Breville coffee grinders are impossible to get internal parts for. I designed a 3D printed upgrade for the main wear-part in their BCG800XL and BCG600SIL Grinders.
The storefront is through ShapeWays[1] and I use iFixit[2],[3] to drive the traffic. It passively makes enough to cover my own coffee needs forever. I spend about 20 minutes per month fielding questions. This all happened because my grinder failed and I could not get parts.
I use a super cheap hand grinder I bought off amazon (the stainless steel one that there are 100 different variations of on amazon). There is a plastic part that breaks after about 6 months of usage. Someone modeled and uploaded a replacement piece to Thingiverse. The grinder is cheap enough that it is disposable, but since it is so easy to print a replacement piece with my $179 3D printer, I haven’t needed to throw it away. I hope that at some point 3D printing becomes more accessible and affordable, and with more materials, that more and more products are repaired instead of replaced.
It's quite toxic. It causes cancer among other problems. A lot of things used to be Cadmium plated because it's an excellent rustproofer. Some things in the aerospace world still are, because for some things, the safety risk from corrosion outweighs the health risk.
It's not a great idea to grind or sand Cadmium plated items, because it kicks the Cd into a fine dust that you will inhale and will be absorbed into your system.
So far I only brushed it, and am not sure my model is Cd plated or not but well. The more you dig into materials, the more you realize you were handling toxic things all the time without knowing it.
My father-in-law as a kid used to go to the junkyard and break open thermometers and dump the mercury out into his hand. Seems like he did it a lot. Dunno if he ever suffered any health consequences because of it; but, you know, he didn't know any better. He just thought it was neat.
Your father-in-law wasn’t in any great deal of danger. Thermometers used elemental mercury, meaning pure mercury that hasn’t reacted with anything. The only real risk from elemental mercury is that it has a low vapor pressure, and can therefore be inhaled, which can be dangerous. Since your FIL was outdoors, the risk of vaporization was high, but risk of inhaling a concentrated amount was low. Had be been doing this in, say, a tool shed, then the danger would have been much greater.
The kind of mercury you hear about that is incredibly toxic and can absorb through your skin are actually mercury salts (ethyl mercury, methyl mercury, etc.) and aren’t as likely to be found.
The other day i accidentally broke a magnetron ceramic heatsink. I knew of the potential toxicity (disassembled a dozen so far) but this time i fucked up. Cue 3 days of ventilation and cm by cm wet cleaning.
Metal on metal knee and hip joints replacements contain cadmium. It can ruin your life. If you want to see a good documentary about problems with modern medical devices, check http://bleedingedgedoc.com/
Another random datapoint. I have been using a Monoprice MP Select Mini V2 [1] for a couple years (similar price point) and am extremely pleased. After leveling the bed the first time I've done no maintenance and it seems to print when asked with no trouble. I typically use it not at all for a few months, then up to multiple times a day when working on something.
I've helped a friend with this one (I have a MP Select V2 full size), and I can tell you the thing is a workhorse. Pretty sure he has it running 5 days a week with 5-7 hour prints per day. He keeps the moving parts lubricated but that's about it. Just set him up with Octoprint to make the loading and monitoring easier.
I recently ordered a part for my daughters dresser drawer - the Kenlin Rite-TrackII, and paid $12 for four including shipping. 6 to 7 years ago I paid $68 for a single part. To my surprise when I opened my recent plastic mailer envelope, I discovered it was a 3D printed piece. Any idea how one can 3d scan a part for exact copy?
They make full on 3d scanners but most parts do not need "3d scanning" so much as they need a few minutes in the hand of someone with a caliper and a sketch pad.
The field of photogrammetry deals with taking multiple photos of something to create a 3d model. There is free software for consumers that can do this. But there are a lot of limitations and currently the traditional way of making a CAD model more or less by hand is almost always faster/cheaper and more accurate.
There are a few services including Autodesk ReCap which you can give a number of high quality photos and a 3D model will be produced which you can then scale appropriately in your CAD software
For most things scanning works pretty poorly. IME, you are better off you use some calipers and a free to use tool like Fusion 360 or TinkerCAD, or a really free tool like OpenSCAD to generate the model.
I know a guy who runs a multi-million dollar business making replacement parts for a particular type of business machine that you find in a lot of places. There are only a few OEMs and they all stopped making a similar (critical) component for their older models.
He was originally in the business of repairing these machines and then discovered he could no longer buy these parts from the OEMs so he learned CAD and CNC and injection molding and started making them a few years ago. He has a 3D printer for prototyping, but he needs to injection mold part of the final product because there is no filament in the particular material that he needs. His business has transitioned from repair to manufacturing and now he mostly sells replacement parts to other repair shops.
I don't want to disturb his business by talking about it in detail, but the point is that I think there are and will be many opportunities around repair parts that manufacturers are unwilling to provide because they'd rather be selling new machines. Aside from the environmental impact, that's fine since there are many people who won't go the repair route, and then there's a secondary market for those who will make parts and repair the machines.
I used to know tool and die makers that did that back in the day. Sadly, a lot of manufacturing was sent off to China. I assume there are Chinese people doing similar things.
I'm willing to bet the quality of a lot of these is shite, though. Plus people in the US would most likely want to buy from a seller in the US (faster shipping + implied better quality).
There is a solution to so many problems here (creating usually unavailable parts for machines/devices/products) but the problem is knowing which parts are in demand and currently have no supplier.
A maker would need to have an interest or hobby in such a device & discover a need for the item for it to come into fruition. But just think of how many general 3D printed parts could be printed as solutions for so many products out there that are going unmade.
Not all Chinese stuff is bad, but there's so much bad stuff that it's hard to know what's good. "Chinesium" is an accurate description of the situation.
In the case of American-made products, it's easy enough to do the research to determine if a product is good, or even try it before you buy. I don't know how good Chevys are these days—the newest one I've driven is a 2005 truck—but they're a known entity and you can test drive one for free. Ordering something online from China is a stab in the dark.
I would like to if time permits. There is a huge untapped market here. The difficulty is in locating the parts that are both unavailable and 3D printable. I keep it in the back of my head as I repair other items. So much expensive stuff ends up in a landfill over a tiny part.
I could see someday having a github project for replacement parts, each one iterating and getting better an better -- far beyond the original.
This. A friend buys and restores old Porsche 911s. He will pay anything for custom made parts that are rare as hens teeth. As an example there is a housing around the main cooling fan that seems to be titanium or aluminum or something very exotic. [1]
A company does sell a replacement, which he paid a fortune for, which had garbage tolerances and we spent weeks modifying it until it fit more or less well enough.
I suspect if you spent time on "classic car" forums you'd find owners of very specific models of cars searching for things you could make and sell for any markup, and every owner would buy one.
I am into older Maserati's. Own a couple of them. I do a lot of manufacturing myself. 3d printing, cncing. The problem is that whenever I design a replacement panel, wishbones or various other stuff and try to sell them commercialy I will get sued by the original Maserati company. On a low scale it's fine, but you will never get a living out of it.
The only parts which are in a gray area are rims, exhausts, filters, springs and couple of other parts.
What do they sue you for? If you are upfront about what you are selling, and you didn't steal any IP, it isn't fraud or theft of trade secrets. Maybe they have patents, and claim you are violating them? I can't see how it is illegal to reverse engineer a part and sell a similar version.
Similarly, a German-based company started producing replica Mercedes 300 SL bodies but they were shutdown and the bodies had to be crushed. Although, this isn't quite the same, because the bodies weren't used as replacement parts to keep existing cars on the road.
If we had a right to repair law, presumably it would allow third parties to make replacements when the original manufacturer lo linger was.
Even without that, I'm kind of surprised they sue. Are they patenting each part? Is there case law that covers this? Or is it just a case of bringing a suit to scare people I sto stopping? I wonder.
I would actually like to hear a little more about why the tolerances were poor. Were the major diameters the issue here? I could see a lot of adjustment happening on a car-to-car basis to get concentricity between the alternator fan and the shroud just right. I have very little experience with Porsches, but am a coordinate metrologist for a major aerospace parts manufacturer. I don't see something like this being a huge issue, at least compared to what I deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Edit: I actually looked into it a little more- it looks like the part is probably machined from casting given that there appear to be four stators which also locate the center mounting point. That's where the concentricity would be set; not by the casting, but by the machining of the center flange. So assuming that the fan's mounting points are within spec, I would say that your friend's part could just be chalked up to machining process that leaves something to be desired. This is actually a trickier part if machined from casting (without the appropriate tooling), but actually pretty simple (and wildly expensive) if machined from billet.
Probably some entrepreneur ordering them in small quantities from China from a place that makes frying pans one day, car parts the next.
I used to order a lot of custom things from China. Took a lot of trial and error to find good suppliers. They only accept bank wire as payment, so they risk little other than repeat business if they choose to be sloppy.
You're right, it was a cast part that had been machined, and (from memory) the machining was not precise enough to locate the alternator (and thus the fan) in the exact center. It kind of seemed liked a backyard job, but the price was anything but.
I think from memory the inside of the circle (which was cast) was not perfectly round. From memory the original Porsche part was titanium, and this replacement was aluminum. But I might have that backwards.
It doesn't surprise me in the least that circularity on the casting would be messed up, you would just think that the person on the mill would have the presence of mind to take a look at it before sending it off to the end-user. We reject castings pretty regularly, and that ID could be turned true without a great deal of difficulty provided the deviation in roundness didn't exceed something like 1/2 material thickness.
What doesn't sit right with me is the fact that for a small run, the price of even an aluminum casting would absolutely motivate me to get it right the first time. At the level of volume that the guy would have to be operating at, I would be test-fitting every part to a car before sending it out the door.
I feel like the relative scarcity of air-cooled 911s coupled with the difficulty of machining the part correctly as a third party is why the part itself is so hard to come by. If a person were motivated, though, there is definitely another way to make a suitable replacement more cheaply and easily with a modified design. That's provided someone is okay with not having a completely factory 911.
A 5 axis mill? Once you had the model you could get one offs in many contract shops. It is by no means trivial but if it is an expensive part you could make a very workable copy. Given the required characteristics of the air flow there are some programs that calculate blade profiles.
Maybe the part would end up even more expensive but that sounds like an interesting and worthwhile project.
I do this for old (15yrs+, not old-old) JDM cars. There's a massive untapped potential in this for any car-nuts who have 3D printers.
Just take a quick look through your favourite forum for your car of choice and there's endless threads begging for some random old plastic part that can no longer be found.
Interior trim clips, centre console fascias, exterior body plugs (where tow hook goes, where roof racks go, etc), stereo surrounds, door handle surrounds, etc etc etc.
Depends on your pricing and margins. There's a huge number of parts that are available but ridiculously priced, often coming out an order of magnitude in excess of what seems reasonable.
Take for instance a kettle scale filter. OK you probably can't 3d print these, but for something so simple they're insanely priced - £5-£15 for a bit of plastic. A whole kettle with filter costs typically £15-£35. Dyson parts are even sillier.
After material costs, time, shipping, advertising, & customer support, how much margin do you think there is to make on a part that already sells at £5-15 (ESP in an environment where spending £15-30 to get a new one is an accepted norm already)?
This is def not viable from my view- at least not for parts that are this cheap already.
lol. 99% of it is margin - it's 50% of the whole retail item cost for <1% of the material or complexity.
That's most of it left for promotion. Domestic appliances, large and small, regularly have small spare parts that attract 25 or 50% of the price of the entire item. Never used to.
That they're already doing well with small appliances in the niche of non-available parts says enough about pricing floor.
All plastic parts for appliances: dish drawer wheels, fridge shelves - are all designed to not last, run for $$$ on vendor site if possible to find at all. If you print it - they would come.
I recently had to replace the side wheel motor assembly on a Roomba. The motor and housing were fine, but the gears inside had worn out. I think they were just made out of ABS, so if they were printed in Nylon they would be a lot longer wearing. Roomba do make their robots (at least the 620 I have) repairable and a replacement of the whole assembly was only £20 so I'm not sure if the margin is there, but it is a bit wasteful when the only issue was the gears.
I've also considered creating some upgrades to the stock parts, but it's on my "some day I'll get around to it" list.
The hard part is finding appliances that need fixing. This is super easy if you happen to own a lot do things that break. If not, it becomes quite boring and tedious to scout out things that are breaking for other people, that you have no personal motivation to fix, to get the broken appliance and then figure out the 3d model for the bad part.
It's a neat business model: The person posts DIY repair videos on youtube, which drives traffic to his site. The strollers can easily cost $1000 new, and are often handed down / resold, so there is motivation to keep them running, and they have some weak spots which tend to break. The 3D printed replacement parts can be of superior quality to the original parts.
It seems like once you build up a critical mass of reputation/SEO you could get people to send you their broken parts to reproduce (then start advertising that specific part too)
Then that depends on either how much they're paying for the part and how much you enjoying 3d modeling and the trial and error dof 3d printing. You'll also need at least a real version of the part to copy and maybe even the appliance.
If you buy a bag with rollerblade wheels vs the plastic castering garbage that comes on a lot of bags you’ll get significantly more life out of them. I spend 15-20 days/month on the road and get several years out of rollerblade wheels.
are you concerned about the low amounts of ground nylon that your customers (or really the original customers) were ingesting if this part does wear down over time?
PA2200 Nylon is not water soluble so any particles would stay with the discarded grounds. It’s pretty harmless stuff anyway. Breville’s version wears fast but the ShapeWays one has held up really well. Check out the two year wear study on the ShapeWays shop page; I am really happy with how minimal it is.
Aah I wasn't thinking it through. I guess as long as the fragments are caught in the filter during the coffee making it's likely fine. And for some reason I forgot that coffee is essentially strained/filtered. I have a jura and so I just press a button and it goooooess.
If OP is selling via Shapeways, it's printed and shipped by Shapeways in the user's choice of material. From the link, it looks like the only option for this one is Nylon, but that's about the strongest plastic you can get for things like gears.
Not necessarily suggesting it for this, but for anyone not used to shapeways they have a wide range of materials, with plastics of different types, metals (I have silver wedding rings I got printed there) and ceramics.
I think sellers may be able to limit the materials to known working ones (each material has it's own requirements).
The goal was the unique design, but they were cheap too for wedding rings. I recorded each of us saying something to the other, then took the waveforms and made a ring from each one. Printing came to about £40 for each ring.
> is there any way to scan it from your phone and hear it?
It's not detailed enough for that, though you can tell the cadence and reliably guess at the number of words. If you know what we said, and only we do, then you can see it.
If you take a look at the shapeways page OP links he mentions that the nylon material is technically not rated food grade due to it being slightly porous. This can cause particles of the food to stick in the holes. He mentions it's not much of an issue with coffee since that just means some stale coffee, however I imagine it might be more of a problem with milk. It looks like shapeways has a variety of material, however.
Had a Breville expresso machine I repaired multiple times for my wife. The pump was decent, but the electronics were complete garbage for a $500 machine. The main problem were unsealed switches in a humid environment.
If you are someone that drinks no more than 1-3 cups a day, then I see no pointing getting an electric grinder over a higher-quality manual grinder, like the Comandante C40.
I buy cars, repair them and recondition them to my level of satisfaction, and send them back out the door, typically targeting 55-65 year olds. I focus mostly on entry level luxury crossovers around 7 to 10 years old, though starting to also do hybrids since there’s more profit in it since everyone is seemingly allergic to batteries and pack replacement/rebuilds.
Parts are cheap, I listen to music or a podcast, I do all the “PITA” repairs (replacing wheel bearings, ball joints, tie rods, full brake service) that are really just labor in terms of professional repair cost, perform additional rust prevention, and for sale it goes when I feel a new grandma or grandpa would never give a hesitation to load it up with all their grandkids. They also see a very thorough interior cleaning, and a full exterior detail (including paint correction when required).
It has bought every very nice tool I could ever want, most are 20-30 hours of labor including acquisition, and I’m at the point where I have repeat customers (the put a 2nd alongside the first) and have direct referrals. Now the profit mostly goes towards putting a 2nd interesting car in the garage, and some towards moving up the ladder to try to earn more per vehicle.
Selling cars isn’t bad when you don’t have employees to pay, and it lets you sell really high quality stuff. I keep thinking of how much I couldn’t justify doing, and how much my product standards would suffer if I had to pay help.
Can you make YouTube videos about it? I watch Chris Fix all the time, not for educational purpose (I don't own a car), but because they are so freaking satisfying to watch. Seeing things go from 'meh' to 'wow.'
I think the unfortunate reality of ChrisFix is to make videos at that level of quality... takes real time and effort -- plus a vehicle that merits actual work he's not done a video on yet. Hence he only puts out one or two a month, but they're of an extraordinarily high quality, which is evident in his sub numbers and view count.
I've considered making videos, but the reality at the moment is there's not yet the time to do it to my level of quality. At least not yet.
ChrisFix videos are outstanding and somewhat generalized, he really does fine work.
One of my favourite channels has much lower production values (not bad by any means though!), and is much more of a hacker. He buys something damaged, figures out how to somehow fix it up and does so. Often a bit of a bodge, lol. But the videos come out frequently and are fascinating. This channel is "B is for Build". [1]
Another channel I will recommend, more for the awe of seeing an absolute master craftsman - "Arthur Tussik". This fine Russian gentleman is almost certainly the most skilled panel beater on Youtube. His videos are bodywork restoration of mangled crash wrecks back to perfect in one short video. [2]
And finally a recommendation I'm sure any hacker will enjoy watching - "Bad Obsession Motorsport", and their "Project Binky" series. Rebuild of a classic Mini, with a twist, almost every part needs custom fabrication. Simply amazing. [3]
There are a few mechanics who stream on twitch... however that does require some level of interaction and distraction which may just be annoying to you, but doesn't require the post processing. However it's a decent sales pitch and if you do enjoy interactive with people and networking it can be pretty good.
