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How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

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

#91
post #78
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how it’s belittling to acknowledge luck as a factor among many in success while also acknowledging the non-luck factors. You can be proud of your accomplishments while still acknowledging the influence of luck your success.

I think it's the difference between what comes first, the work or the luck and what's the dominant force. If you study hard and get good grades, you might find yourself in a position where someone needs to hire for a role that you're already prepared for. Sure, there's luck in bumping into that person, but you worked hard to be able to take advantage of opportunities, so I'd say luck had very little to do with your s…

[deleted]

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

#92
post #78
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how it’s belittling to acknowledge luck as a factor among many in success while also acknowledging the non-luck factors. You can be proud of your accomplishments while still acknowledging the influence of luck your success.

I think it's the difference between what comes first, the work or the luck and what's the dominant force. If you study hard and get good grades, you might find yourself in a position where someone needs to hire for a role that you're already prepared for. Sure, there's luck in bumping into that person, but you worked hard to be able to take advantage of opportunities, so I'd say luck had very little to do with your s…

I view it this way: being smart and hard working is necessary but not sufficient to achieve the success they have. There are plenty of very smart and hard working people that are also dirt poor due to various circumstances. Maybe they have interests that don't happen to pay a lot of money. Maybe they are in locations where being smart doesn't pay off that much.

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

#93
post #43

If you don't mind me asking, I'd like some help laying out what my next steps should be on one of my side projects. I had an idea for a side project, ran it by a hand full of friends and associates, expecting to have a bunch of holes poked into it (they have done that to me many times in the past). This time they all think I have something. Problem is I work full time, as a Linux systems engineer (30 years of Unix ex…

I've been through all of that, and have a great resume.

Happy to partner up, or just mentor. Just went through a third-party AD integration, for example.

(Throwaway as I don't want too many people knowing I'm looking at side projects right now...)

Feel free to email throwaway650@trashmail.com if you're interested.

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

#94
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a millennial myself, I would like the need for income taken off the table so that I can find a recurring source of meaningful work.

> As a millennial myself, I would like the need for income taken off the table In other words, I'd like someone else to pay for taking care of me, my shelter, my food. > so that I can find a recurring source of meaningful work. So that I can follow my desires rather than being forced to pay my own way. As a gen-x'er I just have say, you are not entitled to other people's labor, certainly not so you can avoid labor yo…

Everyone knows this. Even millennials, believe it or not. Yawn.

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

#95
post #94
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a millennial myself, I would like the need for income taken off the table In other words, I'd like someone else to pay for taking care of me, my shelter, my food. > so that I can find a recurring source of meaningful work. So that I can follow my desires rather than being forced to pay my own way. As a gen-x'er I just have say, you are not entitled to other people's labor, certainly not so you can avoid labor yo…

Everyone knows this. Even millennials, believe it or not. Yawn.

The OP's comment shows otherwise, but if you're bored, take your ass elsewhere.

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

#96

Goes into good details about the tactics used to come up with an idea and then recruit the first few customers. After signing up $5k/month revenue it meant he needed to generate 5,000 leads per month for those customers. That is the hard bit, how did he do that on a side project? He says that the income was passive, so how did he generate 5,000 targeted leads passively? That is the magic, not the ability to recruit s…

It was a lead gen tool. He could have used the tool to generate leads for the tool.

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

#97
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a modern problem too. No matter what anyone feels about it having to farm crops to eat was definitely meaningful work a hundred years ago. Even if you were being exploited in a factory suicide was common but mostly from abuse and injury rather than the vacuousness of the job. Its wholly contemporary to invent bullshit jobs and imagine complexity to keep people at desks en masse, leaving them with such a…

Truth. My job is "important", but at the same time I don't think anyone's life would be measurably worse if I didn't do it (besides mine lol). IMO it is kind of a problem with software in general. It is getting me down honestly; I could use some advice.

I feel the same way. Pay is good, work can be interesting, work-life balance and job security are relatively good, but being a developer never gave me any sense of real fulfillment. I'm not making any serious difference in anyone's life, and my six figure salary could be replaced with a team of eastern Europeans who could probably get more done at a fraction of the cost. If I were to die tomorrow, it wouldn't really make any difference aside from friends/family. My company might be inconvenienced for a couple weeks, but would easily find a replacement.

I can put up with unfulfilling work (at least for a little bit). What I can't stand is the Kool-Aid culture surrounding it where you have to put this big smile on your face at all times and pretend like gluing Javascript is your life-calling, mentally stimulates you, and gives you a deep sense of fulfillment. That CNBC article describing Facebook's work culture as "cult-like" is basically every job and job interview I've ever partaken in in the tech industry.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/facebook-culture-cult-perfor...

The modern software engineer is a glorified factory worker, except instead of making cars and computer parts we're making apps that help rich people get a little richer or get people to buy sh*t they don't need.

I envy people with actually meaningful jobs - doctors who save lives, journalists exposing the world's atrocities, politicians, anyone working on the cutting edge of anything, etc.

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

#99
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on when this product was created, I can almost guarantee they are just manually scraping LinkedIn (plus a few other places - Facebook, twitter, Bloomberg, maybe even Pitchbook). There are custom Google search portals you can use to search LinkedIn via keyword that not everyone knows about. From there one can use a bunch of services that will provide you (mostly)valid emails at various companies. I imagine he ma…

> the fallacy of low rent/cost of living in developing economies Let's say a knowledge worker in a developing country could survive on $1 USD a day, adjusting food and rent to local cost. If a local white collar job paid them $5 a day, and a remote "exploiting" job paid them $15 a day, but an American could earn $50 a day for the same task, is this really a moral hazard?

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

#100

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…

Shady as fuck.

I'd never do such unethical things to make money.

I work at FAANG where I get paid more than these scums for ethical work policed by 100s of lawyers team who are stalwart of ethics.

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