Ask HN: What's the easiest money you've made? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the easiest money you've made?

12 pointsleejw00t35420 comments

Some people make a lot of money from a very small amount of work. Maybe by taking advantage of a market trend or just getting lucky. I'm sure plenty of people on here have done just that and I'd be really interested in hearing your stories.

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Arbitraging Blockbuster Video. At one location they were selling DVDs due to bankruptcy. At another location they were buying DVDs for more money. No limit on size.

What does that say about Blockbuster management?

Easiest: Back when I was in school and not many had internet, and even fewer had a 2x CD Burner, I'd create playlist for people at school. They give me a paper with ~10songs, download them, burn them, sell the disk. -_-

Fastest: Invested ~10k in Apple stock during afterhours before they froze trading before announcing their earnings. 30minutes later, sold those with an 8% ROI. 800$ (-commission/tax) in 30minutes.

"easy" for one person might be another's nightmare. Remember Tyson's knockouts? A few million dollars for less than a minute in the ring!!! Sounds so easy and lucrative, doesn't it? However, I'm all ears for biz models that are repeatable and "easy" in today's environment.

Built a billing system for an employer, they let me go on Friday, hired me as a consultant on Monday for a recurring $1000 a month to maintain said system. Program ran for 27 months. Spent more time on billing (5 mins each month) than I ever did on any maintenance.

In 1994-1995 I used to charge $180 to put a "contact us" form on a website. It was a simple HTML form and Perl script. I could bang one out in about 30 minutes and I couldn't keep up with the work. Those were the days!

wow! how did you get people to find you then? You wouldn't have been the only one.

I used to help a lot of new-to-html coders on usenet. A handful of them would recommend me or contract me for the more complicated stuff like shopping carts, contact forms and other data driven functions.

This kind of thing still happens quite a bit now. I'm always hearing of cases where someone has made a few hundred pounds creating someone a website that's been copied and looks like it was originally designed in MS Word for a small business that wants to get an internet presence.

I was making bumper stickers of people's email addresses in 1994. What a dumb idea, but demand was high, though in hindsight what I did was spammy in what was then listserve topics. Then I went onto make printable business cards for your newfound email address. It said 'Net Citizen' with a nice logo/graphics -during the templated printer paper craze.

When I was 14 I bought certain magazines down in Chinatown and sold them to a bunch of my friends at Catholic Schools. I made over $9000 in 3 months. BUT then a little thing called the internet came along...

Accidentally put an Amazon Associates affiliate link in a reddit comment. Thread made it to the front page, comment was near the top, I made about $100.

O... never know that this could work too!

Cleaning viruses off computers for a flat rate. People will pay any amount of money to have their computer cleaned and you will seem like a god.

I've always entered a bunch of science competitions/fairs. Sometimes the prize is $1000 for a paper I spend 8 hours writing - not bad!

> or just getting lucky.

Not sure about "lucky", but death of a parent landed me with tens of thousands of £.

In 2002 i made a SEO'd affiliate site. It took like an hour to make the site but it made me $500k over a year!

£150 for what was essentially 10 minutes of googling, 5 minutes compiling into a document.

Stories about making continuous income are preferred.

Continuous or not is not dependent on the amount of work.

A few thousand trading on the stock market.

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