Ask HN: How do I reach making $1-1.5k/mo in 13 months?

> 3rd world country

That might be your advantage. You know the language, companies and culture.

I'd look into cloning something that international companies overlook or poorly optimize for.

It can be really boring stuff: can you build the best site in the following niches?

Classifieds, auction, product search engine, travel location aggregator, real estate search engine, used car website, etc.

Do you have beaches? Focus on tourism.

If done right, over time you can have your $x000 and many more.

Learn to write well. You can make 1k-1.5k/month starting next month if you can author good blog posts for businesses. Writing content, like coding, is something where the time investment cannot be "hacked." For a 1200 word blog post someone has to sit at the computer and actually write the 1200 words. That takes time. In many cases there is no content writer on staff and someone has to do the work.

I'd say 90% of the posts you read by a company CEO, CTO, or COO are in fact written by someone else and at least half the time in those cases they were written by someone that doesn't even work there. My first professional writing gig was for a German industrial paint company entering the US market. I earned $50 for a 600 word post and wrote them 3 posts per day. Related: I nearly failed chemistry in high school and know nothing about paint.

Until about a year ago I had been blogging for others for close to a decade. 4 or 5 years ago I surmised that I probably had someone in the neighborhood of 4 million words out there on the internet, mostly applying to subjects I have no training in. I just like to write and people will pay for that. I've easily made $400-$1000/month writing posts for businesses as I have a beer in the evening and my wife makes dinner.

Businesses of all types will pay between $500 and $1000 for a well written, well researched blog post between 800 and 2000 words. Can you create a technical whitepaper or even an eBook/lead magnet with citations and some science in it? That STARTS at $2000.

That means companies (like mine) that have those opps are more than happy to farm them out to someone else for a few hundred bucks. You can easily command a dime per word if you are reliable and write with quality. In fact, I don't have $1k of budget for you/anyone right now but I'd be glad to pay a dime a word starting Monday for someone to start pumping out all the posts for my business that I've been meaning to write but - wait for it -simply cannot find the time to prioritize the work.

THe content creation/professional blogging space is still full of opportunity and based on the short post you have here it looks like your English is just fine.

"So where do I find the work?" Craigslist - tons of opps, tons of competition Fiverr Blogmutt and similar Content co-op sites Cold approach - send me an email I'll send you the exact instructions for doing this.

Good luck.

For freelancing sites, you need to focus on stuff established businesses need and shy away from anything catering to individuals or startups.

Payment is all relative. Someone with an idea for a new social network might think of $10,000 as a lot of money, even if they want an entire app with lots of features built from scratch, which could be a months' long job. They will vastly underestimate how expensive this will be, particularly if they don't have technical backgrounds.

Meanwhile, an established business might pay $1000 for something that takes a few hours and think nothing of it, because they are thinking in terms of value to the company, not "I don't want to blow through my personal savings".

I hired freelancers at my last job. When going through candidates, I didn't look for the lowest bidder. I looked for someone who charged a reasonable amount who looked like they knew what they were doing. For example, one guy we hired charged us $400 for something that probably took him two or three hours. Considering that he was working out of Russia, this is probably a pretty good wage. Some of the bids were for $50-100, but from my company's perspective, $400 was nothing anyway, so I looked for someone with great reviews and who seemed like they knew what they were doing. I think we found the guy on Upwork, but we ended up hiring him directly to do a bunch more work after that.

I think that if you are targeting well-paying work, look for things that appeal to businesses. Businesses use Excel, so work on your skills in integrating Excel with your favorite programming language. Lots of businesses want web scraping, so learn that. Businesses might have old code written in language X. If you find the right opportunity there, it could be a long term partnership that can be fairly lucrative.

Back in my freelancing days, everyone was doing php3 web development. I did, too, and it worked out extremely well for me.

A very popular market might be saturated, which is a downside. But it might also mean that customers already know that they want/need exactly this, which makes finding projects extremely easy.

If you want to have the best possible salary, go for an obscure niche where you can be the best in the world.

If you just want an OK salary with not too much work, go for the most popular project categories.

Not true. One of the people I'm referring to was under 25 when he landed a $500k USD remote job at a FAANG company. I'd share more, but too many people would figure out who it is. He didn't get that offer by applying directly.

The point is not that OP is going to make $500k a year. The point is to be smart about the language and project that you pick and to be reliable, professional, and open to learning quickly and delivering. He's asking for such a paltry amount that even if he only gets an $80k offer it's still leagues better than what he's asking for.

Or he could grind it out on Upwork and land a $30k offer after finally hitting a client that likes him and has long term work.