It may be passive or active or maintenance mode of income. Just something created by you and your sole passion that have worked out for quite some time and maybe still going on.
Probably not relevant to the younger set here on HN: I became obsessed in the late 90’s with using a camera to photograph subjects and events that are hard to observe with the naked eye. (Examples include: spotted bats photographed in flight, or red tree voles that only live at the tippy top of Doug fir trees, or nocturnal genets photographed in arboreal habitats). I loved the challenge of the work.
I grew up poor. So I had to figure out how to finance this work up front. It was a true obsession and I would have probably gone completely broke if not for the fantastic interest my work generated. I was licensing the work for good $$$.
Cut to now: I’m still fascinated with this type of photography. But my work these days involves social media content generation. Since I hate being the center of attention, I’m lucky that my clients just want content (and leave me out!).
But this early work just keeps selling. The subjects were so difficult to capture that I guess others have not really pursued the same path? I’m probably just a lucky fool.
If I were to die tomorrow, my family would still have good income from just this early work. I just can’t believe how this played out for me. I’d like to think it was a clever strategy. But no.
Coming from a family riven with poverty, addiction, and early death - I’m just astounded. I’ve already outlived every male member of my family in the last three generations. I hope to set my child on a different path thanks to this lucky break of timing + opportunity.
A shared friend introduced me to someone who claimed to be a struggling Hollywood genius. We were all drinking at some university party. He told us about all the cool shit he would do if only technology wasn't so bad. So I built a tool to solve his issues. To my surprise, he used it on the Expendables 3 blurays. Later, the audio crew for George Lukas' Red Tails praised the tool in an interview. Hollywood guy got grammy nominated. I got paid first for development and then licensing fees. But I mostly like it not for the financials, but because this way my software made it onto a few magazine covers :) I collected all of them.
I'm a bit confused - this doesn't look like a quick tool built to solve one issue - this links to what appears to be a whole company with many sophisticated products. You did this all yourself?
Oh my gosh! I was a happy user of Hajo Headphone Enhancer for years until he dropped off the Internet and his software wasn't updated for newer macOS versions. Now I see that you have licensed it and are reselling it under Spatial Sound Card - L.
It was a tremendous pain to get installed, and the documentation on your site is insufficient (I had to open the driver installer app inside the main app bundle manually, in the terminal to see the output with the error message, then google the error message to find out where the System Preferences request was), but I'm really excited to hear the fullness of the sound again!
Initial notes: Idle CPU while playing through SSC is about 1-2% less than without, and the "Energy Impact" of SSC is ~6.7 compared to Spotify's ~3.0. I don't think I'd call it particularly "light", but I love the sound! I'm rocking Reykjavik, but New York also sounds good in my headphones.
fxtentacle, I remember chatting with you briefly earlier this year about all the projects you had worked on, and you didn't even mention this one. You are one interesting dude.
That's great that your software was able to help someone and that they were able to use it successfully in their work. But remember, the true value of what you've created goes beyond just the financial gain or the recognition you may have received. The real reward is the knowledge and satisfaction that comes from creating something that can have a positive impact on others!
I had partnering with a marketing agency for awhile doing implementation of their designs in WordPress. After a few years of clients breaking their sites doing upgrades and other ad-hoc questions/enhancement requests coming via email, I got tired of sending $100-200 invoices, so I started selling "WordPress Maintenance" as a product. It's not fun or sexy, but don't underestimate the number of organizations willing to pay $3K/year to be able to email you for advice, install plugins, add custom post types, and keep things up to date. I've got ~12 clients now (started with 4 in 2017) and it's an "easy" $30K every year.
FWIW, I work exclusively with local clients. Local clients, in my experience, are more willing to pay more to local people.
Suing lawyers as side income.
we all know most lawyers are scummy using all sorts of deceit to gain advantage.
However in the increasing documented world, it is a matter of digging(using text search) to find fault with the offending lawyer's deceit and then file a DIY action in court.
I am involved in estate litigation since 2016 where I discovered collusion by many lawyers with the estate administrator to defraud the estate. Our laws for anti corruption are stringent in my country where a lawyer causing a beneficiary damage as the estate's lawyer is liable for 20 yrs imprisonment and 5x penalty fine for the gratification received.
Can you elaborate more how such fraud happens? Also, how would you even get access to court record for these estates? Would these records not be private to the party at hand?
