Ask HN: How can I can side money with my engineering skills? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I can side money with my engineering skills?

Many nights outside of work, I still read and build ideas that get me excited about tech. As time grows, it would be nice to make some money on the side with the skills I have. How can I work toward this goal?

I'm a senior engineer at a large bay area tech company working in backend/distributed systems. I have experience with UI/UX as well (which I really love to do for fun!).

I started a Youtube channel and get a few hundred bucks a month from that, but am interested in building some stuff outside of videos/teaching.

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Good question.

If you already make a few hundred bucks from making videos, I think you are on a good track.

Do you make money through Patreon or from advertisment?

Some things to think about:

* Can you generate leads from your YouTube channel, at least for consulting?

* Talk to your viewers. Understand their problems and figure out what a lot of them see as as problem. This could go hand in hand with consulting.

* Build something to address this problem and make it a product. You already have people likely willing to at least try and give feedback.

Generating leads for something from my channel is something I've been interested in doing. The channel has turned a bit passive these days as it was taking me away from what I wanted to do, which was building something and make more money. Maybe I can lean into it a bit more.

Continuous content generation is super critical. Not sure how youtube works in this regard but at least on LinkedIn, you need to be active regularly to get some reach.

What I see quite often is, that "creators" try to get people to sign up for their newsletters and that kind of stuff. I think there are a lot of ways to make money from content, but building something is probably the hardest... But as a tech person, it feels much more satisfying.

Make a newsletter so folks from YouTube can get your thoughts when you choose, not the algorithm.

Write a course/book about something you know that can help others do their job better/get promoted, and charge for its value.

The way I would recommend is to go in accordance with your employer's guidelines.

What’s your yt channel?

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