Easiest path to $2000 a month?

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.820663.27

by sadiq • 16 years ago

129 72 16 years ago

discuss.joelonsoftware.com

Consulting in a hot area like iPhone apps or something, I'd say. Creating and selling some products is much more risk-prone.

josh33• 16 years ago

You need $2000 per month? You must add at least that much extra value into the world to get it. The reason people who responded to the original post suggested consulting is because consulting is value creation that is very well defined by the person requesting it. If you want to create value in software, in either desktop, iphone OS, or web apps, you have to look where there is pain in some market, and see if the pain is worth $2000 to solve. It's not a question of platform, but a question of market and value.

dpcan• 16 years ago

With mobile "games" it's not about pain, it's about pleasure. If you can show someone a good time for 24 hours, you can get $2 from them.

Therefore, in the app world, you are in the "I'll tickle you for $2 business" and you just need 1000 customers a month.

philwelch• 16 years ago

Now that we have mobile games, people have begun to experience "boredom at the train station" as pain, and "getting tired with old games" as pain too.

People will try harder to get themselves from pain back up to baseline than to get themselves from baseline to happiness. And once they reach happiness for long enough, that becomes the new baseline.

cma• 16 years ago

"You must add at least that much extra value into the world to get it."

Not true; every exchange can (and typically does) have externalities (positive and/or negative).

eru2• 16 years ago

For ethical reasons you should strive for (mostly) positive externalities. That means you need to add those 2000$ plus the externalities.

loewenskind8• 16 years ago

>Hard work doesn't scare me but consulting is off the table due to restriction at my workplace.

What "restrictions"? You have a (most likely verbal) contract with your employer to provide your effort in exchange for money. They don't own you and any clauses they have that restrict what you can do when you're not there or don't even work for them anymore are probably not enforceable. Especially when this dubious claus is holding you back from money you need.

Just because a contract says something, even if you signed it, doesn't mean it can actually be enforced.

petervandijck2• 16 years ago

"a (most likely verbal) contract" => most likely he actually has a signed contract, no? Why do you think otherwise?

loewenskind8• 16 years ago

The US goes mostly on verbal contracts for permanent employees. I don't personally know of any non-executive exceptions, but there must be some.

EDIT: P.S. Even if it's a signed contract, that still doesn't mean it's enforcable.

greyman4• 16 years ago

Can you, for example, work for a competition in your spare time? I have a contract which forbids me do that (but I respect it since it seems reasonable to ask for this).

loewenskind8• 16 years ago

Honestly I think it depends on the circumstance. But companies (at least US ones) always try to make these contracts much more restrictive than they could ever actually get away with. I once worked for a company that said I was not allowed to work for a company in a related market segment for 2 years after leaving the company.

pixelbath2• 16 years ago

But whether the contract should, or could be, broken shouldn't even enter into the conversation. The poster said they cannot do consulting. For the purposes of this discussion, that's all the information given, so it's pointless to make further assumptions.

Consulting would be my suggestion as well; it's far more immediately lucrative than creating a product from scratch.

loewenskind8• 16 years ago

I disagree. If the person is skipping their best option due to a misunderstanding on their part (as it appears to be) then that should be addressed.

jswinghammer3• 16 years ago

I wonder if people are being unnecessarily negative on this discussion thread. It seems to me that his best bet is to start something that he can manage in his spare time that solves a problem. That's not easy but it's not horribly difficult either. I was able to bring a product to market in my spare time and recruited sales people to sell it. I have even lined up speaking gigs at conferences in my vertical (no idea if I'm actually going to be any good at this).

I realize that this person is different than me but I did it for a similar reason: I have to make extra money to provide for my family in the long term. Consulting actually seemed harder to me because you need to put in a consistent amount of time and if you have a family that's very hard to do. I still work a job during the day but my evenings are spent largely improving my product and writing marketing copy for the website I'm having designed.

pixelbath2• 16 years ago

I thought they seemed negative, until I remembered that the poster said they couldn't do consulting. It takes the discussion from "I am a skilled programmer looking for work" to "what kind of product should I create and market that will sell immediately," which just isn't a realistic discussion to have. As Bob Frances said in that thread (paraphrasing), if it were that easy, a great deal more people would be doing it.

