Money making ideas for Geeks

If you are a proud geek with some free time then you are going to love this post. Here is a list of websites that pay you for what you love doing i.e coding.

The best one among the lot is topcoder. It has weekly contests for designing, testing and coding. Go here to see the active contests. The prize money ranges from 500$ to 1400$ for one component. You read that right, you can indeed make 20,000 Rs upto 60,000 rupees writing one complete programme. The only problem is that most of the projects are in .net or java. Topcoder provides a rating to each member depending upon how many times you win in competitions among other criteria. If you can get some really good rank then who knows even google may come searching for you

The other type of sites are freelancing sites. These sites allow companies in need of programmers to post their projects. As a programmer you can select projects that you like and then bid for them. If you are selected then you can get paid for developing the programme. http://www.getacoder.com/  ,  http://www.project4hire.com   and https://www.getafreelancer.com/ are some of the freelancing sites.

disclaimer: I have not used any of the sites except topcoder myelf.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Make Money

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Selecting an Idea

I had previously writeen about the possibility of starting your own business without leaving yout job. (Here) It was based on my assumption that most people know what to do but are not able to do so as they are not ready to leave their jobs. However the comments to the post clearly showed that many of us do not know what we want to do. As Suku says so very clearly no one can tell you what to do but atleast I shall try to guide you.

Look for the problem

I think the problem lies in our education system that needs us to find answers/solutions. The problem is always defined by someone else. But entrepreneurship needs you to find a problem and then go ahead and solve it. Noone told larry and binn to develop a better search engine, they identified it themselves and then solved it. Same is true for any great startup. Unfortunately the same is true for you as well. You shall have to identify the problem to solve.

Fortunately it is not that difficult to identify. Just recall how many times in a day you wish that things were better. You get irritated everytime windows crashes, go and design a operating system that does not crash ;-).

Well jokes apart that is the exact way atleast we go about selecting an idea. Frustrated with having to go through 10 different newspaper to find a walkin in hyderabad we started mywalkin. Mostly Pari does not have anything  to do at office and we started bakarbakar

So here is a 5 step approach to finding an idea to work on

1. Carry a frustration diary. Everytime you feel frustrated note it down.
2. Mention about the situation to your freinds. You will be surprised by how many of them have already faced such a problem.
3. Once you have 2-3 problems that you think 4-5 of your freinds have faced, start thinking about possible solutions.
4. Finally select the one that you feel is interesting. This is definitely important because you will have to work on it for atleast 3-4 months before any result is visible.
5. There is no fifth step Go and start working on the problem.

Hope it helps.

P.S: These are my views. I am sure many of you have much better idea than that. Please feel free to post them as comments.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet

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