I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only.

I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/

It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to build a small calendar app (https://lowtechguys.com/grila) from which all the funds will go to my brother’s college costs so he can stop working 12h/day jobs.

Before this I tried creating paid web services but none took off. I realized I actually don’t use any indie web product after 8 years of professional coding. I’m only using web products from big companies like Google, fly.io, Amazon etc.

Desktop apps on the other hand, most that I use and love are made by single developers.

With the ascent of Apple Silicon, and the ease of SwiftUI, this has the potential of bringing a modest revenue while also being more fulfilling than a corporate job.

In case you’re curious how the code looks for something like that, here’s a small open-source app that I built in a single (long) day, which has proven to be useful enough that people want to pay for it: https://github.com/alin23/Clop

This is cool. I hope you make a bunch of extra sales from your (correctly) upvoted comment here :-)

As a long time backend and full stack developer my brain is stucked in web services. Which works Well as employee but when it comes to have your own product you are playing against Google,AWS,meta and so on.

Maybe I try developing desktop applications too.

And here: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/

The most desktop app technical + marketing related article would be: https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/apps-outside-app-store/

I worked as a web dev for 5 years first, and those skills transferred well into the marketing and API part of the apps.

For example my Lunar app even has a CLI that is implemented as client-server and the app also provides an API for controlling displays remotely or through a Raspberry Pi server. That would have been very hard had I not known how to write an API.

The good thing is that usually you just keep growing from this. Now it’s making $1k per month, mostly because of sharing it with the world and implementing recurrent annoyances shared by users.

It’s important to have a way for users to contact you. I love Formspark.io for that, just slap a contact form on the app website and emails will start coming.

In my experience, knowing CSS is 90% of making a pretty and informative page. HTML is mostly just h1 for title, h2 for subtitle, div for groups and p for copy text.

I don’t like writing neither HTML nor CSS so my websites are written in Plim with Tailwind classes for styling.

Here’s a snippet that defines the icon on the https://lowtechguys.com/clop page

        section#hero.min-w-[100vw].flex-center.flex-col.relative.pb-20
            img.w-28.h-28.md:w-32.md:h-32.filter.drop-shadow-2xl src="/static/img/clop-icon.png"
            h1.mb-6.text-4xl.text-zinc-600 Clop
            h5.text-gray-500.m-0.p-0 Clipboard optimizer for images
            h5.text-gray-500.m-0.p-0.-mt-1 Copy large, paste small, send fast

It’s not easy to understand nor pretty to read, but it makes for super fast iteration time, especially because of the responsive breakpoints (e.g. .flex-col.md:flex-row for a vertical layout on mobile and horizontal on desktop)

What kind of paid web services did you try, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m thinking about going this route myself, but I hear you - I’ve also pretty much bought exclusively from the big guys.

Any other learnings from the web service route you could share? Like what tech stack / platform did you use? How did you try to market your service? Can you see other reason (than not being big / trustworthy enough) why it didn’t work?

It’s a next.js + React slow and memory hungry mess [1] which could have been static HTML with some JS for the dynamic bits.

Experience taught me to keep it simple nowadays, but I had to go through the Noiseblend mistakes first.

The stack is Python with Sanic for the backend, Postgres for db and Redis for cache.

That’s what remained after removing all the unnecessary services I implemented because I thought they were paramount: high availability, data locality, time series databases, performance monitoring, alerts etc. Forget about those until you start making money on the product.

The biggest disadvantage a web service has over a desktop app is that you have to keep it up. No matter what, you have a server to manage and make sure it keeps responding. That worry doesn’t exist on offline desktop apps.

The other is finding the market for it. Noiseblend didn’t have a market, and it being dependent on Spotify didn’t allow me to ask for money unless I did something more. That’s another problem, avoid creating functionality that depends heavily on big companies.

I thought about “pivoting” and turning it into a playlist building tool for DJs. I added filtering songs by key and mode (e.g. A minor) and asked a few people if they would use such a thing. Turns out that they use a semi-offline desktop app [2] that already does that and is much faster and powerful.

Oh well, at least now I have a way to find songs to improvise on with my Kaval and guitar.

From my observations, people are reluctant on paying for websites. I guess they don’t feel as “owned” as a desktop app.

[1] https://github.com/Noiseblend/ui/blob/master/pages/artists.c...

[2] https://mixedinkey.com/camelot-wheel/

For whatever reason, the hero video at https://lunar.fyi/ makes Safari use 100% of all cores, Webkit.GPU goes nuts, WindowServer unresponsive… works fine on Chrome however. Monterey 12.5.1, iMac 5K, 27"

I think that might be because Safari uses the HEVC version of the video. I'm also seeing 25% usage on an M1 Max MacBook, which is more than I expected.

Firefox and Chrome don't have noticeable CPU usage. They only support the H264 encoded video.

I might have to reencode the video and optimize for hardware decoding. Default ffmpeg options were not enough apparently.

  -------

Safari is the only browser that can activate the HDR subsystem on these Display P3 screens, and by doing that it taxes the GPU more when playing back video.

How did you find paying users( or just users? i see you have free trials and free tiers) Does the app store offer that much discoverability?