1) Board member (advisor really) of a crypto/blockchain company. They pay me $5k per month to basically answer questions and help solve certain issues that might arise. There's also regular meetings but all in I spend 4 hours per week max.
2) Small contractor jobs. I was a contractor and home builder in a previous life. These days, I do side jobs both for the extra income and as a way to relax from my regular tech job. I build decks, sheds, small patios, and some indoor remodeling stuff. All of it is really basic because I have no interest in large jobs that would take a lot of time. A 10x12 shed will net me around $6k and I can build it in a weekend. A similar sized deck I'll charge $25k. Small patio pours I'll net $4k.
During Christmas season (right now) I also hang lights. I'll charge between $1500 - $2500 and net most of that. Takes me around an hour for a normal two story house.
3) Tech consultant. I help administer various Wordpress and other sites for clients. Basic stuff like plugins, changing font, layouts, etc. Super easy and I get paid a monthly retainer.
4) I work two six-figure engineering jobs. Neither is super difficult which gives me time to do the other things and still have free-time to spend with my family, friends, and hobbies.
5) Rental income. I built a few single family homes and apartment buildings (12 units per building). Nets very good income but can also be demanding because I prefer to do most of the management work myself. Just sold one 12-plex for $1.6MM in August and am sitting on the others.
My favorite so far was a company I founded about 20 years ago with a friend who worked in the film sound industry. He had an idea for a hyper-niche tool for automatically syncing changes from video to sound (industry term is "conforming"). He'd approached a couple people/companies he knew that made tools in adjacent spaces but got turned down with "that's impossible" or "it's not worth it". I had no experience in the space but I got intrigued just from a "can it be done" perspective and coded it up. Once written it required very little maintenance, it was just available on our website for download and we used a shareware service to deal with licensing and sales. Only marketing was word of mouth. Every time someone bought a copy the shareware service would send a text, so I set the text alert sound for their number to be the cash register sound. It was a small addressable market so didn't sell all that often but it was always a little dopamine boost to hear the "ka-ching" come out of my phone. Most sales only netted me a couple hundred bucks, but every once in a while a big player (like a movie studio) would pick up a bunch of copies at once. Eventually sold it off to a competitor and collected a small royalty stream for another few years.
When I was in college I sold discarded text books on half.com. This isn’t my best income stream, but in many ways it was my favorite.
After the Spring 2000 semester, I noticed that the bookstores had junk book bins. Students would dump into the bins any books that the bookstore would not buy back. Anyone was welcome to rummage through the bin and if they found something interesting they could keep it.
The bookstores wouldn’t buy books back if they knew that a new version had been released. They of course wanted to avoid being stuck with useless inventory. I wondered if these books had residual value elsewhere. I collected a few and took them home and started looking up them up on half.com. Sure enough, all of them had listings and lots of them were listed for 10’s of dollars!
For the next few days I made a continuous circuit around all the bookstores, loading my car with any books I found in the bins, and dumping them in my living room. At night I would list the day’s haul. Because my inventory was free, I always listed $1 lower than the cheapest listing.
I now had an inventory of several thousand books and a very irritated set of roommates, including my future wife. All I had to do was sit back and wait for classes to start somewhere in the world where one of these books might still be in use.
Within a week orders started to roll in. Soon I was heading to the post office daily with a huge load of books. Things would quiet down whenever a there was a lull in sessions starting. I’d replenish inventory as the various summer sessions completed.
Fall semester generated a huge bump sales and I was able to get a huge inventory of books when the semester ended. Unfortunately that proved to be the last semester of junk book bins. The stores got wise to what the kid in the beat up Honda was up to and started collecting the junk books for themselves.
I continued to sell what books I had and that went on for the rest of the time I was in school. After graduation my wife demanded that I chuck the rest. She’d had enough of random stacks of old textbooks.
I used to sell on half.com . My dad was a college professor and would get free sample textbooks from the publishers that wanted him to consider them for his classes. He'd give them to me to sell
But my most memorable sale was to see the name of a classmate on my half.com portal. I just handed him the book in class one day instead of having to take it to the post office.
I'd also buy deeply discounted old editions from the school bookstore to resell. They still had resale value because not all schools would update to the latest book right away.
that's interesting, so different locales around the world would operate on different editions. So in the locale you picked up where the old editions were useless they found a home elsewhere in the world. Cool stuff.
