This is a huge personal revelation. I have happened to be in touch with the parent poster via HN and they are simply an intelligent, thoughtful, person with important and good opinions on whatever topics they write about.
I hope you resolve your issues with housing soon. As you write, you have a lot of capacity for high-level work.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+mz+ho...
Since we're on HN: I don't see how it's fundamentally different from people who fail for years to raise money, until they finally do. My interaction with GP is from not that long ago. They're a smart, clear writer and I hope they resolve their housing situation soon. Then, if they ever want to do a startup they'll be better at it than most people, based on my interaction. They've also studied GIS, though I'm not sure if they want to work with it or in a different field. I am confident they can resolve their housing issue and I believe in them. By the way Elon Musk lived in an office and took showers at a YMCA.[1] That meets the definition of homeless.
If you want a chance to back the next elon musk, invest in whatever mz does whenever they're ready to take money (though I'm not sure if they have any such intentions - but surely there's a reason they're on this site).
mz, I hope this reply is not out of place and again, I hope you resolve your housing issue soon. I am basing my opinion of you based on an interaction with you and based your writing, which is all anyone gets if someone sends a pitch deck, emails, or business plan. you might have huge difficulty and perhaps its stretched for years but I believe you will go through it based on your talent and abilities. you can do it. go.
http://personalizedrelocationresearch.blogspot.com/
It was at least conceived of as a business idea. Most of my other sites were conceived of as "well, people clearly need this information, so I will give it to them...and, oh, I guess I should have ads or something because it would be reasonable to expect to be compensated for my time and effort."
Because of my compromised immune system, I basically need to figure out some means to make money online. There are plenty of people here who have managed that. But I have trouble accessing their expertise or getting taken seriously, much to my personal frustration.
Do you already code? it may help your goals if you learn to code. It might allow you to make some sort of more featureful web app than just blog posts. Then, your talent for clear writing and communication would combine with the functionality of whatever you wanted to code. I'm sure you've felt the frustration of only having whatever options your blogging platform gave you. with code, it does whatever you want.
plus you might get some freelance coding work which should pay well. but above all your clear communication with the ability to make features you want would be pretty killer, I think. don't feel boxed into the idea that you have to only just write and English should be your main or only output. you can output code. you can create features that do something. (from a standing start, from 0.) it doesn't matter how bad it is because if it brings some money then later you can hire coders to redo it. (people call this 'technical debt' but it's a stupid term. it's just a free option to pay only if you find something that makes money, where you can throw it away if it doesn't. if you code 99 different things that nobody uses and the 100th is what takes off, you can just pay someone to rewrite the 100th. you can ignore the first 99th projects. which proves that it isn't technical debt because you can't just ignore debt whenever you don't care anymore. you can ignore technical debt, indefinitely, because it's just a free option to try something.)
So try some small web app. AWS has a free tier. Ignore everyone who gives you a lot of bullshit. in the article I linked from elon musk talking about when he was (my term) homeless, he was coding all day. so you could try it and see if you can find something.
this is just based on my impression of your style of communication, thinking, logic, and also you have shown an ability to collect a pretty large audience. maybe the tiniest amount of code would be all it takes. you say you'd like to work all online so this would fit that criterion. it sounds like you might already have some exposure to the google ads network which is a killer way to bootstrap promoting anything: the first time your users spend $90 on your web app, you can try spending $85 of it on an advertisement (don't know about adwords actual minimums this is an illustrative example) and if it brings in just $89 in revenue for every $85 you spend, in theory you can keep turning that process around until you are at $500, $1000, etc. Facebook ads can likewise be bootstrapped like this.
all this depends on making something that has some kind of functionality you can promote, describe, and code. try setting an AWS free tier and go from there. you write that you're not taken seriously but just ignore it - do it underground. nobody took elon musk seriously when he was taking showers at the Y, and nobody took him seriously when he produced a written paper proposing hyperloop.
ignore all that noise. just do something. You will have to adapt all this to your goals, interests, conditions, I don't know the details. you also have to be very careful because (in my opinion) programmers love to waste each other's time, so stick with popular tools where you can just google what you're trying to do and someone has posted the solution. programmers hate that you don't have to waste weeks to years of your life reading manuals, and getting rid of manuals or making things work is simply not a design constraint for them. I'll give you an example:
This is how long it should take from deciding to make a Rails app (a popular web app framework) on a new AWS instance, to having one up: 47 seconds. I should click "I want a new instance with some super-common stack" and then I should click "Rails 5 with" (whatever is most common.) And I should have it.
Here's how long it actually takes: https://hackernoon.com/how-to-setup-and-deploy-a-rails-5-app...
In 47 seconds you can barely read through the introduction (which starts with "Deploying a Rails app can be a somewhat daunting task to get set up right on new applications, even for seasoned Rails developers.")
Remember that (in my opinion) everything you read about programming is meant to waste horrendous amounts of your time and be a huge sink. These people cannot communicate. Which is why you will have such a huge advantage over them if you deploy any app to do anything, because your version can be clear and precise and your experience with audiences would help you promote it. just ignore the noise. Be super careful of your time and only pick the most common tools and languages.
Note: I didn't adapt this advice to the specifics of your situation, or your interests, so really you're the only one who knows how to use it, if at all. As I said at the top of the comment, just think of it like a point of input.
So far, I have not learned to program, though I do know a little HTML and CSS from running my blogs, basically. This failure to learn to code is due to a combination of having been very ill, which makes it hard to learn anything new, and much of my time being taken up with struggling to survive and solving my health problems that are not supposed to be solvable. (And probably other factors.)
