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Comment by twodave | Hacker News Reader

Software consulting. You’d be surprised how many little businesses out there have a need for custom software. I make about $60-70k/year in my spare time (maybe 10 hours/week) doing everything from adding features to legacy products, building brand new applications and even simply conducting technical interviews. It’s also pretty nice to work on something besides the usual thing at work, experiment with new/different tech and also get paid handsomely for it.

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How do you start this? It can't be as easy as a website and some online ads right.

This

Mostly word of mouth. Friends, past and present colleagues, etc. I even went part time at a job once instead of leaving altogether for another full-time job. It helps to have a good reputation. Often those positive relationships pay off over time without any solicitation whatsoever.

That is awesome. Although I'm surprised you can just pickup a new client, bang out a new feature, and finalize everything in 10hrs. Seems like there would be a lot of overhead getting started and whiping your hands of it.

Usually they’re longer-term relationships than 10 hours. I’ve spent anywhere between 3 weeks and 2 years working with the same client/project. Sometimes I’ll have multiple going, but usually can set the expectations such that I don’t have to pull many 20-hour weeks on top of my day job.

+1. JW what rate do you charge and whats your stack? I do about $60k/yr at 8-10hrs per week at $130/hr. Not sure if I am under charging.

If you bill more than me, any advice on how to find bigger clients?

Why on earth do you bill by the hour? You should be doing fixed fee based on value.

Good luck holding the bag when your client changes/misunderstands requirements.

You just set milestones every couple weeks of effort and invoice at the end of each one, and withhold delivery of the finished product until full payment is received… if a client doesn’t want to pay or is too difficult, fire the client and move on. And don’t give clients net30 terms or something ridiculous if you’re a solo contractor. Invoice due on receipt.

If you have the full scope / visibility and large enough margins but if you don"t.

The milestones become another form of hourly/daily/weekly plus you have the added responsibility of meeting goals or you do not get paid. Hourly provides pay for time spent.

This is basically my feeling as well. It also establishes way up front, “This is how much my time will cost you.” That ultimately pressures clients to be prepared for meetings and not ask for frivolous crap. They can judge the output based on the cost for themselves, and honestly for some clients it’s well worth it. For others (especially software shops) they’ll tend to try and replace me with a FTE, but my perspective on it is that I’m happy to help them fill in the gaps while they needed me.

1/ I had a bad experience when I was younger where I overestimated my skills and underestimated the project. Resulting in a very low paying contract. This wouldn't happen today, but I still have scars.

2/ Currently, I work at a contracting company. Their work is erratic. Between bug fixes and new features with constantly changing roadmaps, I think it would be hard to translate shifting requirements to fixed fee.

I’ve done anywhere between $125-200/hr depending on the kind of work. Also have done some work for lump sums (working on one of those right now), but honestly try to avoid those despite what others in this thread are saying. It can be a pain to collect sometimes, but you simply have to be willing to halt work if payment isn’t made timely enough. I’ve got exposure to a lot of things but usually end up working with .NET in some capacity.

I do that same thing. Earning around $100 an hour, and I can do as many hours as I want, whenever I want to. I do this on top of my full time job, so I usually do a few hours at night or a weekend day here and there. That's similarly in the $60-70k extra per year.

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 looking to do exactly this. I'm currently doing embedded software for aerospace, so somewhat similar with regards to documentation and standards (it's critical software, just not human safety related). Can you share how you found the work?

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?

Over the last 2 years, I made ~$30k/year on projects that could be completed in a weekend (10 hours/week max).

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.

Definitely takes some discipline. I’ve found the stress more bearable as time goes on, but it’s definitely a thing, and having a demanding day job can make it worse. Taking a month off here and there from side work can go a long way, though, as can taking a week off the day job to finish a side project ;)

Are you interested in some additional work?

It depends :) I’m happy to talk about anything, of course, and you can find my email in my profile.

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