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I've hired a bunch of people through fiverr to do small gigs for my writing (eg copyedit, add a few jokes, do illustrations). One "dumb" way to make a bit of ex
by adzicg 10y ago
I've hired a bunch of people through fiverr to do small gigs for my writing (eg copyedit, add a few jokes, do illustrations). One "dumb" way to make a bit of extra cash for programmers could be to take on gigs like that. Depending on your skills, there are plenty of web design/automation gigs that you could offer there. This doesn't need you doing time-consuming marketing or sales, or chasing consulting clients. It also doesn't require you to come up with a SaaS product. On the other hand, the gig market tends to be a race to the bottom in terms of prices, so the income won't be that amazing, but then again you asked about dumb income ideas.
a slightly less dumb idea is to write a book. it's more upfront/unpaid work than when doing gigs, and more risk because it's up to you to create a good story, but significantly less risk than building a SaaS system. I've self-published five books so far, and books have three benefits over the gig economy idea:
1) you get to learn a ton of new stuff while researching for the book. writing a book is effectively forcing yourself to learn
2) even if books do moderately well, when you self-publish you retain most of the profit. my passive income from previously published books is roughly 3-4K USD per month now
3) books have an extra effect that they tend to bring name recognition and incoming work for consulting, and that can last a few years even if you don't plan to freelance and work as a consultant at the moment.
- karzeem 10y agoWhat kind of books do you write?
- adzicg 10y agoI wrote one on how to use an opensource testing tool for which there was lots of interest but not a lot of documentation at the time. That was quite popular for a while (almost 11 years ago). Another book was on an emerging technique for collaborative analysis for software projects, that started becoming popular some time back in 2008-9 but was still not well understood. Two more were on practical tips for how to work with user stories and how to come up with good testing ideas.
- vram22 10y agoInteresting. If you don't mind saying, do you self-publish on sites like Gumroad, Leanpub, Softcover, on your own site, or both? If on your own site, you would need some system to accept payments, right?
- adzicg 10y agoI publish using leanpub and KDP (amazon kindle) for ebooks and using Lightning Source for paper books. I used Lulu 10 years ago but their customer service was appalling back then so I moved to LS, which gets the print book in almost all good online stores anyway. I used to sell books on my own site as well until a few years back when EU created the stupid VAT on private electronic purchases that requires stores to adjust price according to the country of the buyer. I figured it's less hassle to just use leanpub for that.
- vram22 10y agoThanks for the info.
- scarface74 10y agoIf I were going to do a small gig at a low pay rate to earn a little extra money, it would be something using a technology that I didn't have any on the job experience with that would increase my marketability. For instance if I were interested in getting into mobile development and had spent some time studying but hadn't done it for a job, I would take a low paying gig as long as I had the right to show off samples of the work for future employment.