

Ask HN: What's the easiest money you've made? - leejw00t354

Some people make a lot of money from a very small amount of work. Maybe by taking advantage of a market trend or just getting lucky.
I'm sure plenty of people on here have done just that and I'd be really interested in hearing your stories.
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hodder
Arbitraging Blockbuster Video. At one location they were selling DVDs due to
bankruptcy. At another location they were buying DVDs for more money. No limit
on size.

What does that say about Blockbuster management?

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Donito
Easiest: Back when I was in school and not many had internet, and even fewer
had a 2x CD Burner, I'd create playlist for people at school. They give me a
paper with ~10songs, download them, burn them, sell the disk. -_-

Fastest: Invested ~10k in Apple stock during afterhours before they froze
trading before announcing their earnings. 30minutes later, sold those with an
8% ROI. 800$ (-commission/tax) in 30minutes.

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codyguy
"easy" for one person might be another's nightmare. Remember Tyson's
knockouts? A few million dollars for less than a minute in the ring!!! Sounds
so easy and lucrative, doesn't it? However, I'm all ears for biz models that
are repeatable and "easy" in today's environment.

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CrossWired
Built a billing system for an employer, they let me go on Friday, hired me as
a consultant on Monday for a recurring $1000 a month to maintain said system.
Program ran for 27 months. Spent more time on billing (5 mins each month) than
I ever did on any maintenance.

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jnorthrop
In 1994-1995 I used to charge $180 to put a "contact us" form on a website. It
was a simple HTML form and Perl script. I could bang one out in about 30
minutes and I couldn't keep up with the work. Those were the days!

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codyguy
wow! how did you get people to find you then? You wouldn't have been the only
one.

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jnorthrop
I used to help a lot of new-to-html coders on usenet. A handful of them would
recommend me or contract me for the more complicated stuff like shopping
carts, contact forms and other data driven functions.

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jklartss
When I was 14 I bought certain magazines down in Chinatown and sold them to a
bunch of my friends at Catholic Schools. I made over $9000 in 3 months. BUT
then a little thing called the internet came along...

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DanLivesHere
Accidentally put an Amazon Associates affiliate link in a reddit comment.
Thread made it to the front page, comment was near the top, I made about $100.

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iworkforthem
O... never know that this could work too!

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dholowiski
Cleaning viruses off computers for a flat rate. People will pay any amount of
money to have their computer cleaned and you will seem like a god.

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got2surf
I've always entered a bunch of science competitions/fairs. Sometimes the prize
is $1000 for a paper I spend 8 hours writing - not bad!

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DanBC
> _or just getting lucky._

Not sure about "lucky", but death of a parent landed me with tens of thousands
of £.

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gopi
In 2002 i made a SEO'd affiliate site. It took like an hour to make the site
but it made me $500k over a year!

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luminare
£150 for what was essentially 10 minutes of googling, 5 minutes compiling into
a document.

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leejw00t354
Stories about making continuous income are preferred.

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why-el
Continuous or not is not dependent on the amount of work.

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joelmaat
A few thousand trading on the stock market.

