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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?

#91

Post by borplk »

waltbosz wrote: post #56
joshxyz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

Sounds cool and I'm not experienced in this area but I'd say watch out that it's not creating some kind of phobia or obsession with them thinking about scary invisible things in their mouth!

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

#92

Post by lawxls »

alin23 wrote: post #68
p2detar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s quite interesting. Thanks for sharing. How did you go about marketing your apps and attracting customers/installs?

My secret is f5bot.com ^_^ I’m notified when keywords related to “human wants thing, my app can do thing” appear on HN, Reddit and Lobsters. If I can then contribute with information to that discussion, I’ll also leave a link to my app. Don’t just self plug, people (myself included) appreciate more detailed information on how they can solve their own personal problem, instead of being thrown into “here’s an app, figu…

Here's something related telegram users might appreciate: https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-personalized

This is a telegram bot for managing personalized feed of stories from Hacker News. Just add keywords, and maybe set score threshold.

Was this a good self plug? :D

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

#93

Post by danielheath »

> The thought of returning to corporate working kind of disgusts me. daily meetings, middle management bs, politics, bureaucracy... im sure your familiar with the typical complaints.

Have you considered working in a company that isn't like that?

Things to look for:

* Ownership: The owner should be the person running the business.

* Size: Fewer than 20 employees. Ideally two or three; consider being the first.

* Revenue: A reasonably stable revenue stream lets you take on mid-long term projects. Ad revenue from a niche content business is quite good here.

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

#94

Post by zarzavat »

bjornsing wrote: post #60
aew4ytasghe5 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You have to deliver value to your customers/users. If doing hard engineering delivers value then you will get paid for it. If plumbing together open source components delivers value then you will get paid for that.

Users don’t care how your product works, they just care that it improves their life.

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

#95

Post by alin23 »

lawxls wrote: post #92
alin23 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My secret is f5bot.com ^_^ I’m notified when keywords related to “human wants thing, my app can do thing” appear on HN, Reddit and Lobsters. If I can then contribute with information to that discussion, I’ll also leave a link to my app. Don’t just self plug, people (myself included) appreciate more detailed information on how they can solve their own personal problem, instead of being thrown into “here’s an app, figu…

Here's something related telegram users might appreciate: https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-personalized This is a telegram bot for managing personalized feed of stories from Hacker News. Just add keywords, and maybe set score threshold. Was this a good self plug? :D

That’s actually really useful! I avoid some keywords in f5bot because they tend to be verbose and I don’t want to receive 100 emails per day on them.

A chat makes it perfect for this use case, I’ll use it right away, thanks for making and sharing it!

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

#96

Post by 0atman »

vermilingua wrote: post #58
0atman wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

WONDERFUL! That's literally my ENTIRE goal with the rust series - to just get people over the initial learning curve. It's not INCOMPREHENSIBLE, but you have to know in your BONES why you are putting in the work!

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

#97

Post by constantlm »

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…

Just want to say that Lunar is amazing.

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

#98

Post by pythonbase »

I have been doing consulting on the side, around 15-20 hours per day. Also into niche website development; building search engine optimized websites that are monetized through display and affiliate ads. Both side gigs usually generate more than the full time job.

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

#99

Post by dustincoates »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #46
rozenmd wrote: post #3

Consider teaching on your own blog - it's not immediate money, but if you're patient, you'll start to get folks asking if you're available for consulting, or if you've considered writing a book on what you write about. Source: I wrote a book about a single function in React, it did okay.

Writing books just don’t make enough money. It makes you look like cool for having published a book, and that’s about it.

I second this. I wrote a book for Manning, and I always describe it as something I'm really glad I did, that I'll never do again.

However, it did have nice second order effects on my career, and if I had written a book in an area that hasn't sputtered out (mine was on building voice apps for smart assistant platforms), I suspect it may have even lead to work directly.

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

#100

Post by snyena »

bitcoinmoney wrote: post #87
jimz wrote: post #21

For the most part, if you can make money for other people, you can use that skill set for yourself. Also, if you're somewhere where it's legal or at least accessible, it's not actually 100% true that at a casino the house always wins. It will take a little bit of effort to get started and you do need a small bit of infrastructure (but a cheap VPS or a SoC would actually do, depending on what you focus on), but it's n…

I know Kelly criterion and some bankroll management. Where do I start? Wouldn’t you be banned from bookies if you’re a winning bettor? Or at least get limited? And which bookies to use?

Former pro bettor here (11 years), Europe based. Yes, you get banned from bookies once they identify you as a sharp punter very quickly.
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