What consistently worked for me is teaching, in hours worked, risk/repeatability, and overall time (3 months).
The cafe brought me that kind of sales in about 10 weeks, but after factoring all the other costs, the income was lower than an average salary.
Startups are very slow to set up. Something with 5%-10% margin would be faster to set up - get a product, hack together an online shop, drop some money on Google ads. But when you look at profitability it could take way more than a year for that kind of money. Cafes are faster.
A startup with 90% profit margin would bring in the income much faster, but it may take a very long time to build such a thing, easily 3+ months.
Freelancing is good. A fixed price project would pay that well in about 1 month if you're good and reputable. I've been offered about 4 projects crossing the $10k mark, but all of them failed for some reason (mostly miscommunication).
A beginner freelancer might make about $25-$50 an hour.
But with similar experience, you might get about $50-$75 an hour teaching bootcamps or individuals.
The reasoning being that most people who hire freelancers instead of in house programmers are broke startups or don't have tech as their core. The price for freelance coding is also pegged against people all over the world. So some lady in India or Indonesia would be equally happy making 5x less. With teaching, your competitors are geographically limited.
Also, programming is very tiring work and teaching not so much. So you can put in many more hours and it's more suitable for someone working full time.
I'll give you an example. A few months back I was chatting with a friend and she was saying how she had this problem at work where she wanted to get customer lists out of a (huge) spreadsheet. I whipped up a Python script to do it - for free. She was delighted. A few weeks later her boss came back to me directly - he wanted a simple web app put together for one of their internal processes and he was prepared to pay $$$.
You'll need to network, build up a body of work. Look for problems to solve and the side income will come.
Your other option. Teach what you know on the side - you can run workshops on the weekends.
2. Bet $20000 on black at the casino, if you win, well done. If you lose, you lost $30000.
There is 75% chance to make $10000 - casino edge using this strategy. You can do this on any day of the week the casino is open.
Trouble is, even when the chance of losing is 0.25%, you'll lost once every 400 games.
And at one point, the loss will be greater than all the money you had.. and there's no coming back from that.
Given the chance of winning a round is p=0.5, the chance of losing is q = 1 - p = 0.5
If you've lost the first round, the odds of you twice in a row are q = 0.5^(2 rounds) = 0.25
Which means the odds of you winning are p = 1 - q = 1 - 0.25 = 0.75.
but of course there are many people who will try to sell you turn-key business solutions
programming is hard, it takes a lot of time and effort, if money is your real objective, there are probably easier ways
A lot of people seem to like the idea of making/having money much more than actually doing it. A lot of very good and relatively easy money making ideas require boring/unsexy work, a small amount of sales behavior, or both. This is an unusually high threshold for most people to cross.
I see a lot of smart people who think that people are just going to drop sexy problems in their lap along with a pile of money to solve those problems. I humbly suggest that this is a relatively rare occurrence.
Anyway, any answer to OPs question is probably going to be some form of unsexy work and light sales. There are a lot of opportunities that meet this description.
- Go to stackingthebricks.com from Amy Hoy.
- Learn how to find a niche market of professionals and find their pain points.
- Learn the fundamentals of making a product or service that these people want (e.g., an e-book) and how to market it via Amy's various writings and those she links to (her network has many prolific writers).
- Execute.
So basically, do any average job.
Ask and you shall receive Seek and you shall find Knock and the door will be opened
The only way to get 10k short of stealing is for someone to give it to you. And nobody will give it to you if they have no connection to you. So the first thing you need to understand is that your success depends on connecting with people who can be convinced that it is in their best interest to give you money in exchange for something you offer. As a coder, you can definitely make 10k on one project or two, so that's a great goal. There are many people out there who would benefit from paying you 10k because you have valuable skills.
Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky said "100% of shots you don't take won't go in the goal". Similarly you won't get any business at all if you just sit around. You have to get up and keep trying things. Attend meet ups. Even go door to door. That's what I did selling a side product I built but now one of the guys I met I'm in talks with to build software for about 15k.
The thing is if you go out and keep trying to find people who might give you money, eventually you will find someone who will give you money. This is one of the secrets to life.
Moreover, the OP lives in Pakistan not the US
Stock trading, particularly when you're working with less than millions, is a very easy way to lose most of your capital.
I mentioned this to you in another thread, but you simply need to be more specific with your advice. Your median smart person trying to do QT does not beat the market over any reasonable time horizon. Most just flat out do worse before quitting.
This person is looking for a solid $10k per year. Suggesting that they do QT is about the same level of usefulness as telling them to write a book and get it published. Sure, it's doable and perhaps even not that difficult for some people, but it's not particularly actionable information.
To provide a contrast, the advice I would give would be something like this:
- Go to stackingthebricks.com from Amy Hoy.
- Learn how to find a niche market of professionals and find their pain points.
- Learn the fundamentals of making a product or service that these people want (e.g., an e-book) and how to market it via Amy's various writings and those she links to (her network has many prolific writers).
- Execute.
This is a formula that is actionable but also has enough abstraction such that the reader can tailor it to their own preferences.
If you could do this for QT, your suggestions will likely stop being down voted so much.
Another thought I had is that the developers that would most likely want to do this are the same ones who are most likely not allowed to do this. I worked at a clearing company as a dev and FINRA was very explicit in what I can and can't do in my free time when it comes to trading. I could only use specific brokers. I probably had a bit more flexibility as I was only bound by FINRA and NFA (National Futures Association). If you are in a trading firm I'm sure they have even stricter rules about individual algo trading.