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

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281–290 of 448 posts

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

#282

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…

> don't underestimate the number of organizations willing to pay $3K/year ... it's an "easy" $30K every year.

So 10 then :)

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate more how such fraud happens? Also, how would you even get access to court record for these estates? Would these records not be private to the party at hand?

Fraud happens when someone does something dishonest to gain unlawful enrichment mostly by fraudulent misrepresentation. The administrator may embezzle and hide the accounts for example, then the scum lawyer try to dissipate all assets in dishonest assistance when exposed the lawyer and administrator had corruptly abused their position of trust. As beneficiary we can file suit for accounting of the estate. Non account…

So you have to be a beneficiary to file? I can't imagine that happening more than two or three times in your life... are you helping others with their cases?

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit confused - this doesn't look like a quick tool built to solve one issue - this links to what appears to be a whole company with many sophisticated products. You did this all yourself?

This used to be the way. Now it takes a whole team to put a textbox on a Web app.

The good thing is, there is a bit of a resurgence of the solopreneur spirit.

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

#285
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so hard to understand? There’s an acceptable level of work at a company and this guy is meeting it without having to use 40 hours a week.

I kinda get where they’re coming from. Those kinds of companies are really rare. Generally management wants to squeeze as much out of labor as humanly possible, to the point where they demand exclusive access to one’s entire labor availability. The fact that xxEightyxx has found not one, but two companies willing to pay six figures for a functionally part-time employee is pretty mind-boggling.

The rarity of these companies varies widely on sector. I agree that it will be difficult to find typical tech startups that wont try to squeeze the maximum amount of time out of you.

If you want high chance of relaxed workloads, look for large corporations that exclusively contract with government out of a large budget. For example, the defense industry (e.g., the few companies designing and manufacturing planes, radars, avionics, communication equipment, guidance systems) is the biggest supplier of these type of roles that I know of. The pay in these roles is usually market competitive or better. At least from my experience, only about 20% of time or less is actually spent "working on something", much of which is sitting in irrelevant meetings. I would only recommend it if you are purely looking to collect an easy paycheck and you have a high tolerance for boredom, bureaucracy, internal politics and incompetence at all levels.

Post-covid remote work that much of government and contractors have moved to (permanently?) has likely also made it significantly easier to have multiple "full time" jobs. Management does not care about anything in this sector except that hard deadlines are met (the real deadlines, very rarely even gets close), soft deadlines are missed (used to justify "needing" more money), and nothing is completed too quickly (they want to give the illusion that hard work is being done).

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

#286

Software consulting. You’d be surprised how many little businesses out there have a need for custom software. I make about $60-70k/year in my spare time (maybe 10 hours/week) doing everything from adding features to legacy products, building brand new applications and even simply conducting technical interviews. It’s also pretty nice to work on something besides the usual thing at work, experiment with new/different…

I do that same thing. Earning around $100 an hour, and I can do as many hours as I want, whenever I want to. I do this on top of my full time job, so I usually do a few hours at night or a weekend day here and there. That's similarly in the $60-70k extra per year.

What I do is embedded software for medical devices though, so beyond building there's a lot of documenting, reading documentation adhering to standards.

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

#287

Probably not relevant to the younger set here on HN: I became obsessed in the late 90’s with using a camera to photograph subjects and events that are hard to observe with the naked eye. (Examples include: spotted bats photographed in flight, or red tree voles that only live at the tippy top of Doug fir trees, or nocturnal genets photographed in arboreal habitats). I loved the challenge of the work. I grew up poor. S…

Sounds like a very simple idea. But, no many consider to monetize it. Can you link to a sample (with a watermark or some protection of course)?

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

#288
post #261
post #63

When 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…

Yes, take the free books meant for poor students and sell them! (It's smart, but I think it is morally wrong.)

to me it sounds like they were serving the interest of poor students by distributing cheap books to where there was demand. Otherwise those books could have been left in the bin gathering dust

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

#289

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…

I'm a bit confused - this doesn't look like a quick tool built to solve one issue - this links to what appears to be a whole company with many sophisticated products. You did this all yourself?

Wow I didn't expect this to get so much attention.

Yes, I built all these products.

The tools have a shared C++ core library and then I did the DAW integrations and platform-specific GUIs with JUCE, which is a cross platform C++ toolkit popular with audio people.

The original issue that I solved was simply mixing a large number of inputs down to something like 22.2 cinema surround based on mathematical formulas. Instead of the user dialing in 24 knobs, they type in XYZ coordinates and the math decides those 24 knobs for you.

Later versions then added animation, control surfaces, the headphone surround sound, and MPEG-H export for live TV.

All the initial release versions were 1 programmer x 3 years. By now, I've moved on and nowadays they have a small team to do maintenance, support, upgrades, etc.

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this has been upvoted to the top, but this is the most matter-of-a-factly description of superhuman productivity I have encountered. Can you elaborate a bit on how you get so much stuff done? What do you see 'regular people' (or HN folks at least) complain/discuss where you just shrug and wonder why it seems so hard?

I have no social life. Without diving super deep into my past or anything, I just prioritize things and go do it. Have no interest in movies, TV, concerts, bars, or anything else really. I suppose I inherited it from my parents who are workaholics. Also, grew up poor and never want to experience that again so there's probably a bit of a deep-seeded fear in the back of my mind that going broke and losing everything is…

You’re one of these special lucky people who only needs 4 hours sleep. I have a friend like that and he uses his extra time to complete video games and be a dad/husband. I’m more of a 8-9 hours person myself so I’m super jealous
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