Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
It may be passive or active or maintenance mode of income. Just something created by you and your sole passion that have worked out for quite some time and maybe still going on.
I grew up poor. So I had to figure out how to finance this work up front. It was a true obsession and I would have probably gone completely broke if not for the fantastic interest my work generated. I was licensing the work for good $$$.
Cut to now: I’m still fascinated with this type of photography. But my work these days involves social media content generation. Since I hate being the center of attention, I’m lucky that my clients just want content (and leave me out!).
But this early work just keeps selling. The subjects were so difficult to capture that I guess others have not really pursued the same path? I’m probably just a lucky fool.
If I were to die tomorrow, my family would still have good income from just this early work. I just can’t believe how this played out for me. I’d like to think it was a clever strategy. But no.
Coming from a family riven with poverty, addiction, and early death - I’m just astounded. I’ve already outlived every male member of my family in the last three generations. I hope to set my child on a different path thanks to this lucky break of timing + opportunity.
> I’m probably just a lucky fool.
Lucky, probably. Fool, less likely. But in any case, "luck" falls where it will, and better to a photographer of bats and voles than a fintech spiv or arms dealer or .. many other things.
A shared friend introduced me to someone who claimed to be a struggling Hollywood genius. We were all drinking at some university party. He told us about all the cool shit he would do if only technology wasn't so bad. So I built a tool to solve his issues. To my surprise, he used it on the Expendables 3 blurays. Later, the audio crew for George Lukas' Red Tails praised the tool in an interview. Hollywood guy got grammy nominated. I got paid first for development and then licensing fees. But I mostly like it not for the financials, but because this way my software made it onto a few magazine covers :) I collected all of them.
Yes, I built all these products.
The tools have a shared C++ core library and then I did the DAW integrations and platform-specific GUIs with JUCE, which is a cross platform C++ toolkit popular with audio people.
The original issue that I solved was simply mixing a large number of inputs down to something like 22.2 cinema surround based on mathematical formulas. Instead of the user dialing in 24 knobs, they type in XYZ coordinates and the math decides those 24 knobs for you.
Later versions then added animation, control surfaces, the headphone surround sound, and MPEG-H export for live TV.
All the initial release versions were 1 programmer x 3 years. By now, I've moved on and nowadays they have a small team to do maintenance, support, upgrades, etc.
It was a tremendous pain to get installed, and the documentation on your site is insufficient (I had to open the driver installer app inside the main app bundle manually, in the terminal to see the output with the error message, then google the error message to find out where the System Preferences request was), but I'm really excited to hear the fullness of the sound again!
Initial notes: Idle CPU while playing through SSC is about 1-2% less than without, and the "Energy Impact" of SSC is ~6.7 compared to Spotify's ~3.0. I don't think I'd call it particularly "light", but I love the sound! I'm rocking Reykjavik, but New York also sounds good in my headphones.
Then, like a year later, it became clear that I would need a full rewrite to make things work again because there was no way Apple would allow me to keep using the old APIs. I took a critical look at the sales numbers (like $6k over 3 years for the Hajo's Headphone Enhancer product) and decided that writing an Apple-only kernel driver from scratch would not be financially viable.
Since I was also the person that built the original Windows-only Spatial Sound Card app, I offered the burning Mac app ruins to them ;) But actually merging both products was done by my successors.
Is the Spatial Sound Card L a bit like a software version of the Sound Blaster 16bit cards? Does it affect performance much on Mac and PC?
I played the original Thief using a Sound Blaster card and still remember the audio giving me goosebumps!
FWIW, I work exclusively with local clients. Local clients, in my experience, are more willing to pay more to local people.
Their website went down when they got some international attention, and the consultants they hired designed a "solution" which involved big dedicated machines to host their (essentially text+image) wordpress site. The site wasn't my job at all, but when I overheard the price (and read their engineering plan) I asked for admin access and told them 10mins later to fire the consultants.
The director of engineering (an awesome guy) advised that I register a business and not use my name, then he hired me under pseudonym as their new consultant and I billed them at twice the rate they were paying me during the day for a few hours here and there at night (in retrospect, a total steal for them as I was an intern..)
Furthermore, unless a service provider has been acting negligently or has given some sort of guarantee like "With my services, your WordPress instance won't be hacked.", they usually can't be held responsible for actions and outcomes that are out of their control.
So 10 then :)
I've got a couple high level questions for someone more seasoned than I.
Could I email you?
