[julianeon]

I've got this sentiment reading a few such goodbye letters like this. They often end by saying something like, "I quit software engineering. Because I can't make money at it, under these conditions." As if the options were work for Big Tech; work for a YC company (aka embryonic Big Tech); or be poor.

So I'm gonna say it like this, to get the vibe across:

It's pretty easy to run some Internet businesses and equal your software eng salary, as the owner of those businesses.

Not in year one, but if your goal is to hit ~40k in the first year and then scale up over a couple years, you can do it.

Also it is vastly easier if you have the capital to jump to the front of the line and skip the horrible 1 year of waiting for traffic/users to come, and just buy a business. Then you're in business from day one and can complete this more quickly and less stressfully. Elon did it with Tesla and he's now the world's richest man; learn from his example.

It's funny that this ends up being a kind of "secret knowledge" because it falls between the cracks of tech and corporate incentives. Big companies won't teach you this, because lol why would they teach you how to screw them and quit. VC's won't (exactly) teach you this, because while they are generically supportive of entrepreneurship and while it is easier to earn less money than more money (obviously), they want you to go straight for the billion dollar ideas and discourage small money thinking. Which leads to this outcome of like 100 engineers trying and only 5 making it through the gauntlet and becoming rich, rather than >90 making it if only the incentives were different.

Incidentally I recently bought a business and, after spending a lot of time in the nitty gritty "weeds" of making an Internet $10 as opposed to "zero to one" thinking, this is all coming into focus. But as I said, it's a kind of secret knowledge, which you have to piece together from YouTube, newsletters, and doing the effort - that last part of which is like 80% of the real learning. In my case I bought something and then learned on the job; fortunately the profits did not suffer.

So I'm here to tell you this is doable; it's definitely doable. If you're a software engineer of average intelligence for a software engineer, you can do it. Figuring it out isn't easy, but it's very far from impossible.

[bix6]

What sort of businesses do you recommend? I’m hesitant to take on someone else’s codebase.

[SoftTalker]

I know of a company and their business is basically: identify software products that have customers but aren’t really being developed any more. Buy them and reimplement the software in a more modern way. Sell it again to the existing users, who are generally happy to buy because now they’re getting updates and support and don’t need to keep that old Windows 98 box around because it’s the only thing that ran the old version.

[julianeon]

I'll just survey the landscape, and then say it ultimately comes down to personal preference.

So the basic idea is to get an audience and then monetize it. For that, there are different ways. In my opinion it's easier to buy something that gets traffic through this and then monetize it, then to buy a whole business, at least for the purposes of this conversation. Why? Because it's much easier to verify something is getting the traffic a platform's stats confirm, and then build a business on top of that, then to extrapolate correctly from a business someone is selling with a thousand moving parts.

With that being said: plenty of people buy complicated Internet businesses and achieve great results with them.

Also to reiterate from my earlier comment: if you can buy an account (some platforms do allow this) and start with traffic that's already earning a trickle of dollars, psychologically I believe that's 100 times easier than starting from nothing and painfully waiting months to earn a dollar. I recommend it whenever possible.

So without further ado here's how I rank the ways to get traffic. Notice how fractured this landscape this is; most people specialize in one, or perhaps two.

Google SEO: avoid avoid avoid. Not only is it saturated but the search arm of Google is a hard taskmaster. The most frustrating and abstruse of all the ways to make money online imo. I would only do this if I started by buying a niche content website business (aka one with prebuilt traffic).

YouTube: much more appealing than Google SEO but still a grind. However what you will learn here is all useful and the YouTube algo is, in a sense, a great marketing teacher. Unfortunately it takes so long to get off the ground that I'd also only enter this by buying a channel with traffic.

FaceBook: said to be lucrative but I don't know it. This is a great example of what I was saying about secret knowledge. How many people do you know who are enthused about creating FaceBook groups and attracting traffic to them? Yet this is, based on the available evidence, a solid business, maybe even the best of the ones listed here.

Instagram: seems tougher than YouTube in my opinion.

Pinterest: the new hotness, and currently being overrun by AI content lol. But AI + mass producing content is a viable strategy, and your North Star as someone looking to make money online is viable straegies.

TikTok: for profit, most likely better than Insta, and even YouTube. I just don't know enough about specific strategies for it unfortunately.

Newsletters: a good niche but kind of opaque (not easy to learn about and getting crowded). But said to be good.

[SoftTalker]

Care to post any YouTube links that you find helpful?

[julianeon]

Two guys who I think are posting good stuff are Jesse Cunningham and Jacky Chou. I'm not doing exactly what they're doing, but I notice a lot of overlap w/my learnings and what they're teaching, in terms of principles. So I believe they're directionally correct.

In general though on YouTube think about a business you'd like to enter, then search those keywords and start grinding through videos. If you're not sure what business to enter than start your search with "how to make money online" and again grind through videos. (Note: this won't be very fun). Some of the best videos are by no name guys with like 100 views precisely because they're starting from nothing and are more like you than the big names.