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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?

#261

Post by jonbc »

0atman wrote: post #18
iamlolz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched your Rust for the Impatient video only 2 days ago. Thank you, it was very helpful.

I'm so pleased! That video is based on an article from fasterthanli.me - Amos writes SUCH high-quality articles, I asked his permission to base that video on his "A Half-Hour To Learn Rust" post. Certainly worth clicking around his site, an incredible resource!

The fasterthanli.me article: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust

I also love your channel, great work!

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

#262

Post by alin23 »

zestyping wrote: post #254
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…

How do you market your apps, and how much time and money do you spend marketing and advertising them? If conventional wisdom is to be believed, it seems like the difference between building an okay app and a great app doesn't matter that much, because success depends on investing the vast majority of the effort into marketing. That's a big deterrent for me — I'm much more interested in building awesome things than ha…

I spend very little time advertising them. Maybe 3 times a week I get an email with a relevant keyword mentioned on HN or Reddit, and in 2 of those cases I spend a few minutes writing a concise comment.

About 3 times a year I do promos on Twitter to get more followers and spread the word a bit more through retweets.

And then I have the blog posts I write, which do take a lot of time, but they are mostly for sharing knowledge, not for advertising. Although they do help get some eyes on the apps as well.

    > If conventional wisdom is to be believed, it seems like the difference between building an okay app and a great app doesn't matter that much
I'd say the difference matters a lot. Since being in these circles, I notice how low quality apps (or just apps where the author didn't give them much thought after launch) don't get recommended as much if at all, and bad rep is spread on them which deters people from even trying them.

I'm more inclined towards the "a good product sells itself" line. It definitely doesn't sell itself if people don't know about it, but you have a much higher chance to get picked up by vocal people and groups and recommended around if your app is high quality and makes a good impression. Even more so if you hear what people have to say after trying your app and try to improve the app for a few months after the launch.

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

#263

Post by alin23 »

Noneofya wrote: post #255
alin23 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you not publish the app with limited functionality and/or ads for free and make the full version an in-app purchase?

I can but:

    - in-app purchases come with more disadvantages than a one-time purchase (harder to implement, more UI and explaining needed, restoring purchases is a confusing thing)
    - I don't want ads in my products
    - there's not much functionality to limit, since the apps are very focused on a single thing
    - App Store reviewers don't approve apps that limit functionality too much
The App Store way of doing this is with an additional $0 in-app purchase named "7-day Trial", but I tried it and it creates an incredibly confusing experience for users.

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

#264

Post by alin23 »

spinlock_ wrote: post #253
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…

Pretty cool, congrats! Can you recommend learning material about developing macOS apps with SwiftUI?

Thanks! I only learn by building small ideas and looking into the Apple documentation through Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash) and searching "how to do X" on Google. So I can't recommend material from first-hand experience.

But I've heard good things about this university video course: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9VJ9OpT-IPSM6dFSwQCI...

On a first glance it seems to cover a lot of stuff I use regularly in SwiftUI, but also some videos are quite long. It depends if you like learning by watching, or by doing.

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

#265

Post by fakedang »

grepLeigh wrote: post #85
paolomaffei wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the problem is how to identify capable non-technical founders. I suspect the ratio of capable non-technical and technical founders is nearer 0.1-0.5:1 any thoughts on how to identify the unicorns?

Look for people who have revenue and traction, not just an idea. Some of the best non-technical Founders I've worked with: - Built a business trip packing / iterinerary recommendation system, using just Google Sheets plugins - Built a video transcription + recutting service in Bubble. Each of these made five-six figures of revenue with the MVP. The Founders couldn't code, but they used every tool at their disposal to…

>- Built a business trip packing / iterinerary recommendation system, using just Google Sheets plugins

Hey, can you point me to this tool? I would love to use this tool.

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

#266

Post by overrun11 »

LouisSayers wrote: post #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 cour…

> I followed this and managed to sell a handful of people on helping them land their first dev job

I've always wanted to do something like this. Could you share more about it? I think I could provide a lot of value to a new dev but haven't identified a business model that would work.

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

#267

Post by yesokayawesome »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #34
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…

It’s a fun niche. I’m making tens of dollars a month on my first app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/audiowrangler/id1565701763?mt=... :)

So good to know there's a $dozens MRR club :) same here with https://apps.apple.com/app/supreme/id1281516834 but upgrading old iOS code to SwiftUI is a bit of a pain

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

#268

Post by simne »

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.

You may believe or not, but large businesses and even some medium, uses strategy of destroy low segments of market with products sell much lower than market prices or even free.

Simple example, HDDs of small sizes and very large, usually sell cheaper than cost production, donated from profitable medium segment, or from other source of cheap money (like VC or stocks).

Hard example, when IBM released Eclipse, killed lot of small companies, who made simple cheap IDEs (shareware). Those small companies usually are not threat, but sometimes could grow.

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

#269

Post by simne »

bilsbie wrote: post #178
jerrygoyal wrote: post #44

i use Toptal to find projects i want to work upon with my preferred tech stack, timezone, working hrs (I prefer 20 hrs) and hourly rate. There's so much freedom for me that I could never get from a corporate . Toptal clients are nice too!

How brutal are the interviews? Isn’t the pay really low? Can you negotiate?

I've contacted with toptal, just for curiosity, to ask questions, because on their site I have not seen clear instructions.

First words they said me, even don't asking what I'm looking for, that I should book interview to next week, if fail, next time not earlier than in 6 months, and after 3 fails ban forever. I don't think, this is normal talk.

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

#270

Post by codealot »

mr_gibbins wrote: post #233

I have tried, and failed, and tried, and failed, to maintain interest in full time office-based positions. I just can't. I've never held a FTE position longer than 3 years. I'm nearing 40, by the way. I use my skills, such as they are, in contract positions. I've been working continuously since 15 or so and aside from a brief spell of 4 months, never been out of work. When I became experienced/qualified enough to use…

After all your time contracting, how easily can you find a new contract in terms of weeks/months spent searching for one? The reason I ask is because I'm getting tired of bureaucracy too and have been considering taking a break and getting into contracting as a software engineer for a while to see how that goes...How reliable is the pipeline of work in the software dev contracting world if you want to maintain access to a steady supply of income/benefits?
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