I am involved in estate litigation since 2016 where I discovered collusion by many lawyers with the estate administrator to defraud the estate. Our laws for anti corruption are stringent in my country where a lawyer causing a beneficiary damage as the estate's lawyer is liable for 20 yrs imprisonment and 5x penalty fine for the gratification received.
It doesn't really seem like a side thing to my I don't know the law eyes.
1) Board member (advisor really) of a crypto/blockchain company. They pay me $5k per month to basically answer questions and help solve certain issues that might arise. There's also regular meetings but all in I spend 4 hours per week max.
2) Small contractor jobs. I was a contractor and home builder in a previous life. These days, I do side jobs both for the extra income and as a way to relax from my regular tech job. I build decks, sheds, small patios, and some indoor remodeling stuff. All of it is really basic because I have no interest in large jobs that would take a lot of time. A 10x12 shed will net me around $6k and I can build it in a weekend. A similar sized deck I'll charge $25k. Small patio pours I'll net $4k. During Christmas season (right now) I also hang lights. I'll charge between $1500 - $2500 and net most of that. Takes me around an hour for a normal two story house.
3) Tech consultant. I help administer various Wordpress and other sites for clients. Basic stuff like plugins, changing font, layouts, etc. Super easy and I get paid a monthly retainer.
4) I work two six-figure engineering jobs. Neither is super difficult which gives me time to do the other things and still have free-time to spend with my family, friends, and hobbies.
5) Rental income. I built a few single family homes and apartment buildings (12 units per building). Nets very good income but can also be demanding because I prefer to do most of the management work myself. Just sold one 12-plex for $1.6MM in August and am sitting on the others.
Can you elaborate a bit on how you get so much stuff done?
What do you see 'regular people' (or HN folks at least) complain/discuss where you just shrug and wonder why it seems so hard?
There's probably a bit of underlying depression involved where I feel like if I slow down all those mental worries and fears will manifest and send me down a dark path which want to avoid at all costs.
I try not to judge other folks because everyone has different priorities in life. Mine is working, but others may want to travel, try different beers, play sports, have dinner with friends, etc. I can never stop thinking about projects I want to do so I really don't enjoy a lot of socializing.
More specifically - my two jobs are typical 8-4 hours. Before and after I do whatever maintenance is required for the websites I admin. The crypto/blockchain company will have meetings in the evening, occasionally on the weekends. I have friends and family assist with managing my properties and I pay them very well for their help because some properties are located in another state that they're closer to. This mostly leaves weekends available for some contracting projects in my neighborhood (new development, wealthy folks who don't want to do any manual labor!). Additionally, I'm able to check on my properties, do walk-throughs with tenants, repairs (normally plumbing related - sinks, faucets, toilets, boilers), as well as move-ins and move-outs. If it's an emergency I have contacts for electricians, plumbers, HVAC, etc. who can get over there when I can't. My biggest gripe is with modern appliances. Normally use GE appliances, but the quality has gone down-hill, tried Samsung and same thing. I'm spending more to put in higher quality products like Bosch or Miele when possible.
Sounds extremely corny but I lost my best friends a few years back and their families are not well off financially, one in particular is struggling so I help them as much as they will let me because they're in their mid 60's and have always treated me like family. Another friend wanted to start a remodeling company so I helped him with that. I think these are the kinds of that brings a level of satisfaction and joy rather than buying new cars or taking vacation - for me at least.
I have never had a job where there is not more than enough to be done, such that I could always fill more hours than I have with useful work.
Both employers allow me a lot of leeway and flexibility so long as I can continue to deliver products on schedule, which to this day, I have never been late. So number of hours worked is fairly inconsequential to actual work that is done in both jobs.
Have you found the magical eighth day of the week??
Also fortunate because the last few years has seen a huge run-up and appreciation in property in my area specifically where the median house price 10 years ago was around $250k, it's now just under a million for a run-of-the-mill 4 bed, 2 bath, 2200sqft home. The buyer was a small investment company from out-of-state which is really unfortunate because I was hoping to sell to someone local but given the offer they made me, no one could match or even come close.
After the Spring 2000 semester, I noticed that the bookstores had junk book bins. Students would dump into the bins any books that the bookstore would not buy back. Anyone was welcome to rummage through the bin and if they found something interesting they could keep it.
The bookstores wouldn’t buy books back if they knew that a new version had been released. They of course wanted to avoid being stuck with useless inventory. I wondered if these books had residual value elsewhere. I collected a few and took them home and started looking up them up on half.com. Sure enough, all of them had listings and lots of them were listed for 10’s of dollars!
