

Ask HN: Did your side project become your main source of income in 2013? - spIrr

Did you leave your day job? How long have you worked on them? Share your story!
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mapmeld
I created a side project this summer based on an open source tool which I use
in my day job. My idea was to offer this open source tool as a service.

So I set aside a week to travel down the East Coast. Every day I went to
offices and MeetUps and demo'ed the original open source project and my
service built on it. Each day was 15 hours, door to door. One time I had to
patch a shoe with duct tape.

A week after my return, I'll admit that the service is a failure. The idea is
a good one, and everyone wanted to try it, but no one committed themselves to
using it, much less paying for it. The trip was still a success! When you show
people crazy projects, they show you theirs. The projects I heard about, I had
no idea that they existed. Networking was good. Being new places was good.

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agibsonccc
9 months of engineering for a core piece of tech.

Wrote the first commercial application for it within a month or so.

Doing great so far.

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AtTheLast
The startup I was working on went under and I was on unemployment looking for
a new job. A friend suggested starting a website that would make money from
affiliate commissions. The goal was to make some extra money for coffee and to
cover my cell phone bill while I looked for a new job. It ended up being a
full time job and 3 years later I'm still working on it.

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anderspetersson
I've gone from §50 per week to §300 pw this year. Still long way to go before
I can quit my job, but slowly getting closer to it every month.

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hansgru
> Did your side project become your main source of income in 2013?

No. My side projects are just my main source of expenditures so far :).

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sidcool
No

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eulerphi
This is going to be a long one.

I started working on Wall Street shortly after the housing bubble in late 2007
for a very well-known firm. After two years of building various computational
models based on esoteric distributions purposed for HFT, I realized that I
could do it myself on albeit a smaller scale. I decided to target bitcoin
because it is highly volatile and makes for a good asset to hedge against. I'm
now making about 20,000 a week just on bitcoin trading with about 100k liquid
(80k earned from trading itself, 20k from savings originally.)

I look at jobs as a good way to learn what is profitable, and self-projects to
make the real cash. Salaried jobs are never going to give a person the freedom
they need. And no programmers are "rockstars", musicians are..

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xSwag
I've been wanting to do something similar to this in the future after my
education. If you don't mind me asking, did you major in Math?

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eulerphi
I can't mention the specific degree because it would probably let the firm
know who I am but I did not major in math, most of my knowledge of statistics,
calculus, number theory, was self-learned out of curiosity.

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BSousa
This is something I'm very interested in. Can you recommend some books/courses
that focus more on the financial/HTF side of things?

Cheers

