> I can code up my dream ideas with ease, what i don't know how to do is market anything or get users
If that's true, you should be doing it. Worry about marketing once you have something to market.
Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?
101–110 of 286 posts
Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sure. But do you see a lot of lawyers uploading their agreement templates on github? Value (or actually price) is a function of supply and demand, and when there’s almost infinite supply at a zero price point value/price goes to zero. That’s what has happened.
Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 seem to confuse "a job" with research. How privileged are you when you are complaining about not being able to have fun 100% of paid time, like no generation before us ever had.
Sure. If you’re looking for “a job” then this situation is great (and there’s nothing wrong with that BTW). But for those of us who like to read Donald Knuth it’s been the road to serfdom.
Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?
#104I've been a successful dev for a decade now but I was a mech E / CS dropout.
I loathe CS for many reasons and saw the writing on the wall for my degree-less ass, so I went back for industrial engineering. 3 semesters to go and loving every second of it!!! Well, maybe not the materials science and beam analysis but the rest is great.
Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?
#105In trading, I realize I always made loses when my emotions get involved. So I decided to implement a trading-bot in Python for fun. It took 1.5 years of development. The bot can open ~100 positions each day and closing all with 1 cent gain (in total ~1$ profit per day). At least its nice to see something I made can make some money even its amount pretty small.
Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?
#106Building 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…
Interesting. The code looks like the love child of F# and TypeScript.
Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?
#107Building 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…
wow, zoom hider! just yesterday i was in a zoom saying i wish i had something that could keep the damn floating controls hidden when i hit escape, and there it is. fantastic
Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also made tens of dollars a month with https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd for the first few months ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The good thing is that usually you just keep growing from this. Now it’s making $1k per month, mostly because of sharing it with the world and implementing recurrent annoyances shared by users. It’s important to have a way for users to contact you. I love Formspark.io for that, just slap a contact form on the app…
Thanks for following up. One q: I suck at building landing pages. Do you have any tips here? I have some ok-ish copy already distinct from the App Store page, but I hate finagling HTML.
For simple one-page presentation websites, try https://carrd.co
In my experience, knowing CSS is 90% of making a pretty and informative page. HTML is mostly just h1 for title, h2 for subtitle, div for groups and p for copy text.
I don’t like writing neither HTML nor CSS so my websites are written in Plim with Tailwind classes for styling.
Here’s a snippet that defines the icon on the https://lowtechguys.com/clop page
section#hero.min-w-[100vw].flex-center.flex-col.relative.pb-20
img.w-28.h-28.md:w-32.md:h-32.filter.drop-shadow-2xl src="/static/img/clop-icon.png"
h1.mb-6.text-4xl.text-zinc-600 Clop
h5.text-gray-500.m-0.p-0 Clipboard optimizer for images
h5.text-gray-500.m-0.p-0.-mt-1 Copy large, paste small, send fast
It’s not easy to understand nor pretty to read, but it makes for super fast iteration time, especially because of the responsive breakpoints (e.g. .flex-col.md:flex-row for a vertical layout on mobile and horizontal on desktop)
Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?
#109AI space is heating up with the release of Stable Diffusion models and OpenAI. If you are interested you can start playing with these tech and make things useful for people. I'm just getting started on this and released the MVP version of Picasa AI[1] and I'm excited about it. I wanted to build something for a long time and I always postponed it for better time. With the AI trends I feel now is the correct time to ju…
Smartly marketed on vanity ;)
Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?
#110Building 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…
wow, zoom hider! just yesterday i was in a zoom saying i wish i had something that could keep the damn floating controls hidden when i hit escape, and there it is. fantastic
Heh glad it’s helpful ^_^
I have it constantly running with the menubar icon hidden, so even I forgot it existed. It just does its job when I go into a Zoom meeting.