Hi, I'm a web developer and I search a way to get extra money, in a regular way if possible.<p>I tried to be a freelance, it is well paid but with my full-time job it's too time consuming and I'm not so ambitious.<p>I'm not here to make advertisement but to hear your experience. I'm considering security audit, consulting and things like that be it's the same as to be freelance: you need to search for prospects, etc.<p>Do you have some clue or experience?
So I have experience working with Udacity (MOOCs for various coding related fields)<p>I work as a mentor for a few of their courses. You're connected to X number of students (you set x yourself). Then as they progress through the course they have the option to send you a message to ask a question or whatever. You also do a weekly check-in with them to see where they're at, if they have any blockers, what their goals are for the next week.<p>You then get paid (via PayPal) based on how your student interactions went on a per week basis. 0$ for every student who didn't message you, 5$ for 1-9 messages, 15$ for 10+ messages. You get bonuses for them completing major sections as well.<p>You interact via a mentor dashboard on web or via a mobile app. If you use mobile, you're basically being paid to text some students a few times a week. Pay will obviously vary depending on how many students you have and how good you are at interacting with them. (The better your mentor rating the more students you're allowed to take on). I had 40 students and made 1.4K a month. The work didn't feel stressful or anything. It's pretty easy to land (no formal interviews or anything), you just have to get involved in their slack and PM one of the Udacity staffers. Was pretty easy, plus I enjoy teaching/mentoring.<p>You can also be a project reviewer rather than a mentor, but not sure how that works.
We're working to solve this problem at <a href="http://MoonlightWork.com" rel="nofollow">http://MoonlightWork.com</a>. At my last startup, I had a lot of friends who wanted to help us out - but they had day jobs that they couldn't leave. So, I started hiring them part-time as contractors. It was great - we had top talent, and they could focus on interesting problems while making extra money.<p>Moonlight is still in its early stages but we are doing thousands of dollars per week in business. Our average hourly rate based on paid contracts so far has been $146.79. We're focusing on more specialized work rather than generic web development from scratch. Early projects have ranged from a custom algorithm for a hedge fund to some infrastructure work to support Tensorflow. The benefit to companies is that they have access to specialized engineers for focused projects, and they can get a match within 48 hours.<p>If you're interested in short-term projects, you can join at <a href="https://MoonlightWork.com/apply" rel="nofollow">https://MoonlightWork.com/apply</a> - we're working on increasing the number of projects, so sorry if it takes a couple weeks to get a first project match.<p>We're going though YC's Startup School MOOC, and we did live office hours with Sam Altman a few weeks ago. You can see the video here: <a href="https://youtu.be/abtHadERzXU" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/abtHadERzXU</a>
<p><pre><code> I tried to be a freelance, it is well paid but with my full-time job it's too time consuming and I'm not so ambitious.
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That's your problem in a nutshell. If you don't have any time to spare, and you're not ambitious enough to find time, then there's not much you can do. However, unless you're putting in 60+ hours a week at your day job you most likely have a lot more time than you think. Even 1 hour a night can add up quick.<p>- I've build a number of websites businesses on the side. Most the jobs come through word of mouth and recommendations.<p>- A few of them have agreed to keep me on a retainer, they pay me $XXX a month and I'll host their sites and give them a couple hours of maintenance each month if needed.<p>- I started a little API about 5 years ago and dropped an advertisement on the homepage. 3 years went by with next to no revenue from it, as time went on though it started to pick up. It runs on a $10/m VPS and at it's peak it made $1600/m in ad revenue. These days it hovers around $600-700/m and runs on a $20/m VPS. This takes about 0.5 hours a month of my time to keep up.<p>- Another company wanted a web application but didn't have the budget to pay for it up front. Built out a proof of concept on my own time and presented it. They liked it, so instead of selling it outright I host/maintain it and sell them seats. They pay $X/m per employee. They're trailing it right now in a few stores but they're in talks to launch it nationally.<p>- About to launch a small SaaS; one of those 'scratch your own itch' things. Whether there's a market for it or not remains to be seen.<p>All of those things have been accomplished over the last 5 years. I have a wife, 10 year old daughter, a full time job, and coach a soccer team. I know there are many people much busier than I am out there, but if I can find time to work on side projects, so can most people. You have to want it though, and your lack of ambition is most likely the prime culprit.