Since the app was free, I didn't seek out users too much. I just shared it on the usual channels of the time and forgot about it: ProductHunt, HN, Lobsters, Reddit

It became popular by itself because it solves a real need that people have and after picking up a bit of steam, it gets recommended a lot.

After launching rcmd, my first App Store app, it felt like it entered a black hole, no discoverability whatsoever. Until an App Store editor placed it in front: https://twitter.com/alinp32/status/1479462684315865099

That generated a large peak in downloads, and people started recommending it again. Blog posts on technical challenges I solved while developing the apps also help a lot but they're high effort and I need 2-3 months to accumulate enough research and knowledge for them.

Before Mac, I was both a Windows and Linux power user. I never saw someone buy a thing on Linux, not that it doesn't happen, but it's a rare occurence so I don't think there's much business there.

On Windows however, people buy software all the time.

Find the Windows inconvenience that annoys you the most, build something to fix it and share it with the world for free. If a handful of people find it useful, chances are there might be tens of thousands more like that who would even pay for you to work and fix more related annoyances that they have.

I have no idea in what state Windows UI programming is nowadays though, it wasn't pleasant last time I tried it 5 years ago. But even system tray utilities with minimal UI can be very useful.

Love this, thank you for the kind message!

For App Store apps I have my own custom solution which uses https://github.com/IdeasOnCanvas/AppReceiptValidator to see if the app has been bought, and if it isn't, I have a time and usage based expiry logic. When the timer expires, I block key functionalities of the app and show this screen: https://shots.panaitiu.com/o6qnP8

Also, I love the secret, extra brightness levels it allows on the main screen, especially when I am outside. Do you know if there is any risk of damage to the brightness by using it at the higher settings?

I once had software that me increase the volume of my macbook speakers and one day I was working and vibing to the song and pushed the volume all the way up... and blew a speaker out...

About XDR, I have an FAQ about its safety here: https://lunar.fyi/faq#xdr-safe

If conventional wisdom is to be believed, it seems like the difference between building an okay app and a great app doesn't matter that much, because success depends on investing the vast majority of the effort into marketing. That's a big deterrent for me — I'm much more interested in building awesome things than hawking them.

About 3 times a year I do promos on Twitter to get more followers and spread the word a bit more through retweets.

And then I have the blog posts I write, which do take a lot of time, but they are mostly for sharing knowledge, not for advertising. Although they do help get some eyes on the apps as well.

    > If conventional wisdom is to be believed, it seems like the difference between building an okay app and a great app doesn't matter that much

I'm more inclined towards the "a good product sells itself" line. It definitely doesn't sell itself if people don't know about it, but you have a much higher chance to get picked up by vocal people and groups and recommended around if your app is high quality and makes a good impression. Even more so if you hear what people have to say after trying your app and try to improve the app for a few months after the launch.

I’d say I had a year of full time work (on and off in 3 years of time) until I had Lunar 3 which was the most stable until Apple Silicon arrived: https://github.com/alin23/lunar/tree/lunar3

I had accumulated about $5k in donations over those years which allowed me to quit my job, do 6 months of full time work in 3 months of time, and launch Lunar 4 with support for Apple Silicon: https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/journey-to-ddc-on-m1-macs/

After that, the hard work started because now I had paying users asking for a stable app that was very Hardware dependent on a completely new macOS architecture. 9 more months of full time work followed.

Right now it’s finally quiet. I do about a bug fix and small feature release per month and I have plenty of time to work on my other apps.

Because Lunar uses lots of private and reverse engineered APIs, it isn’t allowed on the App Store, so I had to replicate a lot of the distribution myself:

    - payments and refunds 
    - license activation
    - anti cracking measures
    - automatic (and rolling) updates
    - making a website for the app
    - SEO (the App Store is quite good at this)
    - error reporting and crash data collection
    - anonymous analytics
    - making sure I’m not mishandling any user data

    - no trial mode for one-time purchase apps
    - the sandbox is very limiting: no private APIs, no full disk access, no Accessibility Permissions etc. 
    - the review process is more annoying than helpful
    - the user ratings can hurt the business a lot when the product is harder to understand and users leave an angry review because they didn’t read the description before buying the app

The sandbox, well I found workarounds for most of my needs [1] but I still skip building some ideas because I know they would never be approved.

The reviews are as annoying as ever [2], I even got my name in a Wired article [3] because of that. They can be very discouraging.

[1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/window-switcher-app-store/

[2] https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/App%20Store%20review%20timeli...

[3] https://www.wired.com/story/apples-app-store-review-fix-fail...

    - in-app purchases come with more disadvantages than a one-time purchase (harder to implement, more UI and explaining needed, restoring purchases is a confusing thing)
    - I don't want ads in my products
    - there's not much functionality to limit, since the apps are very focused on a single thing
    - App Store reviewers don't approve apps that limit functionality too much

Because if yes I'm gonna get it ;-)

The only indie web product I use (and have used for many years now) is workflowy. So simple, so beautiful. Wish I invented it.

If it turns out that people have a need and want to pay for Pro features, I try my best to keep the source available for the free part of the app, and only encrypt the code that constitutes the paid features.