For the next few days I made a continuous circuit around all the bookstores, loading my car with any books I found in the bins, and dumping them in my living room. At night I would list the day’s haul. Because my inventory was free, I always listed $1 lower than the cheapest listing.
I now had an inventory of several thousand books and a very irritated set of roommates, including my future wife. All I had to do was sit back and wait for classes to start somewhere in the world where one of these books might still be in use.
Within a week orders started to roll in. Soon I was heading to the post office daily with a huge load of books. Things would quiet down whenever a there was a lull in sessions starting. I’d replenish inventory as the various summer sessions completed.
Fall semester generated a huge bump sales and I was able to get a huge inventory of books when the semester ended. Unfortunately that proved to be the last semester of junk book bins. The stores got wise to what the kid in the beat up Honda was up to and started collecting the junk books for themselves.
I continued to sell what books I had and that went on for the rest of the time I was in school. After graduation my wife demanded that I chuck the rest. She’d had enough of random stacks of old textbooks.
But my most memorable sale was to see the name of a classmate on my half.com portal. I just handed him the book in class one day instead of having to take it to the post office.
I'd also buy deeply discounted old editions from the school bookstore to resell. They still had resale value because not all schools would update to the latest book right away.
On the side I sell budget star tracking astrophotography mounts I designed and build in my basement. I also do a few consulting gigs each year. These efforts combined bring in an extra ~25k annually. My plan is to develop two more space-related products, hire a tech, and transition to more of an oversight and design role rather than the one guy running the whole thing.
For the record I don't think most people should do this, it is not a balanced life to work this much, generally speaking. But for me it's a worthy discomfort to relieve financial pressures from student debt and being the only breadwinner of a young family. Plus it's fun stuff, I get to design cool products which is what I do for fun anyway, I just usually stop at the level of prototype when it's just for me. ;)
At this point it has earned over $400k USD lifetime with 75% of that being in the last two years. 100% Adsense. The audience who find/use my site are good candidates for high-dollar ads, which is why it has done so well. New data (a few rows in a table) needs to be added once every few months, but it takes < 1hr. Realistically I should invest in blog/content but I don't really find it interesting any more.
Following the "make niche complicated data easily parsable" concept I built another web app in 2018 for a different hobby. For example if the hobby was "phones" and the physical dimensions/specs of "phones" was very important to choosing it, my web app would let you visually compare any two "phones" side-by-side at the correct dimensional scale.
It apparently solved a problem and traffic grew organically. After years of work this web app should get close to 6 figures annually in 2023 - earned via affiliate sales of "phones" and accessories. It's is a much more active endeavor, but if I walked away for 6 months I bet revenue would stay near flat. It fills my time and I find it interesting.
I'm working on web app #3 now which is tangentially related to the "phones" concept.
I used to use adsense on all my side sites too and just focus on the content and UX, but once you reach a certain volume (which you are well above), you are leaving a lot of money on the table not investing the effort into improving your ad monetization.
I earned back my advance after about five years and have been receiving royalty checks ever since.
This year, it surpassed 100,000 copies sold.
Just a little note for other would-be authors ... it's never been easier to self-publish -- but getting a book deal with a traditional publisher still has substantial upsides, particularly on the distribution side. There are exceptions (e.g. if you expect digital versions to constitute the vast majority of sales). But by and large, you're better off getting a book deal if you can.
This might work for some writers and books, but not for others.
There was this one Tweet that went into detail about what some trial documents revealed about a particular publisher: https://twitter.com/aprilhenrybooks/status/15662306587665039...
> In the Penguin Random House/S&S antitrust trial it was revealed that out of 58,000 trade titles published per year, half of those titles sell fewer than one dozen books.
There were also articles that disagreed with the claim: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...
Which also had some discussion on HN, where some people suggested that it was somewhat true, while others explored other aspects of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32794673
But even the article itself refers to more claims like that, with many suggesting that in writing, like many other industries, there will be a few very successful books/projects, and many that will fall by the wayside (honestly, I'd say the same about most things, from making SaaS products, to game development and art/music). Here's a humbling article that someone wrote: https://hughhowey.com/most-books-dont-sell/
I guess what I'm trying to say here: don't write a book hoping to earn a lot of money. Write a book because you find the experience interesting or fun, and just because you want to write (and publish) a book.
We didn’t think there would be any market here because there weren’t any UK shops doing it. Then a couple of years later it took off and growing mushrooms became cool.
In this time we learned how to run a webshop and navigate an industry where every payment processor dropped us - to the point where we only accept cash, bank transfer and crypto.
