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Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#191

Post by jpolitzki »

rahul_nyc wrote: post #83

AI space is heating up with the release of Stable Diffusion models and OpenAI. If you are interested you can start playing with these tech and make things useful for people. I'm just getting started on this and released the MVP version of Picasa AI[1] and I'm excited about it. I wanted to build something for a long time and I always postponed it for better time. With the AI trends I feel now is the correct time to ju…

This is the truth, about to raise and am looking for someone to help out. Let me know if interested!

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#192

Post by ryandrake »

dhimes wrote: post #141
uhtred wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in small (less than 20 employees) companies and although there were no grooming / standup / retro meetings (i.e. all the bullshit agile stuff I can't stand), it was replaced with other bullshit like having to answer the phone and deal with passive aggressive customers, zero benefits other than salary (no 401k etc), an owner who said things like "microsoft can build excel, why can't we build ", no project/…

Yeah it helps if the owner codes- so they know what they are talking about at least in principle when it comes to building stuff.

Sometimes that makes it worse. You'll get founders who say "Well, when I originally wrote [our product], it was 1,500 lines of code, and I did it myself in a weekend. Why are you telling me a team of five needs a month to add a single feature???" Except, things are different now that the code base has increased 100X and the number of users has increased 10,000X.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#193

Post by lavventura »

Temporary_31337 wrote: post #122
lavventura wrote: post #105

In trading, I realize I always made loses when my emotions get involved. So I decided to implement a trading-bot in Python for fun. It took 1.5 years of development. The bot can open ~100 positions each day and closing all with 1 cent gain (in total ~1$ profit per day). At least its nice to see something I made can make some money even its amount pretty small.

Is it outperforming the market though?

I was experimenting in Binance Spot.I don't believe it out-performs the market, but it can survive when market crashes since the bot is not greedy.

The bot opens up to 20 positions in parallel each starts with 2$ and always limit order with 0.5% profit. Some positions close itself in few seconds some remain for a day.

If there is -5% loss on a position, I added up the amount of the position and re-order limit order with 0.5% gain. Let's say for 2$ position if there is 5% loss, I add 2$ more, than 4$ ... The position size grows as 2 => 4 => 8 => 16 ... with updated limit order for each. I observe that eventually position close it self with profit.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#194

Post by slothtrop »

acuozzo wrote: post #155
slothtrop wrote: post #101

> I can code up my dream ideas with ease, what i don't know how to do is market anything or get users If that's true, you should be doing it. Worry about marketing once you have something to market.

> Worry about marketing once you have something to market. After years of research and experimentation, I have written a spatiotemporal comb filter for NTSC TV signals which consistently outperforms the state of the art. It's done. I use it for digitally archiving Laserdiscs. How can I market this?

Does it solve a problem / meet a demand in a significant fashion? If so, ask the right people and ye shall receive. I don't know anything about marketing.

For context, the other user alludes that building their dream project is trivial. I take this to mean it should be pursued regardless of how well the marketing outcome would be. If it's paramount that something sell well (because of upfront cost, time, preference, etc) then it's worth scrutinizing whether it can sell. HN seems to like the Mom Test book, summary: https://sandro.volpee.de/the-mom-test-summary-validate-ideas

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#195

Post by pythonbase »

Mikepicker wrote: post #168
pythonbase wrote: post #98

I have been doing consulting on the side, around 15-20 hours per day. Also into niche website development; building search engine optimized websites that are monetized through display and affiliate ads. Both side gigs usually generate more than the full time job.

Could you elaborate more on your niche websites? Are those blogs or web-scraped content?

Both actually. A niche site is usually centered around a specific topic. Content can be created manually or scraped and repurposed. The idea is to provide relevant transactional information and lead the user towards the conversion funnel which could be display ad, affiliate offer or any other sales pitch.

For instance, currently I am working on a website related to a coffee machine brand. I did the keyword and competition research, layout the site structure and monetization funnel. Now my team of writers is busy in creating content with the goal to turn out 30-40 highly quality content pieces in a month - enough to test the potential of the niche.

Another project I did previously was to set up mini sites for lawyers in a US state. I scraped existing lawyer directories to provide a lead management system to the client who then pitched development services to those without websites.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#196

Post by joshbochu »

alin23 wrote: post #25

Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now. I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only. I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/ It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to bui…

How do you decide on whether you should open source an app? What impact do you think this has on your revenue/profits/clone-ability?

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#197

Post by tayo42 »

alin23 wrote: post #25

Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now. I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only. I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/ It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to bui…

This is interesting, along with the discussion it started below. Thanks! Im a windows and linux (and andorid)user so I'm not to in tune with the mac world

How did you find paying users( or just users? i see you have free trials and free tiers) Does the app store offer that much discoverability?

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#198

Post by joshbochu »

joshbochu wrote: post #196
alin23 wrote: post #25

Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now. I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only. I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/ It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to bui…

How do you decide on whether you should open source an app? What impact do you think this has on your revenue/profits/clone-ability?

Ah I did notice you encrypt/hide pro features. Still curious to hear your thoughts!

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#199

Post by tayo42 »

danielheath wrote: post #93

> The thought of returning to corporate working kind of disgusts me. daily meetings, middle management bs, politics, bureaucracy... im sure your familiar with the typical complaints. Have you considered working in a company that isn't like that? Things to look for: * Ownership: The owner should be the person running the business. * Size: Fewer than 20 employees. Ideally two or three; consider being the first. * Reven…

Yeah that could be a possibility if all else fails. I think I also want to feel like I own my time. I guess i like the idea of taking this into my own hands, instead of being goldilocks with a job.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#200

Post by tayo42 »

0atman wrote: post #11

Coding pairs well and elevates many other side-hustles, I think. Nearly every job can benefits from automation, and if it can't, then the logical thinking that coding requires will improve it in some way. I paired coding with fiction writing and made a scifi podcast, which now represents 10% of my monthly income after two years! I wrote up my experience and advice here, if you're interested in the details https://www…

Thats funny as I just started writing fiction. I wanted to improve my written communication skills and thought it would be a fun way to. Thanks for the comment and link its interesting!
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