Making $60k a month from a podcast on software engineering • Hacker News Board

Re: Making $60k a month from a podcast on software engineering

#51

Post by dahdum » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 1:53 AM UTC

bastawhiz wrote: post #27

kristianp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$250k isn't a huge amount of money for a professional poker player. I few successful and/or lucky years and you can build up quite an operating fund.

As a 19 year old, at least in the US, he'd have had less than two years to win a quarter million dollars. I doubt that happened.

Absolutely could have happened even if he played the lowest variance games available with good bankroll management.

All it would take is good streak (maybe luckbox some SnGs), move up the stakes, and have a good run in something like PLO to do the same in-a-day.

I played extensively and still have friends that play professionally, this type of story is not uncommon at all.

Re: Making $60k a month from a podcast on software engineering

#52

Post by scarface74 » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 2:01 AM UTC

joshvm wrote: post #47

scarface74 wrote: post #15

Slightly off topic, but he mentioned that he got his start from the software engineering radio podcast that's been around since 2006. I've been binge listening to that podcast for about two months and it re-enforced two things that I always suspected. 1. I made the biggest career mistake of my life by staying at one company from 1999-2008. I missed out on so much of state of the art technology that I spent the next 8…

> A daily podcast that lasts an hour? It's remarkable that he can keep up that pace. Could he make just as much money from having fewer podcasts? would the scarcity make the podcast more valuable to advertisers? As a listener, you're in a good position to judge - do you think that the content suffers from being so frequently produced? So they're making $2k per episode on ads - would they make $15k if they made one po…

As a listener, you're in a good position to judge - do you think that the content suffers from being so frequently produced? So they're making $2k per episode on ads - would they make $15k if they made one podcast a week? On that time scale, is there a better monetisation model?

I've never listened to SED and I made no judgements about the quality. I subscribe to a lot of podcasts, but only listen to a few religiously. The others I skim through or just delete.

$2000 a Day is of course not bad - I'm assuming that sales, recording, editing, etc. is a full time job.

I'm going through the Software Engineering Radio podcast now and skipping a lot of them. But I found a few gems from some influential people in software that were relevant then as well as now.

Others, I saved for when I have more time to actually listen to, take notes and maybe blog about.

Re: Making $60k a month from a podcast on software engineering

#53

Post by gmemstr » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 2:05 AM UTC

buckhx wrote: post #48

criddell wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any recommendations for podcast apps on Android? I'm carrying around my a junked iPhone 5C and using it just for Overcast. I haven't been able to find any podcast players on Android that work as well for me. If I could find one, I could stop carrying two phones.

I've been a fan of PocketCasts. Lots of people recommend podcastaddict because it's free and has a million knobs, but I enjoy the comparatively slick interface of PocketCasts.

I'm personally a fan of PocketCasts but with a small caveat: Syncing feeds goes through their servers, which means smaller feeds aren't updated instantly, even when manually syncing.

Re: Making $60k a month from a podcast on software engineering

#54

Post by crablar » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 2:08 AM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #46

nardi wrote: post #16

How to make $60k/mo from a podcast: When I was 19 there was a month when I played poorly and lost ~$250k. I quit shortly after that. It took me awhile to recover my psychological bearings. Step 1: Be super rich.

After a bit of digging, I think his story is plausible. He got into the game in 2004; At that time, it was very much possible for a smart, determined teenager to grind a hundred bucks into a quarter mil. Before Black Friday[1] chased all the soft money out of the game, pretty much anyone with an ounce of sense could play profitable poker and some people made a lot of money very quickly. He claims to have blown most o…

Accurate

Re: Making $60k a month from a podcast on software engineering

#55

Post by crablar » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 2:08 AM UTC

randomsofr wrote: post #17

The site feels so buggy to me, that weird css load and the logo carousel behaves so odd (not to mention the wrong hover on the left/right arrows), i just can't stand it. https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/

Check out softwaredaily.com

Re: Making $60k a month from a podcast on software engineering

#56

Post by Myrmornis » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 2:21 AM UTC

I don’t think podcasts are for me, but maybe I’m missing out on something. I don’t even really know how to play them. Do you stream them or pre-download? People listen to them on their commute do they, or while driving? So requires a cellphone contract with no download limit? I guess you don’t just sit in your living room listening? And you wouldn’t be able to pay attention while cooking right? I don’t think I can take in information in real time, and I hate meetings, so I’ve always assumed I should stick to reading and writing for studying.

Re: Making $60k a month from a podcast on software engineering

#57

Post by bryanrasmussen » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 2:36 AM UTC

nardi wrote: post #24

nardi wrote: post #16

How to make $60k/mo from a podcast: When I was 19 there was a month when I played poorly and lost ~$250k. I quit shortly after that. It took me awhile to recover my psychological bearings. Step 1: Be super rich.

