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Ask HN: What is your side hustle? How much money does it make you?
25 points by good_vibes on Aug 16, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 45 comments
Just curious and wanting to learn how you started and scaled.


Trading cryptocurrency - in stock markets charting, Elliot wave don't really work as well (or not easy to use), you're trading against hyper experienced investors. In Bitcoin, ethereum, there is broad participation by less experienced investors and speculators, and there is much more emotions in the chart. It makes technical analysis very easy, because the patterns are obvious, easy to spot, much less likely to be manufactured. The transaction fees are also low allowing small positions. So when I see an opportunity I just put $500. Next thing you know I'm up $200 and I cash it out. One more thing is if I'm ever wrong, cryptocurrency is in a bull market, and the position would always get rescued as long as I am patient. Of course I do have discipline and do cut my losses. Transaction costs is cheap, and opportunities are frequent, so it's easy emotionally to do it. I have a few grand this year which is nice.

I do have a lot of money in stocks and with those I don't do nearly as well but clearly I learned enough to make a quid or two in crypto markets.


Hello meric, where can I learn to trade cryptocurrency? Do you have any advices for learning?


I'd suggest getting an account and put in $500 you can afford to lose and start by googling for stock chart price and volume patterns and explanations and understand the idea behind them and evaluate whether the current crypto price and volume patterns match or not. And if so, what is your best guess for the next move? Have a read at Mr. Livermore's texts they are immensely useful.


Alright thank you for your answer dude! :)


Hello, I don't trade crypto and I never will.

I'll give you one tip.

Look at a graph of bitcoin, litecoin etc. that extends past the last bubble and collapse and ask yourself if you are willing to eat those kinds of losses if they occur again.

https://99bitcoins.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/bitcoin-ma...


Looks like your link is broken due to some hotlink prevention stuff. :(


That's a shame. Good news is that any graph of bitcoin's historical price over the last 6 years will serve just as well :)


Yes, if the purpose is to make money as opposed to learning or for fun, I agree it's better to ride the trend. :)


> I agree it's better to ride the trend. :)

I think you haven't looked at a 6 year graph if you think the 'trend' is only ever going up. The point of my post was to highlight the risk of (another) crash.


Can you short sell bitcoin?


Yes. I haven't done it myself but it's possible on several exchanges.


Hi calpas - founder of Cryptonnect.com here. Feel free to reach out to us for help on how to get started investing, trading, and learning more about crypto. Contact info is on the site.


Hey asidiali, I registered :)


I do freelance coding work in my spare time and try and combine it with some open source stuff too as a way of boosting my web presence. I recently made £500 in a month doing work in my spare time, not a huge amount but add on a full time job, it's nice to have the extra income.

Link to my latest project - https://github.com/DrRoach/DynamicImage (It's a dynamic image generation library if you're interested)


Nice work Ryan - This is how I started too! Keep going my friend!


I flip stuff on ebay and/or craigslist (or the german equivalent). I want to experiment a little bit with retail arbitrage on amazon fba too.

It is really easy to get started (just sell stuff that you can find in your house and don't need anymore) and I really like this treasure hunt feeling when entering a thrift store or looking for clearance.

made me so far around 300€ in less than 30 days and still have inventory left for about 150€. and I'm still learning what might sell and what not.


>It is really easy to get started (just sell stuff that you can find in your house and don't need anymore) and I really like this treasure hunt feeling when entering a thrift store or looking for clearance.

Interesting. What is the process for getting started and then doing it? Can you provide some links? And by flip I suppose you mean buy and then sell?


Well I just looked around in my house for stuff I haven't touched for 3 months or so. I just looked it up on ebay and craigslist and posted it there. that was how I did my first 300€ bucks now. And then for flipping (buying and reselling higher), look for thrift stores, garage sales, yard sales and so on. If you want to know what to buy look for some youtube channels e.g.: Ralliroots, 10konthebay, rockstarflipper

Just one tip for eBay: don't do auctions. You will usually get low-balled. research the market price and price the item accordingly.


Interesting, thanks for the tips.


Awesome. I'm trying to get into flipping stuff on amazon. There's an awesome site www.qikflips.com which lists details about products which are on discount. You should check it out.


