations they need, flat fee if they actually have well defined requirements, per hour for development time if they are convinced of the value in standing up a new web app t…

How do you get clients for this kind of work and about how much do you charge? This sounds pretty laid back and potentially lucrative

That my friend is the secret sauce. My first job out of school was for a staffing company that pimped me out to perform similar projects. Word of mouth mostly, it's very lucrative if you have domain knowledge and can sit for long periods of time. It's not Mechanical Turk style cleansing and I have to take personal responsibility for every row as they mostly just suck up my cleansed data and roll with it, which you can't do with ML cleansed data or off-shored cleansed data. I've been thinking of launching a SaaS product but the transition from trusted consultant to enterprise SaaS is not easy. What do you do?

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#444

Post by mro_master » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 11:40 PM UTC

MrFoof wrote: post #84

I buy cars, repair them and recondition them to my level of satisfaction, and send them back out the door, typically targeting 55-65 year olds. I focus mostly on entry level luxury crossovers around 7 to 10 years old, though starting to also do hybrids since there’s more profit in it since everyone is seemingly allergic to batteries and pack replacement/rebuilds. Parts are cheap, I listen to music or a podcast, I do…

You should start a youtube channel, buy a wrecked Ferrari from Copart, document the build step by step, then reap youtube riches.

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#445

Post by opportune » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 11:45 PM UTC

denormalfloat wrote: post #72

Invest in an S&P 500 ETF. This is probably the lowest effort side project you can have which still makes money. Also, if you learn about the stock market, it makes you more confident in how your savings looks, how your retirement will look, how to manage money, etc.

I do this but I'm beginning to wish there were a way to exclude specific stocks from the ETF to improve performance. Basically looking for something exactly like SPY but with a way to blacklist certain stocks that I think are poor investments (e.g. Lyft). As far as I know there isn't any way to do this short of buying tons of individual stocks to create my own diversified portfolio without the stocks I want to avoid, which simply isn't worth my time given the sums I have invested and how much performance benefit I think I would get with those stocks excluded.

I have a theory that with a modicum of common sense you can probably increase your gains by 1-3% per year by avoiding stocks that are overbought by ETFs simply by virtue of their market cap or industry (meaning, the main reason these stocks hold their current valuation is that they have a lot of buy-side support from the fact that they are included in many ETFs).

Maybe a good fintech business opportunity since afaik this type of product doesn't exist!

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#446

Post by NeedMoreTea » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 11:45 PM UTC

dyarosla wrote: post #286

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> parts that are both unavailable Depends on your pricing and margins. There's a huge number of parts that are available but ridiculously priced, often coming out an order of magnitude in excess of what seems reasonable. Take for instance a kettle scale filter. OK you probably can't 3d print these, but for something so simple they're insanely priced - £5-£15 for a bit of plastic. A whole kettle with filter costs typi…

After material costs, time, shipping, advertising, & customer support, how much margin do you think there is to make on a part that already sells at £5-15 (ESP in an environment where spending £15-30 to get a new one is an accepted norm already)? This is def not viable from my view- at least not for parts that are this cheap already.

lol. 99% of it is margin - it's 50% of the whole retail item cost for That's most of it left for promotion. Domestic appliances, large and small, regularly have small spare parts that attract 25 or 50% of the price of the entire item. Never used to.

That they're already doing well with small appliances in the niche of non-available parts says enough about pricing floor.

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#447

Post by scarface74 » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 11:46 PM UTC

IanCal wrote: post #412

FPGAhacker wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think offering cash back is a way to get people to use their service?

Of course it is. Do you really think that they wanted to pay eighteen thousand dollars for someone to rapidly transfer money back and forth?

Hopefully they had the financial wherewithal to model outliers in their profit model.

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#448

Post by astura » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 11:46 PM UTC

netman21 wrote: post #198

denormalfloat wrote: post #72

Invest in an S&P 500 ETF. This is probably the lowest effort side project you can have which still makes money. Also, if you learn about the stock market, it makes you more confident in how your savings looks, how your retirement will look, how to manage money, etc.

I am put off by ETF performance thanks to my results last year. I had a SEP IRA for my business with $1,000 in it and a traditional IRA with $6,000. I bought a pharmaceutical ETF with the SEP IRA. After a year it lost about 5%. Meanwhile the trad IRA grew to $10,500 investing in companies I know.

That's a problem with the specific underlying securities you bought, not a problem with ETFs in general. The "classic" ETFs are for well-known indexes, like the S&P 500.

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#449

Post by chris_st » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 11:46 PM UTC

ccantana wrote: post #417

I run a popular weekly newsletter that makes fun of the tech industry. Think: The Onion meets TechCrunch. Newsletters can generally charge a much higher CPM than a social media accounts or even podcasts in some cases. You can start making beer money with only a few thousand subscribers. We’re also thinking of hosting a few live events as well once our audience is large enough. (P.S. for the curious, the newsletter is…

You might want to team up somehow with HackerNewsOnion[1]. They're fantastic.

[1] https://twitter.com/hackernewsonion

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#450

Post by opportune » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 11:46 PM UTC

uchman wrote: post #349

mdorazio wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an alternative if you want cash flow instead of long-term margins, you can go for a dividend-oriented ETF and get 5%+ for doing literally nothing.

Totally agree. I set aside some funds in REITs for good dividends and then some value stocks

Of course there is the whole "timing the market is a waste of time" discussion but I wouldn't buy REITs right now considering where interest rates are going. Though given that interest rates simply haven't increased very quickly, could be that the market is over-discounting them and they are actually underpriced!