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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?

#301

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.

No. It's just what we chose - http://www.radicalsimpli.city/

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

#302

I actually have a few: 1) Board member (advisor really) of a crypto/blockchain company. They pay me $5k per month to basically answer questions and help solve certain issues that might arise. There's also regular meetings but all in I spend 4 hours per week max. 2) Small contractor jobs. I was a contractor and home builder in a previous life. These days, I do side jobs both for the extra income and as a way to relax…

Beware of board member liability for that crypto stuff.

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

#303
My PhD was in image processing - never really got to use it in any day job, but I published an iPhone app that back in the day that would read a sudoku puzzle and solve it. That led to a few side gigs and I’ve done off and on consulting jobs in the image processing space over the years.

Most problems tend to be amenable to “classic” techniques (eg OpenCV) and if you can get involved early enough there are a lot of affordances that can be added to make things a lot simpler (e.g registration marks).

I’ve also got a small YouTube channel that brings in a bit of revenue from ads and sponsorship.

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

#304
It’s definitely not my passion but in 2013 I built a WordPress plugin around the API of a popular newsletter service and it’s been paying my bills ever since.

Still going strong at €36K per month excluding VAT.

There was (and still is) a huge market where non-technical people are looking for a GUI around something a programmer would find very simple (and usually too boring to work on). More so if the tech surrounding it is not particularly sexy, as is the case for WordPress and PHP.

Ps. In case anyone is reading this, I am open to selling. I spent about 4 hours a week on it and the rest is handled by 2 freelance people costing about €1K / month each. Contact me for details if interested and willing to pay in the ballpark of €1.6M.

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

#305
macOS apps which I share at https://lowtechguys.com/ bring me $7k/month on average at the moment, and it keeps growing.

It started in 2017 when I shared the first free and open source version of Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/), an app for controlling monitors.

At that time, there was only a command line for doing this stuff (https://github.com/kfix/ddcctl) and I wanted a more visual way of changing the brightness. So I learned Swift, learned how to bridge the ddcctl C code and call it from Swift, then made a rough interface and published it: https://www.producthunt.com/products/lunar#lunar-5

It turned out people did have a need for this and asked if they could donate. I set up a Buy me a Coffee page and in 4 years collected about $5k in donations. That's a lot of money for a Romanian.

When Apple Silicon appeared, Lunar didn't work anymore because the whole hardware arrangement and drivers were different, and there was no documentation on how to send I²C data. I took the plunge and quit my stressful job, bought an M1 MacBook and reverse engineered the I²C communication: https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/journey-to-ddc-on-m1-macs/

Then published Lunar 4 as a Free version with a Pro paid upgrade. I was reluctant with this, didn't think anyone would buy it, but to this day I'm able to be unemployed and put my ideas into practice because of it.

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

#306
post #16

My 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…

Are you GroCycle by any chance? Huge fan of our YT channel here. Mushrooms are amazing.

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

#307
Started an open source project that was used by a fair number of startups. One of them eventually hired me for full-time dev work and others paid for short term consulting work. Also had an Amazon wishlist with token Items of appreciation (mostly beer). That generated a fair number of deliveries. Eventually bought a dedicated large fridge for it. Got out of it after after a few years tho.

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

#309
post #304

It’s definitely not my passion but in 2013 I built a WordPress plugin around the API of a popular newsletter service and it’s been paying my bills ever since. Still going strong at €36K per month excluding VAT. There was (and still is) a huge market where non-technical people are looking for a GUI around something a programmer would find very simple (and usually too boring to work on). More so if the tech surrounding…

Totally underrated in my opinion. WordPress is a huge market meaning distribution of scale and PHP is still a very popular language. Kudos to you for nailing this.

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

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In my country, we do not ,as I am told, have courts that allow 3rd party lawsuits, so this knowledge cannot be leveraged to represent others to sue by absolute assignment of rights("chose in action"). I am one of few that I am executor of both my parents estate and may become administrator for my grandmother's estate. The asymmetrical financial power of the misbehaving Personal Representative of an estate (having resources of entire estate to resist removal) is something that can be solved by 3rd party financing. Framework of transparency in estate administration may be a digital solution where the court supervise the administration of an estate digitally in fine grain and in realtime instead of beneficiary initiated lawsuits. There is a need for professional estate administration or avoid probate process altogether. Most executors are once in lifetime newbies and are easy targets of scummy lawyers to manipulate into unnecessary and prolonged litigation (milking the estate) by colluding lawyers.
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