I'd love to see your shop or even just time lapses. I really enjoy watching cnc and hand builds on youtube. It's very helpful to watch these to see what's really involved in say pulling the front end off of a mini-cooper.
It would be impossible to hit my target level of quality live, without heavy investment in the environment, lightning, video equipment, and honestly the help of someone when filming. If I can't hit my own targets, I just don't do something.
The videos would also be too long. Part of why ChrisFix is so well known is he has high-quality, edited, to-the-point content that packs everything into a concise high-quality video. I could not do that on Twitch without great expense, lots of advance planning, and helping hands.
Sure, I'm not going trying tell you what to do. You're the content creator, you need to do what you feel works or you won't make good content.
They're 2 different things, eg there's a huge difference between say ChrisFX and a twitch stream for a mechanic, though they're both basically build logs at the end of the day.
Twitch is definitely more the low overhead mass content version of content. Similar to the Howard Stern Show, or Car Talk, as opposed to The Grand Tour. Thousands of hours of contents as opposed to hundreds, or 10s.
I was just pointing out there's a market for the mass quantity content.
It's actually one of the things I DONT like about the produced car rebuild shows, they often edit out stuff just to make it entertaining to everyone, where I'm wanting to watch just to see the whole thing and the techniques. Much more like slow tv. I'm totally happy to skip through parts I don't care about.
The next time you watch one of Chris' videos, try to figure out how much prep is required for every single shot and edit. He works without a cameraman, so figure out where the camera is mounted and how it was mounted there. (hint: it's usually mounted _inside_ the car, somewhere harder to get to than the part he's accessing in the shot!)
It quickly adds up to an insane amount of effort. (Which is why he's got the best auto repair tutorials in human history!)
As an amateur shade tree mechanic myself I have so many questions! Feel free to ignore if you feel you'd be giving away your secret sauce.
1. Where do you find buyers? I'd be concerned about inventory either piling up or taking too long to sell at a price that even breaks even when you are spending time/money on fixing.
2. Do you feel your value-add is more on the sales side as a broker or is it in the repairs? I know people who just flip cars and do extremely minimal "freshing up" and are also profitable/successful.
3. How do you keep up with the increasingly locked down and opaque ECUs and other systems? More and more diagnostics require factory wizardry these days.
4. You implied that you do paint and body work. Where/how did you learn and become proficient? Most auto repairs are pretty much "follow the steps" work anyone can learn from YouTube, but body work is artistry.
5. Do you worry about liability? I'm OK fixing my own car since if I screw up it's my ass on the line. I'd be less confident in sending the car off to grandma, even if I knew what I was doing.
1. Mostly Craigslist, with a bit of AutoTrader. The reality is AutoTrader is swamped with dealer listings and sponsor listings that I don't feel I'm receiving any additional value for their listing fees.
2. Repairs and preventative maintenance. We average ~4 feet of snow a year, so tie rod ends, wheel bearings, control arms, bushes, flex pipes, exhaust hangers, etc. suffer since no one really maintains a steel car properly. The reality is when even a Honda or Toyota dealer is $125/hour and a Lexus or Acura dealer is $175/hour, people don't replace $18/ea bushings -- but when things rattle or feel loose, they sell the vehicle like it's going to explode.
These aren't difficult repairs, they just require lifting the vehicle (I have a Bendpak Quick Jack) and doing it. People also don't properly clean their undercarriage, and rustproof. I do. Very easy, very inexpensive. Though when many people treat cars as disposable, it lets a lot of nice stuff come onto the market for the well-inclined.
3. Not an issue unless you're in Porsches on up with encrypted ECUs, and even then, that prevents MODIFYING them, not reading diagnostics. Regardless, this has been a problem 0 times since I've started many years ago. OBD-II is a wonderful thing, and there's no weird shenanigans coming from Honda/Toyota at all.
4. I only do paint correction, as in "level a clearcoat" to a mirror finish, and only for vehicles that merit it (let's ignore that any car sub-$150K new comes with some level of orange peel). I do not buy any vehicle that needs a respray, ever. It can be DIY'd very well, but the amount of labor is prohibitive. Not enough money made for the time spent.
5. I've an umbrella policy, mostly because I have one for my primary business, in the odd event I ever were sued. In general, vehicles are sold as-is. Zero concern here.
Regarding point 4, do you even consider small patch work? Perhaps where you would need to apply a body patch, filler, sand & paint?
I imagine with the cars you're working with rust isn't an issue, but could be needed for minor damage. Are you passing on those cars completely or leaving those as is?
I can repaint entire panels, and blend it well enough to be indistinguishable — though ultimately I’ll end up leveling the clearcoat on the entire vehicle, which is a ton of work to do right. The problem is to hit my standard of quality it’s far too much time for the effort required. The time is better spent finding something that doesn’t need major paint repair.
I sorely miss being able to regularly work on and drive cars, but job and salary necessitates being in New York City for a long while. I have a long term project sitting and waiting for me 1000 miles from here. Will involve taking everything off the car, fixing rust, repainting and rebuilding everything. Someday...
Do you float the titles or just bend over and take whatever arbitrary limit for non-dealer title transfers that the dealers lobbied into existence in your state?
Correct. Many states have laws where if you sell over a certain number of vehicles a year, you're considered a used car salesman and must register and get licenced. In addition, if you register the title in your name, you have to pay taxes in most states, just to turn around and sell it to somebody else who also has to pay the same taxes.
Some states also take into account intent. Meaning that you need a dealers license and insurance just to purchase and sell a single vehicle, if the original intent of purchasing the vehicle was to sell it.
In my state, Oregon, for example, the DMV has agents watching craigslist, facebook, autotrader, etc. who go test drive private party cars under cover and ask the question, "So, why are you selling?" where answering that question incorrectly (along the lines of, "oh I bought it to fix up and make a few bucks") will net you a several thousand dollar fine.
That's such a scummy enforcement tactic since it's literally going out of its way to screw over people who are taking initiative to try to make money. It's not like they're flagging transactions at the paperwork stage.
Do you live in the US? In my state (wa) you need to be licensed as a dealership to do this legally and I hear this is the case in all the other states too.
There's definitely a benefit to working on the same model/series more than once. Three fourths of my amateur mechanic hours are split between asking "now why won't this darn thing come loose?" and "Oh! So I didnt't need to take all this apart to get to this piece!"
Not really, except out of necessity. Mechanics aren't, cheap, and where I am, really not cheap. Cars are just giant metal Lego.
As for paint matching, I don't. If I car needs any significant paint work, I'm not interested in buying it. It's also a sign that when I get underneath a car, I'm going to find other issues which are going to be an immediate no sale (as in welding required).
Even at normal, non-insurance repair rates (as in, full price), an independent mechanic charges around twice as much per hour than a body shop does for your average paint work (high end a very different story) -- I can get much more $/hour for my labor doing repairs than I ever will doing anything more than leveling a clear coat.
Bread and butter is the Lexus RX, Acura MDX, Honda CR-V and Toyota Highlander. There is zero issue putting them out the door, because the demand is insane. I've also started with Toyota Priuses because there's high-demand, most mechanics are allergic to batteries, and people dump them for cheap over any battery pack issue.
Though I've worked on a ton of stuff, the above is where there's A) enough people owning the above who still think all vehicles explode when their odometer hits 100K B) have inexpensive and easy repairs for simple things that are rotting or are wearing out and C) plenty of people who know better and when they test drive a 10-year old one that feels as good and looks as good as new, won't even negotiate your asking price.
I've entertained the idea of selling BMW M cars, Audi S/RS and Merc AMGs, but the reality is there's far more labor involved, far more to usually fix, higher acquisition costs, less demand, and buyers who are completely insufferable. I've sold several, but in retrospect it wasn't ever worth the time and effort.
For your target market, it sounds to me like you'd be much happier dealing with more mid-range stuff like Fords and Volvos rather than going to premium grade stuff. Parts are cheaper, usually less going wrong, and the customers are of course a whole lot nicer (disclaimer: I'm a Ford owner).
If you want to get into performance, I'd go gentle: Ford have sports lines of their usual mix (ST/RS in Europe), as do many other makes.
Also a small hatchback with a big engine is a lot more fun per dollar than a Merc...
> I've entertained the idea of selling BMW M cars, Audi S/RS and Merc AMGs, but the reality is there's far more labor involved, far more to usually fix, higher acquisition costs, less demand, and buyers who are completely insufferable. I've sold several, but in retrospect it wasn't ever worth the time and effort.
That's interesting, when I used to have a shop and flip cars on the side, honda civics and euro cars were the most profitable. Civics because you can fix them up, lower them and throw on a set of wheels and you're good to go are super easy to turn over. Euro cars are easy to pick up at steep discounts when they're older and need repairs, and the parts are actually not bad and once you get the hang of it, they're not too bad to work on.
Of course you'd want to also have accounts with parts stores otherwise you're losing too much on those costs.
However this was 5 years ago so the small crossover suv craze wasn't what it is today.
If you were to start selling BMWs/Audis/Mercs, you might also find your reputation suffering if/when things go wrong shortly after purchase. You're probably better off sticking to reselling the more reliable brands.
Every reliable source for lifetime cost of maintenance I have ever seen shows Toyota is the cheapest, that most other Japanese brands are close behind, and European brands are way more expensive e.g.
That certainly matches what I've seen happen with my friend's cars: Toyotas just keep going and are cheap to fix, Euro cars have something bust earlier in their lifetime and usually outrageously costly to repair.
I am from NZ and as a country we keep driving second hand cars until they are uneconomic to fix, and maybe half of the cars imported from overseas are second hand Japanese cars. We don't have a lot of American cars but my own limited experience with them is that they are as unreliable and costly as the European cars.
You can find some individual models within other brands that are reliable, however if you are buying a car that is 5 to 10 years old, you can't yet know if the model you are getting is a good one, so buying by brand actually makes sense. Quote from article about maintenance costs: "Toyota completely avoids the the most expensive models list" which helps averages (although I think they used median costs in that article).
I’ve sold them. The main issue is when you look at the extra profit, the extra labor doesn’t really put you ahead.
You also get a very different kind of buyer (skews faaaar younger) that honestly, is just insufferable to deal with. There’s more profit per unit, but not more profit an hour, and too much dealing with awful personalities.
that's really cool man I'd like to check out some of your wares some time. I'm very interested in giving old things new leases of lives and just refurbishing some of my old stuffs
It's illegal in my state to sell a car for the purpose of making a profit as an individual without a dealer license, and there's a limit of 4 per year.
That seems like an insane restriction on what you can do with your private property. What are they trying to protect against? People peddling lemons? There must be a better way.
I think what happened was auto dealerships successfully lobbied the state congress to raise the barrier to entry so they had less competition from private sellers.
It's only a "private transaction" if you aren't doing it for the intention of making a profit. (depending on exact laws).
Unless the laws in their state are solely based on volume, they are almost certainly acting as a dealer, which requires a dealer license and a bunch more legal requirements. In most states once someone buys a car with the intention of reselling it rather than using it, they automatically become a dealer.
So here's the crazy thing -- if you pay taxes on the profit you earn, like everything else, your state tends to not care and treats it like any other business.
Though in my state, in excess of 5 vehicles per year they start to care, and prefer you hold a surety bond -- which as of a few months ago, I do for an amount well in excess of the transaction price of the vehicles I typically sell. I also now have a dealer plate, which never goes on anything because some buyers would get weird if they saw one.
Launched in 2016 for free. Started making money in 2018 with $3,000+ MMR. Referral only (side) business. I work full-time as an engineer/principal in growth.
I conduct a form of ethnography, embedding myself in the lives of consumers the way Margaret Mead did among Samoans. I interviews my subjects and the people around them, itemizing the contents of their home (photographing and videotaping), and accompany them as they progress through their day. Then I sift the resulting information for weeks, even months, looking for connections and telltale behaviors.
The service is used mostly by founders for small businesses and startups. I takes questions about sales figures and product lines and reconfigures them into questions about worlds, the context in which people unthinkingly live their everyday lives. The idea is that examining the beliefs and unconscious biases that people have will eventually yield profitable insights for these businesses.
So far, I've done market entry for a few Chinese companies into Japanese market, helped indie game design company launch a successful game, a boutique lingerie shop launch a new summer line, street musicians, and a few cafes and bars.
I do this on the side with hopes to go full time into it soon.
I think this is a fascinating project, but I have to ask. How do you get your foot in the door with consumers? I'd feel a bit sketched out if someone showed up and just asked to follow me around for a while. What's the incentive?
I have done a lot of consumer research for a previous job - I honestly think if you give someone an ear to talk to about almost anything a lot of people will do it.
With that being said, you might get a handful of, "no, absolutely not that's creepy" responses to the request, but if you ask enough people someone will say yes and be excited about it.
Getting started was (really) hard. There are agencies out there who enable the connection between the researcher and consumers for a fee. These agencies usually have a directory of people who volunteer for this type of research work.
It also helps to build a network, for starters I partner-up with many prominent content producers on YouTube and Twitter and pay them a small fee for introductions.
I also pay the people I study on the field (but not always, some are happy to help once they understand what it's for). A lot say no, but you only need a few yes. It's about drawing insights from a small set of data.
This is the most fascinating side business I've read of! Does what you do ultimately help whoever you are following in their business? Have you seen them make changes that have helped the business in small or even larger ways?
The goal of my side project is to use human science to put people back at the center of business decision-making. I work specifically with the founders of business and not their sales or marketing personal.
Studying consumers on their own isn’t enough to be successful. I look at all the data I can regarding technology, marginal practices, client and industry data, and speak to many experts with knowledge on the topic. I analyze the assumptions underlying what I observe happening and identify the gaps (e.g. between the client’s assumptions about their customers and what I observe in the real world, or between the industry’s assumptions about the future and consumers’ marginal practices).
Analyzing these gaps helps me see white spaces that have impact in the market, which allows me to advise my clients on where the market is likely to be years out and ensure that my recommendations are actionable. Since these are new perspectives they often make it actionable. Execution is something they handle and all of my clients have seen a change. Most are repeat customers.
It sounds like this is a form of consulting where would-be founders outsource the idea-gen / problem discovery work to you.
How does the problem statement from the client manifest -- is it usually something like "I want you to determine if there's a market for X", or "I want you to explore this demographic of people," or something else?
Clients come to me with major and fundamental business issues, characterized by a high degree of uncertainty. Most of my work is focused on helping my clients get a view of their business from outside.
How do you convince founders, small businesses and startups to pursue this kind of ethno work? In my experience only big companies with dedicated consumer insight teams have the budgets and patience to do this kind of exploratory qualitative research. Just curious as to how you’ve ‘sold’ this service in to smaller organizations...
I did not market or sell this service. Back when I did this free, I worked closely with my mentor who had a startup (which later was acquired by a publicly listed company). I helped his company a lot. They were building an BI platform for big data.
That success gave me wings for a while. Word of mouth referring helped and I only took on clients who were recommended to me (i.e. they were aware of it)
Sometimes I meet business owners and founders at meetups or for lunch and we organically start talking about what we do (with no intention to sell). I always try to make the other person curious and then feed their curiosity. Also, I do an initial consultation for free.
The motivation is not money and my rates are pretty compelling (low) for the ROI I promise. Not every small business takes the opportunity but some did.
Do you live in Japan, the US or somewhere else? I work in marketing strategy and we use in-home and other ethnography vendors all the time. I'd be interested in someone who can work in Japan/APAC, or even to have someone else to call here in the US.
As others have mentioned this is a very interesting side gig. How did you find leads on these companies to turn this profitable though? I imagine any company that does this sort of research would have to be relatively forward thinking.
I used to be in technology consultancy and I built relationships and kept in touch. I sent out a newsletter, some reached back and asked for more information, others made introductions and got me connected. Most of the business I get is through referrals / word of mouth.
My base of operations is in Tokyo right now and there's a lot of demand for these services once people hear about it. Often people approach it for curiosity and then I work my leads to turn them into clients.
Not all companies were forward thinking but they have a common traits: empathy, more concerned on providing value to their customers, and emphasize long-term problem solving over quick fixes.
The philosophy behind my approach to research is based on the phenomenon, the science of how things are experienced. I start by working with my clients to identify a human phenomenon at the heart of their business.
I use psychographics to define customer values, opinions, and life-style.
I've been reading books on philosophy, cognitive science and behavioural psychology for half a decade.
For ethnography I don't have any recommendations. I've read books largely to complement my thinking, phenomenology and existentialism. Here's what I've read (notable ones):
Being and Time – Martin Heidegger
The Principle of Reason – Martin Heidegger
Phenomenology of Perception – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time – Ernesto Laclau
Introduction to Metaphysics – Martin Heidegger
The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy) – Martin Heidegger
I negotiated with my current employer, sacrifice salary for time. I get a few extra hours each week. My full-time job doesn't demand a lot. I manage it quite well and get things done during business hours.
I manage my time quite well, I get eight hours of sleep everyday and the rest I try to be productive. I have a wife who understands what I'm trying to do and helps me out. Needless to say I work on weekends and holidays and gave up all hobbies.
It's not easy but it's a choice. This has helped me build habits and a discipline. I am mindful and try not to bite off more than I can chew i.e. understand my limits.
My side project has also changed the way I think about engineering problems and solutions. Since I work on the growth team its complementary rather than diverging.
