Ask HN: How do you make money as a one-person data science business? - hoerzu
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wenc
John D Cook's business is doing well, providing services on what is
essentially data science, or most aptly put, "very applied mathematics"
[https://www.johndcook.com/blog/services-2/](https://www.johndcook.com/blog/services-2/)

But he also has a reputation that has been built up over years through
insightful blog posts. Many people in the applied math community know his
writings, and there is a general recognition of his expertise.
[https://www.johndcook.com/blog/](https://www.johndcook.com/blog/)

Data science is too general and faddish (I say this as someone whose job title
contains that phrase). The market is saturated with too many people who claim
they do data science. If someone were to give me their business card and tell
me they did general data science work, I probably wouldn't even give them a
second look.

My suggestion is to establish yourself in a few problem domains (e.g. data
science for agriculture, data science for transportation, etc.) and show
tangible results. I think that would improve your marketability.

I grew up around consultants, and as with any kind of consulting business, the
advice that was given to me was to work for at least 3 different established
companies in your domain of interest for 3 years at a time before setting up
an independent consulting shop. Without that, you won't have a sufficient
street cred to sustain a stream of business to keep you afloat. (that said,
this advice is 15 years old -- the part about 3 years + 3 companies might not
be applicable anymore, but I believe the part about building a reputation
continues to be true).

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Avshalom
Write a book→ assert you are an expert due to existence of book→ hope people
believe you→ charge to tell people things they already know but wanted to hear
from an expert.

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Spooky23
Find something you want to do, then find some big government or enterprise who
wants to move away from Cognos or Crystal Reports to something sexy and pay
for it by doing that.

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reboog711
Make money by finding clients or customers to pay you a higher rate than it
costs you to produce something.

Conceptually it isn't that hard.

Putting it in practice is not always easy.

I imagine a data science business would be a services business that you can
sell to C-level executives.

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rememberlenny
SaaS, consulting, niche product, recruitment, report generation, user
onboarding optimization, marketing optimization, APIs... off hand

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dawhizkid
Free startup idea that can be a legitimately huge biz: risk scoring
cryptocurrency addresses i.e. a sift science for blockchain

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SirLJ
Stock market trading robots... everything automated and running from the
cloud...

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atm0sphere
one huge prob w/ running it from the cloud is that you will always be picked
off by the Virtus of the world with their own hardware, saddled up in the same
rack as the OMS running the exchange.

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SirLJ
Yeh, right... I am not day trading, so HFT are not my problem...

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lee101
I'm founder of [https://bitbank.nz](https://bitbank.nz) cryptocurrency ai
price prediction stats dashboard, API and bulk data service you can get to
work lots with open source devs if you work lots on a specific niche and
provide a good api