I do feel a little bad about this comment--it's probably overly snarky. Maybe he won that 250 grand playing poker from a small nest egg that he earned at a minimum wage job. And he isn't claiming to be sharing the secret of success--he's just sharing his experience, which is valuable regardless of his beginnings. I don't know. Something about this rubbed me the wrong way, but it probably says something more about me…

if you're 19 and you have 250 grand you are maybe not super rich but pretty rich at that point.

frankly, cutting with ockam's razor leads me to conclude that super rich is a more likely explanation than playing poker from a small nest egg and then going and losing it all.

Re: Making $60k a month from a podcast on software engineering

#58

Post by biztos » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 2:37 AM UTC

Myrmornis wrote: post #56

I don’t think podcasts are for me, but maybe I’m missing out on something. I don’t even really know how to play them. Do you stream them or pre-download? People listen to them on their commute do they, or while driving? So requires a cellphone contract with no download limit? I guess you don’t just sit in your living room listening? And you wouldn’t be able to pay attention while cooking right? I don’t think I can ta…

I use an app[0] that pre-downloads them, and I listen to them on the treadmill at the gym; while cooking or doing household chores; as background when I'm coding at night; and, sometimes, to help me get to sleep. For every one of those uses except the treadmill I sometimes listen to music instead.

Oh yeah, and I sometimes listen to current-affairs stuff in the morning, but owing to time zone differences that can be tricky.

I'm sure a lot of people listen to them while driving or otherwise commuting, but my commute is by tram and by foot, and it doesn't fit that well.

I don't find it distracts me from cooking, though from coding sometimes yes (then I switch to music). I don't just sit in my living room listening without anything else going on, but I don't think that would be weird. I'd listen to podcasts in the bath if I had a bathtub.

It took me a while to find a set of podcasts I really like. This is different for everyone, but I think it's worth spending some time on. I'm still looking for good ones on a few topics that seem under... undercasted? I think there's still room for a lot more good podcasts, and some of them will even make a good living for the host.

You can download everything on WiFi if you like, but they're just audio files so it doesn't eat that much out of a normal-ish mobile data plan.

Give them a chance, and try a bunch of different ones before making up your mind. I ended up liking podcasts way more than I expected I would.

[0]: https://overcast.fm

Re: Making $60k a month from a podcast on software engineering

#59

Post by michaelbuckbee » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 2:42 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #15

Slightly off topic, but he mentioned that he got his start from the software engineering radio podcast that's been around since 2006. I've been binge listening to that podcast for about two months and it re-enforced two things that I always suspected. 1. I made the biggest career mistake of my life by staying at one company from 1999-2008. I missed out on so much of state of the art technology that I spent the next 8…

There are two different podcast listening strategies (which informally seem about equally utilized).

1. Download and listen to every episode of a podcast. For many this would be something like Grubers. Listeners typically keep a much smaller number of podcast subscriptions.

2. Read the title and possibly the show notes for each episode and if it sounds interesting download that specific episode.

My listening habits are very much in mode one here, but for something like software engineering I think it's likely to be much more the second. By producing so much content and on so many topics they optimize their chance of getting at least a download a week.

Re: Making $60k a month from a podcast on software engineering

#60

Post by Applejinx » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 2:46 AM UTC

themagician wrote: post #38

hardwaresofton wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey just want to note that although that sentence makes him look like just some rich kid with infinite resources, I went to college with Jeff and I actually have personally talked to him when he was starting this project. Regardless of what affluence he had in the past/present, he started this idea from near-zero -- the site looked like shit, he worked on it slowly, and from reading the article it looks like he got t…

It's disingenuous to say, "…regardless of what affluence he had." The thing about being wealthy isn't that you don't have to work as hard to succeed at something (well, sometimes it is). The thing about being wealthy is that you don't have to do anything, so you have all this time to focus on what you want to do—and you can fail while doing it without any major consequences. Most people can't do that. Hell, half of t…

Exactly, and this is a thing which would merit some work and attention from SV aspirational rich-sters. The damage done from scarcity is very real, and it's a profound handicap: it's not that effective to go temporarily insane and take on lots of risk without thinking of the consequences. You can't really artifically create the mental state of 'there aren't really consequences so I can focus my attention fully on this work without fear of disaster'.

So, logically, in order to maximize productivity output of entrepreneurs and new-thing-tryers, you must truly remove the consequences, perhaps with something like a universal basic income. Only then do you get to experience innovation as applied to an entire population, and only that will produce a broad enough population of experiments that you'll get a synergism and the invention of really new industries and scenarios.

Not rocket science, but maybe it'd lead to better rocket science :)