That happened with Lunar, and it seems to start happening with Clop as well.

I have no idea if it did impact my profits at all, but it did help other people to start competing with me. The only competitors to Lunar (MonitorControl and DisplayBuddy) started by using Lunar's code [1] for controlling monitors on Apple Silicon [2], as Lunar was the first app to get that feature.

Competition is still good though, as long as it's not break-neck competition. I learned how to make Lunar simpler in terms of menubar UI from MonitorControl, and got some ideas on how to implement Custom Presets from testing DisplayBuddy.

[1] https://github.com/alin23/Lunar/blob/master/Lunar/DDC/DDC.c#...

[2] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/journey-to-ddc-on-m1-macs/

I’m notified when keywords related to “human wants thing, my app can do thing” appear on HN, Reddit and Lobsters.

If I can then contribute with information to that discussion, I’ll also leave a link to my app.

Don’t just self plug, people (myself included) appreciate more detailed information on how they can solve their own personal problem, instead of being thrown into “here’s an app, figure it out”

This is a telegram bot for managing personalized feed of stories from Hacker News. Just add keywords, and maybe set score threshold.

Was this a good self plug? :D

A chat makes it perfect for this use case, I’ll use it right away, thanks for making and sharing it!

But I've heard good things about this university video course: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9VJ9OpT-IPSM6dFSwQCI...

On a first glance it seems to cover a lot of stuff I use regularly in SwiftUI, but also some videos are quite long. It depends if you like learning by watching, or by doing.

[1] https://goose.red

What I'm building and noticing on other macOS developers are system utilities, that have no web equivalent. Things like window managers, app switchers, clipboard history, hardware controllers etc.

It's a smaller niche, but closer to the users. It makes a dev feel like less of a cog in a big system, and more of a craftsman giving people a way to solve their frustrations.

By the way, do you think noiseblend.com would fit into Red Goose? I tried both Ionic and Cordova but there were two big disadvantages to them:

    - way too much work to pack a Webpack+Next.js+React frontend into an app (and I didn't want to sell it, so not much incentive to put in that work)
    - both were still using older WebViews on iOS instead of the newer WKWebView and the memory requirements of Noiseblend triggered iOS OOM killing the app

I like to keep all my app specific developer controls (UX/UI, functionality etc.) in my web-app and put in only very specific native modules that an appstore forces me to use.

NoiseBlend should be an easy conversion from what I can see prima-facie.

You can use the trial build until then :)

I built this www.anxispace.com .. and I literally cannot do marketing to save my life!

I tried paid ads on all major platforms, but unless you have money to sink in, you’ll mostly just lose money and annoy a few people.

I have it constantly running with the menubar icon hidden, so even I forgot it existed. It just does its job when I go into a Zoom meeting.

You can still use the trial build from the website until then.

Nearly every job can benefits from automation, and if it can't, then the logical thinking that coding requires will improve it in some way.

I paired coding with fiction writing and made a scifi podcast, which now represents 10% of my monthly income after two years!

I wrote up my experience and advice here, if you're interested in the details https://www.0atman.com/articles/21/make-fiction-podcast

Which has seen enormous positive feedback - and youtube ads are very fair (50/50 split between you and Google), and you don't have to chase the money, it's all handled for you! Another 10% of my monthly income comes from YT, I'd guess.

The key with a youtube channel is to differentiate yourself from the rest in some way. I'm trying to do that with careful script writing and high-quality audio. Don't just dive in and waffle for 30 minutes while screenrecording, practice!

I also love your channel, great work!

Up until that point, I was having a really hard time and thinking about dropping out of my software engineering degree because I just thought there has to be a better way to work on low level stuff.

And then I found your videos about Rust and I feel so much better about the future! I feel like I know way more now about what I want to look for in a company before I apply.

Thank you! (Literally made my first HN account to post this)

Please keep making amazing content for as long as you enjoy it!

After watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rJ94rbdteE I have this irrational urge to go out and write some Rust.

Indeed your scripts (the spoken ones) are great.

Being a (part-time) youtuber myself, can I ask what you are using for audio?

It is indeed great!

However, I don't recommend the setup, I tested an SM58 and the damn thing sounds IDENTICAL, but 1/4 the price!

The trick is to speak very close to the microphone, off-center, have the microphone 2-3cm from the corner of your mouth, so breath doesn't hit it, but volume does.

Have you considered working in a company that isn't like that?

Things to look for:

* Ownership: The owner should be the person running the business.

* Size: Fewer than 20 employees. Ideally two or three; consider being the first.

* Revenue: A reasonably stable revenue stream lets you take on mid-long term projects. Ad revenue from a niche content business is quite good here.

So I'd walk in there occasionally to look at some of the demo work they had on the walls, and one day I opened my mouth and said "I need some exercise" and the owner said "we'll make you 'shop boy'!"; bear in mind I was in my 40s at the time. So one or two days a week I'd come in and sweep and clean for a few hours, and then that led to dump runs and eventually they found out I could fix electrical things (like their tools).

