I run a popular Quiz website. I make around $6,000 per month from Google adsense. I work between 2-3 hours a week usually posting quiz links on my Pinterest page. My only expense is hosting which is around $20 per month (Digital Ocean). I have never advertised my website and it gets all the traffic from Pinterest Organically. Compare to my salary, I'm an IT Administrator in my day job and make $400 per month. I live in Ethiopia :) I thought this inspires my fellow HN. Good day.
I don't think I'll ever quite understand this mentality that "not having a job"=="sitting at home all day". Do people not have hobbies of any kind? They really only find meaning in pursuit of money?
A job isn't solely about pursuit of money. Presumably, you are doing work that adds value for someone and/or society.
It's also a form of security should the online income suddenly dry up. It can also be a source of healthy social connections.
I was a homemaker for a lot of years. I did a lot of life enhancing stuff for me and other people. Trying to translate that into an adequate income post divorce has been enormously painful.
Some people successfully turn hobbies into careers. Others can't pull that off.
If someone's life works, changing some piece of it could cause it to come apart rapidly. Why risk that?
> Presumably, you are doing work that adds value for someone and/or society.
You can do that without being paid for it, and then you can control your own schedule completely.
> It's also a form of security should the online income suddenly dry up.
That's fair, but chances are if you managed to build something that generates enough passive income to live off of then you probably won't have much difficulty finding a job if you needed to.
> It can also be a source of healthy social connections.
I personally thing relying on work for social interaction is a terrible idea.
> If someone's life works, changing some piece of it could cause it to come apart rapidly. Why risk that?
Fair enough, but all I'm saying is I don't really understand how it works for them. To me, my job is just how I put food on the table, and my pursuit of money is purely so that one day I can do that without having to sell my time to someone else.
Different people relate to work differently. Some people have some of their best relationships through their work.
Your experience isn't invalid, but it also doesn't invalidate how other people experience life.
I replied because I started out as a homemaker, then I got divorced after about two decades. I got to have an extreme experience of doing useful things for reasons other than money, and when I got divorced it was financially and socially devastating.
My so-called friends didn't stick around. All the life enhancing, useful work I had done was not readily translated into paid work.
I've spent recent years figuring out how to have a healthy relationship to paid work. It's overall been a better experience for me than the years I did useful things for others without being paid for it.
I actually have a decent track record of being able to put my volunteer work on a resume to help me get a job and I had a corporate job for a while. But it was an entry level job that didn't pay enough and corporate life wasn't really a good fit for me.
I mean, wherever you go, there you are. I'm no less guilty of tunnel vision (so to speak) than you are. I'm just looking at the world through a different tunnel.
But I desperately want to have enough paid work and to relate to the world through that lens. I don't feel valued for the things I've done and I've literally lived in dire poverty for years, including several years of homelessness. No, people don't really care and I feel I've been badly burned for doing good things for other people and not getting compensated for it.
All those people that I did wonderful things for who got serious careers out of it have not helped me create a real career with sufficient income. It hasn't opened doors for me in terms of being taken seriously and adequately compensated.
It's been enormously frustrating, baffling and enraging. It's proven to be a stubbornly intractable problem.
I never want to be 100% financially dependent on just one thing again.
The guy in this discussion making $6000 a month for two or three hours of work each week may have no ability to replicate that success if this stops working. Lots of businesses have been harmed by the rise of ad blockers, losing as much as 80% of their income over night.
One slam dunk success doesn't guarantee you can readily create another. For many people, that kind of success is short-term and will never happen again.
It's why the NFL requires financial education for their players. They are all college educated, but they are also very young and most NFL careers are short-lived. For many of them, the two or three years they play pro football will be the most money they will make in their life.
If they spend it like they think this is their starting salary and it only gets better from here, then they basically party their asses off for a few short years followed by an injury, the sudden end of their career and no means whatsoever to make anywhere near that much ever again. If they didn't save and invest, it's gone and never coming back.
That's an all too common story for a rather wide variety of wildly successful experiences. That kind of extreme success is frequently described as luck because it's so hard to replicate.