I think people get this idea that striking it rich with a popular app is easy after reading a bunch of rags-to-riches app developer stories.

greyman4• 16 years ago

He didn't actually say "immediately". I understood that he needs $2000/month "as soon as realistically possible," and asks in which kind of software is such a goal easiest to achieve. It's just his question is hard to answer when he seems to not have an idea yet what to build...

dalore• 16 years ago

I think "Marie Petit" is a girl's name.

Poiesis• 16 years ago

"I have even lined up speaking gigs at conferences in my vertical (no idea if I'm actually going to be any good at this)."

Toastmasters International is your friend. They exist for this reason. Find a local club, visit, and see what you think. Really, whether you are naturally awesome or terrified you owe it to yourself and the audience to polish your speaking skills.

jswinghammer3• 16 years ago

I'd say I'm in between. I'm not nervous about it but I realize the limitations of my social skills. I will check it out.

joe_the_user2• 16 years ago

"What do I do when I'm attacked by a man with a banana? It's easy, I just pull the lever and release the tiger"

Sure, making a few inside sales is "very easy", if you happen to have the skills, the contacts, the understanding of particular markets, the initiative, the ability/willingness not to panic when no money is coming in, etc. Opening a locked door is easy too, if you have the key, etc.

If, on the other hand, you aren't leveraging skills and experience but you just want/need money, you can't pull opportunity out of your hit based on your desire.

The worst possible reason to become an entrepreneur is needing money.

jswinghammer3• 16 years ago

I'm sure there are worse reasons to become an entrepreneur. Needing money is a perfectly valid reason to try something new.

ahoyhere3• 16 years ago

Yes, they are overwhelmingly negative because they have all struggled and mostly failed.

Taking years to get to $2,000/mo revenue as some of the commenters say? That is truly sad. Somebody seriously needs to teach these guys some business skills.

Hopefully it will be me.

I wrote a positive comment - I've made gobs of money and my SaaS made $1300 its very first month, after the first round of trials ended. And the reason is because I created a truly different product in a category proven to make money, and used my blog/twitter audience to spread the word as I was launching (and before).

It's really, really, really not that hard.

smanek• 16 years ago

What was your SaaS? (I didn't see a link in your profile)

famfam• 16 years ago

Inspire us. Details?

awa• 16 years ago

You made $1300 the first month you offered the product. how much time did it take to develop it.

heresy• 16 years ago

I'd venture outfits of the calibre of your SaaS are much rarer than you may think.

Your UX is stellar, it's very clear what the value proposition is.

You're solving an actual problem, it's a problem most people and not just programmers have, and you're not building an adware, data-collection social networking honey pot where there is no significant revenue until you have thousands upon thousands of users.

Things which can't be said of a number of the ideas I see floated here...

I mean really, AdSense link farms? What a terrible idea. What a way to waste programming effort and pollute the web with crap.

brc2• 16 years ago

I posted to the thread and I thought I was being positive but realistic. The majority of programmers are not capable of creating a $2000/month cashflow business for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to skills, marketing knowledge and not least of all overcoming laziness.

The BoS forum has a lot of people selling downloadable desktop apps into crowded markets. That's why there is a lot of 'very hard' type comments.

leftnode• 16 years ago

If he absolutely needs the extra $2000 this month, consulting may be the wrong way to go. Say you bill for 20 hours at $100 an hour to a company and they pay invoices 45 days after submission. Now you're SOL.

I'd look for a part time job, or pick up work on the weekends from a Craigslist job where you'll get paid that day.

maxklein• 16 years ago

They are right in that it just does not happen that fast. Furthermore, trying to make cash when you are under pressure to make cash rarely works - people who need cash quickly usually don't have the time or the patience to successfully bring a product from conception to release.

One first has to solve the cash issue before trying to build a product. Building a product from dire straits rarely works.

Mark_B• 16 years ago

One comment in thread stood out for me: "Since your problem is medical bills, it seems extremely obvious that you need to switch to a job that has a better benefits package."

The poster simply stated she needs an extra $2,000 a month for medical reasons. Why? Medication? Visits to a specialist? If the extra $2k is needed because what she needs isn't covered under her current employer's benefits, job shopping is probably a better way to spend her free time.

berntb• 16 years ago

Good point, but maybe the money is needed for a relative that won't be covered anyway?

