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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?

#161

In 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.

How much did you paid for the broker fee ?

trading is free these days for stocks

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

#162
post #12
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…

Fantastic channel!

After watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rJ94rbdteE I have this irrational urge to go out and write some Rust.

Indeed your scripts (the spoken ones) are great.

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

#163
Since I’m quite experienced in the field, I opened a substack called The Web Scraping Club as a side gig. It is mostly free but has some paid articles and have already hundreds of $ in MRR after 2 months.

It is a niche where tutorials and info are pretty sparse around the web and having a centralized blog is useful for operators.

Hope this helps find your way

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

#164
post #156

I have mild success at $500/month by selling my $5 Video Hub App (though I donate $3.50 of every purchase to a cost-effective charity). This is averaging 100 sales per month for several years now. https://videohubapp.com/ - though I also have it open source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

How do you promote it?

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

#165
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…

Paid user here. Thanks for making old-school but super-helpful desktop software!

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

#166
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…

Nice work. This is a great accomplishment, keep going :)

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

#167
I feel like there's heaps of opportunity to make small apps to help streamline processes at boring regular mom n' pop small businesses.

The trick is uh, how do you find out about their problems to even know that you have an ability to help?

It's a tough problem here and I'm not sure how to solve it other than just already knowing people at those small businesses and talking with them about their problems.

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

#168

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.

Could you elaborate more on your niche websites? Are those blogs or web-scraped content?

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

#169
I've been working on Entrepreneurship for quite a while now and still feel like a noob!

I created an ebook a while back on how to make money with Airbnb (based on my experience as a superhost), but I did zero marketing and ended up making about 3 sales total...

A few years back I made a course on Udemy. I figured this would solve my marketing issue. It took me 6 months and was a real slog but managed to create a course about Neo4j. I don't make a tonne of money from that, but managed to make a best selling course, and on a good month it might bring in $1k USD.

A couple years ago I did Sam Ovens consulting accelerator which basically teaches you to reach out to ppl with problems and get them on a sales call then sell them a $2k solution to said problem. I followed this and managed to sell a handful of people on helping them land their first dev job. People's problems were varied, I realise in hindsight that I could have been more educated around coaching but I did help all those people land their first job. I played with pricing a bit, selling at various prices ($2.5k, $750, $1.5k). I feel like if you pushed long and hard enough on this niche perhaps it could be successful, but to me it always felt a bit off for various reasons.

Now, I'm creating a website builder. I'd say it's not a project for the light hearted - it pains me a bit to say that it's been a year so far. I actually have something that can build a website and did have it up online, but took it down to avoid server costs while building it out.

I've learnt a lot on my journey and I find it fun (in a massochistic sort of way), but still very much a work in progress.

Happy to share if anyone has questions :)

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