Our Woocommerce shop was built on pure passion for mushrooms and a crazy late night idea. The kinds you usually just leave as an idea. Now it has consumed our lives and we have multiple employees.
Our business continues to grow with recent months bringing in around £60K/month in revenue.
I had never known what it was like going to a supermarket and not having to add the cost of everything in my head. But with the money, I learned the most valuable lesson - it could all go tomorrow and I would be totally fine with it.
I had a large setup in my shed for a few years. Lots of labor getting the substrate boiled and bagged, but once that was done it was easy. Figured that surely there was legs to selling the means of production directly to consumers instead. Who could have guessed it would take off like it has. Now you can even find the grow kits in TK Max and the like as Christmas presents. The market seems pretty saturated now so I'm sure the boat has long sail for me. I'm glad it's worked out for you, if not a little envious.
It’s a high risk industry, no doubt there have been plenty of scammers out there but the fact we sell magic mushroom spores for the microscope is enough to be alienated by every card processor and their insurers.
It’s fine though, we make it work - it hasn’t stopped our growth and we’ve amassed enough trust from customers to pay via the other methods!
*Edid: Shopify, not PayPal said that about spores into the arm, not Stripe!
But in all seriousness, psilocybin was banned in 2005 in the UK. We have only sold products which were to be used to help cultivate psilocybin mushrooms to one single customer - an organisation with a special license to do so provided by the Home Office in the UK.
I'm guessing the former since payment processors kept dropping you?
Much better than hustling a few different freelance/contracts/side hustles for me at this point in my life.
What's more, my ebooks are all free to read online. Only PDF/EPUB are sold, and I've always given them away for free during launch week.
List of my ebooks: https://learnbyexample.github.io/books/ (topics include Regular Expressions, Linux CLI tools, Python and Vim)
$150/month seems less even for a developing nation (I might be wrong though)
And $150/month really provides a comfortable living for me in the outskirts of a city :)
Still going strong at €36K per month excluding VAT.
There was (and still is) a huge market where non-technical people are looking for a GUI around something a programmer would find very simple (and usually too boring to work on). More so if the tech surrounding it is not particularly sexy, as is the case for WordPress and PHP.
Ps. In case anyone is reading this, I am open to selling. I spent about 4 hours a week on it and the rest is handled by 2 freelance people costing about €1K / month each. Contact me for details if interested and willing to pay in the ballpark of €1.6M.
I would be interested in the M&A idea. I'm managing director of a B2B SaaS company, which is owned by a European private-equity fund. So I would have access to capital to finance such a transaction (without taking a cut on it!).
My email address is in my profile, or feel free to send me yours.
The first product is a B2B onboarding platform. This product generates approx. $100k/year.
Our second product is a microsaas that turns google drive folders into a hosted, searchable wiki with one click. This product is making $2k/month.
Both products require minimum support and continue to sustain themselves.
One thing to note is that we did work full time on both of these products for like 1.5 years during the pandemic. At the time, it was definitely not the best income stream we had created but became so after we both got "real" jobs again.
For Kbee, I actually wrote up our journey here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/our-journey-from-idea-to-p...
Would love to know what you think and if you have any follow up questions :)
Please let me know if you have any feedback on it!
If you bill more than me, any advice on how to find bigger clients?
What I do is embedded software for medical devices though, so beyond building there's a lot of documenting, reading documentation adhering to standards.
I'm also curious to know how you can do small quantities of hourly work in this field rather than take on projects that would require much larger time commitments. Are you just consulting as a domain expert or something?
It was fun to work on something outside my day job but it required some judiciousness to ensure I could meet my set time limits.
I found taking on bigger projects + a demanding day job pushed me to burnout pretty quickly.
It definitely requires a lot of physical work on her part and our spare bedroom is basically a pile of canvas, paint, plaster, and other supplies, but it has generated over $10,000 in revenue. We could optimize more and she could make prints of some of her better paintings, but she does it for fun and most of the money she uses for shopping (and I spend my share on triathlon gear!)
I was inspired by "do things that don't scale".
My business creates European hand-blown titanium crystal stemware for whisky and spirits.
This started as my quarantine project and has grown fairly rapidly relative to my expectations. The product is very expensive to produce because each glass is made entirely by hand in Europe but the results are pretty beautiful. It's not a golden ticket financially but it's very stable and healthy.
Most rewarding is the community of spirits enthusiasts and professionals who I've been able to connect with.
i was pretty naive then, i wish i could do the whole thing over.
Do you mean that you would have done the financial details differently? Like, be paid per filled prescription?
