Ask HN: Did your side project become your main source of income in 2013?

I created a side project this summer based on an open source tool which I use in my day job. My idea was to offer this open source tool as a service.

So I set aside a week to travel down the East Coast. Every day I went to offices and MeetUps and demo'ed the original open source project and my service built on it. Each day was 15 hours, door to door. One time I had to patch a shoe with duct tape.

A week after my return, I'll admit that the service is a failure. The idea is a good one, and everyone wanted to try it, but no one committed themselves to using it, much less paying for it. The trip was still a success! When you show people crazy projects, they show you theirs. The projects I heard about, I had no idea that they existed. Networking was good. Being new places was good.

9 months of engineering for a core piece of tech.

Wrote the first commercial application for it within a month or so.

Doing great so far.

The startup I was working on went under and I was on unemployment looking for a new job. A friend suggested starting a website that would make money from affiliate commissions. The goal was to make some extra money for coffee and to cover my cell phone bill while I looked for a new job. It ended up being a full time job and 3 years later I'm still working on it.

I've gone from §50 per week to §300 pw this year. Still long way to go before I can quit my job, but slowly getting closer to it every month.

> Did your side project become your main source of income in 2013?

No. My side projects are just my main source of expenditures so far :).

No

This is going to be a long one.

I started working on Wall Street shortly after the housing bubble in late 2007 for a very well-known firm. After two years of building various computational models based on esoteric distributions purposed for HFT, I realized that I could do it myself on albeit a smaller scale. I decided to target bitcoin because it is highly volatile and makes for a good asset to hedge against. I'm now making about 20,000 a week just on bitcoin trading with about 100k liquid (80k earned from trading itself, 20k from savings originally.)

I look at jobs as a good way to learn what is profitable, and self-projects to make the real cash. Salaried jobs are never going to give a person the freedom they need. And no programmers are "rockstars", musicians are..