The owner was a fundie who homeschooled his kids, I wouldn't tag him as someone I'd seek out for a friend, but we had great conversations about religion and philosophy. The guy who did estimates was tired of it, so he gave me a week's training and off I went; he was my "boss" and he was 19 years old, awesome to work for. It was usually 4-6 hours, 5 days a week. Only paid minimum wage, but after a month they gave me health insurance and I didn't even ask for it.

It was a hoot, I had a "floor hunter" schtick. I got to look at some wild things: a safe that had fallen through a floor, somebody what wanted to put a wine cellar in the underground tunnel (needed a cypress floor natch) which the PO had used as a gun lane, a studs out remodel of an amazing mansion (I saved the subfloor in the ballroom!). Got to see the other side of some IT peeps I knew by reputation, a couple of whom I'd briefly met; a several of them looked like they were experiencing deja vu, but none of them found me out. I bid jobs from $1000 to $100,000 USD.

Did it for about a year.

<10 employees here. This is exactly my experience. The grass is always greener.

Actually caring about profit is good too. Problems start when the people in charge care about advancement, prestige, status, resume building, or CYA.

These days I'm a webmaster. I don't get paid to write software, but writing software helps me get paid.

I help people with German bureaucracy, and occasionally, being able to create software helps me do my job better. I can build little calculators and widgets that support my content, for example.

If I didn't do that, I'd probably pair with other people to solve small problems that big tech doesn't cover. It's fun, it's effective, and it's often lucrative.

This is the key phrase here. I might tweak it to say "subject matter expert", but that is just semantics.

I help my friend customize and automate his trading research and strategies with my python and automation skills.

We are experimenting with openBB, and I'm learning about trading, finance, and other industries. He gets to do things that a Bloomberg cant or wont do. This is a win-win.

Some people like the idea of doing something meaningful, I've been in the sector too long to care about that. What I do find is that the sort of problems you're facing are far more interesting. For example, I spend all day trying to figure out how best to track how [ISSUE] is presented in the media.

Worth having a poke around non-profit job boards for interesting-looking problems. The good gigs are often solving very specific, weird and interesting challenges.

My take-way: I'd take the corporate world over the non-profits any day of the week. The office politics level was so high that you'd quickly see it and its effects even when you only had like five in-person meetings and a few phone calls. It seeped into everything and it was just annoying. They were very laid back and the pace was a joke in comparison, but they all seemed to attract a type of personality that I don't want to work with (or maybe those are who remain and they run off all the nice people). Plus endless committees.

Granted, non of them were technical non-profits, they were just non-profits that also needed tech stuff done, and as mentioned, they were not small, so things might be very different in a small organization that doesn't yet have local, regional, state and federal levels.

I guess my thought here in my original reply was that one thing they can offer over corporates are cool problems to work on. I've got a lot of friends who do OSINT stuff, for example.

A good non-profit gig is a thing of beauty, I'm very happy with what I'm up to now, but that's me. Bad ones, sure, you'd probably be better off at a shitty corporate. Same with any work, homework on your prospective employer is essential.

Working in OSINT sounds like fun, is the scene large enough for your friends to do that professionally, or are they essentially volunteering?

Since there is no profit-driven forcing function, ALL operations devolve into pure politics and bureaucracy.

If you are interested you can start playing with these tech and make things useful for people.

I'm just getting started on this and released the MVP version of Picasa AI[1] and I'm excited about it.

I wanted to build something for a long time and I always postponed it for better time. With the AI trends I feel now is the correct time to jump in.

[1] - https://PicasaAI.com

Also don’t try to think of an idea, just start talking to business owners about problems that cost them money or constrain growth (opportunity cost) and fix those problems.

Not getting anywhere with cold emails

Chamber of commerce events

Go door to door

LinkedIn messages and/or get introduced through shared connections

Facebook communities and/or other online forums where you can answer questions and build relationships

Phone calls

Better cold emails!

Friends and family

Also whenever you speak to someone and have a good conversation with them, ask that person for the contact details of someone else who might be interested in speaking

I find two issues with this (disclaimer, My "hobby" is coding, so I guess I've been monetizing it, all my adult life):

1) Once someone starts paying you, they get to exert their influence on your work, and it becomes a lot less "hobbyish."

One of the biggest joys in my life, these days, is not having managers destroying my work.

2) Delivering ship software requires a lot of "not fun" stuff.

In some cases, the majority of the project could be wrapped up in "unfun," like needing to use particular coding practices, languages, dependencies, techniques, etc. Also, there's all the "polishing the fenders" kind of thing, like documentation, UX finish, maintenance, fixing all those bugs that you don't think are "actually bugs," establishing CI/D, configuration management, presentations to the Board, etc.

These days, I write software for myself. I eat my own dog food. Every one of my projects is a complete ship product, with all the aforementioned stuff (without the CI/D, as I don't really need it, for my one-man shop).

Definitely. I've been working on a free open-source project for 6 months. Last week, a user came with a feature request, and stated that they were willing to pay me. That could sound nice, but I immediately thought "nope". I told them that donations were appreciated, but I wasn't going to do commissioned work.

I don't want that kind of responsibility for my hobby projects.

Edit, disclaimer: I co-founded a cooperative to help skilled IT people to work independently as freelancers, giving legal advices and a network.

Interesting. Where can I learn more?

