
Ask HN: How can a person with web dev skills make $500-$1000 per month? - vshan
Hey all,<p>I am a college freshman and my summer break (80 days) is coming up in a few days. Wanted to do something productive. (Couldn&#x27;t get an internship).<p>I have the prerequisite HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;JS + one back end lang. (Ruby + RoR) skills.<p>Also since I&#x27;ve got 80 days of free time, would it be better to invest this time in, say, getting a high score on TopCoder?
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patio11
Getting a high score on TopCoder does not get you any closer to landing a
consulting client. Instead, you should contact people who have budget and
business problems, and convince them that giving you money solves business
problems. This will easily sail over $500 to $1k per month. (I don't know what
I'd charge in your position, but I'd be opening with "more than you can even
conceive of asking for." Wait until you get "NO WAY" from 5 people before you
walk down rates. I predict the present economy is unable to count to five.)

This assumes that your level of Rails skill is sufficient to solve business
problems, but out of the universe of all possible problems, many of them are
tractable for the same level of skill as required to successfully complete the
Rails Build A Blog In 15 Minutes tutorial.

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vshan
Thank you Mr. McKenzie for taking out some of your time to reply to my post,
it is much appreciated, as are all your helpful posts on your blog.

I should have provided a bit more context, I'm from India and I was
specifically looking to earn in dollars. $8000/year is akin to coasting here,
I don't think I'd meet any local clients who'd pay anything near $500 for a
gig. Would it be possible for me to get American clients just through email?
What do you think about passive income, say, from selling WordPress themes on
themeforest, or something similar?

I mentioned TopCoder because I wanted to get better with algorithms/ds,
considering the present reality of code-on-whiteboard sort of interviews for a
stable job in the major software companies.

Hopefully my Rails skill is sufficient :-)

(Sorry for any grammatical mistakes, English is not my primary language.)

~~~
mechanical_fish
You certainly can get clients through email, and I can think of no more
valuable skill you could practice than the art of composing a really good
email to a consulting customer who lives twelve time zones away. It is not
especially difficult to earn $500 per _day_ with that skill, plus the skills
you already have. Algorithms, shmalgorithms.

Your English looks flawless to me, by the way, so don't sell yourself short:
you can learn to write like a pro, you may already be there, and _describing
what you have done and what you are going to do in written English prose_ is
where the money is.

Are you actually a Wordpress themer? Learn just that much PHP and you can get
all kinds of little gigs, doing work like customizing themes for people's
Wordpress or Drupal sites. The advantage of learning a package, like a CMS, is
that they lend themselves to little jobs, because most of their code is not
customized and oftentimes the custom code is, shall we say, easy to improve.
And if you are looking to fill time for a few months - and practice those
vital pitching and customer-communication skills - little jobs might be nice.

Incidentally, at some point you might really want to practice whiteboard
interviews, but if I were to do that I would specifically practice whiteboard
interviews, not TopCoder or algorithms. Whiteboard interviews are a specific
skill all their own. That skill is at least as much about being able to think
out loud as it is about what you are actually thinking about. Knowing more
algorithms might not help. I have found it more valuable to be able to
implement bubble sort while telling jokes about bubble sort than to know what
quicksort is.

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leadjoint
Get a database of small web dev agencies (companies that have around 2-3
people at the most) and offer subcontracting position. You are likely to get
at least one or two positive responses if you write to hundred such companies.
That should easily help you sail over $500 a month.

~~~
vshan
Thank you for your advice. Do you think this would work if I contacted small
American firms through Email? I'm from India, and $500 is a lot of money here,
I doubt I'd find many companies willing to spend that much.

~~~
leadjoint
Of course it does. Charge for the value your provide and if you are good
enough, firms don't hesitate.

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enigami
Hi vshan, Incidentally, I am looking forward to build a Webapp and exploring
the options. Let me know if you are interested to take up the project, we
shall discuss more (please share your email id)

~~~
vshan
Hi enigami, this sounds very interesting. My email is
vinaybhat001_at_gmail_dot_com.

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quaffapint
Get a github account, write some code and put it up there. Create a blog and
share what you're coding. Then when you contact agencies you can point them to
a representative of your work.

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angersock
Go do day labor or work construction or be a barback or something--Craigslist
has gigs as well. Easier, and you'll meet people.

~~~
vshan
I'm from India, and construction pays about 50 Rupees a day-- about a dollar.
I was thinking more along the lines of a SaaS business or perhaps, freelancing
on Odesk or something similar. Thank you for replying to my post.

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BorisMelnik
Word of mouth is the best way to start, and how I started. Honestly, Facebook
Groups and local pages are awesome for this. Just post a casual ad with your
email address. That should bringing you in enough jobs to easily make that
amount of money.

Just out of curiosity, where are you located?

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mod
He said elsewhere he's in India.

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seekingcharlie
Probably not a popular answer amongst HN, but Wordpress.