I established DamnInteresting.com in 2005, a place where myself and handful of others produce original long-form non-fiction in article and podcast form. Despite plenty of traffic, it didn't reach the break-even point for several years, because I despise advertisements and I refused to add them to my site. I funded the project in other ways, such as donations, publishing a book, licensing content, etc.
Nowadays it still only earns a little every month, but that's mostly owing to a rise in expenses (e.g., I pay the contributors more). But profit is secondary for me, my primary motive is to have an excuse to research and write this stuff, and for intelligent people to consume it.
Kudos and thank you for resisting advertising and figuring out an alternative business model. It would be awesome if there was a whole alternative Internet like this, where ads (and selling user info) was forbidden.
Thank you! I found your site long ago and I’ve enjoyed every article. I often wondered what your plan for it was and would be. This puts a little closure on it. I feel the same way about advertising and wonder what alternate business models could happily maintain such a place while keeping it mostly free and open.
Wow, I always thought damninteresting.com was wildly profitable. Not sure why - I have been reader since the early days and always found the content to compelling and "sharable" - I'd have imagined that it would be extremely profitable.
I suppose without ads there isn't a lot of high-monetization opportunities.
Thanks a lot for creating and maintaining the site. If you ever need any help with the design and front-end development of your site, let me know - I'd love to volunteer some time to the site that I love so much.
It's a long story, but the short version goes something like this:
At first we worked our cabooses off to publish new original content several times per month. This proved unsustainable, partially because we were becoming more ambitious with our work, but especially owing to stressors that had arisen in my personal life, and I burned out.
I spent a year-long hiatus putting things right, and when we resumed our writing, it was with the understanding that we were switching to a marathon-not-a-sprint publication schedule. The curated column arose to fill in the gaps between our in-house writings. Nowadays many readers specifically visit us for the links, so we feel duty-bound to persist.
I'd just like to thank you for this. I love all your content and have supported the site in the past. But I especially love the curated section - it's better than recommendations I get from other places like Pocket or Instapaper.
Thank you for doing this. Your site is a treasure.
I'm an avid saxophone player and am taking evening classes in theory, so I made this to solve a problem that I myself had. Nothing else like it on the market!
Every part of this notebook is automatically generated with a bunch of python scripts: the cover design, the interior, the line placement, the margins. The program basically spits out a PDF which I can then send to print shops (which is the hardest part of the whole thing!)
The product is good, people like it, and the hardest part for me right now is sales - trying to get stores to carry it, or get traffic to the site to drive sales! If you know anyone who might be interested...
edit: Okay I've opportunistically created a coupon code THANKSHN for 10% off.
First, great job!
Second, I'm confused. When I used to play music, I remember buying staff music pads at a low cost. A quick check of Amazon shows a bunch of staff pads for sale.
What am I missing? Is it the combination of staff and notebook pages in the same book? Or do you use higher quality paper (e.g. are you the moleskin of music staff paper?) Just curious.
Hey, taking a look at the picture on the site I saw that you only offer a format of 8.5" x 11". If you'd like to grow to Europe, other formats like A4 would be very interesting and probably needed. I'd also be happy about one in A5! :)
I actually really really want to do this! It's a chicken and egg thing: do I try to get this 1 product profitable, and then use those profits to invest in new product lines? Or do I try to do multiple versions of the product at first (which comes at higher cost, since I'd start with a small production first?)
Also need to figure out how to ship to Europe more cheaply, since right now I'm sending everything from my little apartment in Brooklyn!
Maybe printing in Europe might already help? – See www.wir-machen-druck.de, probably the most inexpensive German printery (try Google Translator).
I can imagine using Amazon and its FBA service might be an option here – not sure if that's something you'd like to consider.
Very cool! I'm the CXO of TrueFire (leading music education software company with the largest library of online guitar lessons in the world) and would love to find a way to work together to get your notebooks in the hands of our 1+ million students :-) Let's jam on some ideas!
Would love that! Lots of folks have been asking for a guitar tab version, so if you think there's opportunity then I have a few ideas myself. What's the best way to reach you? jay@themusiciansnotebook.com
Please find a way to ship these to Europe! It would become my new notebook of choice in a heartbeat but I run through them like (insert some kind of simile here). I would also happily share this with all my musician friends.
I think most users went digital, like iPad or kindle. There're apps where you can type notes or search and buy existing sheets. Of course paper is better for kids or beginners, so you could push your product in that niche.
BTW those digital sheets are pricey, so I wrote some scripts to generate PDF for my kindle, the output looked quite neat. I used LaTeX, Lilypond and perl to comb out unsupported stave notation from songs I ripped from public sources.
This sounds awesome! I've been looking around at printing specialized notebooks (for various worldbuilding tasks) lately. Do you use local print shops and/or have any you'd particularly recommend?
I feel like the hardest part to get into would be finding a way to keep costs and shipping times down without maintaining a large floating inventory. Have you found that is a problem at all?
If you don't mind me asking, how did you find print shops? I've had random ideas for notebooks that might be useful to someone else before, and getting something printed has always been kind of interesting to me.
Lots of googling,and then emailing stores with my specifications until I found a place that responded and could do it within my budget and with quality.
If you're not fussy about some of the notebook features (eg, the specific kind of binding, or rounded corners) then you can do custom books at your local UPS Store, office max, etc. You'd save money and time by prototyping that way, wish I'd done more of that.
Oh, sure. I mean, the first reason is because I am a backend engineer and all I know is python! The second reason is that it made it easy for me to iterate - you have no idea how painstakingly I adjusted the line thickensss, spacing, margins, etc. So being able to just update a little config file was super useful. And, finally, for future product lines (different sizes, for example) using code made it easy for me to, essentially, provide the dimensions of the book and have the code make the "right" design choices to generate a new PDF.
1. Email 50 print shops from searching google about the project and specifications
2. Wait for 5 of them to respond to you
3. Work with them on the specifications and obtain physical proofs
4. Choose 1 which prints the books with an acceptable quality-to-price ratio
Two things, both of which I stumbled into accidentally -
I make lots of jellies once the berries in the garden are ripe; I bought a house in a rural area a few years ago and it came with loads of berries. Might as well put them to use.
It is all done manually (in part because it is meant to be a diversion from my engineering job) - red- and blackcurrant and gooseberries mostly. Last year the harvest was some 1200 4oz glasses of jelly - some 1150 more than my family consumes. Sells by word of mouth.
Also, as my mother is quite into weaving tapestry and it was hard to find the exact hues she wanted for her yarns, I started dyeing for her, using traditional colouring. Turned out there was a (veee-eeery small!) market for that kind of thing, and I now make small batches for some 30-35 weavers. Again, fully manual as the idea is to do something completely different from my full-time job.
-Oh, I'd go nuts if I did either of the above full-time; however it serves as a wonderful diversion and it is great to do something which produces tangible results.
It helps being an engineer, too - I've found (much to my surprise) that keeping detailed notes to ensure repeatable results is quite rare in both pastimes.
I've written a couple of books that sell on Amazon and Apple iBooks - it takes zero minutes per month work for me, but brings a nice little side income. I won't get rich, but it's nice to have the money come in for doing nothing after I hit the "publish" button. Even the printed books cost nothing.
I'm about to hit publish on a photo coffee-table book from my three years around Africa, and I'll write an Africa guide book and The Road Chose Me Vol 2 in the next 12-18 months.
* The Road Chose Me Volume 1: Two years and 40,000 miles from Alaksa to Argentina (https://amzn.to/2vfCYvn)
Stories and lessons from two years driving my Jeep Wrangler down the Pan-American Highway
* Work Less to Live Your Dreams: A practical guide to saving money and living your dreams
(https://amzn.to/2OD6UtA)
An eBook about how exactly I can afford to take years off work to do what I want and live my dreams.
After driving the length of the continent, I collected a bunch of information that is extremely helpful to anyone else thinking of doing similar. The vast majority of the Western Worlds "knowledge" of West Africa is so out of date it's useless. My book is from info I learned during my drip from mid 2016 to late 2017, so it's relevant
Check PastBook.com I made a coffee table book from my NYC trip and it’s super cool. Stefano, the CEO, is a very close friend of mine, but I can guarantee on the quality of the products.
> Do you work on the road or take off years at a time?
For the first one (AK->Argentina) I just took time off and lived off my savings account. For around Africa I wrote my first book and I write for multiple magazines while on the road.
> Are you armed, or do you just avoid central conflict areas?
Crossing an international border with a firearm will result in instant jail time in virtually every country on the planet. No, it would be impossible to bring a firearm. You might be surprsed to know I have never heard a single gunshot in three years around the continent, and Ethiopia was the only country I ever saw regular people with firearms. In every other country it's only the police/military, who are extremely professional.
> I take it no family? (hence the 'solo' bit) or are they undersganding?
No kids or wife. I did have a girlfriend with me for some of the Africa Expedition - living in the Jeep proved too much for our relationship.
I just bought your book and am excited to read it. I've fantasized about doing exactly this, but in South America. Twice I almost did it, and twice I backed out because I didn't know how to start. You might get me over the third hump!
For eBooks you can write it in any editor you want - word, pages, it doesn't really matter. Then just export to ePub and you're done.
For my published books I want ultimate control over the layout, so I write them in LaTeX to get the pdf to go to the printer. To get it into an eBook I use pandoc to convert them. I wrote a script that does it for me, and massages the resulting ePub until it's exactly what I want.
My published books is about 70,000 words. Writing it didn't actually take very long (a few hundred hours I guess), but then I probably spent at least that much time again editing and revising multiple draft rounds.
I'm going to be self publishing a book this year - very curious about what have you found in terms of income? And if you have any ideas on how people find your work?
Nonfiction about my adventures or guide books. I find it much easier than fiction, though I'm an Engineer and not overly "creative" when it comes to writing.
I taught myself circuit board design and found a niche market that I designed a few products for that sold like gangbusters with zero marketing for a few years until the market cooled off and low cost knock offs started entering the market.
I also found that you could use the same CAD program that I learned to design PCB's to draw outlines to cut out on the laser CNC machine at the local maker space. I ended up finding a niche on ebay building open air computer cases. Because of the economics of shipping large items from overseas and the low cost of the materials I was using I was able to under cut the imports on price by like 60% and still make a nice amount of money on a $/ hour basis.
In hind sight the best way to find these kinds of opportunities is not to be looking for them. You really just need to get a really deep understanding of a hobby or industry or market that interests you in some way and once you have that then these sorts of things kind of pop out of the woodwork.
> I taught myself circuit board design and found a niche market that I designed a few products for that sold like gangbusters with zero marketing for a few years until the market cooled off and low cost knock offs started entering the market.
Can you elaborate a bit? Did you teach yourself literal circuit board design (but already had a background in electronics/hardware)? Or did you start from scratch and learn how to design an electronic circuit?
What was the niche (broadly?)
> In hind sight the best way to find these kinds of opportunities is not to be looking for them. You really just need to get a really deep understanding of a hobby or industry or market that interests you in some way and once you have that then these sorts of things kind of pop out of the woodwork.
1000% agree. The single best way to find an idea is to be seriously and deeply involved in a hobby/area of interest. There are so many ideas out there screaming you in the face.
It was a bit of both, My degree is in CS, I only took one EE/hardware class in school that was more about programming CPLDs than anything else. These days really all you need to know math wise to build simple stuff is V=IR and P=IV, things everyone learns in high school physics class. Everything else you can usually get by looking at the reference circuits in data sheets or looking it up as you go. The hardest part for me was finding the time to get over the learning curve of the PCB design software, in my case I learned EagleCAD. After I did that and formed good habits with how I used the software I now able to do some pretty complex stuff. The limiting factor now is probably that my ambition has outgrown the software I learned.
The niche was building adapters for old server power supplies so you can re-purpose them for use as general purpose 12 Volt power supplies. It was a thing in the RC community for a while to charge batteries but it got really big in the 2014 - 2017 time frame due to the Bitcoin mining industry needing low cost high wattage PSUs.
About 10 years ago and ten years into my career, I had been working and stayed at the same job way too long and both my salary and career stagnated.
I had two part time money making side projects. I was a part time fitness instructor and had some rental real estate.
Teaching fitness classes was fun, I made a lot of friends, and it gave me a release valve from working at a computer all day. Real estate was a headache.
Around 2008 -2011, a few things happened. The real estate market crashed and I did a few “strategic defaults”, I realized I could make a lot more by getting better at software engineering and job hopping, and I got married and gained a wife and two (step) children.
I gave up all of my side projects, concentrated on my career, started building a network of recruiters, former coworkers, and former managers and doubled my income over the next 8 years (not bragging, I still make about the average of principal engineer/architect/team lead in my area).
Even looking over the next two to five years, I should be able to increase my income by 50% (working for local companies) to well over 100% (if I can get into Amazon) as some type of cloud consultant, “digital transformation consultant”, or “Architect”. The only thing stopping me now is the travel requirements. I want to wait until my youngest completes high school.
But, that means I can’t juggle my job, family commitments, working out, filling in some technical gaps and a side job/business.
If I worked on a side business now that wasn’t purely passive income, it would be doing side software gigs involving technology I was already good at. I’m not sacrificing my job (main source of income), my time working out, or my family. The only thing I could realistically give up would be filling in skills gap and learning more.
So instead of in two years being able to command 50% to 100% more as a cloud consultant/architect, I would still only be able to make what I’m making now. I will be spending a lot of time building instead of sharpening my axe.
Even worse, I risk being further behind technically in two or three years and not even being able to find a job in development in the then hot technology.
It’s like the difference between deciding to go to work right out of high school and postponing starting your career and going to college.
to;dr -- Never devalue your personal time. If you can, monetize your hobbies that you'd be doing anyway.
I don't have a side-hustle yet, but I'm working on one. As you pointed out, there's an opportunity cost to a side-business. I'm working on a scheme to monetize a hobby; make money off something I'd be doing anyway. I'm just over 10 years into my career, recently married with a teenage step-child. My family-time or my "down-time" is very precious to me. During our wedding, we got some beautiful wedding save-the-dates off Etsy. They were water-color paintings. But then we needed additional stationary: invitations, menus, seating charts, table signs, a gobo (wtf is a gobo??), etc.... I ended up using photoshop to make all of the other stationary and graphics myself based off the initial Etsy save-the-dates (it was important to me that the fonts & colors matched on everything). My wife loves to paint water-colors, and I'm into photography & graphic-design. I'm working on a side hustle to do wedding invites and similar stationary on Etsy based off her paintings and my photography & graphic-design skills. These are (mostly) activities we'll do anyway. So... make some stationary templates once, throw them up on Etsy, and if people buy them GREAT, if not then no loss.
For me, monetizing a hobby is a quick way to start hating it. Unless you really want as much money as you can get, you probably shouldn't monetize all of your hobbies.
Can you tell me more about your cloud consultant, “digital transformation consultant”, or “Architect” as in what area are you looking to go (or already are in)?
I'm guessing you are helping companies move to Azure or Amazon?
Most AWS consultants that I’ve encountered are old school net ops folks who took one or two classes, became certified and all they know how to do is a “lift and shift” and apply on prem designs and processes to cloud. That always ends up costing the clients more without many real benefits.
Coming from a development background, with some Devops experience, I want to take companies to the next step - actually taking advantage of what cloud providers offer and interface with the developers and Devops.
As far as “digital transformation consultants”, some recruiting companies offer both staff augmentation services where they hire contractors temporarily on a W2 basis to work for clients and offer complete project management. Companies pay them to actually build a project and/or build up a software development department.
The consultants work for the recruiting agency permanently. A team is built up under them consisting of temporary workers either locally, “rural sourced” by hiring developers in lower cost of living areas domestically, or outsourced.
I don’t like the politics and red tape of large companies and have avoided them for most of my career. Being a consultant I hope gives me the best of both worlds. The total comp that only a large company can offer and the ability to just work on projects without worrying about the politics.
If I were to work for Amazon instead of one of their partners, I wouldn’t have to move - just travel a lot.
Right now, I work as a developer at a small company and the de facto “AWS guy” but I am also filling in some non AWS technology gaps.
LinuxAcademy. If you sign up right now it’s $300 for a year. What makes LA different is that they have a “hands on training portion”. When you start the hands on lab for AWS, they create a live temporary AWS account for you where you can follow along. I’m working on the Big Data cert now. For that, they give you a preconfigured AWS account for the lesson they are teaching and a login to a website with a Jupyter notebook where you can follow along with the video and make changes to the Python scripts just to play around with it.
The next time they will probably offer this deal is Thanksgiving week. They have courses and hands on training for a AWS, Azure, GCP, Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, etc.
I worked for a company that managed fitness classes for corporations, churches, and apartment complexes that had gyms. Later on, I just worked at the local Y.
I raise bees and sell the honey. Good for a few thousand a year and the money makes up for the stings.
I have a couple of dozen chickens and sell the eggs, but this makes very little money since eggs are so cheap in the super market. It pays for the feed and that's it.
I wrote an Amazon book on how to play harmonica in the style of Sonny Boy Williamson II that sells steady and makes me beer money.
I sell a couple of my Science Fiction short story collections on Amazon. "Error Message Eyes" and "Frogs in Aspic", but after a good first year they sell only a couple of copies a month.
I sell four or five Science Fiction stories a year, but only occasionally do I get pro rates. It's nice to see your name in print, though.
How many times a day? I usually can't get away from being around the hives without a sting. Luckily the bees are usually calm and a honey bee sting is like a bad mosquito bite. It is not like a wasp or hornet sting.
If I open the hive without gloves and veil, I can get stung, but not always. If I have to "work the hive" I have to go full bee suit to prevent being stung.
If you can't handle being stung then raising bees is not a good hobby. If you can stand it, honey is like gold, and people will hound you for it.
