Starting https://pdf2qrcode.com
It does not bring in a whole lot, but I like having a side hustle.
Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
61–70 of 448 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#62Got a job and then married someone who also has a job. We go to work, make our money, come home and relax.
Same! Except my wife quit her money-making job to take care of our kids full-time. I go to work, come home, and spend time with my family. Every Friday my employer deposits about $1,500 in my account, which represents an income stream of about $6,800/mo, not to mention paying for my health insurance and putting about $100 in my 401k. All I have to do is show up for about 40 hours Monday through Friday. For a side hus…
You need to put more in to your 401k
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#63When I was in college I sold discarded text books on half.com. This isn’t my best income stream, but in many ways it was my favorite.
After the Spring 2000 semester, I noticed that the bookstores had junk book bins. Students would dump into the bins any books that the bookstore would not buy back. Anyone was welcome to rummage through the bin and if they found something interesting they could keep it.
The bookstores wouldn’t buy books back if they knew that a new version had been released. They of course wanted to avoid being stuck with useless inventory. I wondered if these books had residual value elsewhere. I collected a few and took them home and started looking up them up on half.com. Sure enough, all of them had listings and lots of them were listed for 10’s of dollars!
For the next few days I made a continuous circuit around all the bookstores, loading my car with any books I found in the bins, and dumping them in my living room. At night I would list the day’s haul. Because my inventory was free, I always listed $1 lower than the cheapest listing.
I now had an inventory of several thousand books and a very irritated set of roommates, including my future wife. All I had to do was sit back and wait for classes to start somewhere in the world where one of these books might still be in use.
Within a week orders started to roll in. Soon I was heading to the post office daily with a huge load of books. Things would quiet down whenever a there was a lull in sessions starting. I’d replenish inventory as the various summer sessions completed.
Fall semester generated a huge bump sales and I was able to get a huge inventory of books when the semester ended. Unfortunately that proved to be the last semester of junk book bins. The stores got wise to what the kid in the beat up Honda was up to and started collecting the junk books for themselves.
I continued to sell what books I had and that went on for the rest of the time I was in school. After graduation my wife demanded that I chuck the rest. She’d had enough of random stacks of old textbooks.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#64My partner and I created a very successful business in the UK out of selling mushroom grow kits and microscopy spores. We didn’t think there would be any market here because there weren’t any UK shops doing it. Then a couple of years later it took off and growing mushrooms became cool. In this time we learned how to run a webshop and navigate an industry where every payment processor dropped us - to the point where w…
That's absolutely mad
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#65Got a job and then married someone who also has a job. We go to work, make our money, come home and relax.
For almost my entire marriage, my wife has either been at home with our kids or trying to get a teaching job in a saturated market. When she has worked, it was never a big contributor to our income.
She'll be joining the workforce full-time in the next 6-9 months in a new field. I'm psyched for a pretty significant boost to our overall income that we've never had before.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#66Most lucrative: my FAANG job Most satisfying: my investment portfolio of passive index funds
This is my income situation as well. Career investments have a higher ROI than side hustles for me.
That's surely the case for everybody? I can't imagine bothering to go to work for less money than I'm making in the evenings/weekends - why not do the 'side hustle' full time instead, or use the time for something new, or family, or whatever.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#67My partner and I created a very successful business in the UK out of selling mushroom grow kits and microscopy spores. We didn’t think there would be any market here because there weren’t any UK shops doing it. Then a couple of years later it took off and growing mushrooms became cool. In this time we learned how to run a webshop and navigate an industry where every payment processor dropped us - to the point where w…
I’m curious, why did every payment processor drop you? Did they see “mushroom” and assume you were selling psilocybin mushrooms or something?
They make £60k pcm in cash, bank transfer, and crypto from it - they must be?
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#68I built a license-based self-hosted analytics platform (https://uxwizz.com), the revenue varies, earning around $1500/mo on average without any real marketing, I like building it more than marketing it.
Started it 9 years ago, still working on it.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#69To date the best one i created was a specialized billing/inventory system for an injectable class of mental health drugs for community clinics in Mississippi. I did it on the side while fully employed (heh the advantages of youth and no family). Mississippi's medicaid system couldn't handle the coding and so it was paper and it took forever for pharmacies to be reimbursed and so no pharmacy would dispense the drugs. I developed it with a pharmacist friend of mine (former boss) who took on the expensive risk of stocking the drugs and then he paid me probably $75k over about a year to work on it with him. It made him a lot of money and when he eventually sold his pharmacy he wrote me a check for $50k. I have the email i sent to him announcing the system was live framed and hung on my wall.
i was pretty naive then, i wish i could do the whole thing over.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
#70My partner and I created a very successful business in the UK out of selling mushroom grow kits and microscopy spores. We didn’t think there would be any market here because there weren’t any UK shops doing it. Then a couple of years later it took off and growing mushrooms became cool. In this time we learned how to run a webshop and navigate an industry where every payment processor dropped us - to the point where w…
I’m curious, why did every payment processor drop you? Did they see “mushroom” and assume you were selling psilocybin mushrooms or something?
Maybe. When Shopify blocked us, the representative kept insinuating that the microscopy spore syringes we sell could be injected into the arm. This was in 2019. It’s absolutely absurd but that was what we were up against.
It’s a high risk industry, no doubt there have been plenty of scammers out there but the fact we sell magic mushroom spores for the microscope is enough to be alienated by every card processor and their insurers.
It’s fine though, we make it work - it hasn’t stopped our growth and we’ve amassed enough trust from customers to pay via the other methods!
*Edid: Shopify, not PayPal said that about spores into the arm, not Stripe!