

Ask HN: How to make very small amounts of money ($500ish) working remotely? - canbrianExp

I would describe myself as a pretty okay software developer. I&#x27;m definitely competent, I&#x27;m passionate, but I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m good enough to land a 80k job in SF at the moment.<p>What I would like to do is make a very small amount of money ($500ish a month) programming on the side that would support the side projects I want to run.<p>What do you think would be the best way to make that kind of money reliably and with as little time investment as possible?
======
_pius
You should be able to charge $100/hr for your services as a software
consultant.

My advice would be to plan to spend 15 hours a month (5 hours of research on
consulting practices, 5 hours of actively pursuing leads, and 5 hours of
billable work) on this. Over time you should be able to ratchet down
everything but the billable work.

Patio11, in particular, has written quite a bit about this sort of thing. I
highly recommend checking these articles out:

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-
pro...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/)
[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/17/ramit-sethi-and-
patrick-...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/17/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-
mckenzie-on-getting-your-first-consulting-client/)

~~~
sdegutis
I'm not the OP, but I've always wondered just how you find these kind of small
contracting jobs, especially when you work remotely. I hope these articles
mention that.

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patio11
If you can program your way out of a paper bag, you're good enough to land an
80k job in SF at the moment. People whose entire programming careers are
measured in weeks are hireable in the current environment, for at least some
engineering roles, at at least some companies.

~~~
canbrianExp
Tell me where to apply for a job that will hire a competent programmer for 80k
and I'll split my income with you if I get a job in a month.

~~~
patio11
Approximately every company in the Valley which has 10+ engineers is currently
hiring more engineers. Do you need an introduction? Email me with anything
that demonstrates programming ability. I'll recommend a few folks to talk to.

~~~
canbrianExp
They may be hiring, but they're not getting back to me. I've applied to yahoo,
google, twitter, mozilla, facebook as well as 30 smaller companies. Some
aren't hiring people unless they have many years behind a specific skill set
(Twitter), others haven't gotten back to me or rejected my application for
different reasons (Didn't go to prestigious enough school, haven't worked
anywhere with 1 million users, they wanted to hire a friend instead, etc etc.)

I think there's this veneer of can do optimism that pervades the valley. I
honestly wouldn't be here if I didn't buy into it. But I kind of want to buy
out of it at this point.

~~~
travisby
I second the idea to add your email to your profile. I have an email I'd like
to send you.

~~~
canbrianExp
I added it to my profile. (Its my spam email but I'll go through it the next
week.)

------
pw
Start by putting your email address in your HN profile. There's plenty of
people here that might have projects for you.

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jackgolding
Hey mate,

This is not reliable, might be low if you are on a 6 figure incom and it might
not be good where you live (I live in Aus) but try look up research
panel/focus group recruiters in your city - I work in Market Research and we
generally pay $50-100 per hour, online surveys through these groups can be
good too (~$50-60 per hour) (A LOT better than doing them through online based
agencies.)

For those in Perth, Western Australia and interested we use ResearchPanel and
West Coast Field Services.

Some food for thought anyway!

~~~
sycren
Can you give me an example of a company/organisation that you work for so I
can look for something similar.

------
jordsmi
I'm not really sure how good the money is, but I have a friend who recently
became an 'expert' on airpair. He said he likes it so far

www.airpair.com

------
stevekemp
I'm a system administrator, and I've generally found that local people seem to
remember me fondly and offer me work - whether it is tuning nginx, setting up
a small cluster, or similar.

Actually finding remote people to hire me for longer jobs is hard though, so
unless I receive contact out of the blue I've more or less given up looking
for it.

(I do keep pondering the value of being a "Remote Sysadmin", but I receive
conflicting feedback:
[http://blog.steve.org.uk/it_is_unfortunate_that_many_compani...](http://blog.steve.org.uk/it_is_unfortunate_that_many_companies_need_the_same_sysadmin_jobs_carried_out.html)
)

------
shayonj
Hey there,

We are actually working on a solution that might be useful to you. That said,
feel free to check out [http://ladr.io](http://ladr.io). We are hoping to
launch a beta/prototype in the coming 2 weeks.

------
NameNickHN
1\. Step: Create a software and sell it (or give it away for free).

2\. Step: Offer to create add-ons for that software.

It has been working fine for me for a couple of years now. The software is B2B
and the customers are mostly small businesses. I get a couple of feature
requests per week from those existing customers. And not only convert those
requests quite often to new projects, I also get to offer the add-ons to other
customers. That's always part of the agreement.

The costs of the add-ons have been in the range from $250 to $2000.

~~~
js7
What type of software can I sell to a company? Seriously, I just don't know
what to build.

------
sdegutis
Another option is to write little apps, maybe for iOS or Android, and sell
them on their respective stores. It probably won't be a significant source of
income (it never was for me, so I gave up on it) but who knows, it could go
viral.

~~~
js7
What apps did you make?

~~~
sdegutis
The ones I sold:

\- AppGrid, a simple GUI-configured window manager for OS X 10.7+, predecessor
to Zephyros

\- DeskLabels, lets you put labels on your desktop so you can label groups of
icons

\- Mail Ping, pretty much a clone of Gmail Notifier, but works with multiple
gmail accounts

\- LoginControl, lets you reorder your login items in Mac OS X 10.5

\- Docks, an Mac OS X 10.5 app that let you swap out the apps/documents in
your dock quickly (featured in MacWorld magazine a few years ago, leading to
the only month I had any real sales)

\- TunesBar, showing your iTunes song in your menu bar; now integrated into
Bahamut[1]

\- QuickApps, icon in your menu-bar that gave you quick mouse-based access to
all your apps

\- QuickTimer, a simple microwave-style timer for your desktop

\- TiltRecall, an iPhone OS 3 simon-clone based on tilting your iPhone

(I'm probably forgetting a few.)

I've since open-sourced many of these apps. The repo[2] was forked a lot, and
then I deleted my own repo.

[1]:
[https://github.com/sdegutis/bahamut](https://github.com/sdegutis/bahamut)

[2]:
[https://github.com/fuseelements/grs](https://github.com/fuseelements/grs)