I'm a mechanical engineer (satellites currently, launch vehicles and satellite payloads previously).
On the side I sell budget star tracking astrophotography mounts I designed and build in my basement. I also do a few consulting gigs each year. These efforts combined bring in an extra ~25k annually. My plan is to develop two more space-related products, hire a tech, and transition to more of an oversight and design role rather than the one guy running the whole thing.
For the record I don't think most people should do this, it is not a balanced life to work this much, generally speaking. But for me it's a worthy discomfort to relieve financial pressures from student debt and being the only breadwinner of a young family. Plus it's fun stuff, I get to design cool products which is what I do for fun anyway, I just usually stop at the level of prototype when it's just for me. ;)
Built a hobby informational web app back in 2005 related to a collectible item I was interested in. It basically tells you if your X is considered common or rare (potentially valuable). Determining that is nuanced and people don't want to figure stuff out on their own, so my web app became popular.
At this point it has earned over $400k USD lifetime with 75% of that being in the last two years. 100% Adsense. The audience who find/use my site are good candidates for high-dollar ads, which is why it has done so well. New data (a few rows in a table) needs to be added once every few months, but it takes < 1hr. Realistically I should invest in blog/content but I don't really find it interesting any more.
Following the "make niche complicated data easily parsable" concept I built another web app in 2018 for a different hobby. For example if the hobby was "phones" and the physical dimensions/specs of "phones" was very important to choosing it, my web app would let you visually compare any two "phones" side-by-side at the correct dimensional scale.
It apparently solved a problem and traffic grew organically. After years of work this web app should get close to 6 figures annually in 2023 - earned via affiliate sales of "phones" and accessories. It's is a much more active endeavor, but if I walked away for 6 months I bet revenue would stay near flat. It fills my time and I find it interesting.
I'm working on web app #3 now which is tangentially related to the "phones" concept.
I earned back my advance after about five years and have been receiving royalty checks ever since.
This year, it surpassed 100,000 copies sold.
Just a little note for other would-be authors ... it's never been easier to self-publish -- but getting a book deal with a traditional publisher still has substantial upsides, particularly on the distribution side. There are exceptions (e.g. if you expect digital versions to constitute the vast majority of sales). But by and large, you're better off getting a book deal if you can.
> In the Penguin Random House/S&S antitrust trial it was revealed that out of 58,000 trade titles published per year, half of those titles sell fewer than one dozen books.
Which also had some discussion on HN, where some people suggested that it was somewhat true, while others explored other aspects of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32794673
But even the article itself refers to more claims like that, with many suggesting that in writing, like many other industries, there will be a few very successful books/projects, and many that will fall by the wayside (honestly, I'd say the same about most things, from making SaaS products, to game development and art/music). Here's a humbling article that someone wrote: https://hughhowey.com/most-books-dont-sell/
I guess what I'm trying to say here: don't write a book hoping to earn a lot of money. Write a book because you find the experience interesting or fun, and just because you want to write (and publish) a book.
If you don’t mind sharing, what do the advance and royalty terms look like for a first time author? And how many copies does it take to “break even” on the advance?
My partner and I created a very successful business in the UK out of selling mushroom grow kits and microscopy spores.
We didn’t think there would be any market here because there weren’t any UK shops doing it. Then a couple of years later it took off and growing mushrooms became cool.
In this time we learned how to run a webshop and navigate an industry where every payment processor dropped us - to the point where we only accept cash, bank transfer and crypto.
Our Woocommerce shop was built on pure passion for mushrooms and a crazy late night idea. The kinds you usually just leave as an idea. Now it has consumed our lives and we have multiple employees.
Our business continues to grow with recent months bringing in around £60K/month in revenue.
I had never known what it was like going to a supermarket and not having to add the cost of everything in my head. But with the money, I learned the most valuable lesson - it could all go tomorrow and I would be totally fine with it.
Left my job in 2014. Tried a few things that didn't succeed before selling programming ebooks came to my rescue (2018). From the danger of draining out my savings completely, I'm now earning more than double my needs (which isn't really that much for my modest lifestyle, living alone in a developing nation - $150/month).
What's more, my ebooks are all free to read online. Only PDF/EPUB are sold, and I've always given them away for free during launch week.
It’s definitely not my passion but in 2013 I built a WordPress plugin around the API of a popular newsletter service and it’s been paying my bills ever since.
