There is no difference between running a good business and a bad business

One of the longest lessons it took me to learn is that there is no difference between running a good business and bad business. When you look at a business from a very high level there are 3 universal components:

• Customer Acquisition
• Overhead
• Service

People give you money, you provide a service. There are 2 costs associated with providing that service. The cost of acquiring a customer and the cost of providing that service. When Profits from service provided > Customer Acquisition + Overhead you are winning….

Are you though?

You could launch a platform for people to journal daily, a tool for downloading YouTube videos, or a system that converts speech into text. Sure, these can yield profits, but they might demand as much of your time, energy, and resources as a business with the potential to rake in 7 or 8 figures.

Where do you want to invest your time?

The distinction between a “good” and a “bad” business isn’t just about financial gain. It’s about the potential for growth, scalability, and personal fulfillment. It’s about pursuing a venture that aligns with your long-term vision and goals. Why settle for short-term profitability when you can invest in a venture that gets you excited to wake up every morning.

Tutor Arbitrage

The basic idea revolves around using platforms like Chegg, StudyPool, and SchoolSolver to establish yourself as a reputable tutor. By building a positive reputation and earning high ratings, you increase your visibility and demand. As your reputation grows, instead of doing all the tutoring yourself, you hire people from sites like Upwork or Freelancer to complete assignments at a much lower rate. Your role then becomes ensuring quality control and pocketing the difference. Easy way to earn money?

I used this same approach with YouTube views, likes, etc., in the early days of social media.

What do you use Crypto for?

We are several years deep into what I refer to as the “mainstream crypto era.” By now, most people are familiar with what cryptocurrency is, but its regular use still seems limited. Things that I have seen it used for (ignoring nfts, decentralized exchanges, defi, etc):

1. Buying stolen/hacked accounts on hackforums & darkweb

2. Purchasing leaked music

3. Purchasing drugs

4. Money Laundering

None of these seem like something my mom would be interested using….

Services like ko-fi or buy me a coffee seem like an ideal service to replace with crypto. Have a donate button that when you click opens metamask or another wallet and lets you donate.

The transaction speed problem seems to be fixed. Could the difficulty lie in people’s ability to acquire cryptocurrency in the first place, or perhaps in the transaction fees involved?

Support Your Foundation

My GitHub account hosts more than 60 projects. I would estimate that 90% of these are built using the same handful of packages: Django, requests, PostgreSQL, etc. These projects often share common infrastructure as well.

I’ve created a simple script that can analyze your ‘requirements.txt’ file and inform you if there’s a funding page on PyPI for the corresponding project.

If you visit https://github.com/sponsors/explore, you can see the dependencies of your public repositories that you can sponsor.

Are there any other methods to support these developers or projects in an easy or fast way?

#Made by https://twitter.com/OppositeInvict2
 
import requests
 
 
def get_packages_from_requirements_file(filepath):
  with open(filepath, 'r') as file:
    lines = file.readlines()
  packages = [line.strip().split('==')[0] for line in lines]
  return packages
 
 
def get_pypi_info(package):
  url = f'https://pypi.org/pypi/{package}/json'
  response = requests.get(url)
  response.raise_for_status()  # will raise an error if the request fails
  return response.json()
 
 
def check_for_funding_link(package):
  package_info = get_pypi_info(package)
  project_urls = package_info['info'].get('project_urls', {})
  funding_link = project_urls.get(
      'Funding')  # 'Funding' is common but not guaranteed
  if funding_link:
    print(f'Package {package} has a funding link: {funding_link}')
  else:
    print(f'Package {package} does not have a funding link.')
 
 
def analyze_requirements_file(filepath):
  packages = get_packages_from_requirements_file(filepath)
  for package in packages:
    check_for_funding_link(package)
 
 
analyze_requirements_file(
    'requirements.txt')  # change to your requirements.txt file path

Exploiting Crypto for Profit?

Alpha Vantage Coin (AVC) was a token created by the company Alpha Vantage, known for providing market and financial data for public companies. A few years back, they launched AVC as a utility token which allowed holders to vote on the company’s roadmap and gain access to a special API.

The AVC token could be obtained in various ways, the most reliable of which was by completing a three-question quiz. Correct answers would reward participants with 50 AVC directly into their account on the website (not their wallet), and the reward would double if the participant already held AVC in their wallet.

The AVC tokens could be transferred from the website to your personal wallet at any time, but due to transaction costs, it was generally more economical to wait until reaching a specific balance.

Interestingly, there didn’t seem to be any tracking on the number of accounts one could hold. I created approximately 25 accounts, each loaded with 1 AVC. I developed a simple script that stored the quiz answers using tampermonkey. This allowed me to quickly log into each account, answer the quiz, and log out.

After reaching a certain threshold, and noticing a decline in AVC’s price (https://info.uniswap.org/#/pools/0x08c119404dddcce48182441fd1316ba02b2731ec), I began to withdraw my tokens gradually over the following months. This caused a slight drop in the price each time.

I tried to find similar projects, but unfortunately, none seemed worth my time. Since the AVC price has dropped so low to the point where its not worth it anymore, I thought I’d share my experience.

Illegal Life Pro Tip: Want to ruin your competitors business?

ILPT: Want to ruin someone else’s business? Start paying scammers to use stolen credit cards on your competitors payment processor.

Having this done to me right now and its killing me.. 10 year relationship with Paypal and 7 year relationship with stripe with gross over $500k combined in sales and they limit my account without even contacting me.

I’ve seen how often people complain on hacker news and reddit about these companies but as a solo SaaS builder it seems harder and harder these days to have any sort of job security.

Big corporations with billions in profits without any real support staff….

Edit: Did not realize that this was posted on hacker news. Appreciate the views. Follow me on twitter for more of my random musings https://twitter.com/OppositeInvict2