I think it would be great for Europe (or at least for Sweden) if bright and productive software engineers stopped working for peanuts and went freelance instead. Would love to help push the needle in that direction.

Source: I wrote a book about a single function in React, it did okay.

And then once you're explaining the thing over and over again and need to get into more depth, write a book or training module. For example, some things need background knowledge on how coroutines work, and then you end up explaining why we use coroutines over threading, and so on.

Once you have some traffic coming in, promote a paid course/ebook where you build a full project/app or some bigger unit of work with the thing.

However, it did have nice second order effects on my career, and if I had written a book in an area that hasn't sputtered out (mine was on building voice apps for smart assistant platforms), I suspect it may have even lead to work directly.

Alexa/Amazon is still going, but there are rumors that layoffs will disproportionately impact this division, Google has shut down their APIs unless you're wanting to integrate with an Android app, and Apple has never really opened up Siri.

As for why—it's so hard to build a business on the platforms. They are geared toward "get in and get out" interactions and for things like ordering a pizza, you've already got your phone on you. I still think voice has life, and I love using my devices, but it didn't take off how I thought it might.

I created an ebook a while back on how to make money with Airbnb (based on my experience as a superhost), but I did zero marketing and ended up making about 3 sales total...

A few years back I made a course on Udemy. I figured this would solve my marketing issue. It took me 6 months and was a real slog but managed to create a course about Neo4j. I don't make a tonne of money from that, but managed to make a best selling course, and on a good month it might bring in $1k USD.

A couple years ago I did Sam Ovens consulting accelerator which basically teaches you to reach out to ppl with problems and get them on a sales call then sell them a $2k solution to said problem. I followed this and managed to sell a handful of people on helping them land their first dev job. People's problems were varied, I realise in hindsight that I could have been more educated around coaching but I did help all those people land their first job. I played with pricing a bit, selling at various prices ($2.5k, $750, $1.5k). I feel like if you pushed long and hard enough on this niche perhaps it could be successful, but to me it always felt a bit off for various reasons.

Now, I'm creating a website builder. I'd say it's not a project for the light hearted - it pains me a bit to say that it's been a year so far. I actually have something that can build a website and did have it up online, but took it down to avoid server costs while building it out.

I've learnt a lot on my journey and I find it fun (in a massochistic sort of way), but still very much a work in progress.

Happy to share if anyone has questions :)

I've always wanted to do something like this. Could you share more about it? I think I could provide a lot of value to a new dev but haven't identified a business model that would work.

Company selection, CV review, coding exercises and question prep. With one guy he actually recorded an interview without my asking him to do it, but it turned out to be really helpful as I discovered he needed help with basic small talk type skills as well.

The main challenges are: 1) Finding people that are at that point in their career 2) Most people actually are lacking in technical skills and need to up their skillset 3) The obvious challenge that people without jobs don't always have a heap of spare money floating about 4) Tech stacks are often quite different (although not really a problem for me personally).

It's not too hard to sell people (still a numbers game though), but the price point was Def a sticking point.

You get paid to do what you like. And things goes well, get a big payday later on. If not, by then, you would know how to do another one but with a much better experience, connections, and still not do the "typical complaints."

Then of course, not all days are like that. Although John Conway allegedly said that he never worked a day in his life. Can't find the source of that though.

I think it's sometimes an overlooked mistake in companies when they move people around. "Hey, Tim is like a world class performer. He's doing X, let's move him to Y". It works for some, but not for others.

Anyway, there are lots of communities, cohort-based, hybrid-style, and what-not options these days to find someone or a few. You can start with https://www.startupschool.org and/or https://www.beondeck.com

I suspect the ratio of capable non-technical and technical founders is nearer 0.1-0.5:1

any thoughts on how to identify the unicorns?

For quick starters, look for someone who tinkered, cobbled, hacked, juggard[1] his/her way through an MVP with no-code, low-code, dump-code, Figma-ed, etc. Better yet, s/he had tried selling that idea, napkin-diagrams, to customers. Avoid anyone that smooth talks with nothing to show for (MVP/Customers/Prospects).

While talking (do this for as long as you are comfortable moving ahead), watch out if s/he can articulate and build an idea maze[2] of what his/her current thoughts are.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad

2. https://cdixon.org/2013/08/04/the-idea-maze

- Built a business trip packing / iterinerary recommendation system, using just Google Sheets plugins

- Built a video transcription + recutting service in Bubble.

Each of these made five-six figures of revenue with the MVP. The Founders couldn't code, but they used every tool at their disposal to get enough $$$ to find someone who can code. True grit!

Hey, can you point me to this tool? I would love to use this tool.

edit: You'll probably have more success, as I don't know the German terminology for things like 'startup' - Geschaeftsaufstellung?

The bot opens up to 20 positions in parallel each starts with 2$ and always limit order with 0.5% profit. Some positions close itself in few seconds some remain for a day.

If there is -5% loss on a position, I added up the amount of the position and re-order limit order with 0.5% gain. Let's say for 2$ position if there is 5% loss, I add 2$ more, than 4$ ... The position size grows as 2 => 4 => 8 => 16 ... with updated limit order for each. I observe that eventually position close it self with profit.