I'm in a similar position, a web developer with a reasonable salary interested in side income, but not interested in onerous responsibilities of running a business. I've been had two projects I'm sort of happy with<p>1. A shopify app that makes about 150/mo. I answer about 2 emails about it per month and otherwise don't work on it. It took about 150 hours to build so I haven't been paid well for it, but I enjoyed building it.<p>2. A WordPress plugin I acquired for about 10k that makes 800/mo. I get a lot more emails about this but I think if I get it into a less buggy state then I can get that down to something more reasonable.
I've recently been playing around with HackerOne. It's a great way to both benefit society (by finding, reporting, and eliminating security flaws in software that people rely on) and yourself (most companies on HackerOne give Bug Bounties out, anywhere from a couple hundred to thousands of dollars, depending on the bug). Specifically, I looked at shopify's mruby bug bounty (<a href="https://hackerone.com/shopify-scripts" rel="nofollow">https://hackerone.com/shopify-scripts</a>) and used a fuzzer (AFL/honggfuzz) to find bugs in mruby, which I could then investigate and report. That specific bug bounty is a lot of C/low level security, but there are many bug bounties which are geared towards websites/web development (XSS/SQLi/etc).
Web dev? Affiliate links.<p>Consider a consumer item you are passionate about. Walk through the typical shopping process, either as a newb or as an enthusiast. Identify all the pain points, every bit of friction. Consider everything you've listed as an embarrassment that you will personally make right. Build the smoothest, fastest, most respectful experience possible. Compile lots of information too - your goal is to become the best resource on the internet. Put the user first at all times.
And when appropriate add affiliate links. (In my case only 27% of URLs are affiliated.)<p>Why is respecting the user the #1 priority? Because you do not want to look like an affiliate content mill! Go read the blogs that teach you how to affiliate^W build dark patterns and do the opposite of what they suggest.<p>Of course even if you are unquestionably the best resource on the internet, some communities will still tar and feather you for having affiliate links. I was very lucky to find a great and supportive community.
We're working to solve this exact problem.<p>Check out <a href="http://turtle.ai/" rel="nofollow">http://turtle.ai/</a><p>We've focused on building software that makes it really easy for "plug and play" software development work. We think 40 hours isn't perfect for every kind of engineering job. We even have some software developers delivering customers value in just a few hours per month.<p>You do need to be able to clearly say "here's what I'm doing, and here's when to expect results", but we also recruit customers that buy into our vision. Also, our software makes it really easy for both sides to keep smiling :)
I made a macOS app [1]. It was a lot of work and the outcome is always unknown beforehand, but I could do it at completely my own pace (which could be an answer to the "little time" problem).<p>[1] <a href="https://easygit.me" rel="nofollow">https://easygit.me</a>
I think there should be a service for that.<p>For example, if I say that in the following two weeks, I want to do X hours of programming work, and they know my skill level, they should be able to match me up. Like a job agency, but for short-term freelance work.
Freelancing takes some degree of ambition and if you're just starting it can be time consuming.<p>What I'm hearing though is you want the benefits of freelancing without having to do the work of a freelancer? That's a huge fallacy. Freelancing requires some degrees of ambition and most importantly work.<p>Unless you've built a reputation for providing these services its going to be difficult obtaining customers.<p>What should you do? At the very least<p><pre><code> - build your profile and build your brand
- "become" an "expert" in your field by blogging, tweeting, etc to drive engagement
- get connected to other "experts" and start conversations
- build a simple landing page (site) for each area you want to provide services for. A/B test the landing page using Google Ad Words, etc
- sign up as an organization on freelancing sites and start doing jobs which can be done asynchronously
- become a maintainer or contributor to security auditing software
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Alternatively you could buy an existing business and improve it.<p>Again, all this requires ambition and work.<p>If you don't have time or interest in finding the time it's probably not for you.