Still going strong at €36K per month excluding VAT.
There was (and still is) a huge market where non-technical people are looking for a GUI around something a programmer would find very simple (and usually too boring to work on). More so if the tech surrounding it is not particularly sexy, as is the case for WordPress and PHP.
Ps. In case anyone is reading this, I am open to selling. I spent about 4 hours a week on it and the rest is handled by 2 freelance people costing
about €1K / month each. Contact me for details if interested and willing to pay in the ballpark of €1.6M.
My cofounder and I have bootstrapped two software products that are generating revenue today with minimal involvement on our side.
The first product is a B2B onboarding platform. This product generates approx. $100k/year.
Our second product is a microsaas that turns google drive folders into a hosted, searchable wiki with one click. This product is making $2k/month.
Both products require minimum support and continue to sustain themselves.
One thing to note is that we did work full time on both of these products for like 1.5 years during the pandemic. At the time, it was definitely not the best income stream we had created but became so after we both got "real" jobs again.
Software consulting. You’d be surprised how many little businesses out there have a need for custom software. I make about $60-70k/year in my spare time (maybe 10 hours/week) doing everything from adding features to legacy products, building brand new applications and even simply conducting technical interviews. It’s also pretty nice to work on something besides the usual thing at work, experiment with new/different tech and also get paid handsomely for it.
That is awesome. Although I'm surprised you can just pickup a new client, bang out a new feature, and finalize everything in 10hrs. Seems like there would be a lot of overhead getting started and whiping your hands of it.
I do that same thing. Earning around $100 an hour, and I can do as many hours as I want, whenever I want to. I do this on top of my full time job, so I usually do a few hours at night or a weekend day here and there. That's similarly in the $60-70k extra per year.
What I do is embedded software for medical devices though, so beyond building there's a lot of documenting, reading documentation adhering to standards.
My fiancee sells self-made art somewhat successfully for the last 9 months. I contribute by managing communication with buyers through FB Marketplace, Craigslist, and while we tried Etsy, it didn't do that well. We specifically target the mid-range market which means we price below top artists on Etsy/Instagram, but above cheap prints and generic Ikea style art.
It definitely requires a lot of physical work on her part and our spare bedroom is basically a pile of canvas, paint, plaster, and other supplies, but it has generated over $10,000 in revenue. We could optimize more and she could make prints of some of her better paintings, but she does it for fun and most of the money she uses for shopping (and I spend my share on triathlon gear!)
My business creates European hand-blown titanium crystal stemware for whisky and spirits.
This started as my quarantine project and has grown fairly rapidly relative to my expectations. The product is very expensive to produce because each glass is made entirely by hand in Europe but the results are pretty beautiful. It's not a golden ticket financially but it's very stable and healthy.
Most rewarding is the community of spirits enthusiasts and professionals who I've been able to connect with.
To date the best one i created was a specialized billing/inventory system for an injectable class of mental health drugs for community clinics in Mississippi. I did it on the side while fully employed (heh the advantages of youth and no family). Mississippi's medicaid system couldn't handle the coding and so it was paper and it took forever for pharmacies to be reimbursed and so no pharmacy would dispense the drugs. I developed it with a pharmacist friend of mine (former boss) who took on the expensive risk of stocking the drugs and then he paid me probably $75k over about a year to work on it with him. It made him a lot of money and when he eventually sold his pharmacy he wrote me a check for $50k. I have the email i sent to him announcing the system was live framed and hung on my wall.
i was pretty naive then, i wish i could do the whole thing over.
HN will hate this, but I was curious about web3/crypto and wanted to build something to understand how it all worked. This was inspired by moxie's post [1] (don't echo other people's opinion because you see them repeatedly, rather build something and make your own opinion).
Ended up being a very interesting project which also led to earnings around 10eth (~12k today). Took around 2 months. https://blockchainsmokers.xyz
[+] [-] LiquidPolymer|3 years ago|reply
I grew up poor. So I had to figure out how to finance this work up front. It was a true obsession and I would have probably gone completely broke if not for the fantastic interest my work generated. I was licensing the work for good $$$.
Cut to now: I’m still fascinated with this type of photography. But my work these days involves social media content generation. Since I hate being the center of attention, I’m lucky that my clients just want content (and leave me out!).
