From what I can see, however, there is no straightforward process for this. Online freelancing platforms are a crapshoot. It is impossible to monetize a random open-source library or other similar project. Starting your own consultancy takes a lot of initial effort and capital. Entrepreneurship is even riskier and more time consuming.
For someone in my position who is not looking to quit my job, start a billion dollar company or change the world, just convert some of my spare time into spending money, what is the best solution at present? Has anyone else run into this problem and found something that works?
If a $500k is still not enough for someone's annual salary, then maybe they should be seeking out something more important than a side gig.
Why? I don't follow this reasoning at all. There's no reason that because someone makes a lot of money, there should be an easy path to making more. What am I missing?
The only thing that comes to mind is contracting/moonlighting. This lets you work in the domain in which you are already an expert. To do this, just follow these simple steps:
* examine your employment contract and ensure you can legally do this
* carve out time on your nights and weekends
* reach out to former employers and colleagues and say "do you need any extra hands? I'm looking to moonlight"
* manage expectations carefully
* deliver
* wash, rinse, repeat
Everything else I know of (consulting, writing a book, blogging + selling ads, starting a company) isn't an extension of that, so takes a lot more effort.
Now, should you? That's a question of the value of your free time. That I can't comment on, except to say the older I get, the more I value my free time rather than money.
To find these jobs open up LinkedIn and start responding to recruiters. Say something like "thanks but no thanks I'm happy in my current role. I have actually been interested in doing some freelancing in the X space. Probably about Y hours a week part time not during business hours."
Some of the recruiters won't know what to do with that but a suprising number will, remember that big cut they get?
Alright now one last thing here. Another option. Instead of consulting and working extra hours, consider studying a topic that you enjoy and other people hate. It also needs to be in high demand and pay well. Then go double your salary or whatever and not worry about working extra hours or filling out billable hour spreadsheets and so on.
I would be learning how to invest (in fact, I do with far less than 500k salary) in my spare time if I really need to maximize income.
Maybe your living expenses match (or exceed) your income though, so you don’t have much capital after expenses.
30yo, European based with lousy 60k/year. With the rising real estate prices I probably won’t even be able to afford a house in my lifetime. (Except maybe with a working SO - but even then until I’m too old for work)
I’d say if it’s it just about earning more money maybe work overtime for a little salary boost. Hard to beat that $/h.
I used to help a local outdoors club with some PHP and LAMP stack dev for pittance an hour, but it was fun, I didn’t use any of this tech in my day job, and I felt I was helping something I really cared about. In the end too it broadened my dev problem solving skills.
Ideally I'd like to buy some rental real-estate, I'm just not too into the risk profile of that kind of thing for now.
My only advice here is to be careful of the brand / market you go for - DTC is great, however handling customer support is a huge drain.
Alternatively, non-billion dollar projects are relatively untapped. There's a rich seam of million dollar ideas that VCs won't fund but are too deep to do in a weekend and too niche for corporations and agencies to do in their spare time. People have made good money off recipe apps and news apps, or some form of API that does things like live movement detection. You'll probably have to solve consumer problems though.
First off, I think that that's extremely rare at that level with those hours.
Second, why would one want to work for a couple extra percent? If the comp is second to some passion, then sure.
Edit: I haven't personally done this; I'm speaking from the position of someone who conducts a fair number of interviews at the day job and wouldn't relish the thought of doing more after clocking out. My spare capacity does in fact go to side projects.
Seriously, did you post this just to brag about how much you make to everyone? It seems almost ludicrous that this could be a serious comment....