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Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#51

Post by waltbosz »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #17
arjvik wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you find the non-technical cofounders to do this?

I seriously hope you are not kidding with me. Back-of-envelop, napkin-calculation, and my 8-ball wizardy data would say that there are 9 non-technical founders looking for every capable technical founder. Anyway, there are lots of communities, cohort-based, hybrid-style, and what-not options these days to find someone or a few. You can start with https://www.startupschool.org and/or https://www.beondeck.com

Another place I've seen non-technical founders looking to pair up is at https://www.indiehackers.com/

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#53

Post by matznerd »

alin23 wrote: post #25

Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now. I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only. I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/ It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to bui…

Thanks for Lunar, I have been using it b/c the native apple software wouldn't let me adjust light on my external monitor properly.

Also, I love the secret, extra brightness levels it allows on the main screen, especially when I am outside. Do you know if there is any risk of damage to the brightness by using it at the higher settings?

I once had software that me increase the volume of my macbook speakers and one day I was working and vibing to the song and pushed the volume all the way up... and blew a speaker out...

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#55

Post by SuoDuanDao »

afroisalreadyin wrote: post #27
Brajeshwar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously hope you are not kidding with me. Back-of-envelop, napkin-calculation, and my 8-ball wizardy data would say that there are 9 non-technical founders looking for every capable technical founder. Anyway, there are lots of communities, cohort-based, hybrid-style, and what-not options these days to find someone or a few. You can start with https://www.startupschool.org and/or https://www.beondeck.com

Thanks for those two links. I'm in the exact same place as the OP, and would love to start something of my own, but I have only technical skills, meaning all my startup ideas are for devs, a domain that's absolutely saturated. In the best case, I would pair with someone who is a "nerd" of a different domain, but somehow I find it rather difficult to meet such people. In case you (or anyone else) know of similar progr…

Meetup is still a good source for making lots of surface-level connections, here's a quick search I did: https://www.meetup.com/find/?keywords=startup&source=EVENTS&...

edit: You'll probably have more success, as I don't know the German terminology for things like 'startup' - Geschaeftsaufstellung?

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#56

Post by waltbosz »

joshxyz wrote: post #36
joshxyz wrote: post #10

learn sales, it fixes everything.

OP, sales is a skill that has the highest ROI of all. life is sales, it's how you pitch yourself to a company or a client, how you negotiate for a larger salary, how you identify the pain points of your clients, how you screen if they're the right fit for you, how you prioritize if you're focusing on the right stuff. even dating the right person is sales, also how you convince your kid to beush his/her teeth every af…

> convince your kid to brush his/her teeth every after meal. all of it is sales, which is more about emotions than logic.

Cute story: I was having trouble getting my 4-year-old to brush his teeth until one night, I had to idea to show him this children's Q&A book that had a page about "why do I have to brush my teeth?" The little cartoon bacteria convinced him that brushing his teeth was a good idea. It was like a light switch in his head; I finished the page and he said, "daddy, I want to brush my teeth now" and walked off to the bathroom.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#57

Post by bjornsing »

ktpsns wrote: post #8

Depending on your country, freelancing next to the day-job may be an option to testing "the new job" without giving up the security/benefits of an employment (for instance an affordable employer's contributed health care if you are in western europe). Hourly rates for IT freelancing professionals are only increasing, there is a long standing and ongoing shortage for skilled people. It is not uncommon to earn a yearly…

> Edit, disclaimer: I co-founded a cooperative to help skilled IT people to work independently as freelancers, giving legal advices and a network.

Interesting. Where can I learn more?

I think it would be great for Europe (or at least for Sweden) if bright and productive software engineers stopped working for peanuts and went freelance instead. Would love to help push the needle in that direction.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#58

Post by vermilingua »

0atman wrote: post #12
0atman wrote: post #11

Coding pairs well and elevates many other side-hustles, I think. Nearly every job can benefits from automation, and if it can't, then the logical thinking that coding requires will improve it in some way. I paired coding with fiction writing and made a scifi podcast, which now represents 10% of my monthly income after two years! I wrote up my experience and advice here, if you're interested in the details https://www…

More recently (March of this year) I also started to teach what I can about coding on my YouTube channel ( https://www.youtube.com/c/NoBoilerplate ) Which has seen enormous positive feedback - and youtube ads are very fair (50/50 split between you and Google), and you don't have to chase the money, it's all handled for you! Another 10% of my monthly income comes from YT, I'd guess. The key with a youtube channel is t…

Oh man, just want to say what a massive help your videos have been. I’d tried getting into Rust several times before finding your channel this year; and now I feel like I finally get it, not just the how but the why.

Please keep making amazing content for as long as you enjoy it!

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#59

Post by alin23 »

mrtksn wrote: post #32
alin23 wrote: post #25

Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now. I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only. I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/ It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to bui…

I see you sell apps directly and from the AppStore. What do you think about mac AppStore? The word in the street is that it's not growing and users aren't using it and developers are hating it because it lacks [INSERT FEATURE]. Is that right?

I love the App Store product and what it offers, what I don’t like is the bureaucracy that grew around it.

Because Lunar uses lots of private and reverse engineered APIs, it isn’t allowed on the App Store, so I had to replicate a lot of the distribution myself:

    - payments and refunds 
    - license activation
    - anti cracking measures
    - automatic (and rolling) updates
    - making a website for the app
    - SEO (the App Store is quite good at this)
    - error reporting and crash data collection
    - anonymous analytics
    - making sure I’m not mishandling any user data
I mostly opt for the App Store nowadays because it saves me the hassle for all of the above, but it comes with a number of pains and disadvantages:

    - no trial mode for one-time purchase apps
    - the sandbox is very limiting: no private APIs, no full disk access, no Accessibility Permissions etc. 
    - the review process is more annoying than helpful
    - the user ratings can hurt the business a lot when the product is harder to understand and users leave an angry review because they didn’t read the description before buying the app
For the trial thing I have my own solution where I publish a trial-only build on my website and a link to buying on the App Store when the trial ends.

The sandbox, well I found workarounds for most of my needs [1] but I still skip building some ideas because I know they would never be approved.

The reviews are as annoying as ever [2], I even got my name in a Wired article [3] because of that. They can be very discouraging.

[1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/window-switcher-app-store/

[2] https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/App%20Store%20review%20timeli...

[3] https://www.wired.com/story/apples-app-store-review-fix-fail...

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#60

Post by bjornsing »

aew4ytasghe5 wrote: post #22
yrgulation wrote: post #19

Most web related indie dev has been killed by open source. Best alternative is to look into niche programming or pairing with a person that understands real life problems and needs. Game dev is an option along with programming plugins for various platforms. Dont be put off by nay sayers and do your own research.

> Most web related indie dev has been killed by open source. You throw this out there like some fact. Meanwhile, the lot of us make money on web dev that is built upon open source. The same we have been doing for a long time now.

Yup. If you want to do interesting work / really write software then you have to give it away for free. If you want to get paid you have to spend your days cobbling together open source to accomplish totally trivial functionality that some dimwit has “invented”. That’s the situation we’ve gotten ourselves into, unfortunately.
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