

Ask HN: Income on the Side?  - dryicerx

What do you guys do for income on the side?<p>I am devoting my entire time working on a startup (bootstrapped so no income yet), and completely living off savings, I am sure a few others here have done the same.<p>I'll start. I usually aim at very low time commitment tasks.<p><pre><code>  Photo shoots for people (just with a simple dSLR)
  Fix Computers/Networks and IT guys for local businesses.
</code></pre>
Share your ways, helping your fellow HNers ease their bank drain.
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caffeine
Grad school. They pay your rent for a few years, and you just kind of do
whatever you'd be doing anyway. It's great.

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pxlpshr
iPhone apps and consulting work.

From a boot-strappers perspective, I had hoped for more sustainability from
iphone sales, but we make far more building apps for other people (for cold-
hard cash) than we do from our product sales. Nevertheless, it's a nice global
gumball machine that we're participating in. Hopefully AppStore makes some
much-needed changes in the near future.

Animosity aside, I'm still very bull about the mobile market. You can build it
and put it out there for nothing.

Lastly, MEANINGFUL income on the side == full time job. Sorry to break it to
you but there are no shortcuts outside of luck (or perseverance).

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cperciva
I occasionally do FreeBSD / security / cryptography / algorithms consulting;
it doesn't make much money, but I find that it's worthwhile just for the sake
of helping keep me aware of what's going on in the world around me (if I'm
interested in something and not too busy, I'll normally offer to spend an hour
or two listening to people and throwing out ideas for free).

It's not really about easing the bank drain, though -- I take consulting work
when it comes up, but I don't chase after it.

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PStamatiou
I write articles (about various tech) on my blog, albeit my startup has
definitely decreased my rate. Used to post stuff everyday, now its more along
the lines of every 3-6 days, but with much more substantial articles.
Obviously, I have some ads on there. Pays the rent, utilities and most of my
health insurance.

Supposed to be doing consulting for a local ISP for 5-10 hours per week sooner
or later, just waiting on their CTO to get back to me.

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woodsier
So you're saying a decent article on your own blog posted twice a week is
enough to pay utilities and rent + some insurance? That's pretty impressive,
to me at least.

How do you monetise your blog? Just through ads? What kind of ads?

I've been thinking about doing something interesting to this, so it interests
me. Would you mind linking to your blog?

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jamiequint
Its in his profile: <http://paulstamatiou.com>

Pretty well known and according to Compete.com seeing about 55k uniques/month,
thats quite a bit.

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PStamatiou
hey jamie!

Get about 100k-120k/mon uniques with my tracking
(<http://pstam.com/i/ac2e01d23b0c4e03ba265bb271c03ab0.png>), but its a far cry
from when my blog was in its prime and would get 300-500k views/month. I've
always wondering what I could make if I did that full-time...

as for "How do you monetise your blog? Just through ads? What kind of ads?"

I have a few streams, but I am far from whoring my blog out with ads so my $'s
are conservative. Mainly I have an SEM firm that sells ad space on my site,
affiliate stuff for my usenet host and affiliate stuff for the theme my blog
is based on. Everything is relevant and tech related.. no random adsense.

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redorb
design a few websites and help local business's get found on the web - more
"best practices" that others are selling under the name SEO - which is
starting to make me feel dirty.

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csomar
1- Write articles it's simple, but gives a great revenue

2- google adsense from sites/blogs i built/build/will build

3- Twitter; a new income, advertising/selling accounts/ and other tricks

That's it, i live with my family so i don't really need that much money

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dryicerx
Selling accounts as in those with a large user following?

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csomar
yes, when the twitter bubble just began it was a very profitable business

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ilitirit
I just finished my first bit of private consultation work. Basically I told
the guy I'd do a website prototype free of charge, and if he's happy I'd
continue with the "real" work. He was so happy with the prototype has wanted
to use it in his production environment. After that he needed a few changes
and enhancements and I think he's getting ready to demo it to his business
partners as I type this.

Post-mortem:

No matter how simple the task seems it's usually more work than you
anticipate.

Stick to the requirements. I spent about 40% of my time implementing nice-to-
haves that noone would probably use anyway.

Proper documentation is paramount

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cliffdickerson
This strikes me as slightly funny/ironic. As a sysadmin/IT person I do small
programing jobs for side cash. :) When possible I try not to contribute
spaghetti into the wild.

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timwiseman
I write articles about SQL Server. The pay is minimal but the practice writing
and solidifying what I think I know is far more valuable to me than the
income.

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pclark
who do you write for?

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timwiseman
Mostly <http://www.sqlservercentral.com>

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mburnett
Freelance web dev. Might be easier if I had a programmer to team up with,
could get better sized projects and focus on what I do best.

~~~
akamaka
Lots of web programmers here you could team up with.

If you mention what city you're in, you might find someone who's interested in
working with you.

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quizbiz

       - adsense
       - istockphoto & shutterstock
       - freelance  web design / consulting

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secos
I also do basic IT work, but try to keep more to development oriented work.
So, small-medium projects are my ideal.

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codeodor
Prior to the summer, I've been working part time at the local university
bioinformatics lab. It's been incredibly fun and full of learning, and time
consuming.

I intend to continue in September.

Other than that, I keep starting personal projects and failing to finish them.

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nibrahim
Freelance web development (not much) and corporate training (might sometimes
make more than my day job). This is in India where service companies abound
and they have high training budgets.

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rodyancy
I write contacts for businesses, file trademarks and copyrights, and an
occasional probate. Unfortunately, the law degree doesn't help the day to day
start-up too much.

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quellhorst
I do Ruby On Rails and internet marketing/seo on the side.

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akamaka
Freelance sysadmin and web development work brings in a bit of money. I've
never gone out and looked for this type of work, but I've gotten to know a
handful of good clients over the years.

I do the work more because I like them than for the money, and I'd still help
them out if I was rich enough not to work, but getting work from them has
really helped when money is tight.

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jim_lawless
I sell a few command-line utilities for Windows ( MailSend, MailGrab, CMD2EXE,
and ScreenKap ).

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ssanders82
How do you promote these?

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jim_lawless
I don't do much promotion. I used to visit some appropriate Usenet groups ( 10
years ago ) and would announce new versions and such on groups such as
alt.msdos.batch.nt. Before the dot-com bubble burst, I used to get a lot of
traffic from the good shareware sites out there.

