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Ask HN: Income on the Side?
38 points by janitha on July 31, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 31 comments
What do you guys do for income on the side?

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.

I'll start. I usually aim at very low time commitment tasks.

  Photo shoots for people (just with a simple dSLR)
  Fix Computers/Networks and IT guys for local businesses.
Share your ways, helping your fellow HNers ease their bank drain.


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.


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).


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.


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.


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?


Its in his profile: http://paulstamatiou.com

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


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.


Thanks for that. In future I'll check profiles.


Yea thats more than my startup. Sigh...


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.


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


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


Selling accounts as in those with a large user following?


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


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.


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.


who do you write for?


Mostly http://www.sqlservercentral.com


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.


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.


What language? What do you do best?


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


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


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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


How do you promote these?


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.




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