In some parts of the world, if you meet people and they ask what do you do, and you say, "I do X, I work for Y" they nod and understand. If you say, "I run my business" you are met with serious suspicion, as a possible scam artist. It can impact you real life social network, dating etc. Not only that, online businesses are not guaranteed for life, things changes fast. But career is. You can say I have been a teacher, IT admin, programmer or XYZ for 20 years. Doesn't matter if you changed job once or 30 times.
I know people who work within their industry (health care) in a specific place that tends to be low paying. They could very easily switch (because people have tried recruiting them to do so because they worked with them previously and they know they're good) to a higher paying job with a lighter workload without moving but servicing a different group. But part of the appeal of the job is that they are working in support of this specific class of patients.
Dunno, I could see aspects other than money being a driver in someone sticking with something when a better opportunity or situation seems to be present with little effort.
Not necessarily pursuit of money. Work. The world is built on work. If we stop working we go back to living in wilderness - literally and figuratively. Hobbies are fun, but they aren’t work. Work provides a different kind of satisfaction.
Maybe it provides satisfaction for you. My most satisfying projects have always been the ones I was passionate enough about to do at home on my own or with a small group of like-minded people. I'd have done a lot more if I weren't balancing it with the necessary evil of a paying job.
Other way to put it: he likes his job, so he hasnt thought too much about doing something else with his time. If he would quit, he probably wouldnt be sitting at home all day but would end up doing something - however he hasnt thought much about it since he is content with the current situation, therefore "sitting at home all day" is just easy way to put it.
I dont think there is nothing wrong in staying at a job if you like it, even if you dont need it financially.
Unless you have enough money to comfortably retire, or at least, the social network that can catch you if you meet catastrophe, allowing your skills to erode or even allowing the perception that they have via not having a day job is probably a bad idea.
From a different perspective, the site sounds great but it's not something to be be guaranteed to be around forever. I understand steady employment, both from a security standpoint and from not having a gap in employment history.
Some people thrive in structure. Taking away their job wouldn't be freeing. It would remove a big foundation their life is built on. Not everyone want to self-motivate and build their own structure because there already exists large structures you can just find your place in.
So it's not about not having a hobby. It's about having a place and purpose in life.
You don't have to work for someone else and be an employee your whole life, it's not the only way. There are other choices available to you.
You can also be your own boss too and have other people working for you, or at least help you out occasionally on a part-time basis.
You can easily rent an office in a shared space if you don't want to work from home and go there a couple of times a week.
Also, you don't have to focus only on your current project if it's not your thing.
You can start something else that you would like to create while living off the income generated by your current project.
But I get it, the social expectation is that you have an office job, its what almost everyone does.
But think about this: someone at your company at a given moment had to quit their job to create the company you work on, right? Otherwise, your current day job would simply not exist.
All those things require certain skills and whatnot though. If someone has a good thing going and doesn't want to plunge into the abyss, I'd say good on them. The abyss is full of pitfalls and ways to lose life savings and go into major debt when the lucrative side gig can no longer pay for the vision. Employment is at least guaranteed no debt, especially while the lucrative side gig is going. Correspondingly, when they have this good thing going, they're not being a drag on society. Their employer is still finding value in them too. To those who want to take the plunge and risk it all, that's cool too. On HN, even honourable. But it doesn't have to be the only way.
There is not much financial risk involved in his case, and it looks like he already has the skills needed. He already makes over 10 times his salary. In one year of employment, he spared the equivalent salary of 10 years.
I think people exaggerate the dive into the abyss thing and risking it all. If you have some savings, you can try to launch a business and if it doesn't work you can always go back to work for someone else.
At a given point, someone is going to give you another job as a sysadmin again. He can even work remotely and easily make more than $400 a month.
If you are not hiring other people and purchasing equipment, starting a Saas business as a sole founder has minimal financial risk involved compared to almost all other types of businesses, it's really not that risky.
I think what holds a lot of people back is the fact that they come from an employee background probably at the family level, and they see the world through the eyes of an employee.
They don't even remotely consider the several options that they actually have available.
