Ask HN: Do you have multiple income streams? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you have multiple income streams?

3 pointsxupybd3 comments

I'm thinking about what I've done over my career and wondering if I should have taken more chances and built alternative sources of income.

In our industry it seems we could but how many do?

Have you? If so what is bringing in your side income?

View on HN

The study about an millionaire having 7 sources of income is often misunderstood and misquoted. I believe this is the original report : https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/14rpoverthetopbournerosenmer... and then multiple streams that people often quote are not multiple streams, but multiple forms, like investment income, rental income, royalties, earned income etc.

The study is actually quite insightful if you read it for what it is and not what you want it to be.

I have also found this video to be quite insightful : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF5H7ch2Ngg

For me i made a few businesses, mostly games (https://addictingwordgames.com) and a crypto forecasting tool that i stopped working on.

They mostly helped me learn/grow on to better roles and learn more about creating businesses and machine learning.

My main income so far was mostly powered by house flipping/stock (canva)/work but i recently left to persue running my own AI business.

I now made/run https://text-generator.io an API for devs to generate text/code which recently became profitable.

I find with careers in general it's best to be the fearful one feeling like the perpetual imposter around greats, taking too many risks, moving around what you do a lot to build your skills, i received lots of negative feedback about ideas before e.g. "its impossible to predict the stock market", "if your predictions are so good then why arent you just keeping it to yourself", "why compete with Github copilot on generating code?" "arent they so good already", "isn't it too ambitious", "why compete with OpenAI", turns out there's lots of potential customers who are in much different situations than ones giving negative feedback, receiving the negative feedback helps you feel scared and know your doing something against the status quo.

I made some massive "blunders at face value" like leaving Canva and blowing lots of potential stock to go learn about using Machine Learning for generating text at a startup, blowing lots of money developing stock trading algorithms etc...

While taking the appropriate amount of risks to have a fulfilling life, you'll find it feels like a rollercoaster filled with ups and downs that may feel like epic fails but are really epic lessons.

If income is your goal, in this industry, I think that it makes more sense to maximize TC in your day job. SWE can reasonably make over $1m per year, from a single job.

If you’re not in FAANG or equivalent, work on getting there. Then if you’re not L7+ work on that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com