Making money
thread: is there a way to construct a memetic money funnel?
— Sid (6/100 digital art) (@ftlsid) October 16, 2022
I switched from full-time to software contracting earlier this year and it's working really well for me (I actually earn more annually than before). But the core issue is that income is still proportional to time spent
How do you make money without a job? Serious question
— sid (hooded arc) (@ftlsid) December 27, 2022
The most meritocratic & lucrative “standard” way to make money is software engineering. You should know how to code (Learning to code).
# Decoupling money from time
Usually, you trade time for money; X dollars per hour. You can increase your hourly rate a lot by obtaining skills and credentials, but ultimately you can’t get money without giving up your time.
A more time-efficient way to make money is through owning something that increases in value, like an investment. Safe investments in the market probably won’t get you enough returns to sustain yourself, unless you have enough money that you don’t need this guide. Risky investments are, well, risky.
Another way to own something is by creating it. You could start a company. But starting your own company is extremely time-intensive, and doesn’t guarantee a payout.
The best way to make money, in my opinion, is to construct something that can provide unbounded value given a fixed time input. One obvious example is creating content: books, videos, tweets, art, weird networked pseudo-blogs. Your content creates value proportionally to (number of people consuming) x (average value derived), which is somewhat disconnected from how much time you spend creating it. If you can capture some of that value (through ads, patreon, etc.), you have a chance at making money without time expenditure.
trading time for money hourly prevents the time from compounding and returning long-term gains!!!
— sid (hooded arc) (@ftlsid) November 28, 2022
You should take advantage of incremental creation: create a hundred small things, see what your audience likes, and focus on those. Trial and error is much more likely to work than committing to a guess upfront (a startup, writing a long book, etc). (Of course if you want to write a long book go for it. but don’t do that for the purpose of making money)
Things that spread memetically (videos, art, tweets, links) are even more likely to generate value than traditional media (books etc). Your best shot at decoupling money from time is by building an audience and generating memetic content.
As for actually generating the content: the market is so saturated that you’ll have to be a genuinely weird or interesting or extremely hot person to create anything good. So explore your interests, increase your agency, try things normies wouldn’t dare to.