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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?

#331

Post by roland35 »

polishdude20 wrote: post #224
roland35 wrote: post #163

Kept at embedded engineering personal projects through some years working as a backend web developer, and finally got a chance to interview for a big tech job and landed it! I am much happier now and I have no urge to do side projects as I scratch that itch at my day job. My desk is covered in electronics again!

What kind of embedded projects have you made in your personal time before? I'm a backend engineer and I like to build embedded stuff as well for fun. What are some differences between your two jobs? Do you think embedded stuff will get boring at some point where your hobby becomes a chore?

I have a few ongoing projects - one is a music block toy for my kids (assemble blocks together that makes a song), another is a IoT shelf which syncs inventory. Someday I'd like to also make a large scale pen plotter.

Embedded software is obviously a lot like backend in the day to day, write code, design docs, etc, but instead of trying to keep up with all the things like serverless functions, Kubernetes, Cassandra, etc etc we get to think about things like microcontroller peripherals (timers, serial data, power management, interrupts) and supporting a variety of hardware configurations with testable code.

It isn't a chore yet! My only problem is as a staff engineer only half my time is spent actually doing coding!

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

#333

Post by nlh »

lolive wrote: post #204

Dealing MtG[1] cards on eBay. [1]: Magic: the Gathering.

That's awesome! MtG didn't make me any money but it got me into MIT, so I love sharing this story:

I was super into the game in my later high school years (1994-96), right when the market started going absolutely bonkers (relatively speaking). And I discovered a pattern - there was a price guide that got published on Usenet every week, and every card had "low", "average", and "high" prices. But people would only transact at the "high" level, so every week the price guide was updated with the new average and the loop began. Anyway I discovered this loop, started trading actively at tournaments, built up a huge portfolio of cards.....and then had the entire collection stolen from me while I was playing a match.

Anyway, I told this story to my college interviewer who just so happened to be an early Algo trader at a large Wall Street bank, and he loved it and wrote me up a glowing interview recommendation.

(Side note: At one point I had 9 Black Lotuses and was super proud of that...first page of my album. Few Alpha, few Beta, mostly Unlimited, one was signed by Christopher Rush, etc. Ahh memories.)

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

#334

Post by Mushhh »

dvko wrote: post #306
Mushhh wrote: 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.

No, that’s not us. We teach customers from the ground up how to cultivate using sterile spawn, whereas they sell pre-colonised substrate where much of the process has already been done :)

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

#335

Post by nlh »

svnt wrote: post #113
bloodyplonker22 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It may happen but the benefits of being secretive are lower than the benefits of sharing an idea and getting constructive feedback. One of the earliest fallacies I learned as an entrepreneur is that ideas need to be protected lest someone "steal" them or "beat me to the punch." It's just not true.

The benefits of sharing an idea and getting feedback far far far outweigh the minuscule risk that sharing an idea will spark a competitor that will end up outcompeting me.

Now - having said that - posting your ideas in detail on a public thread on Hacker News doesn't necessarily have the same benefits, so I can see the hesitation ;)

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

#336

Post by twodave »

ipaddr wrote: post #250
lukevp wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just set milestones every couple weeks of effort and invoice at the end of each one, and withhold delivery of the finished product until full payment is received… if a client doesn’t want to pay or is too difficult, fire the client and move on. And don’t give clients net30 terms or something ridiculous if you’re a solo contractor. Invoice due on receipt.

If you have the full scope / visibility and large enough margins but if you don"t. The milestones become another form of hourly/daily/weekly plus you have the added responsibility of meeting goals or you do not get paid. Hourly provides pay for time spent.

This is basically my feeling as well. It also establishes way up front, “This is how much my time will cost you.” That ultimately pressures clients to be prepared for meetings and not ask for frivolous crap. They can judge the output based on the cost for themselves, and honestly for some clients it’s well worth it. For others (especially software shops) they’ll tend to try and replace me with a FTE, but my perspective on it is that I’m happy to help them fill in the gaps while they needed me.

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

#337

Post by mmcconnell1618 »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #164
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing! Care to elaborate more?

I won't give away the exact niches but they are in the universal, evergreen problems: wealth, health and love. I charge really high around $300 per month. That way you cut through the b.s. and it is clear you are delivering value or not. Also helps with the marketing as I can get more per customer than I spend on acquiring them. Usually saas businesses all seem to charge really low like $10 / month for some reason. T…

Are the manager roles full time positions or is it something that I could do on the side to learn from your experience?

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

#338

Post by mmcconnell1618 »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #143

I read all the comments, the most popular income stream in the comments is to get a FAANG gig. Pow. Done.

FAANG jobs have some of the highest salaried positions available but even those will reach a cap because of limited leverage. One way to leverage salaried roles is to move into management where you can leverage your team's hours to accomplish more and move beyond a single IC salary. Otherwise, you have more leverage by owning a business of some kind.

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

#339

Post by peter422 »

giegs wrote: post #327
peter422 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are actually generating that much on adsense I think you'd likely make 20-30% more if you moved your ads to a high quality agency like adthrive or mediavine (those 2 are the only ones I'd firmly recommend over adsense). I'm sure you'd be approved by at least one of them based on the description of your site. I used to use adsense on all my side sites too and just focus on the content and UX, but once you reach…

Thanks. I'll look into those. I get a few pitches per week from ad agencies but don't know which are legitimate or worth it. It's doing so well that I'm paranoid about touching anything revenue related.

Just stick with adthrive or mediavine and you'll be fine. Many others are scammier (though in fairness they'll all probably outperform adsense).

You can search Reddit and you'll see the same advice over and over again: Mediavine/adthrive are the best.

I can't give you first hand advice on mediavine but one of my sites is on adthrive and I can confirm it's very good! Outperforming adsense by around 50% (though this will vary based on your specific niche/topic).

But my advice is also to learn about the ad ecosystem yourself. Once you reach a certain level of revenue you just have to learn about it, it's going to delivery a very high ROI as compared with other things you can do.

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

#340

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #337
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't give away the exact niches but they are in the universal, evergreen problems: wealth, health and love. I charge really high around $300 per month. That way you cut through the b.s. and it is clear you are delivering value or not. Also helps with the marketing as I can get more per customer than I spend on acquiring them. Usually saas businesses all seem to charge really low like $10 / month for some reason. T…

Are the manager roles full time positions or is it something that I could do on the side to learn from your experience?

They are all full time positions now.
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