Ended up being a very interesting project which also led to earnings around 10eth (~12k today). Took around 2 months. https://blockchainsmokers.xyz
[1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
What parts of web3 deserve their day in the sun and which are utter BS?
A couple years into it I started reading in the forums about changes to the search algorithm and how it was hammering people and killing their existing gigs. It was all speculation since it's not transparent. Shortly after that, I started to notice the random one off orders completely stopped. I was still getting orders from my regulars, but over time their business started to drop off. A lot of those customers were using my services to fulfill orders on their own gigs (lots of whiteboard animation videos, things like that). So I imagine some of them also dropped off due to the algorithm and I went with it.
When they were gone, it was over. I'm left with a gig with over 500 completed orders with a perfect 5 star rating, that never gets seen by anyone.
There isn't much in the way of SEO you can do - you have your gig description and you can add some keywords. There is a system for buying ads - I tried that out, but it didn't lead to any clicks.
Turns out, they shook off both their doldrums and their VC-fueled overambition and started throwing off cash. The first dividend check alone quadrupled my investment cost, and they're still going strong.
In other words, they converted their startup into what is sometimes known as a "small business".
That was a shady thing - I literally helped to cheat the system. But these were times in our market.
Despite that this "job" lasted for couple of years only, the best income was that it pushed my coding experience years ahead compared to my peers. I was way more better than most of them. At least at coding :-)
I spent 4 years on and off writing and preparing the book for publication, and it's been bringing in a steady stream of income since it was published in October 2022.
Currently the best I've made is from iOS apps with little to no server backend, or async server-sync'd offline-first local DBs tolerant of downtime to minimize on-call requirements. I make money through recurring IAP, and offer student etc. discounted rates without any verification to capture more sales. These apps grow organically when I don't put time into them actively.
I have plans for pushing this much further (getting people to spread word of mouth more actively, virality elements, interesting ways to share content) but this was enough to get going and quit my job.
I also put keywords of some loosely competitive apps and former dead apps or Android-specific apps that people will still look for into iOS app store keywords so that my apps show up in search results. Technically not allowed but it is the norm and I see competitors do it with mine.
I also try to leverage everything I do in multiple ways, so that I have features I can reuse across other apps, a common foundation, etc. I'll start documenting these practices in the open under indiedevstack.com but haven't set that up yet.
1. Selling domain names. This was when I was in college and somehow traded my way into mid-high five-figure domain names. I turned over $100k in profits in a year, and then 2008 happened and all markets collapsed.
2. Starting a D2C brand. Shipping is automated via a third-party provider. Sourcing is easy since I have a very reliable supplier. All marketing is through word of mouth. I get around 300 orders on Amazon monthly, some 100 on our website, and land the occassional business order that gets me around 2,000 orders extra per year. Not a huge money maker, but pays my mortgage for practically 2-3 hours of work/month.
3. I ran an informational website about music production (I produce as a hobby). Somehow, a few of my articles became popular and I landed a ton of good links. Google loved my website and I was pulling in mid four-figures in affiliate checks every month. That went on for years even when I stopped working on the site.
I have a bunch of domain names but never figured out a way to sell them.
https://uk.auctions.godaddy.com/ is the largest auction site. If you're looking for a quick sell, this is the place.
I enjoy the work. I'd love to start writing/creating CPD etc for other audiences but need to figure out how.
I'm always on the lookout for freelance work. Should anyone need a writer with technical knowledge then my email is in my profile!
Eventually they realized they could just copy the game and run it inside the MMO itself, so they terminated the partnership. At the end it was grossing 20k/month, but it literally consumed every moment of my free time so in some ways it was a relief to shut it down.
This was early in my career so I learned an incredible amount about scaling, catching, etc. that I was able to leverage at future jobs.
Haven’t done anything on it beyond fulfilling orders for years - I found a really high-quality printers who do the production and shipping - but it’s probably good for an extra £100-300 a month, depending on how Etsy’s algorithm is feeling at the time.
I could probably sell more if I put more effort into it, but it’s nice as a very low-effort, if small, income stream.
For a while after the dot com bust I sold music CDs via Amazon and also refurbished docking stations and power adapters for laptops.
I published a few smutty short stories and a couple of apps that I’d made for my kids, all of which together might have netted me a few thousand in total. No marketing or anything.
It’s not universally better than when I was merely well paid and affluent, even if heavily in debt. But not having to worry about whether to buy food or pay rent is quite a huge difference. My kids will never know the struggle I did. I can’t say whether that’s good or bad. I have a more well rounded perspective than most other techies
Keep it up, and enjoy some nature walks!