But this early work just keeps selling. The subjects were so difficult to capture that I guess others have not really pursued the same path? I’m probably just a lucky fool.
If I were to die tomorrow, my family would still have good income from just this early work. I just can’t believe how this played out for me. I’d like to think it was a clever strategy. But no.
Coming from a family riven with poverty, addiction, and early death - I’m just astounded. I’ve already outlived every male member of my family in the last three generations. I hope to set my child on a different path thanks to this lucky break of timing + opportunity.
[+] [-] fxtentacle|3 years ago|reply
A shared friend introduced me to someone who claimed to be a struggling Hollywood genius. We were all drinking at some university party. He told us about all the cool shit he would do if only technology wasn't so bad. So I built a tool to solve his issues. To my surprise, he used it on the Expendables 3 blurays. Later, the audio crew for George Lukas' Red Tails praised the tool in an interview. Hollywood guy got grammy nominated. I got paid first for development and then licensing fees. But I mostly like it not for the financials, but because this way my software made it onto a few magazine covers :) I collected all of them.
[+] [-] windowshopping|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CGamesPlay|3 years ago|reply
It was a tremendous pain to get installed, and the documentation on your site is insufficient (I had to open the driver installer app inside the main app bundle manually, in the terminal to see the output with the error message, then google the error message to find out where the System Preferences request was), but I'm really excited to hear the fullness of the sound again!
Initial notes: Idle CPU while playing through SSC is about 1-2% less than without, and the "Energy Impact" of SSC is ~6.7 compared to Spotify's ~3.0. I don't think I'd call it particularly "light", but I love the sound! I'm rocking Reykjavik, but New York also sounds good in my headphones.
[+] [-] comprev|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mfrye0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hypertexthero|3 years ago|reply
Is the Spatial Sound Card L a bit like a software version of the Sound Blaster 16bit cards? Does it affect performance much on Mac and PC?
I played the original Thief using a Sound Blaster card and still remember the audio giving me goosebumps!
[+] [-] sudomatic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jalino23|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] highwayman47|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marpstar|3 years ago|reply
FWIW, I work exclusively with local clients. Local clients, in my experience, are more willing to pay more to local people.
[+] [-] gualang|3 years ago|reply
I am involved in estate litigation since 2016 where I discovered collusion by many lawyers with the estate administrator to defraud the estate. Our laws for anti corruption are stringent in my country where a lawyer causing a beneficiary damage as the estate's lawyer is liable for 20 yrs imprisonment and 5x penalty fine for the gratification received.
[+] [-] shauryamanu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] langsoul-com|3 years ago|reply
It doesn't really seem like a side thing to my I don't know the law eyes.
[+] [-] mwerd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leohart|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mushhh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xxEightyxx|3 years ago|reply
1) Board member (advisor really) of a crypto/blockchain company. They pay me $5k per month to basically answer questions and help solve certain issues that might arise. There's also regular meetings but all in I spend 4 hours per week max.
2) Small contractor jobs. I was a contractor and home builder in a previous life. These days, I do side jobs both for the extra income and as a way to relax from my regular tech job. I build decks, sheds, small patios, and some indoor remodeling stuff. All of it is really basic because I have no interest in large jobs that would take a lot of time. A 10x12 shed will net me around $6k and I can build it in a weekend. A similar sized deck I'll charge $25k. Small patio pours I'll net $4k. During Christmas season (right now) I also hang lights. I'll charge between $1500 - $2500 and net most of that. Takes me around an hour for a normal two story house.
3) Tech consultant. I help administer various Wordpress and other sites for clients. Basic stuff like plugins, changing font, layouts, etc. Super easy and I get paid a monthly retainer.
4) I work two six-figure engineering jobs. Neither is super difficult which gives me time to do the other things and still have free-time to spend with my family, friends, and hobbies.
5) Rental income. I built a few single family homes and apartment buildings (12 units per building). Nets very good income but can also be demanding because I prefer to do most of the management work myself. Just sold one 12-plex for $1.6MM in August and am sitting on the others.
[+] [-] femto113|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] powvans|3 years ago|reply
After the Spring 2000 semester, I noticed that the bookstores had junk book bins. Students would dump into the bins any books that the bookstore would not buy back. Anyone was welcome to rummage through the bin and if they found something interesting they could keep it.