That's amazing and I can't believe how much this sounds like what I'm trying to go for! I got my first two hives setup on Saturday and we finally moved our first group of 12 chickens out of the house and into the coop yesterday.
If you don't mind, how many hives do you have and how do you sell the honey? I was always thinking I would need more hives than I could ever manage to actually get enough to sell. My goal was to get into gourmet mushrooms and sell through the office or maybe get attached to a CSA or something.
I have 4 hives now out of 8 that made it through the fall. I can't seem to keep the hives alive in the winter even with treating. This spring it was Hive Beetles that killed them.
I'll split any hive that looks healthy - walk-away splits almost always work if you are careful to get a frame of brood into the queenless half.
One year I made $5,000 off of 6 hives, but usually $2,000 to $3,000. Except for the glass that is mostly profit. I can charge $12 a pound in a New York suburb. I put a sign up at the end of the driveway and 10 days later I am sold out. I harvest in June/July and again in October (Ragweed and Goldenrod make great honey).
Not OP, but suits can be really hot and uncomfortable so you only wear them if you must. For example, you would definitely wear one during harvest but maybe not if you are just doing a checkup. Not wearing one then obviously runs the risk of getting stung. Then there are some tasks, where you would like to wear protection but can't: for example, sometimes you need to remove the queen from a hive (for example, when she is growing too old, or because the hive is too small or too large, or you want to sell one). Doing that requires very fine motor control which is hard enough in thick gloves that many beekeepers will forgo them and take the stings instead.
Not really a productive venture, but it was profitable. I used a 3% cashback credit card on a financial company's money sending service with no fees, and sent my sister $3,500 every two days. She'd then eventually pay me back through bank ACH (also free). Then I'd pay off my credit card every week so my credit balance remained low. Made about $1,500 a month for a year, before they stopped giving cashback for transfers.
Yep, the standard practice nowadays is buying Visa gift cards and then using them to purchase money orders. It’s usually only worth the time and effort if you have a good sign up bonus on your credit card. However, I’ve also been looking into some creative and profitable ways to utilize the “float”—the pile of cash you’re sitting on for 4-6 weeks until the bill is due. It’s definitely worth my time if I can use that productively and roll it over each month...
Before CCs started treating purchases from the US Mint as cash advances, people did something similar. At the time the mint wanted to get the $1 coins into circulation so they had free shipping. People would buy thousands of dollars of coins, deposit them into their bank, and then get the CC points/miles.
I was actually thinking about ethics a lot while I was doing this little project. By ethics do you mean morals or something different? What framework would you suggest for determining the ethics/morals of doing something like this, where we're playing by the legal rules by trying to optimize for our own benefit?
Think about it like this. The logical conclusion of people acting like you did is that credit card issuers increase interest rates to make up for their losses. That makes life worse for everyone but the people exploiting the loophole. You’re no different from the people who exaggerate their losses to insurance companies in order to claim extra insurance money. Because of them, premiums have gone up. You might see yourself as some kind of Robinhood figure, but ultimately it’s going to be the other people participating in your network that suffer.
Thanks for the reply. There is a clear difference between claiming extra insurance money and what I'm doing: lying to get more insurance money is fraud, while what I'm doing is exactly what the service is intended for (sending money to others for free).
But using your framework of, "if everyone did this, how would this affect the business and others using the business," then I (and many others) are doing a lot of other unethical things. Ad blocking and card counting (in blackjack) clearly would be deemed unethical under this criteria, but here's a bunch of other more tangible examples.
There's a popular pastry place that has 50% off sales on Sunday afternoon because they are closing Monday so they sell the remaining stock at a significant discount before close. I only go there on Sunday afternoons, but if everyone did that, then the prices would go up for all.
Another thing I do is using the books, video games, movies, and streaming services offered by my library and never buy any real media. But if everyone did this, then bookstores, theaters, and streaming companies would go bankrupt.
You may be following the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law.
The cashback was created as an incentive, you found a way to exploit the business model for personal gain in ways that can have an impact on others ability to enjoy the system while having a material impact on the provider of the service. Most in your position will say "but I am only a small piece of the cog" however, if a small minority starts to think the same way, it can have a real impact on a variety of things, including trust between parties.
Everyone tries to rationalize their actions, whether it is or becomes socially acceptable is another matter.
Well, everyone that takes a VC subsidized ride on Uber is also having a negative impact on their business. If the business makes rules that are unsustainable for their business, it’s their fault. They could very easily set limits to curb abuse.
Uber are obviously trying to get people to use their service. If using their service is bad for them, that's their fault because they were deliberately trying to encourage a behaviour that was detrimental to their business.
That is different from finding a way through the rules which is clearly unintended.
The best way I've seen businesses get around this issue is to just have an upper limit on the incentive like interest applies only to the first $x. Its often a nice bonus for people that were going to use them anyway but not enough for people to justify exploiting the incentive alone.
Interesting discussion. Certainly, some of this fails simply by not agreeing upon what is ethical. For instance, people can claim that blocking ads is an unethical action, but if the ads themselves are attempting illegal things (and some are), then blocking ads has a quite legitimate and useful purpose.
I’m going to preface what I’m about to write by saying yes I understand life happens and I’ve carried a balance on a credit card charging high interest at one point in my life.
- If you have a credit card with decent cash back/rewards program. The interest rate is going to be higher. If you are carrying a balance month to month. You’re doing it wrong.
- If life happens and you do end up with a balance and your credit is decent, you should be able to get a no interest for x months, no interest balance transfer.
Credit Cards aren’t a life necessity. Homeowners insurance and car insurance are. Taking advantage of the rules as they exist is not unethical. Insurance fraud is both unethical and illegal.
> The logical conclusion of people acting like you did is that credit card issuers increase interest rates to make up for their losses.
Actually no, they pay for it directly out of transaction fees levied on sellers (which are usually around 3-5%). Some of that they take for themselves, and some they use for consumer rewards. It's a great way to make a lot of money and keep consumers incentivized to use them.
Economically, it's sort of like crappy product/service things licensed to prisons (like video telephones) that charge hefty fees to the inmates and their families, and give a significant portion of those fees back to the prisons. They're taking advantage of the incentives they can provide to the decision makers (prison administrators, or consumers in the case of credit cards) to overcharge the other party (inmates, or vendors), and make a lot of money in the process.
Be careful with stuff like this. Credit card contracts typically require a fee for anything that amounts to a cash withdrawal instead of a purchase. Depending on the exact construction, it might be fraudulent to knowingly breach the contract to bleed the bank. If it’s not worth talking to a lawyer about it, it’s probably not worth doing.
A simple overall rule here is to consider what the intended behaviour was from the company offering this. Anything that fits the rules, but is outside what you would consider expected behaviour is essentially exploiting a bug.
A similar thing happens when someone offers "unlimited storage" for home broadband users backups and people start hosting many many terabytes of porn / isos / whatever. Sure, they're entirely within the allowed behaviour, but it's clearly intended to make it easy for people to backup their photos and documents without having to know if a gigabyte is enough or not.
I would say I feel like using something in a way not intended (even if allowed) that is detrimental to the person/people offering it is unethical when considered in isolation.
I'm actually a little surprised this needs saying, is this not a common view?
edit - I guess not if it was downvoted so quickly (I know, I know, I'm not complaining about the internet points, it's honestly very interesting to me). Are people that on board wit h heavily abusing systems just because it's technically within the rules?
Remind me to never offer free pizza at a HN event as someone may turn up, say "you didn't specify a per person limit" and walk off with the food intended for everyone.
I don't subscribe to your view at all, but I think this is an interesting discussion. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that users/customers should be trying to guess what the intention of the company is, and doing things not aligned with those goals is unethical?
My local gym and Moviepass (remember them?) expects people to sign up and rarely use the gym or watch movies. Otherwise, they would go out of business if everyone actually constantly used them. Is my using the gym or watching movies every day unethical? It sounds like you're calling lot of people unethical. Aren't people heavily abusing Moviepass by actually watching movies nearly every day?
In a more hypothetical scenario, let's say Facebook does not want people to use its platform to organize political/activism activities, because it makes the company look bad. It does not prohibit it, but let's say the CEO says on a talkshow that he wants people to use Facebook only for positive things. Would that make organizing on Facebook unethical?
It just seems like your view doesn't match how most of society views their social contract with for-profit companies.
> If I understand you correctly, you're saying that users/customers should be trying to guess what the intention of the company is, and doing things not aligned with those goals is unethical?
No, that's missing the key part that it has to be detrimental to the person offering it.
> Is my using the gym or watching movies every day unethical?
I don't think so, if you're using the service because you want to go to the gym every day or see all the films. The website for moviepass says "see it all" so it seems reasonable to go and see every film. Finding a 24 hour cinema and living in it because now you don't have to pay rent - seems unethical to me.
Imagine if moviepass said "see a film every week" but technically didn't say you couldn't see many every day. The underlying rules are technically the same - if you knew they had to pay most of the cost of a ticket, would you feel like the ethics of going every day would be different?
I said it was a simple rule, as there will be edge cases for everything and wider contexts (blocking a road as an act in isolation seems bad, but what if it's a protest, etc). There are though obvious answers to me, and getting eighteen grand a year for rapidly moving money back and forth is one that has an easy answer.
> In a more hypothetical scenario, let's say Facebook does not want people to use its platform to organize political/activism activities, because it makes the company look bad. It does not prohibit it, but let's say the CEO says on a talkshow that he wants people to use Facebook only for positive things. Would that make organizing on Facebook unethical?
Comes down to level of harm, just like anything else. Remove the brand Facebook from that as it's a vast empire. What if it were a small local service for residents to catch up, and political fighting would mean they'd have to shut down?
> It just seems like your view doesn't match how most of society views their social contract with for-profit companies
Is it ethical to go to an all you can eat restaurant and if there's no explicit sign stopping you then packing up all the food in huge bags and walking out?
If there's a sample table that says "free cakes" would you take all of them?
If you remove the editorializing, I don't see a bit of difference between "moviepass says you can see all the films (but if everyone did they would go broke, and they did go broke, leading to loss of service for everyone)" and "financial company says you can send money for free (and if everyone did they would lose money)" which is what the op did.
On a more meta level, I am concerned about an ethical view where different ethical rules apply if different actors are involved. It leads to one person basically not liking something (drugs, activism, etc.) and calling it unethical because of some broad claims about harm to society.
> If you remove the editorializing, I don't see a bit of difference between "moviepass says you can see all the films (but if everyone did they would go broke, and they did go broke, leading to loss of service for everyone)" and "financial company says you can send money for free (and if everyone did they would lose money)" which is what the op did.
The financial company didn't run a website saying "want to be paid thousands? Move money back and forth repeatedly with our services!".
> On a more meta level, I am concerned about an ethical view where different ethical rules apply if different actors are involved.
Different actors are different so I don't see why that's a concern. Different intent is also surely not an odd addition here? It's foundational in so many legal systems even.
I think it would be better to assume that any service you offer could be exploited, than to think otherwise. Lots of places run deals and sales on items with the condition "limit x per person per day" for that exact reason. Or an "unlimited" high-speed phone plan might have a restriction in the fine print where you're throttled after some amount.
Also "expected behavior" seems like it could be pretty subjective. Different cultures have wildly different values.
Somewhat disagree. Not only do these spending bonuses encourage endebtedness and consumerism, but don't forget that such bonuses likely aren't offered the the poor (read: bad credit score), and the credit card companies use and sell your information to advertisers (and probably hedge funds) while credit rating agencies likely do the same and are basically not held accountable (see Equifax).
If these are companies like JP Morgan - Chase, then let's also not forget how they were helped by the American taxpayer during the recession and that basically nobody was held accountable.
I'm also of the opinion that it is basically impossible for any corporation to do business ethically, so I largely have no problem with it.
Take a close look at the USA Hospital (/Healthcare) business model. No payment of property taxes ("Hey, we're a non-profit--nothing to see here"). They get all kinds of Free labor ("Volunteering is good for the community"). They solicit and receive Every manner of donation under the Sun ("We're a Non-Profit; please help us out").
They Make Billions and Billions of dollars... just sayin
"Teacher, billy punched sally and got away with it, that means I can punch johnny too!"
As for the ethics of this CC deal: fuck 'em. :) Global speculative capital makes money on arbitrage and legal fictions that produce financial instruments all the time, if a consumer can play that game, god bless em.
All true. Which makes it hard to understand how so many hospitals are in financial trouble. Like you said, low taxes, volunteers, donations, and charging $600 for an aspirin -- and many can't stay afloat. Strange.
I did a coffee kiosk once. It went well, but required a large amount of energy and focus.
We did a little twist on the business model. Starbucks sells nice places to sit down. We sold drugs. The model, from logo design to promotions, was designed to create a habit loop where people would get their morning coffee from us.
It was so profitable that I seriously considered making it my full time career, expanding cafes all over the country. The only thing that changed my mind was 1) the startup boom 2) dealing with minimum wage workers is extremely depressing. The tech industry has its abundance, whereas with food and drinks, it was clear that income was limited and had to be managed carefully.
Did you consider paying more than minimum wage? I wonder if a higher wage would enable you to expand your talent pool to folks who would enjoy slinging coffee a couple days a week on the side to improve their situation while actually finding it fulfilling work. The math does seem fixed, there is only so much time in the day and the inputs have fixed costs, but if you can get it all well tuned to the point where effort and time in is worth it then it can just run for a long time until some change in conditions makes you walk away instead of tweaking again. It always seems to me like spending more for a better product should be the first tweak attempted rather than the race to the bottom so many places undertake.
Our value proposition was that we just provide tasty enough caffeine. It's a psychological boost - first thing on a tough day, end of a tough day, before a class on linear algebra.
We weren't competing with other cafes. We were competing with cigarettes. We aimed to be daily, unlike Starbucks.
Our key metric was quantity:
1. The more purchases they make, the more the lock themselves into the habit loop.
2. More quantity means we could negotiate cheaper prices for beans, cups, marketing, etc.
3. The main factor for quality was bean freshness. If a bag is opened for more than an hour, it rapidly loses 70% of its flavor. The faster we go through a 1kg bag of beans, the higher the quality of the next cup.
4. By selling 100-200 cups a day, our baristas skill up far better than those selling 30 cups a day.
Unfortunately, this process requires little skill other than the team being charismatic and pulling in more loyal customers. The race to the bottom is part of the business model. With food & beverage, you start at 20% profit margin and save money by controlling the supply chain (roasting, etc).
The system let us create a better product than the competition, but we couldn't really charge more because the target market just didn't have the money.
I'd love to read more about how you positioned your brand, especially on the design decisions that you made to entice customers come more regularly and how you manage to sell more cups than your competitors.
Habit loop: cue, routine, reward. This is how all habits form, whether it's shampooing hair or gambling/gaming addiction. Once a habit sets in, people can only control the routine, not the cue and reward.
Starbucks is an entirely different thing. As mentioned in other comments, ours was closer to cigarettes in market size and problem solved.
Reward: Caffeine
Reward: Coffee flavor
The caffeine acts as the bubbles in your toothpaste, it's there to remind you of the loop without being too strong.
Cue: Entering work/class, before 9 AM. Promoted with steep 'discounts' during this period - it was already profitable and looked cheap anchored against overpriced coffees like Starbucks.
Cue: Seeing logo on cup. The coffee was all in paper cups, not sitting down. It saved a little money on rental area and training. But the main reason is that people would walk away with the cups and throw it in a trash. They'd bring it up to their offices and their friends could see it. Students would take it to other buildings. We didn't have to put up any banners - the cups were the banner. The logo was bright yellow and black, designed to be highly visible.
Cue: Stressful periods - after classes, before exams, at the end of the day.
Marketing? It was quite straightforward for us. If saw someone walking by, we'd ask them to try. Especially if they were staring at the menu.
Those who were hesitant, we'd offer a 100% refund if they didn't like it. Nobody ever requested a refund.
First day, we sold 100 cups. After that, many were repeat customers. A lot of people are afraid to approach strangers. But if you do it playfully and without any pressure, they never get angry.
Note that I mean profitable comparing to a developing country tech job, not to Silicon Valley standards. Also most of the profit is if you scale it to multiple spots.
One cup made about $3* unit profit. We sold 75-300 cups a day. $5k to $20k of profit a month to start with, 5 days a week. Rent is about $1k. So let's say $4k-$19k, with it more likely being around $6k/month.
Peak hours were 6-7 AM, 12 noon, 7 PM and it takes an hour to open and close. We can't miss any of these periods, and often have lines too long to manage. But that's a 14 hour shift or two 7-8 hour shifts.
To sell 100-200 cups, the minimum team size is two, because people get sick, go to the bathroom, pick up kids, etc.
If someone wants to do an 8 hour shift, that boils down to an average value of $1500/month. If they can do 14 hour shifts, we could pay them $3000 instead, but we lose some benefits of redundancy. I'd be paying 2x for a 1.8x gain or so.
Scaling the company means more quantity. If I had 5 kiosks, I could negotiate 10% better prices and push the 20% margin to 30%. My $3 profit margin becomes $4.50. I can give raises, but not double salary.
Let's say salary and rent totals $5000/month. At 1 kiosk, we'd take home about $1000 on an average month, lose $1000 on a bad month, take $10000 on a good month. If I paid them 20% more, that makes it $-2k/$0/$9k. There's a huge incentive to pay as little as possible.
If we expand to 5 coffee spots, it becomes more like $1.5k/$4k/$9k per kiosk because of economy of scale. Multiplied it would be $4.5k per month pessimistically, $20k realistically, $45k per month optimistically. Scale to 20 or 200 spots, and it does become hugely profitable.