Started it 9 years ago, still working on it.
It started in 2017 when I shared the first free and open source version of Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/), an app for controlling monitors.
At that time, there was only a command line for doing this stuff (https://github.com/kfix/ddcctl) and I wanted a more visual way of changing the brightness. So I learned Swift, learned how to bridge the ddcctl C code and call it from Swift, then made a rough interface and published it: https://www.producthunt.com/products/lunar#lunar-5
It turned out people did have a need for this and asked if they could donate. I set up a Buy me a Coffee page and in 4 years collected about $5k in donations. That's a lot of money for a Romanian.
When Apple Silicon appeared, Lunar didn't work anymore because the whole hardware arrangement and drivers were different, and there was no documentation on how to send I²C data. I took the plunge and quit my stressful job, bought an M1 MacBook and reverse engineered the I²C communication: https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/journey-to-ddc-on-m1-macs/
Then published Lunar 4 as a Free version with a Pro paid upgrade. I was reluctant with this, didn't think anyone would buy it, but to this day I'm able to be unemployed and put my ideas into practice because of it.
• workshops • custom illustration packs • microcoaching • online courses • ebooks • merch on Etsy • Upwork gig
I’ll be working on converting residue from time-for-money projects into products. For example, I’m turning my workshops into online courses, my illustration packs into icon bundles to sell as digital products, microcoaching as asynch videos, online courses transcribed into ebooks, and concepts from all of them into merch (coffee mugs, journals, t-shirts) with an ability to mix and match bundles
I started all of this when I got laid off. I ended up needing flexibility to take time off to help my family so can’t see getting a full time job anytime soon. I’m also done working 60-80 hour weeks for startups and can’t figure out a job that pays enough that’s low stress. So scrambling to make this work
Current income at 80k/year with relatively low maintenance. I have a full time job as a software engineer on the side.
You can also do a 7 day trial of SEMRush and do some competitive research on the app’s domain.
See if they’re ranking for any keywords/how much search traffic the keywords have.
After my most recent forgotten event, I did bookmark it and now I have this comment. Hopefully I can remember now. :)
Otherwise I wrote a book (real world cryptography) which is selling really well. Not going to replace a full time job though.
I run a SaaS, and nothing makes money as easily as that React blog.
Essentially, you write content once, and a single email can pitch it to a whole new group of potential customers at nearly zero additional cost to you.
(of course, it took a year of blogging regularly to reach that point, but now if I write another book it gets additional sales at no additional cost to me, which feels wild compared to running a SaaS)
It does around $5-10k a month. Fairly passive. A few hours of support a week. Was full-time on it for the first few years, but decided to join a company recently and keep growing this on the side.
I charge really high around $300 per month. That way you cut through the b.s. and it is clear you are delivering value or not. Also helps with the marketing as I can get more per customer than I spend on acquiring them.
Usually saas businesses all seem to charge really low like $10 / month for some reason. That is a mistake in my opinion.
There are lot of wealthy people in the world for whom $300 and even higher is nothing if it totally solves a problem.
I also provide human customer support because of that high price point so they like it if they have a problem.
Then I hired managers for each business who manage it for me and now it is almost a replicable model that I can use when starting any business.
Most problems tend to be amenable to “classic” techniques (eg OpenCV) and if you can get involved early enough there are a lot of affordances that can be added to make things a lot simpler (e.g registration marks).
I’ve also got a small YouTube channel that brings in a bit of revenue from ads and sponsorship.
And if you want a cool demo, try this on your phone and point it at a sudoku puzzle: https://sudoku.cmgresearch.com/
I was trying to build a B2B sales/marketing app and all the ML stuff we wanted to do required business data, which was too expensive for us. Long story, but after a cofounder blow up, a failed acquisition, then covid being the final straw, I started poking around during lockdown on how to get business data at scale.
I ended up building an API to look up any business by domain/name, which has been particularly popular for fintechs. It's more or less fully automated now and is a nice income stream.
also how did your customers found you ?
Not a huge income generator (around $19,000 total over the last 5 years), but the pose research, networking, booking sessions, actually doing the modeling, and reporting on / posting the artwork from my sessions on my social media is pretty much a "sole passion" for me.
To keep it interesting for me and my artists, I regularly scan the Instagram posters I follow, as well as other sources (like classical art sites), and save interesting ones I'd like to try.
Then I run a slideshow of the poses on my home TV. I'll take a moment to look as I pass by while doing chores, or I'll spend some dedicated time actually doing the poses for timed intervals.
