Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?

#81

Post by allsystemsgo » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 7:11 PM UTC

wushupork wrote: post #79

darkmethod wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trading time for money doesn't scale.

I'm sure Price Water House Coopers, Ernst & Young, IBM, Deloitte, McKenzie, and Accenture would beg to differ. Or any huge law firm for that matter.

I'm in public accounting. We just arbitrarily raise our rates. At the end of the day it depends on what the partners are selling. Audit work has kind of stopped growing. Consulting could grow but all these public accounting firms are fairly risk averse as well.

Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?

#82

Post by ricardobeat » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 7:33 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #60

darkmethod wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trading time for money doesn't scale.

Tell that to Skadden Arps.

Trading your time for money doesn't scale. Trade others'

Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?

#83

Post by tptacek » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 7:41 PM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #82

tptacek wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to Skadden Arps.

Trading your time for money doesn't scale. Trade others'

That's true, but it's also what every large tech company does too, services or otherwise.

Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?

#84

Post by jroseattle » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 9:08 PM UTC

PostOnce wrote: post #52

jroseattle wrote: post #33

Lost my job. Updated my resume. Got on the phone. And pinged all my contacts via LinkedIn. And instead of taking the next F/T gig, I went to work for myself. 5 years and counting.

Doing what?

First as an independent consultant, moving to establish my own firm and bring on additional consultants.

Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?

#85

Post by rprospero » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 9:18 PM UTC

This takes me back to my brief stint with consulting. I knew someone who had a VBScript web application that kept crashing. I'd never done a lick of VBScript, but I had cut my teeth on QBasic, so I figured that I could get up to speed on the language in a week and probably get the bug fixed in another two. I was straight out of school and only wanted $20 an hour, so we said $2500.

With all of that out of the way, I finally got a look at the source code. Fifteen minutes later, the bug was fixed (it was just a missing quote in an SQL call).

Of course, while they could justify hiring a consultant for $20 an hour for a three week job, management wasn't happy with the idea of paying a fresh college grad $10k an hour to fix a one character bug. Thus, I wound up writing another app that they had wanted, also in VBScript.

If there's a Hell, I'm going there for the SQL injection vulnerabilities in that program.

Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?

#86

Post by badkangaroo » Wed, May 01, 2013, 6:48 AM UTC

I started a small 2 person "multi media" company using Macromedia Director. Had a few cool clients who did some Quicktime3D accelerator cards... That was around 1994

Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?

#87

Post by bradleyland » Wed, May 01, 2013, 2:58 PM UTC

By performing approximately 105 hours in basic computer repair, from which I pivoted to...

Nearly doubling that rate for "consultation" for larger companies, from which I pivoted to...

Dumping about $15k of savings (made possible by a dramatic increase in income tied with a continued frugal lifestyle) in to an "enterprise" startup, which made well over $10k in the first sale (took about three months).

Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?

#88

Post by jamesjguthrie » Wed, May 01, 2013, 10:46 PM UTC

My first £1,000 (about 8 years ago) from a small PC repair shop I opened with a friend.

Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?

#89

Post by weedwall » Fri, May 03, 2013, 1:43 AM UTC

Made my first 10K in Online Poker at 17 and parlayed that into 50K by 20.

Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?

#90

Post by danielstudds » Fri, May 03, 2013, 7:38 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #75

dctoedt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's scalable for the partners at Skadden (and similar service firms) to trade time for money because the time they trade is that of other people (viz., associates, and/or analysts at investment banks) who put in prodigious hours in the hope of becoming partners themselves someday in the distant future.

Sure. That's how you scale a professional services organization. Later You fleshed this comment out, which is great, but I want to be careful to say I'm not endorsing the business model of wringing hours out of people's speculative hope that they'll reach the top of the pyramid. We don't have "work 60 hours a week and make partner" model, for instance. But the general principle of developing and refining skills to th…

Agree that tech is myopic... or perhaps it's just a segment of tech - there are a lot of tech people working happily for those large PS firms you mention.