Very similar to systematically trading options, i.e. selling covered calls, ...

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)

Source (FWIW, but it really isn't needed for this case): I worked at the most prestigious hedge fund/market maker in the US running their strategies on the servers colocated in all the major exchanges, so I know a couple things about arbitrage strategies. If a similar approach were to even remotely work, I would have most certainly seen it.

No need to reply (to me at least): I won't be convinced by any further argument that your trading system circumvents this basic paradox :-)

> "The day comes where you continue doubling down and you lose a substantial amount of capital in the process."

- I believe that continue doubling is one of the most fatal stratetegy. Sadly, I made this mistake multiple times, which caused me a extensive loss. The only solution I come up is, while continuing doubling, cut loss if there is a certain amount loss reached (like 10$ or 1% of the capital). That was the actualy reason I implemented the bot where it automatically closes the position for me; since in a loss , "fear" does not let me realize what's happening and instead of a cut loss I adding more into a losing trade.

You throw this out there like some fact.

Meanwhile, the lot of us make money on web dev that is built upon open source. The same we have been doing for a long time now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/open-sources/1565925823...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23884395

https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2020-May/021225.html

Users don’t care how your product works, they just care that it improves their life.

They learned how to play the game. Absolutely no other trade out there makes their work available for free to the extent software engineers do. Essentially software engineers put themselves in a position where they _depend_ on salaried employment, working for those that leverage their free work to generate billions in revenue. Sure there are contractors out there but by and large software engineering is salaried work. The naive thinking is that by making software available for free somehow they change the world for the better. Instead they willingly provide free work to corporations that then abuse them.

How privileged are you when you are complaining about not being able to have fun 100% of paid time, like no generation before us ever had.

Simple example, HDDs of small sizes and very large, usually sell cheaper than cost production, donated from profitable medium segment, or from other source of cheap money (like VC or stocks).

Hard example, when IBM released Eclipse, killed lot of small companies, who made simple cheap IDEs (shareware). Those small companies usually are not threat, but sometimes could grow.

That is the key. If you learn marketing strategies, you will be able validate ideas, grow a customer base, test what works and doesn’t.

* build something great

* build a list of people interested in that thing

* Keep them engaged by giving them value

* occasionally ask them to buy stuff

And the rest is implementation details.

If you dont want to do that then maybe finding a smaller company or a company with a better culture will help. I didnt love my first two eng jobs. I like this one a lot. No middle management bs. No politics. Get to work on interesting stuff. Just took some time to find it. Ask friends where they want to work/the best place they have worked is.

Yeah for the short term, i have been thinking of ways to leverage the person I am now. Developing new skills and talents is a long term investment, which is useful just not my immediate goal. hope that makes sense

I use my skills, such as they are, in contract positions. I've been working continuously since 15 or so and aside from a brief spell of 4 months, never been out of work. When I became experienced/qualified enough to use my programming/engineering skills, after another failed FTE position I went contracting and never looked back.

Once again, recently, I have failed to engage with my latest run at an FTE role. I can't be doing with the monumentally slow pace of my employer, the power structures, the bureaucracy, the 45-minute daily standups (yes, I know), the broken business processes. So I'm back to contracting.

Some people aren't cut out for office life. Contracting is office life, sure, but you dictate the terms, you (generally) dictate the pay, you stay when you find a good team and walk when you want to. The problems are harder, you're generally solving issues the client can't solve themselves and bureaucratic blockers magically disappear when the client remembers you're costing them three figures a day.

LinkedIn jobs (HEAVILY filtered) tends to be my go-to when I go shopping for a new client, but there's plenty of contract-specific talent networks and bodyshop consultancies who you can find work from.

The quickest I have found a contract position from a cold start is 45 minutes.

Market's teeming and has been for years, aside from the obvious Covid period, there hasn't been any meaningful market collapse for a long time.

Saying that, this time of year is generally poor as companies eye Xmas and start shutting up shop. You'd do well late January onwards and especially after the start of the next budgetary cycle, typically end of March.

And it's not that I don't want to work. I put 3-4 hours per weeknight into side projects, and another 8-12 hours on weekends. I have yet to make money on the side, but I keep hoping that something will succeed and I can run my own ship.

But start working for yourself and all that goes away. You have CONTROL back - you dictate what you do, i.e. what you find interesting. Of course, the difficulty is making enough money to live, and finding that balance. I can't make money from side projects, I'm not that talented, but I can make money picking and choosing the projects that suit my interests and contracting is a happy medium.

Isn’t the pay really low? Can you negotiate?

First words they said me, even don't asking what I'm looking for, that I should book interview to next week, if fail, next time not earlier than in 6 months, and after 3 fails ban forever. I don't think, this is normal talk.

You set your hourly rate yourself, but you have to consider the competition. So, it’s usually good enough for Europe, but not for the US.

Not good enough to teach?

You are thinking about this wrong!

Passion about something and communicating that to others is the invite for them to take that journey to mastery.

You just need the garyVee social media money tricks on top to make it fundable.