A SaaS we developed with my cofounder. Started at the beginning of this year and been growing steadily. We are involved daily in user support, marketing and development.
We attribute the growth to a couple of very successful blog posts which made it to the front page of HN.
Thank you HN!
Embedded software is obviously a lot like backend in the day to day, write code, design docs, etc, but instead of trying to keep up with all the things like serverless functions, Kubernetes, Cassandra, etc etc we get to think about things like microcontroller peripherals (timers, serial data, power management, interrupts) and supporting a variety of hardware configurations with testable code.
It isn't a chore yet! My only problem is as a staff engineer only half my time is spent actually doing coding!
It does not bring in a whole lot, but I like having a side hustle.
only thing i'd suggest is that you add more examples of what where people can put those QR codes. I think most folks in the US don't "get" QR codes, or how they could benefit from them. Also it'd be good google food.
probably a description of how easy it is to scan them on iOS and android. I think a bunch of folks still don't know it's built into the phone apps.
It covers word and phrase frequency, adverbs, dialog tags, etc.
I spent a good bit of time working on it years ago alongside my full time jobs, but haven't touched it in years. It still brings in about $1000 a month.
I Google every one who buys it and they're all published writers or run editing shops.
And apps on various app stores.
When the company disappears from under me, calling people in my network and finding someplace else that will give me money for my skillset and experience.
There is way too much emphasis on trying to find a “side hustle” and starting a company when the best statistical path forward for most developers is to “grind LeetCode and work for a $techCompany” (tm r/cscareerquestions)
I’m old enough and experienced enough to make FAANG money without having to jump through those hoops. But I still give that advice to anyone in the field.
I then started getting “architect” type jobs as far as responsibility. Where I was brought in when the companies needed to mature their processes. But I was still hands on.
I belatedly discovered the “cloud” in 2017 and in 2018 I was hired at a startup where the then new CTO wanted to be cloud native and was envisioning pivoting the company to selling micro services to support large health care companies apps and websites (that came in handy post Covid). I led the efforts.
Two years later a recruiter called me from Amazon Retail about a software developer position. I had no interest in either working for any large company as a software developer or doing the leetCode monkey dance at 46.
We kept talking and she suggested that I apply for a role in AWS Professional Services consulting in “application modernization” - full stack app dev + cloud + “Devops” + a lot of customer facing/presentation responsibilities.
The rest is history.
I don’t recommend this statistically unlikely route to anyone. 99% of developers should “grind leetCode” and get a good at coding interviews.
Working for small companies, I just happen to have experience from pre-sales all the way to implementation down the stack to cloud infrastructure. Not bragging, I’m just old /s.
One of my favorite projects and one that keeps bringing me joy is my online course on Programmatic SEO.
Created in January 2021, after the initial 5-digit launch sales, i didn't work on the course or make any updates and just kinda left it.
The course has been making >$500/mo in fully passive income. I love it more than the SaaS product I run even though that makes >50x more per month.
Course landing page, for whoever is interested - https://preetamnath.com/programmatic-seo
Simple IOS game, that I wrote during COVID. IDK how, but it's pays for itself (apple subscriptions is 100$/year, game revenue 100$/year)
renting out for 1800€/month now (4 individual rooms)
there are a bajillion worthwhile business ideas... they're a dime a dozen (and that's paying too much). The problem is IMPLEMENTING them, which essentially no-one ever bothers too.
way more folks who hear you idea will say "shit, i wanna use that" than "i'm going to spend a year of my life making an app to compete with that, and then another year marketing it and...."
Can you list a few of the best ones for me?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23700486
got decent spike of initial sales but surprisingly it has continued to sell about 3-5k per month since then with not a lot of additional promo work
All the domains I've purchased over the years, I haven't had time to develop them, but also didn't like the traditional parking pages. Newsy generates a content-aggregation site for given set of keywords related to your domains. It's automated and you can add your own ads.
[1]: Magic: the Gathering.
I was working at Software Etc.[1][2] in 1995 and used my employee discount to buy 12 boxes of Fallen Empires. I was certain it would make me (relatively) rich.
Five years later I sold them all on ebay for, basically, even money. FE was so overprinted that it had no value at all and I don't think I would have made any significant money until after 2010.
[1] Southdale Mall in Edina, MN - the first shopping mall.
I was super into the game in my later high school years (1994-96), right when the market started going absolutely bonkers (relatively speaking). And I discovered a pattern - there was a price guide that got published on Usenet every week, and every card had "low", "average", and "high" prices. But people would only transact at the "high" level, so every week the price guide was updated with the new average and the loop began. Anyway I discovered this loop, started trading actively at tournaments, built up a huge portfolio of cards.....and then had the entire collection stolen from me while I was playing a match.
