Ask HN: As a programmer how can you start a small business | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: As a programmer how can you start a small business

10 pointsmraza0074 comments

As programmer how can we start business and create a passive income or maybe active income stream.

What are some ways in which you can get started and what are some hurdles you face ?

I would love to know the opinion of people who initially started out as programmers but moved onto doing there own business and what motivated them

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Many hurdles and it's very tiring. From one problem to another.

Passive income hurdles:

* change in the commission you get, this happened on many platforms. I personally experienced going from 50% commission to 15% commission

* your domains could be attacked by international link farm botnets (national police ignores this), causing your income to tank. This is happening to my domains now. It's a brick wall of law enforcement, domain registrars, domain hosting etc ignoring this crime. Then it's a problem of scale, should you as a solo developer go after 100.000 botnet domains? Google disavow tool is way to slow to solve the problem, even after reporting spam domains they're there for 2+ months

* dealing with international cyber crime in general. Because national law doesn't apply to the world, you are pretty much on your own when it comes to security. The internet is the wild wild west, crime is the norm.

* you could be kicked of the platform like App store, Play store for unspecified reasons. Maybe you made apps that provide you a nice passive income, then poof, gone.

* your co-founder could sue you (if you don't work solo)

Active income hurdles:

* customer goes bankrupt

* customer refuses to pay

* a pandemic could disrupt your business

Overall active income is better, because the passive income problems are much harder. Passive income is awesome when it works, but it's not a guaranteed income and it's outside your control.

Start with an advertisement. Either trough an advertising platform (google ads etc) or by contacting companies directly (linkedin). Something like "need a website? yada yada yada"

Are you looking at, or doing any other forms of passive income that don’t share the same flaws as above?

Working as B2B contractor instead of regular employment contracts, there are many companies/clients that prefer to hire that way. You can begin consulting in your area of expertise, you can even become a recruiter and gradually create a business out of it. And the most obvious is, you already have a product you want to promote/sell, so you might need to register as a small business for that. Or you got money already and idea of a product/service, so you create a start-up and hire developers to work on it. Or you pretend to be a CEO on AngelList and promise equity instead of salary to prospective hires.

Not really a programmer but was in a similar stream. I trade stocks/options now.

I worked really well with excel sheets (macros) and was able to calculate an edge from watching data which was available to me. Maybe your work has a problem you can solve and it would work for other companies.

I had to get the same data at that time, now it's easily accessible, and enough capital to implement the strategy full time.

I had to learn to program a different language which created the active income stream.

Ask yourself what do you like doing? Then work on it in your spare time. What's fun for you? For me, I wanted to make money without working hard. I also love money.

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