In the tech world, if you pay 2x, you'll often bag a 3x programmer. Quality scales very well with salary. The output also scales.
With coffee, not so much - we sold great coffee at low wages, the kind that people come in skeptical and end up buying two cups a day, or take a bus from the other faculties just to buy. If we improved quality by a lot more, I doubt they would buy three cups a day instead.
* not actual dollar value, just normalized for simplicity
Yes but seeing the numbers I think this person could have paid workers more and still make a profit. I don't know if it's greed or robot like optimization
Well, look at it this way, by increasing salaries 20%, we'd double losses on a pessimistic estimate, and make no profit on a realistic estimate. Of course everyone starts a business being optimistic; businesses are gambles after all. But nobody wants to lose money.
It's more fear than greed. As an employee, you're always working hard trying to not drown. As a business owner, that feeling is multiplied. You don't just have to feed your kids, you have to feed your employees' kids. You can lose $500/month as an employee or $2000/month as a business owner.
But even if the pay was doubled, it would still barely be a "living wage". There's an argument that traditional businesses drive down prices and drive wages up, which is true, but it's still pretty bad.
I'd rather focus on startups, which creates few jobs, and destroys other jobs, but there's plenty of incentive to pay people well, and their salary scales well with the company's success.
Freshly brewed coffee is exactly one of the many, many things you can buy at Japanese convenience stores, which are franchises open 24/7, at walking distance from any inhabited neighborhood.
Also comparable to Italian coffee shops or "bars" (different meaning from standard English usage) which are also found at walking distance from any inhabited neighborhood. But not open 24/7, because of cultural and regulatory differences.
I'd be happy to share. But your email address doesn't seem to be in profile. If my responses in the other comments haven't answered your questions, feel free to email me.
In addition to regular index fund investing I trade options sometimes. Been doing it for about 6 months now and I'm up about 90%. I am a lot more conservative than most options gamblers but it's still pretty risky. I put all my gains into high earnings stocks (currently buying STX and LYB) and at this point since I've almost doubled my principal, I could lose basically all my money currently allocated to options and have only lost 10% from my initial investment. I do it somewhat as a way to earn money but mostly for the experience, since I think it helps me learn a lot about how equities are priced and how the market reacts to news and macro events.
Rather than continually making bets just for the sake of making bets I only make trades when I think a stock overreacted to bearish news (meaning it's likely to rebound to its old price given that the business' fundamentals are unaffected), was oversold due to underperformance of other stocks traded alongside it, or is greatly overvalued due to some irrational hype (Lyft and most canadian weed stocks). And I sell quickly if the option loses a lot of its value or if the option greatly appreciates to lock in profits and limit losses.
I'd add trading Futures to the mix too or Options on Futures. The beauty with the Futures market is it's open 24/7(though liquidity might be a problem in the night) and there are only a limited number of futures markets/commodities you need to keep track of. Just stick to the S&P, Nasdaq, Treasury, Crude Oil & Gold. You can do some currencies if you like. Yes it's highly leveraged so more risky but that's why you make risk management front and center of any strategy you end up using to enter a trade.
For options? I guess http://www.optionstrading.org/strategies/a-z-list/ is a good place to start. One way people just starting out with options fuck up is that they take out positions with a very large upside but also very high risk to ruin. It's like going to a roulette table basically. If you take out more complex positions you can limit your downside, make money on sideways movements, etc. You can also limit downside by setting up orders to sell above/below certain values too.
I read some finance textbook when I was just starting out, I think it was "introduction to derivatives and risk management". That helped too. It's a good, gentle introduction to derivatives and you can skip most of it unless you want to work for an investment bank.
I think the best way to learn is to just watch stocks overtime, and read up on the news relevant to them. That's really why I play with options, it keeps me plugged into following the movements of a bunch of different stocks, so I learn a lot about what makes them behave in certain ways. Definitely stay away from paid classes on investing or trading, those are almost all scams - if a "successful trader" has to teach paid classes they're not actually successful. And re: my strategy of trying to identify short term movements that make something under/over-valued and hoping it will correct, just realize that sometimes the market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent, and sometimes you just need to take the loss and get out.
One more thing I forgot. When I refer to "news" I mean real news. A lot of financial news websites are complete bot-written vacuous garbage. Real news is things like deals happening or falling through, large orders, interest rates, lawsuits, recalls, earnings, trade deals, etc.
I started playing with Options recently too. I read many books/blogs but "Trading Options Greeks: How Time, Volatility, and Other Pricing Factors Drive Profits" seems to be most helpful. Not sure if it is really a beginners book or not.
I mostly stick with SPY and it keeps climbing. I just buy 30-45 days out calls that are slightly out of money. Usually sell them at 20-30% profits with in a few days.
Of course, it is only 1-2% of my regular investments in index funds. Too risky to put any real money in options.
It's less than 5% of my total investments too (I am young and don't have tons of money yet). I will check out that book, I've already got a good intuition for the greeks but don't know much theory on how to actually price them in if I were to sell options.
The thing I'd be worried about with medium term SPY calls is that you will be completely wiped out by a recession. Or even if a correction happened like in December and didn't rebound fast enough. Of course during a bull market that's a fine strategy (as long as theta/IV don't eat any potential profits) , and if you are socking away your gains it's probably fine. But if you are just growing your options allocation by 50% every couple weeks and then throwing it all back into the same position, eventually your double or nothing will come up nothing. Just something to consider
For the past few years I've been buying, renovating, and selling small-ish houses. My dad was a contractor growing up so I picked up most of the necessary skills helping him out during middle and high school. I mostly work on weekends and holidays which makes it a bit slow going, but I've made a reasonable amount of money. Even if the money was worse I would still probably do it, I really enjoy both the physical aspects of the work and seeing a house go from a beat up old husk to a shiny new place! I have to contract out some of the work (electrical mostly) because I'm not a certified electrician, but otherwise it is a one man show.
Depending on the country you are in, it shouldn't be that hard to become a certified electrician.
Granted, I have a degree in electrical engineering, but certification was not part of that degree. I got the certification at a night school, IIRC it took 2 months with about ~5 hours per week in effort. If you don't have experience with electronics it would obviously take a bit more effort, but it's totally doable.
Besides, I've fixed / expanded / rearranged my own electrical wiring more than once (which is legal here without a license, if you do it on own property for non-commercial purposes) and I didn't use any of my electronics knowledge. You just need to know what the wire colors mean, employ some basic safety procedures, and don't do stupid things with wire size and currents.
Well the first rule of electrical work is to assume an idiot or a cheapskate did the original work (or most recent repair) and the colors have a fifty-fifty chance of lying to you...
I look for smaller places that I can handle on my own (2 bedroom max), no major structural/foundational issues that would require bringing an engineer in, no demolition that would require an engineer, that kind of thing. Finding an inspector that you trust and that knows their stuff is really key here. Basically the same kind of things you would look for when investing in house flips (which is really all I'm doing, just for fun on my own).
I would then have to deal with finding tenants, property maintenance issues, etc (or pay someone to do this), which is more than I really want to do right now. At that point I would be closer to a full time landlord, not a full-time software engineer who enjoys working on houses on the side!
A coworker found a company that handles most of it, and they call when they're tasked with fixing something, he then figures out if he wants to pay them to fix it or what have you, or if he just wants to do it himself. He says it's basically paying for his rent. Of course it's all about researching the companies. Worse case you sell off the house. Totally worth looking into though.
I do electronics repair for cars. For many older and rare cars it's usually no longer possible (or desired) to replace broken electronic components such as the engine or transmission controller. So owners contact me to have the part repaired instead of replacing it.
The repairs are usually not that challenging for me, and it won't make me rich, but it's a great way for me to clear my head from challenges with my tech startup. It also gives me access to some very rare and expensive cars. Obviously you need to test drive the car if you just fixed the ECU ;-)
That sounds really interesting. By repairs do you mean mostly board level type stuff? How do you handle all of the encryption and road blocks OEMs like to put on the software? Doesn’t that make it challenging to get a board diagnosed or operating properly again?
Mostly board repairs, but also wiring on the cars itself.
Like I said, I mostly work on older cars, since those are the ones where it makes economic sense to do this kind of repairs. Those cars are usually from the era where ECU's had little to no encryption, or even no software at all (pure electronic based ECU's).
* Act as a standby for dish pits at the local restaurants - filling in only when someone doesn't show since I don't want to take what could be a lifeline job for someone AND having a standby like me means they can keep their job instead of just being a no-show
* Write articles for other people - usually on topics I really don't have a lot of knowledge or feeling about to start.
* Mow lawns - I'm allergic to grass. Builds character.
* Labor - the harder the better. Beats the gym and there is no better way to turn a Budweiser into a $100 beer than sweating your tail off digging a ditch.
* Help startups bootstrap or otherwise avoid "the man" while they find their dream.
* Sell chicken eggs when the hens push more than I can French toast.
* Make films, music, stories, pamphlets...often these cost more than they make, but I refuse to call them losses. Slightly passive income stream.
* Consult - since I was 11 in '81 I've been paid for helping people with their broken technology. I'm not exactly on the edge of all tech like I was, but I still serve a purpose.
* This is an odd one, but I have found it at least as profitable as a few side projects over the years. Be lucky. Actually look for money on the ground ($143 last year), win prizes, expect financial benefits from transactions, assume your (educated) choices will make money.
* Sell plant starts - a little late for this year, but it's one of those things you can save seeds from your regular groceries / food prep at home and early Spring...ba-da-bing ba-da-bang...kind of almost free plants!
* Investment clubs - getting a small community of a tech nerd, business geek, social butterfly, and either an accountant type or law dog, plus whatever else you happen to be friendly with, you can end up with a very smart engine for investing. Invest in either public stock, local businesses, people with ideas, or projects of your team's own creation.
That sounds interesting. What kind of people, and how do they find you? Where are the articles published? How much time do you usually have for writing them (days, weeks, months?) Do they get published under your name or the buyer's name?
As far as I can tell, there is no gold standard for text brokering, including TextBroker.com, but start with Textbroker Alternatives and you'll see lots, and plenty of reviews to find something you like.
After that, get old school and check out the Writer's Market Guide 2019 (or anything from the last couple of years). Keep in mind, all the magazines and industry publications out there need a ton of content every month. What are YOUR favorite places to read? Heck, it can be poetry, fiction, DIY, anything.
Timeline, word count, style, pay and all the other tidbits are almost always agreed upon prior to your efforts. Unless you want to pitch a story. Which can be super fun! And these can be blogs, industry rags, magazines, newspapers, and so on.
if you are interested to get into that line of work check out http://www.hitsubscribe.com/ they are hiring writers (part time i believe).
eric dietrich who is one of the founders of the company is a frequent speaker on the freelancers show ( https://devchat.tv/freelancers/ ) and seems like a nice guy to work with.
seems like a good way to get started and learn the ropes
> Act as a standby for dish pits at the local restaurants - filling in only when someone doesn't show since I don't want to take what could be a lifeline job for someone AND having a standby like me means they can keep their job instead of just being a no-show
I'd like to try something like that. I have no experience in restaurants. How would you suggest I go about it?
* not a chain - too many rules
* don't get in the way - harder than it sounds
* bring your own gloves and get used to them before the big show
If you don't know anyone working a dish pit, ask around. Another good bet is someone just starting a restaurant. They will probably go through many tryouts until they get someone good in the pit, so you'll be really helping them out by being standby.
A few more tips.
* get some copies of the zine, Dishwasher.
* know that the dish pit is the center of the restaurant cycle
* call out all sharps in the water - especially soapy water
* keep a flow and constantly look at the big picture
* always be ready to help anyone in the building
Lastly, find out when they clean the grease trap - and stay home that day. Haha.
> Sell plant starts - a little late for this year, but it's one of those things you can save seeds from your regular groceries / food prep at home and early Spring...ba-da-bing ba-da-bang...kind of almost free plants!
Might work with vegetables, but aren't most grocery fruits derived from cuttings?
Actually it doesn't even work with most vegetables. To get the kind of yields people are used to, many vegetables are hybrids. The kicker is, the second generation plant (the one that you'd grow from the seeds) is no longer a hybrid, so you won't get the same plant.
For selling, you'll want to have starts, from seeds. Peppers, cucumbers and so on. Organic is usually far easier to sprout - especially if they haven't been radiated or whatever they do to things to keep them "fresh".
For eating, it's fun to toss scraps like lettuce feet, scallion spiders, and ginger thumbs and eventually (almost) never buy them again. Potatoes are fun since they grow so fast and just a bucket by the window is enough.
Of course, a trip to a local farmers market and you'll have an even better starting stock.
Just walking or driving around town. I've helped a couple get a refrigerator in their house - somehow the delivery service left it in their driveway. Weeded without asking - parking strips, or other parts of property not near the windows or house. I'm always on the lookout in winter for a stuck car that needs shoving.
Since it's Spring, offer to help older folks get their garden going. Once things are planted they can usually manage well enough.
If you live where people dig pools often, sometimes it's easier to shovel than Bobcat - noise issues with neighbors, restricted space, etc. Excellent work if you can get it.
Neighborhood websites around here usually have someone asking for some sort of physically demanding help. Today, for example, someone is asking for help clearing their 10 acre property of limbs that fell off during the winter storms. One could not only pile them up but also bow saw them into kindling.
I'm a lawyer who doesn't do much (any) marketing. But when someone gets referred and calls or sends an email asking for help with setting up an LLC, helping wind-down or sell their business, or even something small like reviewing an NDA, I can jump in.
I'm solo, so I don't have any overhead and I can charge far less than anyone else. This is also entirely a side gig, so volume is so low that I can be responsive, helpful and more like a thought partner who is also helping out on legal.
It depends on how busy my practice is. If it's pretty busy and what I'm taking in would at least cover the cost, I'll purchase insurance for the period.
If I'm not handling very many matters, I might affiliate with a firm that has insurance to keep costs down or forego insurance. If I forego insurance, I take care to disclose that fact to the client before beginning the engagement.
Got any advice on getting a referral to someone like you? I’m a founder who could use some advice independent of the company’s counsel. I’ve tried my non-startup network but am only getting leads for the big firms. How do I find an attorney like you? (New account for privacy reasons)
My practice is corporate law, yes. Everything from basic stuff like commercial contracts, incorporation and financings to complex mergers & acquisitions.
That is pretty cool. I have a friend who mentioned he helped another friend sell his company once. He was a business guy, not corporate, but it kind of piqued my interest.
Probably going to be downvoted, but I do adult webcam stuff, mostly with private already established regular clients. My net profit can be as high as $1200 per week, $800 on the low side, for a few hours of “work”. I generally use it as a fall-back income when I’m in-between tech jobs but I do it if I’m employed or not to keep my paying client list fresh for when I need it. I could make a lot more, I have a “cam friend” who makes $5k/week regular but he does it full time and markets himself and such. I put the minimal amount of time & effort into it.
You are a guy? Does most of your revenue come from men? Are you gay or bi? Just clarifying for others that this may not be a realistic or enjoyable option for them, lol...
May I ask what flavour of cam? 1200 per week for low effort sounds kinda high.
(I know nothing about cams, but I'd imagine there is a large supply of people willing to push the limits for profit)...seems like a race to the bottom in hn parlance
That's an unusual way to make money for someone skilled into generally well-paying tech jobs.
It's an interesting niche though, being your own "product". Is it something you enjoy doing as well or do you feel you have to because it's the only way to survive the lean months and keep a regular clientele?
I enjoy doing it, it's fun for me and silly and I have, like any business relationship, relationships with my clients I have built over the years. I am a part of their lives, so even when I don't need the money I feel bad if I let them down. I have no clue how long it will continue, but it has saved me more than once when I've had issues with my tech employment. It also allows me the safety net of being able to quit bad jobs and not having to stress, use savings, or take the first opportunity that comes to me.
The types of people willing to pay this kind of money generally are looking for someone very specific and are very loyal once they have/you have found them. I've only ever had two clients stop in the past 10 years of doing it or so and I turn down new clients all the time.
1) I own a small rental property in Florida that is fairly low maintenance and pays for the mortgage + a small amount each month on average. This is a long-term ROI play since after taxes, maintenance, repairs, and everything else it ends up being close to a wash until the principal to interest ratio on the mortgage payments improves after 5+ years. I only say this because everyone and their brother in my age group seems to want to retire on rental properties, but in reality it's really not that great.
2) Basic ETF investing in a combination of value-oriented and dividend-oriented ETFs. This is, in my opinion, the only way to get truly passive income with literally zero ongoing effort.
3) I design and 3D print props and cosplay pieces on a referral basis for commission. In reality it's a horrible way to make money since quality 3D modelling for 3D printing is time consuming to the point of the hourly effective rate being lower than minimum wage, but I enjoy it, so it's kind of a semi-paid hobby.
Makerpad.co - I teach people how to build projects without code. I’m collaborating with companies now to help provide educational content on how to use the tools for a non-technical project or business. Last 4 weeks revenue is around 30k (from memberships and companies paying to be listed and create the content which isn’t released yet). It’s pretty much all profit too as I do it solo with little overhead.
There’s a huge interest growing around building without coding and any technical people are also jumping in too.
Not a side project per se, nor am I making enough to retire anytime soon but I give bike tours of the city I live in. Its a fun way to explore the city, meet fun people, and learn something new. On a good weekend I can pull in $100 in cash plus a small check from the bike shop I tour out of.
I manufacture and sell cool pull-ups bars [1] for fitness ethusiasts and all others, who want to have an allrounder at home for their fitness workouts.