Anyway, I told this story to my college interviewer who just so happened to be an early Algo trader at a large Wall Street bank, and he loved it and wrote me up a glowing interview recommendation.
(Side note: At one point I had 9 Black Lotuses and was super proud of that...first page of my album. Few Alpha, few Beta, mostly Unlimited, one was signed by Christopher Rush, etc. Ahh memories.)
It is a huge health care org
Happy with the pay
Benefits are top notch: insurance is less than half of what I was paying at previous job.
Traditional pension plan (no monetary input from me) along with retirement health insurance (huge, huge for me since I have chronic health issues)
401K option + matching
tuition reimbursement (I am stoked about this but not sure of when I will take advantage of it)
Lots of free resources (OReilly books, Udemy and Pluralsight)
Just like North America (and largely Europe too) outsourced its manufacturing know-how to cheaper markets, labor, resources, and regulations, we're outsourcing all our business logic, day-to-day functions, and IP to cheaper and cheaper SaaS products. Sure, you can get setup quickly, but it will get torn down just as quickly with deprecations, no support, rising prices, mergers, discontinuations, buyouts, shutdowns etc.
What's happened is that any small/medium business is required to be a mini-tech company to keep the doors open, but paying ever-increasing monthly rent to 15-30 SaaS companies. The tradeoff is that now they don't own or operate their own data, have little control over how it's queried, displayed, or accessed, all while basically getting zero support (i.e. Google, Shopify, SendGrid, Stripe, the list goes on).
I spent 5 years developing an in-house system to run a coffee roaster. All the internal tools, reporting, organic certification, roast logs, traceability, customer service, shipping, wholesale, international, taxes, etc. You name it, any tool we needed, it was built. Prior to this, after 13 years of being in business, they were still wildly unprofitable and doing 600 orders a month. A few years after systematizing the company, now they're very profitable and doing >6,000 orders a month.
Then I spent 5 years taking that knowledge and toolset and built a V2 for an organic farm to logistics and delivery of fresh produce. Again, after 15 years in business and doing 2500 deliveries a month, it was mildly profitable but struggling under the weight, rigidity, and complexity of an outsourced system. I replaced it with my own system and grew it to 2500 deliveries per week (4x).
I then stepped down and started my own company to license out the system I built to run any small or medium organization. They get to own all their data, customize what they want, and I pick up the phone when they need help (crazy idea, I know). Most companies don't need bigger, better, flashier, cheaper software. They're actually happy to pay for systems that will be flexible when they need, and someone to call if required.
All organizations are basically a set of people who need access to customers, addresses, payment methods, products, and orders, with functions to track communication via phone/email, make payment transactions, create/send PDFs, and report on what was/is/will be ordered.
Running a company on outsourced SaaS is financially-cheap, but it's time-expensive, and brittle.
My system now runs many multi-million dollars companies, small and medium scale, across many verticals. Whether it's shipping thousands of packages, delivering thousands of boxes, or running a local subscription bagel delivery service, or shed manufacturer, or running a Home Owner's Association, or running my own tech company, or a fertilizer company, or a youth sports team, or a malting company, or private chef/meal-planning service. They all have the same basic needs.
For some companies, it's my active income, some it's maintenance income, some it's passive. They're all in different seasons, and it fluctuates throughout the year. A couple get busy in the summers, some need special stuff built in the fall for the holidays, some are quiet all year and chug along. But there's always someone to help, something to polish, or some JS dependency to remove :)
Not joking just another angle: I worked on that actively.
renting out for 1800€/month now.
Fundipedia.com
Totally niche product
Enterprise revenue
For a side hustle, we bought a home around 2015 for $125k. We've paid off about $70k of the 2.8% 15-year mortgage and property taxes at $1100/mo, it's now estimated to be worth about $330k. That represents an income stream equivalent to about $2200/mo due to that asset's value rising at about 15% per year. If it wasn't for the fact that I live here, I'd be divesting a lot of my investment in that obvious bubble ASAP. Similarly, my parents built my childhood home nearby in '96 for about $80k, their property is now worth about $750k, you do the math.
She'll be joining the workforce full-time in the next 6-9 months in a new field. I'm psyched for a pretty significant boost to our overall income that we've never had before.
Most satisfying: my investment portfolio of passive index funds
Career investments have a higher ROI than side hustles for me.