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How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

campfirelabs.co

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Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#131

Post by GabrielBen »

kokokokoko wrote: post #121
vesak wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if a person is producing below a living wage, then it's difficult to pay that person a living wage.

You realize, that the business we are talking about is performing arbitrage on labor. That the very definition of this business is that the workers are receiving less than the full amount of the value they are creating. Its literally how the business makes money. Paying them less than their output. This business cannot exist and at the same time not have more money to pay the people doing the work.

> That the very definition of this business is that the workers are receiving less than the full amount of the value they are creating.

Of any businesses, its necessary to also maintain the capital that gives them the productivity to generate all that value. Even under a marxist theory you cant pay someone what they produce exactly, cuz then they wouldnt be your employee.

Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#132

Post by sah2ed »

burtonator wrote: post #34

I actually did this too... I create Datastreamer ( http://www.datastreamer.io/ ) which (when I created it) was an RSS syndication platform as a service. You gave us RSS feeds and then we would index them and send you the output without having to deal with the insanity of RSS feeds. This was a decade ago though. I've been running it since and now it's more of a massive search engine of content - nearly a petabyte at t…

> Datastreamer was the first company in the content indexing space and we were WAY ahead of everyone else.

Meltwater.com is in the same space but is much older — it was founded in 2001.

Their engineering team recently blogged [0] about their petabyte-size Elasticsearch cluster which still uses a much older version of ES (1.7.x).

0: Optimal Shard Placement in a Petabyte Scale Elasticsearch Cluster https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18413862

Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#133

Post by strken »

kokokokoko wrote: post #125
DATACOMMANDER wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he should be employing Americans, or because he should be paying the developing-country worker $50/day? If the latter, how do you think that workers in developing countries are going to go from making $5/day to $50/day if they never make anything in between? Surely a 200% pay increase given immediately is better than a 900% pay increase that’s purely hypothetical?

Because he should be paying human beings a living wage no matter where they are. Pretending that living costs in a developing nation is somehow magically non existent is immoral. Pay people a reasonable wage to live their lives and provide for their families. Just because someone lives in another country does not give a person the moral authority to pay them an amount that does not allow them to properly feed and car…

This point of view compares a marginal improvement with a massive improvement and concludes that bringing about a marginal improvement when you could cause a massive improvement is wrong.

This is a false comparison because there's a third option, which is doing nothing. Doing nothing is worse than causing any size of improvement, and almost all of us are doing nothing. If we are to accept that paying Filipino workers slightly more than the local economy is offering is wrong, then we must also accept that not paying them anything is wrong, in which case we should be going after the hordes of people who aren't doing anything instead of the people who are only doing a tiny little bit.

Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#134

Post by ubercow13 »

kokokokoko wrote: post #125
DATACOMMANDER wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he should be employing Americans, or because he should be paying the developing-country worker $50/day? If the latter, how do you think that workers in developing countries are going to go from making $5/day to $50/day if they never make anything in between? Surely a 200% pay increase given immediately is better than a 900% pay increase that’s purely hypothetical?

Because he should be paying human beings a living wage no matter where they are. Pretending that living costs in a developing nation is somehow magically non existent is immoral. Pay people a reasonable wage to live their lives and provide for their families. Just because someone lives in another country does not give a person the moral authority to pay them an amount that does not allow them to properly feed and car…

Isn't the point of this kind of labour arbitrage that a living wage is still less in some countries? You seem to be conflating two points in this thread - that the should pay a living wage and that they should pay in line with the value they generate. The whole point of labour arbitrage is that there is a large(r) gap between those amounts no?

Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#135

Post by dcx »

blunte wrote: post #69

This is great and educational. But I've noticed that many (most?) of the successful side projects were started by people who had some sales and marketing experience. Sales first, tech second (or third). If you want other people to buy, rent, invest, etc., you have to be able to find the right people and communicate with them in a way that will lead them to become your customers/partners. Unfortunately, I doubt many o…

Not saying your conclusion is wrong, but could this be selection bias? Maybe it's just that people with sales and marketing experience are disproportionately likely to write about it. I know some engineers with quiet side hustles that do quite well.

Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#137

Post by karatefylla »

blunte wrote: post #69

This is great and educational. But I've noticed that many (most?) of the successful side projects were started by people who had some sales and marketing experience. Sales first, tech second (or third). If you want other people to buy, rent, invest, etc., you have to be able to find the right people and communicate with them in a way that will lead them to become your customers/partners. Unfortunately, I doubt many o…

The fact is that you can have the best product in the world but if you can't sell it, it's basically worthless. No product or service is going to sell themselves.

Re: How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

#138

Post by webdood90 »

tengbretson wrote: post #47
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a mom + pop Amazon seller (manufacture + ship from China to America, stick packaging on it, send it in to Fulfillment by Amazon, collect a check) He's probably worth $50m as one of the top 250 sellers. Probably ~20 SKUs. Tons of competitors trying to bring him down but his product has so many reviews that it is just a money printer. He was smart to be at the right place at the right time. He undercut the…

>But like... he couldn't do again if he had to start from scratch in 2019. This misses the point by a country mile. The skill is knowing and predicting the when and where in addition to executing on the what .

Just like the people who time the stock market.
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