Anyway, how about a move to a country with socialized health care? (Canada?)

a-priori• 16 years ago

Under most circumstances, those benefits take time to kick in. In Ontario, for example:

http://www.health.gov.on.ca/english/public/pub/ohip/wait.htm...

laut• 16 years ago

Socialized health care is not the same as having money to pay for treatment. Some Canadians go to the US to get treated for cancer.

In Denmark there is also government healthcare, but some people, including politicians, still pay private hospitals for treatment.

yan• 16 years ago

> > Success in business is rather like pregnancy.

> Because you get screwed a lot at the beginning?

aaronsw• 16 years ago

$2000 a month? Find a large quantity of text that isn't on the Web that people might search for, put it online, and put AdSense ads on it.

greyman4• 16 years ago

You mean like scanning some old obscure books with expired copyright?

zackattack2• 16 years ago

Haha.

Aaron, how do you figure out these kinds of things (popular searches)? I know there's the Google search keyword tool.

ddemchuk3• 16 years ago

I really hope you're kidding...I would venture a guess that there are no more than a handful of people in the world making more than $100/month in adsense, even with a lot of content sites

_delirium• 16 years ago

I don't know about $2k, but $100 isn't a high threshold at all. There are plenty of areas where $10+ CPM is the norm, and plenty of people in those areas run 10k-visitors-per-month sites.

prawn3• 16 years ago

I'm smallfry and do $3-4k/month through AdSense for about 10 minutes/week effort tops from a handful of sites.

axod• 16 years ago

Bear in mind that people earning a lot on adSense don't usually talk about it much.

(I've been making a living off adSense for quite some years now).

kljensen• 16 years ago

Very very skeptical it's that easy. $2k/mo in AdSense is a TON of traffic. So, unless these are celebrity diaries, unlikely.

OmarIsmail2• 16 years ago

30 hrs/week * 4.3 weeks = 130 hours in a month. $2000/130 hours = $15/hour

You can take on freelance writing gigs that pay the equivalent of $15/hour pretty easily. And these have the extra benefits of being incredibly flexible in regards to work hours, can start pretty much immediately, with no real sales effort required.

hugh32• 16 years ago

Where would one find these freelance writing gigs?

OmarIsmail2• 16 years ago

There are dozens of postings here: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/wri/

And don't limit yourself to your local city, look in all the major cities in North America. At any given time you'll see a few dozen freelance writing/editing gigs in the San Fran, NYC, Toronto Craigslists.

You also have sites like Associated Content, Hubpages, etc. And actually, in its heyday Mahalo was probably a pretty good place to make decent money for the right people.

I don't think sites like Squidoo, Knol, and the new Mahalo that do rev share are good sources of income. I mean, they can be, but it's probably almost as difficult to make money on those sites as it would be to start up your own content site. Being paid per article/report is the best way to do it - from a writer perspective. Rev share is the best way to do it from the site's perspective.

If you're in Canada: http://apply.productwiki.com

JoeAltmaier• 16 years ago

http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/109756/7-strange-ways-make-mo... Its another Hacker News article on the main page. Don't know how to copy the HN link.

jonpaul• 16 years ago

I've done it. I consistently make over $2.5k a month selling iPhone apps. At my peak I made a little under $5k. It kinda sucks at times as it's not just one app. To be honest, most people would consider them shovelware, but if you actually download them you'll see that they provide value. You can read my story here: http://techneur.com I should mention though, it didn't happen overnight and it took about five months or so to get to this point.

brc2• 16 years ago

I've thought about this some more, and I've come to the conclusion that by the time you need $2000/month more, it's almost too late.

The problem is that by aiming for such a small amount you're going to be looking at marginal solutions to marginal problems.

You're better off, in my opinion, aiming for 10 or 20,000 a month and hitting 2,000 than trying to max out at 2,000, and probably hitting 200.

shalmanese• 16 years ago

Start with a product that's earning $4000 a month.

pramit• 16 years ago

Does this story help the quest to $2000/mo? Making Money Online in your Spare Time: 50 Ways & 150 sites http://bighow.com/news/making-money-online-in-your-spare-tim...

Easiest path to $2000 a month?

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