The bookstores wouldn’t buy books back if they knew that a new version had been released. They of course wanted to avoid being stuck with useless inventory. I wondered if these books had residual value elsewhere. I collected a few and took them home and started looking up them up on half.com. Sure enough, all of them had listings and lots of them were listed for 10’s of dollars!
For the next few days I made a continuous circuit around all the bookstores, loading my car with any books I found in the bins, and dumping them in my living room. At night I would list the day’s haul. Because my inventory was free, I always listed $1 lower than the cheapest listing.
I now had an inventory of several thousand books and a very irritated set of roommates, including my future wife. All I had to do was sit back and wait for classes to start somewhere in the world where one of these books might still be in use.
Within a week orders started to roll in. Soon I was heading to the post office daily with a huge load of books. Things would quiet down whenever a there was a lull in sessions starting. I’d replenish inventory as the various summer sessions completed.
Fall semester generated a huge bump sales and I was able to get a huge inventory of books when the semester ended. Unfortunately that proved to be the last semester of junk book bins. The stores got wise to what the kid in the beat up Honda was up to and started collecting the junk books for themselves.
I continued to sell what books I had and that went on for the rest of the time I was in school. After graduation my wife demanded that I chuck the rest. She’d had enough of random stacks of old textbooks.
[+] [-] oefnak|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waltbosz|3 years ago|reply
But my most memorable sale was to see the name of a classmate on my half.com portal. I just handed him the book in class one day instead of having to take it to the post office.
I'd also buy deeply discounted old editions from the school bookstore to resell. They still had resale value because not all schools would update to the latest book right away.
[+] [-] ozfive|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxramos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spacemark|3 years ago|reply
On the side I sell budget star tracking astrophotography mounts I designed and build in my basement. I also do a few consulting gigs each year. These efforts combined bring in an extra ~25k annually. My plan is to develop two more space-related products, hire a tech, and transition to more of an oversight and design role rather than the one guy running the whole thing.
For the record I don't think most people should do this, it is not a balanced life to work this much, generally speaking. But for me it's a worthy discomfort to relieve financial pressures from student debt and being the only breadwinner of a young family. Plus it's fun stuff, I get to design cool products which is what I do for fun anyway, I just usually stop at the level of prototype when it's just for me. ;)
[+] [-] clay-dreidels|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giegs|3 years ago|reply
At this point it has earned over $400k USD lifetime with 75% of that being in the last two years. 100% Adsense. The audience who find/use my site are good candidates for high-dollar ads, which is why it has done so well. New data (a few rows in a table) needs to be added once every few months, but it takes < 1hr. Realistically I should invest in blog/content but I don't really find it interesting any more.
Following the "make niche complicated data easily parsable" concept I built another web app in 2018 for a different hobby. For example if the hobby was "phones" and the physical dimensions/specs of "phones" was very important to choosing it, my web app would let you visually compare any two "phones" side-by-side at the correct dimensional scale.
It apparently solved a problem and traffic grew organically. After years of work this web app should get close to 6 figures annually in 2023 - earned via affiliate sales of "phones" and accessories. It's is a much more active endeavor, but if I walked away for 6 months I bet revenue would stay near flat. It fills my time and I find it interesting.
I'm working on web app #3 now which is tangentially related to the "phones" concept.
[+] [-] jawns|3 years ago|reply
I earned back my advance after about five years and have been receiving royalty checks ever since.
This year, it surpassed 100,000 copies sold.
Just a little note for other would-be authors ... it's never been easier to self-publish -- but getting a book deal with a traditional publisher still has substantial upsides, particularly on the distribution side. There are exceptions (e.g. if you expect digital versions to constitute the vast majority of sales). But by and large, you're better off getting a book deal if you can.
[+] [-] KronisLV|3 years ago|reply
This might work for some writers and books, but not for others.
There was this one Tweet that went into detail about what some trial documents revealed about a particular publisher: https://twitter.com/aprilhenrybooks/status/15662306587665039...
> In the Penguin Random House/S&S antitrust trial it was revealed that out of 58,000 trade titles published per year, half of those titles sell fewer than one dozen books.
There were also articles that disagreed with the claim: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...
