Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 186 posts

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#21
My girlfriend was doing medical transcription for a while before going back to school. It's boring, but it's a somewhat skilled position and thus the pay is decent (my girlfriend topped out around 2k per month). Your wife will have to get a medical transcription certification first, though.

Here's the company she worked for: http://www.nuance-nts.com/ - they're the same people that do Dragon Naturally Speaking and Siri. Kinda weird to be training algorithms that are replacing you.

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#22

I was looking for something similar for my girlfriend. I was thinking she could market/translate Western apps/websites for the Chinese market since she is Chinese and speaks Mandarin and Cantonese. Not sure how to get her started though. Would you pay for such a service?

she could sign up to be a translator on mygengo: http://mygengo.com/

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#23
Is all manual labor off the table? Does your wife have any crafting skills?

On Etsy, I've seen a lot of people making things that don't seem like they would be labor intensive beyond the occasional shifting and arranging of raw materials.

If she's capable of making things that would do well on that website, count me among the jealous :)

Good luck.

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#25
I'm getting ready to start an online forum, but I don't relish the prospect of having to monitor it for spam/abuse. It seems like having one person casually scan 10, 20, 50? forums throughout the day could easily keep the spam at bay, and each of those forums owners would probably be quite happy to pay $100+? per month to keep their forum spam free.

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#26

Maybe drop shipping? You have to make an effort in finding a !crowded niche but there's money to be made if you got your act together. Check out this Reddit IAmA http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/se78n/i_make_over_100k...

Hi Arkitaip, there was a thread exposing this guys posting as dishonest. I can't find it on Reddit any longer, but I did find this: http://r.bernsteinbear.com/r/self/comments/sgaka/dont_trust_... The gist was the links he posted to the PPC/SEO companies were actually his own (and this was his true purpose). [Edit, found the link!]

Thank you for bringing this up. I've read that thread a couple of times but this has completely escaped my attention.

I still think there's business in drop shipping as long as you do your home work and apply common sense.

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#27
just a wild, very wild and untested, idea. a mini-niche "mechanical turk" iphone(andorid) app.

i.e.: if your wife is called "gloria" the app is called "Ask Gloria"

  * user types in an question/request.
  * gloria (the real gloria) response.
the app is free(? or 0.99) with a 1 question package.

an additional question pack (of 5 questions) costs 10(?)$

the selling point is that not an anonymous person or siri-AI answers your stuff, but a real human being. the app can be pitched to techblogs and other stuff as an (funny and "slow life") alternative to siri & co.

it's the smallest niche i can think of. just a wild idea, would love if you give it a try and report back to HN.

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#30
post #20

AirBNB hires at home customer service reps or at least they used to anyways not sure if they still do. A lot of companies hire people to manage social media too.

Do you have any good links/references/experience with 'managing social media'? My wife has been offered a social media position with a small local company but neither of them know 'what to do' beyond managing facebook and she really wants to do well at the job (she's excited!) so is looking for ideas.

I've done some research into the area. Email me and we can chat.
Post reply on HN