Does not make me rich, but provides in addition work and income for three people doing it also as a side-job. Main problem: the product does not brake and it's a true craft business, so 95% of all customer buy only once.
Firefighter/medic and wildland fire contractor. I pull in about 15% of my base tech salary doing a few hours of work a week and one wildland fire deployment per year. It's a hobby that turned into a side profession and feels great to help people.
I've just moved to the US. Any details about how to get involved in this? What are the base requirements to work as a medic for this kind of work, would MIRA qualify?
My job occupies most of the time. The rest of it I invest it with my children and family.
I'm father of 2 twins sisters (11) and a boy of 5 years old.
My father have a degenerative disease (fatal but with slow progression), and my mother spends most of her time taking care of him.
I put all my energy with my kids and helping my parents.
As soon as I realized that I can loose my loved ones, I started making selective choices with my time.
In the past, I was course trainer of linux during weekends. It was very rewarding to teach students that "wanted to learn" and the money was good, too. I remember when a student ssh'ed to a station and executed "eject" in the remote machine - he literally jumped in happiness!
I also made some websites in my spare time but it wasn't so rewarding.
I used to be a magazine/newspaper editor. About eight years ago, I made a career change and became a full-time programmer. But I wanted to continue to write. So I wrote a book proposal, found an agent who loved it, found some publishers who were interested, and went with a publisher who offered a two-book deal.
My first book, "Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform on Your Kid" (http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com) ended up selling pretty well.
My second book, "Correlated: Surprising Connections Between Seemingly Unrelated Things," (http://www.correlated.org) did not do nearly as well. In fact, it bombed pretty hard. I assumed my book writing career was over.
But because of the strength of "Experimenting With Babies," I ended up getting two more book deals, each of which follow a similar format.
"Experiments for Newlyweds: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform With Your Spouse" (https://newlywed.science) came out earlier this month. I'm really proud of it. You should give it to any engaged couples you know.
And "Experimenting on Kids: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform on Children Ages 2-5" will hit bookstores in May 2020.
If you factor in advances, royalties, foreign rights, and other secondary deals, the amount I've made from my books is about what I make in a year as a programmer. So it's a nice chunk of change, but also a decent amount of work.
Advice to anyone else who's considering writing a book:
* You can do well with self-publishing if you're really good at marketing your own stuff, already have a strong platform, and don't need to depend on an advance. If any of those things aren't true, you're probably better trying to get a book deal with a traditional publisher.
* Writing the book is often not the hardest part. Selling the book is often the hardest part. If you just want to write, but you don't want to sell, this might not be the side project for you.
* If you have a literary agent, you typically pay 15 percent commission. And boy is it worth it.
I woodwork at a local makershop, I started out making random things for my home and when I no longer had ideas for other stuff I wanted I’d make things and give them away for free to friends.
Eventually other people wanted to know if I can make them custom pieces so I began doing it for money, mostly to cover cost of materials and a bit of time for labor.
Not making big money from it but it’s fulfilling work and good to know I could still have a place in a world with no technology. Surprisingly, woodworking shares some things in common with building software.
I've been enjoying some minor woodworking as a purely hobby. I agree, it's great fun, and I think there is some common idea along with building software.
Wondering what you've found to be a reasonable amount of income vs work for sale? I'm not really interested in making money, but covering costs and feeling satisfaction would be good.
I give a fixed cost so materials cost x 2 is usually a good starting point for a minimum price, then add on if you think it's going to be very labor intensive.
I've been wanting to get into this for awhile, but find myself procrastinating mostly out of uncertainty and fear of failure; but somewhat out of just having no idea where I should start, what tools I need to start, and what is achievable for a beginner.
I started by watching Youtube videos. My first project was a modern bench built out of 2x4s, I picked a project that didn't require too many tools or advanced cuts of wood, and could be put together with wood glue. I also learned how to sand and finish wood to a professional finish. I then built this same bench again but better, learning from mistakes I had made. Then I went on to learn how other tools worked like jointers, planers, routers, bandsaws and learned about joinery. I then kept doing more advanced projects and seeking out more exotic woods to work with, such as walnut.
There's not much failure in woodworking as a hobby, if what you build isn't great just toss it out and try again. It doesn't matter much if you're just building cheap pinewood prototypes. Perhaps the only failure would be like losing a finger on a table saw or ruining very expensive wood.
I assume you've gone through this journey all at the makershop? How did you find it? I'd really like to find a place where I can say "I have no idea what I'm doing but I want to learn".
To get a solid feeling of satisfaction from that project, I’d recommend a picture frame that doesn’t require mitres in the corners. Getting the length and angle exactly right is pretty frustrating for a beginner.
Aside from the things mentioned: Like software, wood is something that is around us everyday, but very few people really stop to think about how it's assembled. Wood and technology are things we can never seem to escape in human civilization.
People see computers like a black box that does magical stuff, in the same way they will look at a curved wooden chair and simply sit in it, without thinking how it got to be in that shape and how the carpenter knew it would be a safe design for holding a person's weight. People also don't think much about the types of woods used and their special properties, similar to how people don't think much about technology stacks and why certain applications work better than others.
In wood working it's also common to make other tools and jigs out of wood for you to use, to make other kinds of cuts easier. This is the same as writing smaller programs that do one task to help accomplish other tasks. A woodworker may use a series of tools and jigs to produce some end result the same way a programmer may pipe different programs together to make some end result. Each tool is a lot like a discrete program with input parameters that applies some effect to a piece of wood, and their combination allows for the production of a multitude of wood works.
Also, when you get good enough at building furniture, you will begin to wonder why people would pay so much money for something you could easily build yourself, similar to how people wonder why pay for Dropbox when you could just mount an FTP server on a filesystem and use some version control. $400 for a coffee table is ridiculous, I could build the same thing for maybe $100 in wood, and probably better, because I can be sure it wasn't mass assembled by a crackhead following basic instructions in a sweatshop.
The thing I love about woodworking (I’m not the op) is the upfront planning and design process, the immaculate attention to detail (an 1/8” off is often a big deal), and then the satisfaction at the end of being able to physically hold the finished product.
For commonality with software, personally, I like to do a fair bit of up-front design work before building something. Not days worth for most stuff, but hours worth. Scribble ideas, riff on them, iterate to a design I like before building it. And then during the build process, you’ll probably discover something you missed in the design process and have to improvise a bit; software is generally more forgiving in this regard, but it’s the same shape of process.
I find that when I’ve been doing more hands on stuff (small woodworking, welding, car repair, bigger construction), I get better at doing the software design stuff. My brain gets better at thinking through the consequences of design decisions and picking out small details that can have significant implications.
One big commonality I found is that a woodworking joint (dovetail, mortice & tenon, etc) is equivalent to a software design pattern. There are very well-established procedures for common problems.
Invest in an S&P 500 ETF. This is probably the lowest effort side project you can have which still makes money. Also, if you learn about the stock market, it makes you more confident in how your savings looks, how your retirement will look, how to manage money, etc.
Of course there is the whole "timing the market is a waste of time" discussion but I wouldn't buy REITs right now considering where interest rates are going. Though given that interest rates simply haven't increased very quickly, could be that the market is over-discounting them and they are actually underpriced!
I do this but I'm beginning to wish there were a way to exclude specific stocks from the ETF to improve performance. Basically looking for something exactly like SPY but with a way to blacklist certain stocks that I think are poor investments (e.g. Lyft). As far as I know there isn't any way to do this short of buying tons of individual stocks to create my own diversified portfolio without the stocks I want to avoid, which simply isn't worth my time given the sums I have invested and how much performance benefit I think I would get with those stocks excluded.
I have a theory that with a modicum of common sense you can probably increase your gains by 1-3% per year by avoiding stocks that are overbought by ETFs simply by virtue of their market cap or industry (meaning, the main reason these stocks hold their current valuation is that they have a lot of buy-side support from the fact that they are included in many ETFs).
Maybe a good fintech business opportunity since afaik this type of product doesn't exist!
The product you are looking for exists in the form of hedging out what you don't want in the ETF. Buy your ETF, and short the stocks you don't want in it.
ETF's are low to no rates because they don't have active management, and you are talking about active management.
With active management, you are describing the job of a hedge fund manager, and essentially wanting to create your own fund.
If I do that though then I pay a premium to open the put/short position in the form of theta and interest respectively. And since my portfolio isn't that big I would end up allocating a sizable percent of it to open short positions on all the stocks I want to exclude. So as far as I can tell, it's considerably more expensive than just not holding those stocks to begin with
What I really want is a way for a company like vanguard to let me purchase something based on an index but in the form of a weighted basket of fractional shares. That why I can keep the same allocation as SPY but hold shares that I can micromanage to "fix" any issues I have with the ETF. Theoretically that should be possible to set up for not very much money since there's no active management on behalf of the fund.
Or, you define your own ETF, maybe initially based on some existing ETF or well known index, and then you can dump arbitrary amounts of money into it - but without actually having to individually buy the shares yourself. Maybe a product like this exists already but I don't know what it's called. I would be willing to pay a higher expense ratio than normal low-cost ETFs charge to use this product, but not as high as a hedge fund (since I am the one actively managing it).
There is a new company that lets you build your own basket of up to 30 stocks or ETFs. It's not exactly what you're looking for but might be helpful. https://www.motif.com/motifs/byo
Wealth Multiplier Protip: if you're a business owner (even if your business is just a single person LLC) you can put away up to $56K a year pre-tax into your "solo" 401k.
I am put off by ETF performance thanks to my results last year. I had a SEP IRA for my business with $1,000 in it and a traditional IRA with $6,000. I bought a pharmaceutical ETF with the SEP IRA. After a year it lost about 5%. Meanwhile the trad IRA grew to $10,500 investing in companies I know.
That's because you bought an industry-specific ETF. So any imbalance in that industry would noticeably affect your holdings in the short period. General advice is to buy diversified ETFs (like the S&P 500 as the OP said) and hold them for long periods of time. It's a very different strategy from buying and selling individual stocks over a short term.
That's a problem with the specific underlying securities you bought, not a problem with ETFs in general. The "classic" ETFs are for well-known indexes, like the S&P 500.
That’s where I learned everything I know about investing. It’s definitely the ultimate source of information about passive investing. I spent a lot of time there a decade ago and now I pretty much don’t need to visit much anymore as the whole point is to “set it and forget it”
Investing. It takes a lot of time to have an understanding of filtering the good long term stuff from the bad short term strategies, but it's worth it.
I'm focusing on Bitcoin and physical gold / silver, as I view stocks and houses overvalued, but I always get downvoted here on HN when I go into details, that's why I prefer if people read a lot for themselves.
I like Mike Maloney's youtube series as a start on macroeconomics.
I got into crypto investing last year but with a strategy that nobody else seems to be doing (except maybe hedge funds). I don’t have the stomach or emotional stability for risky trades so everything I do is delta-neutral. Mostly leveraged futures basis trades, i.e. selling contango futures and buying spot, or vice versa on backwardated futures.
It will never generate the same returns that skilled long/short trading can pull, but I also never have a drawdown. Still managed >50% return last year so I’ll tale it.
I hope you know what you're doing and making money, as I was afraid to go into futures / leveraged trading so far.
I'm also working on making more money with some trading, but I don't want to talk about it, and even in the best case it has only a small of upside compared to just holding Bitcoin itself.
I understand your viewpoint totally, as I saw many friends getting into deep depression because of the volatility of the Bitcoin price. It is very serious thing. One friend of mine got very strong into cocaine, another friend's marriage burned down, another friend started day trading alts and lost half of his Bitcoins, and another friend (the smartest one) realized that he can't take the volatility and sold after a 10% loss. I view holding Bitcoin as a revolution, so I'm emotionally attached to holding it even if its value goes to 0. Still, I'm a software engineer, so even in the worst case I just work and get a high salary and probably start investing again.
One thing you could do is to just buy Bitcoin with 1-2% of your net worth, which is a great hedge for the current financial system, and also maybe that loss / volatility you are able to stomach. You're upside will be tiny, but you will get used to volatility a bit more.
Look at my top comment. Probably Bitcoin and physical gold is not for you, the important part is that for me long term investing is a great side project to make money. There are lots of ways to do it, and if you don't like my tools, there are lot of other options to be profitable.
I tried making a single player clone of your game agar.io: https://www.agar22.cf : can we be friends or can you share your discord? Did you make Diepix arena 2?
Sure, no problem. As you can see I didn't dig deep in other instruments, though there are a lot of interesting things (selling puts for banks, corporate bonds, buying VIX), but they require due diligence as well, you just need to dig deep and read everything that you can find about them.
Also if you decide to invest into Bitcoin, the most important things are:
- Buy only what you can hold for at least 5 years (and expect the 95% downturns)
- Use a hardware wallet (I prefer https://trezor.io/ , Ledger is probably OK as well, but the source code is really ugly, and it has a trusted module that I don't trust).
- Don't buy alt coins, or if you do, make sure that you read the source code, look at the test coverage, read cryptography books to understand their cryptography, see how many bugs they have, make sure that you are really able to run a full node that synchronizes from the genesis block, if it has smart contracts, see if the smart contracts have integration tests as well, look at the energy that's securing it...there are a lot of reasons why I never ever thought of buying any alt coins.
Ethereum is very interesting, but it has some red flags for me:
- It has multiple implementations, which is generally a good thing, but not for consensus critical software. When you have a software worth tens of billions of dollars, and people don't have consensus on who owns those billions of dollars, that's really really scary.
- Ethereum has a lot of hard forks and the ice age, which is a way for the dev team to force users to always switch to newer clients.
- With Bitcoin backwards compatibility is one of the main features: you don't need to trust new code from the dev team to send your money (for receiving new money, the situation is trickier).
- The parity multisig theft was extra scary for me, because I use multisig to store my Bitcoin in multiple physical places. The 1 line bug fix without tests was even scarier. If you look at Bitcoin, the devs are working on MuSig, the newer multisig protocol for years now, and they are trying to have a protocol that's proven to be safe and goes through peer review before thinking about implementing it. Ethereum doesn't care about having a provably safe multisig implementation, because it focuses on general smart contracts.
- It's really expensive (more than $10k) at this point to have a machine that have a full sync node from the genesys block, which means that Ethereum has less security than Bitcoin, as there exist only a few full nodes in the whole world.
- State data is not cacheable, which makes it harder to improve on the node syncing protocol
If you're going long term, the platform doesn't matter at all. With short-term trading quants have a huge advantage (I went through an interview at a hedge fund, I know how smart they are, but their downside is that they have to have high sharp ratio to attract investment). I'm always looking at 5 year+ investments only
I've got accepted, but at the end I decided to go back to work at Google for personal reasons, so I don't know that much of the inner workings of the criterion.
If you're conversant in financial accounting, I can recommend https://www.portfolio123.com . They use Compustat data. However, building your own models will require significant effort, but it's worth it. I think of it as a site for the thinking investor.
$150. At that price it was a much more risky investment. The software, hardware, regulation environment improved a lot. I bought as a high risk high reward long term investment, waiting for 1 BTC to worth millions of dollars in the next 20 years, or 0.
I do stand up comedy, get a couple gigs per month (~1500$), sometimes I get more sometimes less. Every sunday I shut myself off to write, and perform on weekdays, been doing this for 7 years now and it only started to pay for about 2 years.
That's great! Seems like a VERY hard job to break into--lots of discipline, learning from painful failure, and hard work. Do you have any of your comedy on Youtube?
I've been doing audio mastering as a creative hobby for about 5 years but I've never done anything professionally. I was literally just contacted early this morning (EST) regarding an opportunity to do some work professionally for an indie record label so I am going to see where that goes. There is a "Full-Time Effort" clause in my employment contract that might require me to get permission from my company to do it, but I'm hoping it won't be an issue either way.
In a previous life, I became a scuba instructor that kept me in the latest dive gear. (This was along side working towards a Ph.D.)
Eventually it burned me out -- instructing is a stressful "service" gig; and it turned me off of diving for years. This is something that I've observed with other folks in "lifestyle" businesses, e.g., I know yoga and martial arts instructors that ultimately quit not only the instructing, but the hobby.
If you love something, be careful about teaching it!
Betting on politics on PredictIt. I wouldn’t recommend it as an income stream, but having an interest in probability, markets, and international politics, it has taught me to read the news more objectively.
The problem with such predictions (likewise stock market) is that they are not binary. The question is not if a stock goes up or down. The question is "when?". There is no such thing as "opposite" of a date (in a useful sense).
There is actually another questions "how much?". There is also no opposite for that.
But many predictions ARE basically binary. I made so much money on the "Will Trump be impeached by the end of 2019?" question. I can't believe how many people put money on that.
To be honest, I’m still down from the 2016 election. After taking a break from it, I’ve started to recover since taking the time to sit down and understand the rules, fee structure, and betting tactically at the beginning of this year. Even if I were to attribute all my luck this year to skill and I could keep it up, I wouldn’t be able to make a minimum wage at it. I was particularly leaning on OP’s word possibly :)
I paint. I don't take commissions and the stuff I've sold doesn't even come close to the total I've spent, but who cares, that isn't the point. I love coding, but doing something totally expressive rather than logical is a valuable part of my life too.
Don't want to share the website publicly, but the reason Amazon affiliate works so well is that people don't just buy the product you're referring but a ton of additional products too.
On a given day, a customer might buy 1 MIDI keyboard that I referred. But he will also buy books, CDs, home tools and anything else he needs, and I get 6% of all of that
Stay away from M-Audio. The newer Akais aren't very good either. Try Nektar.