Which also had some discussion on HN, where some people suggested that it was somewhat true, while others explored other aspects of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32794673
But even the article itself refers to more claims like that, with many suggesting that in writing, like many other industries, there will be a few very successful books/projects, and many that will fall by the wayside (honestly, I'd say the same about most things, from making SaaS products, to game development and art/music). Here's a humbling article that someone wrote: https://hughhowey.com/most-books-dont-sell/
I guess what I'm trying to say here: don't write a book hoping to earn a lot of money. Write a book because you find the experience interesting or fun, and just because you want to write (and publish) a book.
[+] [-] koolba|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jobs_throwaway|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mushhh|3 years ago|reply
We didn’t think there would be any market here because there weren’t any UK shops doing it. Then a couple of years later it took off and growing mushrooms became cool.
In this time we learned how to run a webshop and navigate an industry where every payment processor dropped us - to the point where we only accept cash, bank transfer and crypto.
Our Woocommerce shop was built on pure passion for mushrooms and a crazy late night idea. The kinds you usually just leave as an idea. Now it has consumed our lives and we have multiple employees.
Our business continues to grow with recent months bringing in around £60K/month in revenue.
I had never known what it was like going to a supermarket and not having to add the cost of everything in my head. But with the money, I learned the most valuable lesson - it could all go tomorrow and I would be totally fine with it.
[+] [-] Gortal278|3 years ago|reply
Much better than hustling a few different freelance/contracts/side hustles for me at this point in my life.
[+] [-] asicsp|3 years ago|reply
What's more, my ebooks are all free to read online. Only PDF/EPUB are sold, and I've always given them away for free during launch week.
List of my ebooks: https://learnbyexample.github.io/books/ (topics include Regular Expressions, Linux CLI tools, Python and Vim)
[+] [-] dvko|3 years ago|reply
Still going strong at €36K per month excluding VAT.
There was (and still is) a huge market where non-technical people are looking for a GUI around something a programmer would find very simple (and usually too boring to work on). More so if the tech surrounding it is not particularly sexy, as is the case for WordPress and PHP.
Ps. In case anyone is reading this, I am open to selling. I spent about 4 hours a week on it and the rest is handled by 2 freelance people costing about €1K / month each. Contact me for details if interested and willing to pay in the ballpark of €1.6M.
[+] [-] sarora27|3 years ago|reply
The first product is a B2B onboarding platform. This product generates approx. $100k/year.
Our second product is a microsaas that turns google drive folders into a hosted, searchable wiki with one click. This product is making $2k/month.
Both products require minimum support and continue to sustain themselves.
One thing to note is that we did work full time on both of these products for like 1.5 years during the pandemic. At the time, it was definitely not the best income stream we had created but became so after we both got "real" jobs again.
[+] [-] ad404b8a372f2b9|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scyzoryk_xyz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twodave|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brystephor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonethewiser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itake|3 years ago|reply
If you bill more than me, any advice on how to find bigger clients?
[+] [-] Fredej|3 years ago|reply
What I do is embedded software for medical devices though, so beyond building there's a lot of documenting, reading documentation adhering to standards.
[+] [-] munbun|3 years ago|reply
It was fun to work on something outside my day job but it required some judiciousness to ensure I could meet my set time limits.
I found taking on bigger projects + a demanding day job pushed me to burnout pretty quickly.
[+] [-] zdyn5|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkwizard42|3 years ago|reply
It definitely requires a lot of physical work on her part and our spare bedroom is basically a pile of canvas, paint, plaster, and other supplies, but it has generated over $10,000 in revenue. We could optimize more and she could make prints of some of her better paintings, but she does it for fun and most of the money she uses for shopping (and I spend my share on triathlon gear!)
[+] [-] bryanmgreen|3 years ago|reply
I was inspired by "do things that don't scale".
My business creates European hand-blown titanium crystal stemware for whisky and spirits.
This started as my quarantine project and has grown fairly rapidly relative to my expectations. The product is very expensive to produce because each glass is made entirely by hand in Europe but the results are pretty beautiful. It's not a golden ticket financially but it's very stable and healthy.
Most rewarding is the community of spirits enthusiasts and professionals who I've been able to connect with.
[+] [-] chasd00|3 years ago|reply
i was pretty naive then, i wish i could do the whole thing over.
[+] [-] nichochar|3 years ago|reply
Ended up being a very interesting project which also led to earnings around 10eth (~12k today). Took around 2 months. https://blockchainsmokers.xyz
[1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
[+] [-] hstern|3 years ago|reply
What parts of web3 deserve their day in the sun and which are utter BS?