My experience is that hardest part is marketing.

Yesterday I have launched https://submit-sitemap.com and I have shared link to it on various platforms. How much traffic I got:

- reddit - side project - 4

- hacker news - 11 (+2 from different aggregators)

- I have added link into 2 communities on Google+ with around 200k people - 3

- producthunt - 3

- Facebook where I have shared it in group with 5k people - 5

- StumbleUpon - 1

And I think that I can subtract 1 from these numbers since I have clicked on them myself to test if those links works. :)


Explanation for StumbleUpon is, that I am sending X-Frame-Options DENY, so it never loads there. This explains no traffic from there.


Are you sure sitemaps are important to website owners these days? I haven't heard anyone talk about them in a long while.


I pay people to ghostwrite books for me. I then list them on Amazon and market them. I started 2 years ago and have been putting out about 1 book/mo.

Last month I made ~$4.5k


Not expecting you to share one of the books with me, but I was looking to get into this as well. I am assuming they are small, niche-specific books.

Do you perform all of the keyword research ahead of time (before finding your writer), and build out an index/table of contents so that every chapter in the book is planned ahead of time, or do you leave all of the research, chapter creation, and writing for the ghostwriter?


Much of it depends on what I am looking to publish. I mostly focus on popular romance niches.

For instance I publish a lot of LGBT erotica/romances. I write up about 1-2 paragraphs of what I want the story to be and pass it to the ghostwriter. I have a few different pen names and each stick with one genre. Example: "Mary Sue" only publishes BDSM Gay Romances. That way if you find one of my books and like gay bdsm romance, you're more likely to buy the others or subscribe to learn when new books come out.

I have a simple wordpress site for each author with an email list. I provide 1 book free for signing up.

I've used the same ghostwriting service for ~2 years so they're pretty consistent.

I'm currently working on a nonfiction politics book. I basically provided a word doc of research (news articles/etc), and a theme. I only specified 2 chapters and a word count. The other chapters are up to them.


https://statetable.com

~ $30/month from donations covers my Digital Ocean bill for the month.

I'm also trying to get some sales & affiliate revenue going with athletic wear designs on Zazzle. Starting with a niche to get rolling then probably expanding to more general designs. The biggest problem I've hit so far is their fulfillment times & prices.


Any revenue from the ad?


After 6 or 7 years I think I finally had enough for Google to drop a direct deposit in my account. That's, what, $100?

It's pretty unobtrusive up in the corner there. I'm sure it suffers from banner blindness. But I don't want to load the page up with ads. It's a tool for other devs, not really a revenue source. But the donations are nice.


Nothing wrong with that. It's a nice tool. Glad to hear the donations help keep it alive.


Making various things, explaining various misconceptions, playing with blockchains.

Makes me zero money and some knowledge.


NL holdem live only. This month I'm at about +$80 an hour.


Stakes? Rough location?


https://oppslist.com/subscribe

Started charging this month.

~ $40 / mo


Trading forex CFDs (contract for difference), gold, oil, grain futures.


A rental property, earns about $400 a month in principal paid down.


algo trading and I am pretty happy with the profits...


Thanks for filling out your profile! Helped give some background.


No problemo, let me know if you have any questions...


No questions, algo trading is not something I want to get into. But it was interesting to read about your approach


cool!


I'm curious as to why you call it a "side hustle"?

Is the term "hustle" not extremely negative to you?

Merriam-Webster defines "hustle" as to push or shove someone in a rude way.

Urban Dictionary says "Anythin you need to do to make money... be it sellin cars, drugs, ya body. If you makin money, you hustlin."

Obviously, you don't seem to think that the word "hustle" has negative connotations, so I'm wondering how you came to that view?


I hired some movers once, these guys really 'hustled'; they moved quickly and worked efficiently. You can say this of a sports team as well. It is a colloquialism with good and bad connotations. Someone who has hustles can be seen as getting things done. The negative is a 'hustler' someone who gambles on games of skill pretending they're worse than they are to draw people in[1] ie crooks or con artists.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054997/


I don't like "side hustle", I'm really working hard.


It's the colloquial term now. Hussle can mean just making money.




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