It all depends on how well you already know the keyboard though. A cheap Akai LPK25 is good enough for absolute beginners. But if you have some piano playing experience, I would go for something like an Alesis VI49
Not op, but the alesis V ones have such a comfy key weighting and are quite cheap. Only thing I don’t like is the drumpad on the left feels cheaply made
I make and sell custom tabletops compatible with the festool woodworking products. I cut them locally on my CNC router and advertise exclusively through craigslist. I do 3-5 per month of those, and another 10 projects / month that come from repeat customers - mostly hobbiests and contractors.
Through craigslist, I’ve ended up making components used in the Apple campus, and service pieces used in a 3 Michelin star restaraunt.
Take a look at Festool’s MFT 3 table system. It is a grid of 20mm holes, spaced at 96mm on center. There are many time saving and convenient tools made to take advantage of them, and many more custom stuff that craftsmen build to make things easier.
Without a CNC it is frustrating to drill those holes reliably square enough to use them in downstream operations like squaring cuts or aligning/spacing.
I used to do POD stuff, but bailed on my former platform a few years ago. How do you find Red Bubble's quality? I have a few designs requested by family that I'd like to get onto shirts (and also sell).
If one sleeps well, one might work better in his regular job, might live longer, be better able to engage in more activity as well as more strenuous activity, all potentially allowing one to make more money, be a better companion, parent and member of society.
Tried everything:
youtube channel,
multiple tutorial websites,
music video making/videography,
photography, for artists and bands,
and finally sound design and mixing
The last one is the only that is actually working somewhat
Incredibly this almost exactly the path I've taken outside of my day job as a software engineer.
Product photography -> headshot/corporate event photography -> corporate video -> field recording -> music production
The "problem" that I've allowed myself to have is that I have the disposable income to take care of the gear bottleneck that many people in these fields dream of, but not the time overall to invest in the skills bottleneck.
Few years ago I've bought few plots of vineyards and started to make my own wine. I was lucky that many members of my familly is making wine for many years already (like few 100s of years) so I was able to borrow some equipment and get help sometimes.
It is generating some money, but I am in the process of professionalising whole business and that costs HUGE amount of money so I basically invest all of my earnings and will continue to do so for next decade(s).
Being born into winemaking familly was big gift and a curse. Without having some basic infrastructure there is no way I would be able to afford starting. On the other hand it brings complex familly issues when you try to do something different: I am farming organically, I refuse to use any "modern" additives and even stylistically I prefer doing very dry old-school type of wine instead of what they thought is modern off-dry and semi-sweet wine.
I am a corporate drone and not a programmer, but anyways; I sell computer chips on the Craigslist of my home country. Mostly Intel CPUs, genuine and not engineering samples. Wherever eBay can't reach due to import tolls, there is a market. Profits are at around 30% margin. It feels fun and does not feel like work. It has helped me save up to some nice vacations. Going to Japan in the summer. This activity is somewhat inspired by threads such as these on HackerNews.
==> This activity is somewhat inspired by threads such as these on HackerNews.
I am reading all these comments with joy. I picked up options trading as a side gig, it works sometimes, it does not work some time. I am satisfied with it, but reading this thread made me wonder if I should not try something "real".
If there are other similar threads, please do link to them. This Sunday will then be productive :)
A friend of mine used to work at a junkyard. People would bring in old computers all the time and he could buy working parts from the company by the pound (literally). He made a lot on the side selling them online to people who needed spare parts that were no longer in production.
I think side projects and businesses are a great way to learn and have an interesting life, so I am usually doing something outside of work. My friends write plays and do standup which sometimes pays. I used to teach swimming after work because it got me to the gym and I could develop my communication skills.
Currently, I have a hobby map business that generates some money (https://www.wellingtonstravel.com/). Recently I created a matchmaking app for people who travel. It's not making money yet, but I expect it to be able to generate income too (https://www.fairytrail.app/).
I believe it's about finding what interests you first. Money is a nice bonus.
I love the concept of your FairyTrail app. I am trying it out right now but I wish there was a way to continue without facebook for those who don't have a facebook account.
My wife sells women's clothes as part of an MLM. I help her, mostly back office stuff but sometimes I help with shipping and sales.
MLMs (deservedly) have a bad rap. The focus is usually on recruiting rather than selling, and usually involves converting social relationships into business ones.
For us, it's more like being a franchisee. We do $20-25k in sales a month, have two part time assistants to help with shipping and cataloging inventory. We have non trivial spend on marketing and are actively involved in our local chamber of commerce and various networking groups.
My wife otherwise is home with our kids, and she loves it. It's busy, it's a ton of work, but we have fun doing it.
I made enough to take a small hiatus on software work by DJing (200-400 most nights) Some people successfully make it their full time gig.
Essentially you’re sitting at your computer all day, and listening to music while you do it right? so there is plenty of opportunity to find and save interesting (or basic) music.
Combine that with maths and counting (what’s 4+4?) some practice, networking around, and you can land yourself some very well paid nights out, they pay you AND pay for your drinks. Only big downside I’ve experienced is the toll on your health if you regularly stay out drinking all night.
I do business strategy for startups through topographical business maps. It's the best strategy tool out there and helps avoid costly mistakes. It also aides in acquiring funding.
Could you talk a bit more about what services you offer? Do you have more of a consulting relationship or are you offering a service at a set price?
Also, one random question: do you find most of your clients are from the UK? For some reason I've always associated Wardley maps with the UK but I'm not sure if that's actually the case.
No website. Just referrals. Every founder I've worked with will always talk to other people about it and share my contact info. Works great because I cannot do it full time at the moment.
Email in profile if you have context-specific questions.
I run a popular weekly newsletter that makes fun of the tech industry. Think: The Onion meets TechCrunch.
Newsletters can generally charge a much higher CPM than a social media accounts or even podcasts in some cases. You can start making beer money with only a few thousand subscribers.
We’re also thinking of hosting a few live events as well once our audience is large enough.
(P.S. for the curious, the newsletter is called TechLoaf: https://techloaf.io)
Started a CNC machining side business. Always had an interest and found a broke down CNC mill for cheap. Fixed it up and have been doing quick prototype and small runs for locals by referal only. Its fun and more than offsets the cost of the machine.
This is inspirationally depressing. Really makes you realize what a shit human being you are when everyone is doing so many interesting things -- on the side.
Do you have a hobby? Most of my side projects (and if you notice, a lot of the projects here too) stem from a hobby. It's not work if you have fun doing it, and if it's a side project then you can stop whenever it stops being fun.
My core money making project is to learn literate investing . Some good long term investments in liquid, equity bonds can result in upto 18% annualized returns.
I am not very well versed with direct stock investing. The risks are just too great for me.
I dry age meat and sell it. I live in indonesia at the moment and its hard to get a hold of this for a reasonable price so i setup some fridges, bought some special bags for dry aging and dry age about 15 kgs of mean at any one time. After I dry age the meat i can sell it for about 4x the price that i bought it for and it makes a decent amount of additional income. I sell it online and through whatsapp also :)
I run a cookie bakery. Started it about 6.5 years ago. Mostly local delivery, some nationwide shipping as well.
Doesnt make much but covers its own bills with some extra leftover. I've gotten further in my actual career than I thought during the same time so leaving to bake full-time would be large risk.
Mostly, I just really enjoy the direct interaction and happy emails, really lights up my day and gives me a sense of fulfillment.
My wife and I have a YouTube channel on which we are fixing up an old Toyota MR2 [0], we’ve no desire to be full time “YouTubers”, but we enjoy making the videos and get about $70 / from patreon/ads
I follow your YouTube channel! Really enjoy it. I've wanted an MR2 Spyder since I saw one in my university's parking lot, but it's always been metaphorically like a couple who would be great together but were always with someone else when the other was on the market.
Selling custom signs to businesses. I help them design the sign but also have a sign creator on the site that businesses can use for more basic signs. I send the design files off to a supplier who then makes and ships the signs. It averages $20k in sales per month. It is not hands off (fair amount of customer support & design work) but the net profit makes it worth it.
Organizing events is obviously very different than programming and shipping software, but it's nice to create something that programmers enjoy and it's been awesome to meet so many industry folks whose work I really admire.
This is unlikely to be reproducible, but I bought a foreclosed condo in Seattle in 2013, did a few weeks’ worth of work (spread out over a year or so) redoing the kitchen and bathroom, and sold it not quite three years later for $120k more than I paid for it.
I also have a couple of super simple apps in the iTunes Store that earn about an iPad a year worth of money.
This seems very reproducible, or at least many people focus on doing this. Donald Trump is probably the most popular example of someone who got rich buying things at low value and fixing it up for a large profit.
It’s not easily reproducible in Seattle any more. The housing market has flattened over the past year or so. Back before 2018, properties would easily go up 20% a year.
The sampler link from the (?) in the customizing UI is broken.
Have you tracked how many people ordered the sampler and than also ordered a real one after that?
I don't want to bother with the customize UI too much so I think you can do two things:
1. push the sampler as the main tool to find out what fits (so have it as the primary sales target)
2. make it easy to order what you like on a sample.
In general the wizard could be easier by doing:
- a step by step guide
1. choose pattern (only one possible, maybe link to the old UI for "experts")
2. choose distance
3. choose color (maybe go with a nice color picker directly)
4. done or tweak expert settings (with bug UI)
- and always showing roughly original size-zoom and full page
edit: and I agreed shipping, general pricing and payment methods would be great upfront.
And for the paper + cart steps: Keep it consistent, I accidentally skipped to the empty basked instead of putting something in the basket. I'd even make those steps part of the step-by-step guide I suggested instead of the current hierarchy.
Good input. I'm actually going to be adding more products to choose from before entering the designer, so that would be a logical point to have pricing.
i really like this idea, but i am not a fan of the elaborate battle rules in d&d. in fact, i'd like to do roleplay without any fighting at all. just treasure hunting, puzzle solving, etc...
basic setup: there are no monsters, just NPCs that block your path. role the dice to decide who needs to give way. if the player "wins" they get to keep the NPC as a score. if the NPC wins they need to move back as many steps as the NPC roll, and try again when they get there later, or go another way. there can also he other surprises such as treasures or cards that add to your rolls (+1, +2 etc)
the rest can be like any d&d game, but this avoids the whole battle scenarios which is not something i want my kids to grow up with when i don't even like it myself. (when i play online RPGs, i find fighting just a nuisance that prevents me from enjoying the rest of the game)
Wow, after skimming the site, this is a really cool idea! Imaginary play is a great thing for kids but it's a hard sell if kids struggle to "come up with" a story... Giving a little bit of structure is brilliant, and based on your customer reviews, it looks well received.
Landlord, private equity investing, business and real estate project consulting. I take topics I’m curious about and translate the experience and skills learned into revenue.
Cold emails and calls, networking mostly. Get some business cards, hand them out freely and include it as part of your pitch if the audience is a right fit (person or small group of persons). Email in profile if you want to discuss further.
I realized I was always looking for the best pen and I was geeking out about writing instruments so I started a website about pens: https://unsharpen.com/. There is some light programming, but it's mostly data entry.
I write books about programming at www.learn-with.com
Right now it is just a bunch of Angular and related stuff; but I Want to expand to React.
I make ~$200 a month, which is pretty good considering how little I put into promotion. I consider the platform my own personal reason for learning / experimenting with new stuff.
I have the luxury/privilege that my job pays well. I can do side stuff purely for enjoyment. That enabled me to explore different areas (like bee keeping) or explore scial stuff (i.e. social volunteering in a jail) without having customer demands or such.
I created ShutterDeck[1], a system for controlling multi-camera arrays. I designed and built the hardware and the iPhone app, which serves as a remote control for the device. I do basically no advertising or I'd probably sell more. The next batch I order will have the boards pre-assembled for me, which I'm really excited about.
Most of my clients have photo booths, but I do have one researcher using it to try to treat scoliosis in children. I'm actively looking for new markets. It barely brings in enough money to make it worth doing, but the system is essential for some users, and I like doing it.
I make video tutorials about Arduino programming on https://arduino-lessons.com/ and earn some money via the referral program when visitors buy parts via my website.
I'd like to do something constructive, maybe tutoring the local college and high school students, but since people are mentioning index funds: I bought a couple Vanguard funds about 8 years ago and have been maintaining an average return of 10-12% which is almost enough to pay rent. I used some of the returns to help pay the down payment for my condo. Now, my rent won't go up anymore. My mortgage isn't much more than my old rent and less actually then one of my previous places. It's also about double the size and arguably in a better location. If I ever get another job some where else and because of it's location I can rent it out extremely easy.
When I was in Texas, I used to buy Disk drives in bulk through auction from PC manufacturers Compaq and Dell that didn't meet their QC, test these drives and sell the good ones to retail shops, PC repair shops and individuals. I stopped once competition became tougher, bad to good ratio of disk drives increased, and disk drives became cheaper.
In Japan, several people asked me to teach them English. So I teach them English, some pay me in food and drinks. I also figured out that I was good in helping others prepare for standardized exams TOEFL/TOEIC/GMAT/GRE/USMLE so that became my primary side gig.
I never charged money for it, but since I live in Japan and used to teach English for a living, I used to teach English to retired people in the area. I stopped because I don't actually have enough time any more, but it was very rewarding. I'm thinking of starting up again, holding sessions in the pub and charging beer as payment.
Now that I think about it, it's how I got together with my wife. I met her running in a marathon of all things and she wanted to learn English. I said I'd be happy to teach her and after 2 lessons I asked her out on a date :-) I never did teach her English beyond that!
Helping organize small music concerts and festivals and recording local indie bands. Mostly friends or friends of friends.
I've been doing it since I was a teen, before I started programming, and the first significant amount of money I made was after I invested all my savings in a small festival I organized with my friends.
As for recording, it's been a fun ride because equipment go so much better and accessible since I started 15 years ago. For recording, having portable stuff is nice, but affording to pick studios because of the room instead of the equipment was a real game changer.
I was a university student pretty recently. I started a company where I delivered cookies (freshly baked from scratch) on rollerblades to dorm rooms/apartments/houses on and around campus. It was such a fun way to make $12-$16/hour and get exercise.
Not sure what I’m going to do with the site now, but I went all out and built a fully delivery management platform for they side gig. Hit me up if you have ideas.
- I currently make screencasts to teach people the Elixir programming language (https://alchemist.camp)
The revenue on all of these things except for the screencasts is gradually falling to zero. The screecasting revenue has roughly quadrupled from October through March (~6.8)% weekly growth rate), but still not quite up to $1k/month.
I perform data cleansing of excel spreadsheets and sometimes convince them to develop basic CRUD apps to take the place of excel. Depending on the project and the feeling I get about the depth of their budget I charge: per row based on the transformations they need, flat fee if they actually have well defined requirements, per hour for development time if they are convinced of the value in standing up a new web app to handle the process.
That my friend is the secret sauce. My first job out of school was for a staffing company that pimped me out to perform similar projects. Word of mouth mostly, it's very lucrative if you have domain knowledge and can sit for long periods of time. It's not Mechanical Turk style cleansing and I have to take personal responsibility for every row as they mostly just suck up my cleansed data and roll with it, which you can't do with ML cleansed data or off-shored cleansed data. I've been thinking of launching a SaaS product but the transition from trusted consultant to enterprise SaaS is not easy. What do you do?
I do big data stuff mostly. A lot of that involves cleansing. So working with large excel/csv/other tabular data formats is second nature to me. Familiar with many technical tools that I could maybe use as force-multiplier (e.g. serverless SQL processing, OLAP, RDBMS, python pandas, spark), hence my interest since if we relax the condition that every single row is accounted for, my productivity would likely be pretty high
The customers always find the rows that are not accounted for, it's bad form to drop data. We sell high quality data, which you can't claim if you can't account for every single row. You should be careful about delivering an incomplete data-set.
Back in college I started Alphalux, A men’s accessories mostly bracelets business. I was a full time college student and was working at a pharmaceutical company full time. I would custom order bracelets at Alibaba with my logo on it. Would pay wholesale price of $0.75 per bracelet and would sell it for $10-$30 dollars on Etsy and my website. It was fun while it lasted. I was making $3-4K a month until dropshipers ruined the market.
Not OP, but I've done some work in the space. The market is just saturated now. It takes such little effort to start a dropshipping "business" that unless you have a really unique angle or spend absurd amounts on marketing, you'll probably make somewhere in the range of peanuts to beer money.
Even if you do find a successful niche market, it won't take long for a low budget clone to jump in, which invalidates a lot of the up front work in marketing and product validation.
I had a coworker who literally did a rant, slammed the door of the conference room and quit. He was earning some side money playing online poker then made a go of it full time. His conclusion: This is a lot less fun when it's your sole source of income.
Yeah, even if you are good enough to make a decent wage, it can be boom or bust. On a long enough timeline, there will be times you say, make a bet with 4 aces but get beat by a straight flush[1]
Also, most poker players are American - so they're going to need to cover health insurance.
Maybe when I retire I'll give it a go, but I don't think it's practical to envision retiring early to play poker unless you amassed enough savings you could live without the poker income.
A few things. First, I play in an Irish wedding band (it’s insane how much people pay for wedding bands...and since they’re Irish weddings we usually all end up being fed shots throughout the night (this was more fun when I was in my twenties, now I stick with a beer or two so that I’m still standing (well, sitting, I’m a drummer) at the end of the night). Secondly I do quite a bit of teaching / mentoring. It’s easier in nyc than in other places because of how many boot camps there are here but companies pay quite a bit for a 6-10 pm twice a week gig. Plus at my job I’m primarily working with php and vanilla js so this helps me keep my react / insert framework or library here skills sharp. I argue that this is still outside the field because teaching beginning web dev is to actually working as a programmer as apples are to oranges. That last sentence was super bungled but I think the point comes across.
