Comment by walletdrainer
3 hours ago
You don’t have to be “industry leading” to reach that kind of comp working for big tech.
I could be totally wrong, but in a world where plumbers and the likes can walk away with multimillion dollar profits you probably don’t have to be top <1% to pull that off either. Not taking shots at plumbers, but the point is that even something boring can and will pay off if you work hard at it.
My own work couldn’t be more boring, I’m not particularly smart or talented. I just grind out many little varyingly useful websites with card payment forms.
Most people don't work for big tech. Most people who work for big tech don't make so much. And not most plumbers.
Many people under estimate their skills and luck.
$1M/year in big tech is like director level? That's not "industry leading" but there aren't that many of them.
> My own work couldn’t be more boring, I’m not particularly smart or talented. I just grind out many little varyingly useful websites with card payment forms.
Are you talking like one-off niche utilities/services that another busy person would happily pay a small amount to solve an immediate problem with and don't necessarily require a ton of backend scaling/maintenance, or subscription type stuff? When you say "many", is that >100?
100+ sites, most took less than a day to build.
So far the most profitable category has been sites which simplify some government processes, e.g. helping you fill a form or even just basically selling a PDF version of a form that a government only provides on paper (with a nice web UI to help you easily fill it).
Little scaling or maintenance, I can host everything on a single dedicated server but have a few so I don’t have to worry about things breaking.
Most of the work is just locating these niches, but honestly it’s easy to find at least one a week even if I’m being lazy. If I was really trying very hard I’d probably be at 1000+ sites right now.
One simple example would be helping people change their name in the UK with a deed poll, which basically amounts to a pdf saying “hey my name is now [enter name here]”. I didn’t do this particular one even though I probably should, I found out about it pretty early on and I was (wrongly!) dissuaded by the competition.
Edit: I specifically should not have been dissuaded by the competition because it’d take an hour or two to build a decent website with the necessary information, and despite the competition there’s a decent chance my page would start ranking pretty well within a couple of years. I’ll probably do this one tomorrow.