What you're forgetting is that running an online business all day is isolating. Going to work with colleagues, all working towards a common goal, gives a sense of community. When you are not dependent on the money from your job, it also gives you a certain amount of leverage people normally don't have.
Then on top of this, for this gentleman to see a big change in his/her lifestyle, considering they are already earning $6K/month, any new business would need to make substantially more than that. Is making another $6K/month going to seriously change his/her life? Probably not. Maybe it affords a bit of a nicer house, staying at 5 star hotels VS. 4 star hotels.
The reality is to see a major difference in lifestyle from a new business, it would need to make $20-30K a month, or more.
There is not a lot of sense of community in most companies these days, its often each person for itself.
Especially in IT, people stay for a couple of years and then leave or get laid off, there is no employment for life anymore.
You can run the business from a shared workspace, it's not an issue. And even hire a couple of people to help you out since the salaries there are relatively affordable, and build your own community then.
You don't have to go to an office working for someone else, that is optional. Nothing wrong with it, it's just not the only choice.
I don't agree with your generalization. When you keep in touch with people you used to work with then some relationships usually expand beyond companies and employment duration. In the future they can become your business partners, employers, referees, spouse or just friends.
Perhaps he genuinely enjoys his job? Why should he have to launch another business? He already started one and it's very successful! Let the man enjoy his freedom and have a regular job if he so pleases!
That is highly unlikely, such a mundane job as a sysadmin compared to having your own online business.
If he liked it that much, then probably he wouldn't have started a whole side project that must have consumed evenings and weekends for years.
If he would have found professional fulfillment in his job, he would not likely have started a side project in the first place.
As he mentions in his own reply, he stays because he feels that his job defines him as a person, and he would lose his social identity if he left.
This is a surprisingly lucid reply, he can do whatever he wants and I wish him the best, but it's clear to me that he has other much better options available.
Not true for everyone. I genuinely love being a sysadmin, or more accurately business recovery specialist. Rebuilding systems after a disaster with no documentation is genuine fun for me. Otherwise I'd have gone insane. However, I have other projects that I work on.
Your reply seems rooted in the fairly widespread assumption that having your own online business that makes solid "mrr" is some kind of supreme achievement and you should relish in it solely.
Some people have higher-dimensional desires and interests in life.
I have a simpler explanation, what likely happens is that most people don't even try to do it (even though they could do so like the case here) because it's different than the social norm, which says that you should be an employee working for someone else.
I'm saying that there are other dignified ways to live that are different, you don't absolutely have to be an employee at all costs.
Independent work, running a small business, those are other alternatives to live that are equally valid.
At a personal level, I'm not a fan of this generalization that being an IT admin (or any other boring job) is inherently inferior than, I don't know, skateboarding or playing the guitar for a living.
That's true, but the way people do things they enjoy when it's a job is very different from how they do them when it's a hobby.
I write code for a living, and I write code for fun. I would never choose to write the code I write for a living if I weren't getting paid to, and it's unlikely I'll ever get paid for the code I write for fun.
Yeah, the question is IT administration for what. I do a lot of stuff in my job that I don't enjoy for its own sake, but I enjoy it because I feel alignment with the purpose the organization is serving.
if i didn't define myself by what allows me to make a living, then i would hate my work. now i am not defining myself only by paid work. but it is part of my identity. if it wasn't i wouldn't be able to do it.
The problem with that is that, outside of our personal lives, most of our meaningful activities and contributions in society are organized as jobs at companies (or various government bodies). In my country even more so than in the US, as there's almost no volunteering here. It's just hard to feel like you're living a meaningful life without a job, or running a company yourself.
If you get a long enough break from work your hidden inner voices will start talking. You will discover that your identity isn't tied to your work-for-money activities.
IMO (I can't be sure of course) you simply never got off the hamster wheel for long enough to give your inner voices a chance to speak.
I think it's great that you know what you want to do and like. The income from your website is probably very mentally freeing, because you could do a lot of different things with your life but you can choose not to.