I started creating apps when the first store was opened. It makes almost 10 m times more than my normal job (team lead, developer). Still I have no desire to quit my day job. If I manage to keep this going for another 5 years I will reach a point where I have enough money to live my life without any financial issues.
I have been working as a male escort for women (gigolo). Seriously. It works quite fine. Just created my website and females contact me. I enjoy my work and also earn some side-project extra money. https://www.guysinisrael.com
I licensed my house as a winery, and run a hard cider company with my girlfriend. We sell to some stores in our area, and do our local Farmer's Market during the summer.
It's been very satisfying making and selling a physical product.
The profitability part isn't quite there yet. But we're working on that.
There was a lot of research that was done, but we were able to get into cans with a few key components.
We use a piece of home brewing equipment right now to fill our cans and bottles, the beer gun [1]. The beer gun allows us to purge our cans/bottles with CO2 (oxygen is bad for alcohol), and then fill them from the bottom to reduce foam.
I was able to find a local supplier, that wraps cans in plastic. So rather than printing them, they shrink wrap our label on to them. They're a bit more expensive than printed cans (if I recall 34¢ sleeved vs 19¢ printed). This allows us to order a single pallet at a time, decreasing our storage needs
The last key was the can seamer[2]. I found this early on, and it's been a great little work horse for us. We've put over 6,000 cans through it, and it's been one of the best purchases we've made.
Bottles are the easy one, we just use the beer gun [1] and then a manual capper to seal them.
Happy to answer any other questions! It's been a fun ride trying to figure out how to "mass produce" something on a smaller scale :)
For a while I worked with a friend "reconditioning" laptops and selling them on Ebay (lots of just-out-of-warranty Dells and Thinkpads from local companies. Easy to work on: upgrade RAM, swap HDD for cheap SSD, replace broken keyboards, etc.) We could sell them for a nice profit with very little work. I wouldn't want to do this work on many "modern" laptops since many parts are not (easily) user replaceable these days.
Most passive income just comes from Index Funds/miscellaneous investments. But I don't really see it as income since it all stays invested/just grows until I retire some day. Still trying to find the right app/site/tool to build to bring in real passive income from something I have built.
Not necessarily outside of programming, but I used to do web pages for wineries in Oregon when it wasn't so obvious for a business to have a website. I'd always do it for barter, never cash. We had a pretty nice wine cellar back then.
My winrate online is only a couple dollars an hour. I don't play live very often so I don't have the sample size to say what my winrate would be, but I'd guess $10-20/hr. So, ultimately, not too much money. But if I keep improving, my winrate should keep going up.
It also makes a lot of sense because I'm developing a poker app - https://premiumpokertools.com/. So I guess it is sort of tied into programming/CS for me in a way.
I buy and fix up mid century modern and Bauhaus furniture and either sell it online or to local stores as a “picker” it’s a fun hobby and can score me an extra 800-1000/month in profit.
I DJ in nightclubs at the weekends, just Friday and Saturday nights but manage to make about 40-50% of my full-time salary for say 8-10 hrs/week.
Started it in University as a hobby, and just built it up from there. 20 years later, still doing it (although never once imagined I still would be)
Extremely thankful for it, has helped to weather the storms a few times between job changes and has provided me and my family with a few extra little luxuries that we may not have otherwise been able to afford!
I make things out of wood with a laser cutter and sell them on etsy. Mainly things from an MMO I play but also other games and tv shows. So far it covers the cost of materials and laser time. It won't ever comes close to my day job in terms of income (I did the math) but it's interesting as a side thing that's not engineering. I optimize the process and marketing (since I find that interesting) but don't stress over income from it.
At first it was just a project of passion, but years later and a not insignificant investment in gear, software, and other equipment has left me with a side business that nets a tidy bit of income.
It’s also something that I adore doing, and hence a massive plus. I get to mix and master a whole variety of music, from classical to ambient, to EDM, and it’s always a pleasure to work with artists whether they’re new to it all or seasoned professionals.
Used to teach music part-time (guitar, theory, composition, recording, production, everything), ended up working +20hr every week teaching only + full-time job. Dialled it down but I do sometimes teach in small groups via Skype.
Now I do a bit of consulting, helping bands with production, composition and chops in general. The plan is to get back to teaching but only through apps.
I run a do it yourself web site builder for clients that need simple website and e-commerce.
I sell payment processing services for First Data
I run a while label payment gateway
I build custom apps for payment terminals.
I have a rental property.
I'd say I make roughly 2k a month with out really having to do any work. But Payment processing with in the next six month could generate me around 6k/m. I have some big deals in the pipeline.
I made $6000 in 2018 selling my Ruby book online. It was in my native language, but I'm translating it into English. About half of the book has been translated.
I help founders hire technical staff, or find co-founders.
I’m not a recruiter - I’m a CTO who’s done a lot of hiring myself, and it’s more about how to understand who you need and how to talk to them.
(I’m currently working on some free resources/workshops on the topic to build my pipeline, so if the above sounds useful to you then get in touch - my email is in my profile)
I started a conference (Reactathon.com) as one of the various channels of income I had (entrepreneur, not FTE). One of my sponsors liked it so much that they asked me to run theirs. Now their conference has expanded to 3x per year in 3 cities, and I’m still helping to run it. And I now consider myself a full time conference consultant.
Restoring and fixing vintage computers then reselling them on eBay. I am just doing that for fun during weekends and I never expected to be a profitable business. It is very satisfying to buy those old, rusted, dusty, yellowed broken machines and restore them so people can relive the 80s or 90s hay days of the family computers.
I’m a physician (epileptologist)... Started out comp sci and made the switch to medicine to help people. Currently doing programming/academic medicine roughly 50/50; the former has yet to provide any significant money or grants, but it’s still enjoyable and comes in handy from time to time for research endeavors.
I realise that this is not going to make me popular on HN. However, apart from the job, I have the best side-business ─ being idle, sleeping a lot and generally acting like a bum; all the things that make me happy are hobbies and I have never had any real intentions to monetise them.
Thanks for the suggestion, but it is not a novel concept. It takes some re-configuration or leap of faith, to accept it as a personal development plan.
I used to own/run a hot sauce biz. I did quite a bit of sales, but it started to grow to the point where it was eating into all my spare time, and quitting my day job to pursue it full-time wouldn't have been equitably profitable for many many years. So I ended up dropping it.
Did you try raising prices to lower demand? I haven't sold anything before so I don't have any idea what I'm talking about. I'm just asking since I'm curious.
I get about 1/6 of my yearly salary, a year, doing software job as an consultant for my ex work place. They did not replace me when I abruptly quit in 2017, giving them 3 months of notice. They have been a steady source of income since. I adjust my price yearly adding inflation + 2%
I've long been a professional fine artist and illustrator. As side gigs go, it has the added benefit of being a cathartic shift from tech-land. I work in a studio space where none of the artists other than myself day-gig in tech. It's a good cache-flush for the soul.
I’m a hypnotist. Most of my clients are through word-of-mouth referrals, although I do have a website, as well. It’s an unusual skill that I developed over many years, and I enjoy being able to help people. It’s a fun conversation topic at parties, as well. :)
I'm going through some really tough times and I'm very interested in things that can help me change my behavior. How would you describe what hypnosis does to a person to help them overcome these things?
I’d also be happy to chat more about this one on one, if you’d like. No obligation to actually schedule a session; I don’t charge for chatting and answering questions. :) Shoot me an email: david@quietstrengthhypnosis.com
I recently launched https://www.silverwoodbrokers.com/
We represent buyers in residential real estate purchases in NYC and rebate them part of our commission.
I designed and built quality (high-brightness, high-CRI) ceiling light. Not very profitable, but it was very fun and refresing to negotiate with aluminum profile manufacturers, paint shops, etc. And real-world customers, outside of IT echo chamber.
Sports photography. Can make a decent amount of money shooting high school sports, or local races. I think its a great hobby that complements programming as you can really nerd out about digital cameras and how they work, as well as photo editing.
Well this isn't totally outside programming but you can tutor programming on wyzant.com for some good hourly rates. Even cool if you like teaching what you do, plus you'll probably not be teaching stuff as complex as your daily hustle :)
I guide sea kayaking expeditions and provide instruction for a local outfitter. It pays for itself, as kayak gear is not cheap, and forces me to exercise my social skills. My "day job" is solo remote founding engineer for a RegTech SaaS.
I translate magic books (with a speciality on old books that I find for my editor).
Like others in this thread, it started as a hobby and evolved as I made contacts. It feels quitte good to know that a hobby is now earning me more money that I spend in it.
I make heirloom yogurt from organic milk from a local dairy farmer, currently about 50 litres a week & increasing fast. Turns out real yogurt is real popular these days. Doesn't exactly pay the bills yet, but it's delicious!
For 30 years it was playing music. Doesn't pay well - it was basically my food budget. I kept at it for 9 years anyway after I retired as a programmer. Some of the gigs were fun, and most of my friends are musicians.
I build furniture. I don't make much - honestly, I just do maybe 1 paid project per year. I only use handtools (mostly due to shop constraints) Maybe someday I'll be able to do more with it.
I used to buy old furniture, refurbish it and resell it on craigslist. I made generally about $20 - $30 an hour. I also kept things for myself sometimes and slowly replaced different furniture items with nicer and nicer items. One year, I had 4 different coffee tables in succession. I found a cool coffee table and kept it, then I found a cooler one weeks later so I kept that and sold my previous one. Repeat that 3 times.
I'd mostly troll a certain thrift shop for antique-ish and mid-century items. It doesn't take long perusing Pinterest and design blogs to get a bit of an eye for what people want to consider collectible. Plus often if you look at something and squint, you an see if shaping it up will make it into something people want. I occasionally hit some garage sales, estate sales were too high priced and competitive. Sometime going an hour before they closed, they would drop the prices super low. %75 off would be better for them for them than not selling AND having to move it to get rid of it. Not always though.
I mostly just used Old English oil or Minwax furniture wax on items. It wasn't unusual for me to buy a $20 dresser, spend an hour giving it a cleaning (with Windex or other dollar store cleaners) and an oiling and sell it for $80 - $125.
I would do some small carpentry repairs on items, usually broken drawers, loose legs and occasionally a crack in the piece that was on a non-essential or non-structural area. You learn to avoid the repairs that are time consuming, difficult to get right or especially those--this is hard to describe--that will either be super easy or will fail no matter what you try with no in between. I avoided painting things, too time consuming plus I hate covering good wood. If anything is missing a knob or matching decorative hardware--it was an instant "no". You'll never find one that matches just right without spending a ton of time--if at all--and if you replace them all, it's expensive. Plus new knobs usually look weird on an antique and ruin the aesthetic of a mid century item.
I have had dozens of people tell me that I am a magician because I could take an old dried out looking item and bring the finish back. Honestly, it was the oils and the wood itself. I's take a piece like a dresser, table or chair, and after cleaning it for 5 - 15 minutes, just spend another 20 wiping the oil on. You just go over every bit over and over to rub the oil in well and also that takes the excess off. Give it a 2 minute wipe down an hour later if you can, using the same rag but without adding oil. (sometimes the wood soaks the oil into itself, but then it's wet and starts to expend. Then the oil gets pushed back out and sits on the surface. This step gets rid of that.) Give it a super light coat of oil the next day, looking for areas you missed or that soaked up more or less oil than others. This takes maybe 5 minutes.
Dressers were my staple. Everyone has at least one dresser, people use them in other rooms for storage or decor. Chairs were okay deeding and also would sell in even number better. Coffee tables, especially mid century items went easily also. Headboards and foot-boards I would buy if they were exceptional in appearance or super, super cheap. With those, any physical repair needed would also deem them a "no".
All my supplies fit in a dollar store plastic basket that was about 14"x14"x12". A few bottles of surface cleaner, oil in dark medium and light and a can of wax. Then a bunch of rags, use the same rag for the oils, one for each color. and one for wax only. Some steel wool for scuffs or hard stains, a small hammer, a few screw drivers and a ton of different sized screws and nails, almost all in the smaller than average to tiny varieties. I very occasionally used a drill and do have a couple long bar clamps for gluing.
The skill needed to bring a finish back is minimal. I'd say if you can clean a bathroom well or polish a chrome bumper, you can make a $10 thrift store item look like a $150 one. Just rub the stuff on and it does the work. People will call you an artist and not realize they could do the same.
I sold on craigslist and usually the people came by in the evenings when I was just making dinner or getting stuff ready for the next day anyway. I have a covered porch so they'd never come into my house, I have a large dog with a scary bark, plus I had a few hidden aces up my sleeve in case anyone got cagey. No one ever did. Craigslist can be a gutter of society but the people wanted what I sold were about 20 somethings, soccer moms, "artsy neighborhood dwellers" of varying demographics or empty nesters. I had a 4 text limit and if someone texted me more times than that, I'd do my best not to arrange to meet with them. That sounds like a dick move, they just want to know about the item, right? But like clockwork, those were the people who would no-show, super low-ball me once they got here or reschedule 20 minutes before they were due. People got one strike and they were out.
The thrift store I went to to was near where I would run errands and so I would stop in there for 5 minutes every time I went to get groceries or whatever. I made one special trip a week on Saturday mornings, right when they opened. I was there 1 - 4 times a week, usually about 3. So it did not take much time out of my day or routine to get stuff. It came to a close because the one thrift store I used to get stuff from really fell off in their selection. In the Pinterest craze, more people started keeping things and "Up-cycling" them themselves. My store also lost a deal with some organization and suffered a drop in items. They also used to make regular pick-ups in areas and I think they just saturated it an sort of squeezed the sponge dry.
I have a CNC Laser and do stuff for friends and schools in the area I live. Nothing like a real business, but help to free my mind from my daily work, and I make ~USD 300 per month.
I teach mindfulness and breathwork, guide somatically-based self exploration using the Hakomi method, and provide healing touch and bodywork for clients in my private practice.
Photography in the early 2000s. Made enough to level up my gear multiple times over. Renovated houses from 03-07. But now my money making side projects are programming-based.
I just started but I'm trying to get into the bug bounty / hunting field. I spent 40 bucks on a web application hacking book so I'm currently in the negative.
I sell filk CDs and craft items at SF&F conventions. It feeds my need to create and share enjoyment with others. My spouse does all the computer stuff for it.
Group fitness instructor: several different formats, certified through Les Mills. I teach 4 mornings per week, and it works out to about USD $7000 before taxes.
TL;DR: not making money yet, but enjoying stop motion animation of marble track construction.
Back in the day, my brother and I would use Legos to build tracks for marbles, using roof pieces as ramps. Eventually I started making marble tracks out of popsicle sticks. Over a period of some years, I built a track 2+ feet (70cm) tall with lots of tracks intertwining each other all the way down.
After moving and leaving that old track behind, I made Marble Track 2 over an eight-month period in my free time at work.
I posted the finished track on YouTube[1] and comments fell into 2 categories.
Trolls: U suck, it's garbage, get a gf, etc.
Fans: U rule, it's amazing, make a tutorial, etc.
Me: "Make a tutorial? about how to make a marble track?? hmmmm that gives me an idea!"
So far, I have about 11 minutes[2] worth of (silent) video of little pipe cleaner characters placing wooden pieces onto a stage. They are answering the question "how do you make a marble track?"
The project has its own website[3], which reinforces the story that the characters are building the track.
(fake spoiler)
However, it's actually me behind the scenes moving the characters to make the movie in which they build the track!
300+ hours of livestream[4] answer the question "how do you make a stop motion movie which answers the question of how to make a marble track?"
The livestreams are long, dull, often quiet, interspersed with a few ramblings that go through my head.
So, back on track (ahem) for this thread, I believe there are people who'd be interested in this project, and eventually we will figure out how it can be monetized. I am just enjoying the creation process and open to possibilities.
I’ve always thought about starting a side business doing that. I love making cocktails and want to practice and actually serve people. How do you do it? Do you have a website?
I just have a couple of contract jobs on the side. Nothing particularly interesting. One is software for a custom physical security system (involves cameras, RFID readers, and various sensors), and the other is for an embedded system that is to be used for environmental monitoring and control in a greenhouse (monitors things like soil moisture, CO2, temperature, and so forth).
Hey I saw this here last week and just played through the whole lot with my partner tonight. We’re looking forward to you’re next update if you are working on more.
No site, but I also misread the title of the post: I make no money doing it. It is just a hobby. I make kayaks and canoes. Been doing it for almost a decade, I make about one a year.
I travel a lot, and outside of the United States, countries have import taxes, especially on luxury goods. In some countries and iPhone Xs will cost $800 more than in the USA.
I have to visit the USA about 8 times per year, so every time I do I buy 10 phones in a state with no sales tax (usually Oregon) and make about $5k in profit selling locally (which does eat up a ton of time, but not $5k worth).
Attempting to make money making side projects and instead just expensing servers and subcontractors and getting the tax refund from everything my employer withheld by April
It probably is the same as programmer / computer field MALE and FEMALE ratio. I doubt anyone here would reject the idea having 50% of females typing every day as much as males do.
I am doing IT and programming at the same time, I don't see a single girl doing IT or programming at the companies I work with (SMBs) doing anything close to hackernews material things other than graphic design or social marketing.
The storefront is through ShapeWays[1] and I use iFixit[2],[3] to drive the traffic. It passively makes enough to cover my own coffee needs forever. I spend about 20 minutes per month fielding questions. This all happened because my grinder failed and I could not get parts.
[1] https://www.shapeways.com/product/NASLAGCCP/breville-coffee-...
[2] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/BCG800XL+Grinder+Jamming+due+to...
[3] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/BCG600SIL+Dose+Control+Pro+Coff...