Hey, here is my idea for you to consider: stock trading, for me it is the ultimate lifestyle business with no customers, no employees and no investors...<p>You only need some python (and pandas) knowledge, a Linux server and some historical stock market data - please check my older posts for a source (I would love to post the source here, but there is a forum bully stalking all my posts – a failed day trader who will crap all over your post).<p>The barrier for entry is very low, you can program your trading strategies in your spare time and run the tests while sleeping without loosing a single cent and once you find what works for you can automate it and it’ll run on autopilot...<p>Just my 2 cents, hope whatever you do works for you in the end, I was in a situation like yours and this is what is working for me...
My best source of good income was doing code reviews for an agency, but after while they realised how lucrative it is and started to do them inhouse.<p>I also did some presales engineering work for another agency. Agencies are great for this kind of biz/senior dev roles: they dont always have enough skilled personel that could do this kind of work and might be open hiring somebody to do it. If this is something you might want to do, then try to look around for it.
Normally if your social circle knows you're a webdeveloper, you'll automatically get offers, or let's say: requests for sites. Most of them you want to skip (like your friend who want to start a bar and has no money but will pay you in beers), or anything that is not for an established and succesful business. But still there should be a few freelancer opportunities without really trying, just around you.<p>So perhaps that could be a first step, getting word out more in your closer circle.<p>I personally have too much work with this ever expanding social circle freelancing stuff, as sidebusiness, that I think of outsourcing it or am wondering when the point is of quitting my day job (which is well paid). That said, I'm using "social circles" for lack of better wording.<p>What I really would like to do is creating my own sideprojects like goldenbeet here addresses, that seem like fun or just interesting myself. I have a bunch of good project ideas, but the sideproject freelance work keeps on flowing steadily and I never get to it. If this sounds like a brag: it's not. I actually consider anything of (semi-)passive income much of a success then regular freelancer gigs.
Hi Kmaschta,<p>I saw some folks mentioning Gigster so thought I'd add some notes. For reference I'm Christian Thurston and I've been working at Gigster from early on.<p>The benefits of our model is that we do fixed price, not hourly, so if you're able to work better and faster then your effective hourly goes up. Also, with us you don't have to interface with the client - you work with a PM who speaks tech and write code - that's it.<p>Our clients are both technical and non-technical but it's a lot less relevant because you'll always be working with that PM layer as a dev, not directly with the client.<p>Here's what the higher end of pay looks like as well: <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/reneemorad/2016/10/24/the-skill-thats-paving-the-way-for-freelancers-to-make-500k-or-more/#7dda10fa13ae" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/reneemorad/2016/10/24/the-skill...</a><p>Good luck on your search and hope you find a good situation that fits your needs :).
I've gone the side-gig-for-extra-cash route before. It was easy to make the money, but hard to sustain with a full-time job. It's a recipe for burnout.<p>If you're a skilled developer, you're much better of demanding a raise, switching jobs, or switching up your skillset to a higher paying job if your motivations are strictly cash.
I don't know if it still works today, but Forbes says there are some people who make very serious money on fiverr, but they are mostly creative work though (voice over, writing etc). Not sure if it will work for software dev. Also the site is quite established now, so there is some stiff competition for low price.<p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2016/05/31/how-these-3-people-make-6-figures-a-year-on-fiverr/#2f39a7d31df2" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2016/05/31/how-these-...</a><p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/04/25/how-to-make-1-million-on-fiverr-secrets-from-the-sites-top-earner/#25ba992031f8" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/04/25/how-to-mak...</a>
The easiest way to make more money, without devoting more time into working, is to ask for a raise. If that doesn't work, find a job that pays more.<p>All of these other ideas are good, but are not easy and require time commitments.
check out some of the posts on indiehackers.com it lists side projects that are all cash flow positive to some degree. I use it to gain insight into how they got started. The IH community is also very cool.<p>oppsdaily.com is another great resource, it sends out a daily email with problems people are willing to pay to be solved.