I am in the process of re-vamping that stuff to do exactly that and I am probably older than you at db of 1965...follow me to see it happen

https://fredgrott.medium.coom

Side note garyvee content stack for devs is the reels get expanded in to code and screenshot visual slides in the medium articles while at the same time making mp4 animation reels for instagram, linkedin, Fb posting. On top of that you break the programming into smaller foundation units that get the same expanded reels treatment. In my case I finalizing 8 months of sm postings in a few weekends at over 2,000 artifacts for 20k in social media postings. Yes! Really that much damn efficiency!

Come on take the damn plunge! the hard swim will do you some good to chase away all those wrong assumptions and mind fog!

BT FB, Linked, Instagram , Youtube all have 1 billion users to make this strategy work.

Having trouble parsing this to understand what you mean. I have a feeling I am missing context. For example, what do you mean by "reels". Is this an analogy to film reels?

I'm working on DiffLens to improve how developers see diffs of their code changes. DiffLens uses abstract syntax trees to make diffs more focused and understandable. It's free at the moment while we iterate on it and get the word out. I think it's the best way to view source code changes. If someone is interested in checking it out, see https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DiffLens... . It works within VS Code and supports JS, TS, CSS and text diffs. JSON support is coming soon!

At this stage, I've got a full time job (and I'm pretty burned out, frankly) so don't take on those technical things as I come across them. But, it sure feels like just engaging with them (or not saying "no") could quickly turn in to a sort of technical odd-job-fixer/consultant role.

you resist learning it because you're anxious, probably because you got this idea that learning and doing it is cringeworthy as hell. what you resist persists, it might be the sign it's the right thing to do: to start fucking learning it.

check out @bowtiedsalesguy on twitter, his tweets alone will show you a different frame and headspace of how to properly approach these things.

Cute story: I was having trouble getting my 4-year-old to brush his teeth until one night, I had to idea to show him this children's Q&A book that had a page about "why do I have to brush my teeth?" The little cartoon bacteria convinced him that brushing his teeth was a good idea. It was like a light switch in his head; I finished the page and he said, "daddy, I want to brush my teeth now" and walked off to the bathroom.

That's good advice about phobia/obsession.

My daughter is a bit weird about germs. For example the other day, I was handling a deer skull that we found in the backyard, and she was a little put out that I touched a doorknob before washing my hands.

As a kid, I was the same way with germs. As an adult, I'm probably still a bit overly cautious. When COVID happened, I joked that it wasn't OCD, but rather it was training for a pandemic.

My observation of her behavior makes me wonder if it's a nature vs. nurture thing with her. Nurture: Did I accidentally teach her my phobia. Nature: does her brain (like mine) ruminate about everything, leading to phobias when the topic of ruminations is a scary thing like germs.

I'm not a germaphobe, but I think I'm with your daughter on this one. :)

Have you ever heard of prions, e.g. chronic wasting disease?

Having said that, "Learn to Sell" can be told blanket to all aspiring founders, and trying to take on a CEO role.

it's how you nego for a better salary, how you identify real pain points of people, how you charge higher rates, also how you date and how you teach your kids. everything is sales.

more answered in sibling comment.

There is a problem.

Operate the sales.

I remember having the fullstack design and operations of the tech side of the product but the sales and support side of the product (conversion, adoption, tech support, tickets) required the same muscle volume than the tech side did.

So you can double your knowledge rasonably fast but you cannot double your attention and dedicated time.

Selling Sales to Techies - Business of software 2010 https://vimeo.com/96703844

From my exp/knowledge, most important to start doing business.

- 99% of ideas end just ideas, nothing done, just from some foundations mistakenly considered, doing will be too boring, or not worth time/money/etc. Unfortunately, books and academia, not too helpful, because, usually, books written and academia running, by people, who are not successful in business, but good in write books or in teaching.

Next important thing, don't screw up. Meaning, even experienced people make epic mistakes, which are really easy to avoid.

But for this need to be experienced and open minded, this is not easy. When you do sales, your skin becomes thick and solid, because you lot of time hear refusing, but in product dev (on service even more!) you need to have powerful closed loop with client.

So, in conclusion, two main business principles: 1. hear your clients, who pay money. 2. start/stop easy.

1. https://www.foundingsales.com

Perhaps there is a window of opportunity in content, video content. For youtube, start with making shorts or just copy popular shorts from tiktok. Youtube promotes them so you can get subscribers (but no money), that you can then use to upload longer, money-making videos.

Gaming is also a possible niche. If you can create something that complements a popular game, you have a dedicated community to monetize.

Having a solid partner is key, I've struggled find solid coding partners because they lose interest. They like their 9 - 5 programming job and don't care about coding after work.

Easy way to get started is to look at products and find complaints, major issues, or ideas they haven't implemented and build it. All you have to do is market to the users of the other app directly on the forums or help chats.

Please contact me as I have lots of SaaS products built for my company and fun ideas.

Knowing a thing or two about Python and Pandas and Sqlite has also been very profitable.

How do you find "side quest style work" and what does that even mean?

Closed mean, client need something fast, but for him accessible only employers.

For example, my friend, have lot of side requests, working as engineer in isp with few thousands clients.

Clients just say him, they want to pay for example to install them wifi at cafe (for which they already bought internet from isp).

