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Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?

#111

Working at a FANG in software development has been pretty outstanding income wise. Much better than hustling a few different freelance/contracts/side hustles for me at this point in my life.

yep, ditto : save in earnest, in stock and 401k, and dividend stream from the shares alone can be very useful as a side cashflow.

What are you invested in that dividends net you meaningful cashflow?

Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?

#112
post #91

Most lucrative: my FAANG job Most satisfying: my investment portfolio of passive index funds

Do you still think index funds like Vanguard Total World is good to invest in now, as you watch stock market slowly losing steam this year?

Yes, because I like buying things for a lower price than a higher price.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?

#113

this is like asking a fisherman where his best fishing spots are

The mentality of your statement is the same as when college kids refuse to tell VCs their ideas because they think VCs will steal it.

They won’t steal it but they will float it to their networks for validation and if any of them are looking to pick something up and run with it, now they’ve got the same idea from a known-quantity team.

It absolutely happens.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?

#114

My fiancee sells self-made art somewhat successfully for the last 9 months. I contribute by managing communication with buyers through FB Marketplace, Craigslist, and while we tried Etsy, it didn't do that well. We specifically target the mid-range market which means we price below top artists on Etsy/Instagram, but above cheap prints and generic Ikea style art. It definitely requires a lot of physical work on her pa…

That's awesome! Good on you both.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?

#115

I had partnering with a marketing agency for awhile doing implementation of their designs in WordPress. After a few years of clients breaking their sites doing upgrades and other ad-hoc questions/enhancement requests coming via email, I got tired of sending $100-200 invoices, so I started selling "WordPress Maintenance" as a product. It's not fun or sexy, but don't underestimate the number of organizations willing to…

For kicks I once saved a local company I was working at about $30k by installing a wordpress caching plugin.

Their website went down when they got some international attention, and the consultants they hired designed a "solution" which involved big dedicated machines to host their (essentially text+image) wordpress site. The site wasn't my job at all, but when I overheard the price (and read their engineering plan) I asked for admin access and told them 10mins later to fire the consultants.

The director of engineering (an awesome guy) advised that I register a business and not use my name, then he hired me under pseudonym as their new consultant and I billed them at twice the rate they were paying me during the day for a few hours here and there at night (in retrospect, a total steal for them as I was an intern..)

Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?

#116
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you literally are, you just said you sell them. You sell magic mushroom spores and kits for growing them

We sell products which are related to all things mushrooms. There’s equipment, supplies you name it. Our grow kits are for growing shiitake, lion’s mane, king oyster or just about any gourmet mushroom which is legal to grow. Our microscopy spores are a product which are strictly sold for microscopy use. We love mushrooms and all things about them. But illegality is a red line, whether immoral or not.

I think we can see why the payment processors stepped back now.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?

#117

I've had quite a few: 1. Selling domain names. This was when I was in college and somehow traded my way into mid-high five-figure domain names. I turned over $100k in profits in a year, and then 2008 happened and all markets collapsed. 2. Starting a D2C brand. Shipping is automated via a third-party provider. Sourcing is easy since I have a very reliable supplier. All marketing is through word of mouth. I get around…

How did you sell them?

I have a bunch of domain names but never figured out a way to sell them.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?

#118
Built a hobby informational web app back in 2005 related to a collectible item I was interested in. It basically tells you if your X is considered common or rare (potentially valuable). Determining that is nuanced and people don't want to figure stuff out on their own, so my web app became popular.

At this point it has earned over $400k USD lifetime with 75% of that being in the last two years. 100% Adsense. The audience who find/use my site are good candidates for high-dollar ads, which is why it has done so well. New data (a few rows in a table) needs to be added once every few months, but it takes Following the "make niche complicated data easily parsable" concept I built another web app in 2018 for a different hobby. For example if the hobby was "phones" and the physical dimensions/specs of "phones" was very important to choosing it, my web app would let you visually compare any two "phones" side-by-side at the correct dimensional scale.

It apparently solved a problem and traffic grew organically. After years of work this web app should get close to 6 figures annually in 2023 - earned via affiliate sales of "phones" and accessories. It's is a much more active endeavor, but if I walked away for 6 months I bet revenue would stay near flat. It fills my time and I find it interesting.

I'm working on web app #3 now which is tangentially related to the "phones" concept.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?

#119

https://www.newaudiotechnology.com/ A shared friend introduced me to someone who claimed to be a struggling Hollywood genius. We were all drinking at some university party. He told us about all the cool shit he would do if only technology wasn't so bad. So I built a tool to solve his issues. To my surprise, he used it on the Expendables 3 blurays. Later, the audio crew for George Lukas' Red Tails praised the tool in…

Amazing!

Is the Spatial Sound Card L a bit like a software version of the Sound Blaster 16bit cards? Does it affect performance much on Mac and PC?

I played the original Thief using a Sound Blaster card and still remember the audio giving me goosebumps!

Re: Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?

#120
post #4

Working at a FANG in software development has been pretty outstanding income wise. Much better than hustling a few different freelance/contracts/side hustles for me at this point in my life.

Same. The amount of overhead involved in any side hustle is just too high compared to getting stuff done as an employee. even volunteering as anything but unskilled labor is a hassle.

There's no overheads as a employee but too many in solo endeavours? Did you get that the right way around?
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