In many countries, people don't understand the concept of lifestyle business (even if it brings multiples of salary in revenue, like this case). It is considered "prestigious" and safe to have a job (It doesn't make sense, but it is how it is).
They makes the same amount from AdSense in one month as they do from 15 months of their job. Assuming this has been going on for a few years, I doubt the money from the job is really effecting the size of their financial safety net. If they're spending within their means from the job they have a safety net that will last "forever". If not their real job isn't enough for them anyways.
Non financial reasons for keeping the job could make a lot of sense though.
A regular job with regular income looks good on paper if you want a bank to lend you money, for example.
Maybe less likely to appear on tax authority's radar for undisclosed income if people know you as Joe the IT guy who leaves for work at the same time every morning?
Banks are looking for stability in your income. A regular salaried job counts as stability. But proven bank deposits over multiple years also counts. I wouldn't shy away from self-employment just because of banks.
Source: I worked at a bank, and wrote algorithms for loan acceptance which evaluated such things.
For loans, banks are looking for expected future stability in your income.
I would never discourage anyone from self-employment, but right now I'm watching a good friend try to get a mortgage in Germany... and he's been running his own company for 20 years... in a highly volatile industry... and let's say they'd be treating him a whole lot better if he had a boring day job at some big company.
If you're planning on stuff like mortgages and (depending on your passport) visas, "regular old job" is worth many multiples of self-employment. If your self-employment makes enough that you won't need a mortgage (etc.) then great, but I would bear it in mind when thinking about quitting the day job.
> I would never discourage anyone from self-employment
I would, especially if they are in their prime earning years and are trying to become independent contractors. Software engineering jobs command high salaries and benefits these days. The opportunity costs are just too high and the odds of sustaining a one-person contracting show for 5, 10, 20+ years is slim to none.
It's easy to change from independent contractor to employee if you really want. The experience on the CV is just as good and you probably get paid (a lot) more.
The only real risk is that during economic downturns it may be hard to find contracts but your employer could fire you as well.
It depends on the market. I worked with contractors back in 2008 who said it became easier to find work during the crash because they were seen as Capital Expenditure while Full-Time Employees were considered Operating Expenditure and were being laid off en-masse.
This benefit is always true, especially in locations where you can write off CapEx against your taxes. My main point was that if you are a contractor and want a perm role you can just apply for a permanent job. You don't even need to write whether or not you were a contractor in your application form / CV, the hiring manager only cares about your projects and roles within the project.
> But proven bank deposits over multiple years also counts.
That's just one factor. Banks are looking to minimize risk and from the perspective of banks, self-employment increases risk. That's not to say banks won't loan to you, just that the hurdle is much higher for you to prove that you are not a risk. Chances are your interest rates will still suffer even when a bank decides to loan to you.
Meeting other humans, enjoying work and staying on the good side of the tax authority are important. I just imagined that she or he could do these things other ways; hire one or two employees, diversify the business a bit, and incorporate the company.
I actually do think keeping the job is a good idea for exposure to different ways of thinking, but perhaps scaling it back a little (part-time?) in order to invest more time into the primary income source.
Some people stay in jobs not only for money but for other minor stuff. They continue because they don't want to work alone, keep pushing themselves, keeping a routine, etc.
I think some people get shocked of something which may raise from cultural difference, especially compared to highly capital-focused West. Work doesn't have to be modern financial slavery. There are places where there is no overtime or weekend work at all, you go to work to meet nice people, learn interesting stuff and have some common goal which benefits your community. All that is possible.
Hola. Not related to this post, but I remember you from the early days of Envato when Jeffrey way and you had most of the blog posts. I learned a lot and kickstarted my career from those tutorials. Cheers and All the best..!!!
How do you manage to kickstart something like this? You mentioned you get your traffic organically via Pinterest, but there had to be something you did initially that set off that growth.
My website started five years ago, It didn’t get any traffic the first three years before one of my quiz went viral. Now I have around 70k followers on Pinterest.
This is important. I have seen this a lot. Persistence. Many people keep pushing,keep pushing even if there is no positive feedback loop for a long time.
After a while, they beat time.
Kudos.