Freelancing money can be very, very good. It does take work to find jobs initially, but often at a certain point your referrals start kicking in, and you've got to increase your rate because you've got too much work. Not that it's easy, but it's a good racket, and during economies in which companies may not have budget approval to hire salaried employees, it's probably not a bad option to consider.

This was in like 2007, so I don't really know what the landscape is like now, or how you find jobs. I would assume it's easier if anything, because it's just a larger space with more resources, but what do I know. I stopped being a sole proprietor in 2010, and joined a consulting company for the next 10 years, and am now elsewhere, as a salaryman.

If I were starting today, I'd probably look at job postings anywhere (LinkedIn, Indeed, whatever) and even if the job posting was for a salaried position, I would contact them and say "I am a freelancer, and if you can't find somebody qualified, or if it doesn't make sense for you to hire someone on a permanent basis, please consider me." /shrug

https://videohubapp.com/ - though I also have it open source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

After that shared it a bit on Reddit and some forums. Haven't promoted it for several years (other than occasional comments on Reddit and HN, where fitting). I got lucky that several individuals reviewed my app on their blogs.

Some traffic also comes from this amazing website: https://alternativeto.net/software/video-hub-app/

People's tech experience has earning potential but untold thousands of people have similar experience and are trying to get a footing working for themselves using that experience. Absent some remarkable idea, the world probably isn't willing to pay (much) for yet-another person doing the same thing. Money should not be the only determining factor for the path we take, of course, but meeting our basic needs is pretty important, especially if you have kids like I do.

Thus, identifying an un(der)served niche can be a key differentiator.

I took an unconventional approach, after being (directly) in tech for 14 years, and started my own consulting business. This business works with law firms to analyze and describe software (and some hardware) to give them insights on intellectual property litigations. Most of my day is spent learning how other people implemented specific solutions and advising clients on what those solutions mean for their IP cases. I love helping smart, grateful clients through learning and then explaining their tech stack.

I have a handful of people on my team that are former developers that wanted to use their experience in a different way. We enjoy working together and like the work we do. People are key. We make reasonable incomes but not outlandish $.

This business is a relationship business, as any professional services business is, so we focus on meeting client goals and anticipating their needs. This approach does not need to be grueling (I've experienced a grueling form of this before going on my own) but this approach, and the business generally, requires some effort. Those that have gone out on their own will usually find that they put more effort into the business, than they did working on their own, but that the new approach is more gratifying and is thus an overall win for them.

This post is about sharing my experience and a different take the topic discussed in this thread, rather than looking for new colleagues, but I would be open to hearing from people who find what I say intriguing. DM me if so.

Also, if you're somewhere where it's legal or at least accessible, it's not actually 100% true that at a casino the house always wins. It will take a little bit of effort to get started and you do need a small bit of infrastructure (but a cheap VPS or a SoC would actually do, depending on what you focus on), but it's not only possible, but can be fairly profitable to bet on sports. You do need some money in the bank to start, but there's a fair bit of resources on Github that can help you with data collection, analytics, etc. And places like the sportsbook subreddit or one of many forums out there where you can get a lay of the land.

I have no CS degree, hell, I haven't taken math since I failed AP Stats in 11th grade (tbf my teacher had a stroke in class 3 weeks before the test and died before he got to the hospital and it screwed up everyone and nobody in the class passed since this was just before we could bring cell phones to school, but still, that year was a wash). I haven't taken a formal math class since and I went to 8 more years of school after that. 3.5 years later I'm up 161 units which is just about viable (5%+ ROI is generally considered viable).

It's nice to work from home, hang out with likeminded fans in groupchats and reddit, and watch sports and make money. Now, it is still gambling. I've lost 32 straight picks in a row once - then Brentford beat City and made half of that back. It's not for the faint of heart, but it is a viable option if you are into sports, or statistics, or just hate making front ends as I do. Just don't buy anyone else's picks, they wouldn't be selling picks if they're actually making money.

A retired friend does sports betting as a hobby and is quite good at it, but has been banned from two big name bookies for nothing more than a brief winning streak. No software or analysis, just a sports enthusiast.

I totally understand the mentality of folks who sell picks. Especially with all the KYC regulations these days it can be a real slog to keep an account live.

I wrote a popular MP3 search engine pre-Napster, a site dedicated to price tracking in the game EverQuest, and even a technical analysis website for predicting price movement in Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).

Each one of these worked out well enough to live off at the time.

The first two of those projects worked just because the underlying "thing" was huge at the time (MP3s, EverQuest).

That last one required actual marketing, buying ads in magazines related to the field ("Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities", etc). But I knew the audience for the ETF idea likely had a lot more disposable income, so the monthly charge was high.

Unfortunately, as I've gotten older and have a "real" job, I no longer have that desire to write more code after work, so these sorts of ideas and projects have stalled out.

The point being if you can find a niche that's popular, or even something you are just very interested in (in my case, at the time, technical analysis), you can likely make money off of it as a software engineer.

I loathe CS for many reasons and saw the writing on the wall for my degree-less ass, so I went back for industrial engineering. 3 semesters to go and loving every second of it!!! Well, maybe not the materials science and beam analysis but the rest is great.