The other thing is I am good at solving things, but I am not good at figuring out "business ideas." I know how to get well when that is not supposed to be possible. But I don't know how one turns that into money.
I don't think this is just me being neurotic. I think there are some inherent problems in monetizing such a product. I feel strongly that the way modern medicine is monetized is part of the reason people are failing to get well. Modern medicine makes money for treating you, not for getting you well. Ongoing need for treatment is a means to keep making money and I think that is an inherent conflict of interest. I haven't yet figured out how you set your sights on actually getting people well and somehow get money out of that. Because that is not the financial model for modern medicine.
I would like to create simulations for smaller health problems and eventually create a simulation to teach other people with CF how to do what I do. Blogging is wholly insufficient to convey the density of info required. My thought was that I would start with a small simulation for how you cure sunburn rapidly by eating the right things and then build on that for larger, more complicated problems.
But I used to get really ugly pushback for talking about getting myself well. This was far beyond not getting taken seriously. It was incredibly threatening and worrisome, so I have also spent some years working on figuring out how to approach the problem space without inspiring lynch mobs, basically.
I do have a private blog with some of my ideas written out intended as a design doc. But it hasn't gotten a lot of development. I have been mostly overwhelmed by events.
Thank you for your long comment.
The most important thing is to build a habit and stick to it. If you reserve some specific 10 minutes of the day for learning to code, like just before going to sleep, it will soon become so ingrained that you wouldn't even think of stopping.
It may seem like a daunting task before you start, so much to learn, but if you take it step by little step, 10 minutes at a time, you can do it.
Plus, my student loan is being paid off this week. With that paid off, the odds of me getting off the street start going up. There are plenty of articles on how much of a burden student loans can be in the US. So google it if you can't fathom how that matters.
Student loans are one of the (the only?) forms of debt in the US that cannot be discharged via bankruptcy. I believe that too is a major factor in the rising cost of college and other secondary educations; there's no market pressure to price the services at a rate based on the student's success.
Have you considered coming up with a resource for those paying off student loans? Not so much a pity-party community, but more of financial resources + legal contacts + "life hacks" + community / forum. I'd imagine the potential audience is quite large in the US and the emotional appeal of getting debt collectors off your back is pretty enticing.
I imagine the next generation of resource websites like this will use "brain hacks" (concepts in BJ Fogg's persuasion techniques -- similar to gamification) and may even be able to charge a subscription if it can change habits and encourage positive progress on paying down loan debt.
I paid down A LOT on a family member [A]'s student loan to take the pressure off another family member [B]. I would gladly pay a subscription fee for [A] to learn to take control of their own finances and figure out how to save money on their own.
http://notanothermoneyblog.blogspot.com/
I would welcome feedback on it. That would help me figure out where to go with it.
Most of my financial advice stuff ends up here:
http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/p/money.ht...
I don't really plan to create anything with a subscription because the kinds of problems I talk about tend to leave people with too little money to survive. My hope is that as my writing helps people start solving their problems, they will leave a tip when they can better afford it. But I do have a Patreon:
notanothermoneyblog:
I tend to be turned off of traditional blog layouts because of navigational structure. As a reader, I don't care about when an article is written, I care about matching my reading interests quickly with what is available on your site (perusing the titles / tags / categories). If there is a config to toggle away the year-month navigation style, I would prefer that. YMMV
sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide:
The site seems niche and, as you have mentioned in other posts, there is a stigma against homelessness. Non-homeless (awkward description, I know) readers might feel immediately turned off before reading anything. You might be able to convey the same type of message by describing it as "scraping by", although this may be counterproductive.
I would suggest you might try to review your previously-written articles and see if you can make them more reader-friendly. Currently, they seem a little writer-friendly and not very optimized for the reader. Having a TL;DR at the top might keep interest. Eg. the "gift card" article #2 was interesting because it mentions the CA state law that gives consumers the right to cash out sub-$10 balances. That is very useful for me, as a California consumer and I probably would not have thought I would find a nugget on a site and wouldn't have found it if I wasn't trying to review your site. Having the nugget of wisdom in the article title (eg. "Gift cards can be cashed by state law") rather than a less-specific "Cash for Gift Cards -- Addendum"
Small bug: The link from the /p/money.html page to "Starbuck's and Domino's Rewards and Gift Cards" is broken (there is a stray "http:/" at the beginning).
If you can, try to get an Amazon Affiliate account and add Amazon affiliate links when you describe / review books like "Book recommendation: How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt and Live Prosperously". It might not be useful short-term as they won't cut checks for amounts smaller than ~$25, but they pay 4+% on lots of products.
I will look at the navigational options.
There is actually an amazon affiliate link for that book on the site. I have not done well with amazon affiliate links. But maybe I will figure it out someday. (Though, I have updated it to make it text on the assumption that you have an ad blocker and that's why you didn't see it.)
I am not planning to abandon the homeless survival guide, but the TLDR is that I am more interested in promoting solutions that reduce homelessness than in helping people after their lives fall apart.
Also, it seriously doesn't work to tell me "there is no stigma -- all you have to do is hide those facts about yourself." If there is no stigma, why on earth would I need to hide them? Or to blame me for admitting that I am female and homeless. Hiding information about yourself is another burden to communicating and can complicate the hell out of attempts to accomplish anything when you need to work around certain things but are compelled to not mention them for fear of stigma.
Did you mean this in good faith? Where I was raised throwing that in is fairly insulting.
Being from the South, I've heard this in both the straight version and the condescending version. As you point out, without sufficient context, it's bodylanguage-ambiguous.
If I may offer one piece of advice that worked well for me when I was starting out in freelancing: "On the internet nobody knows you're a dog". You don't have to tell people that you're homeless, if you think that diminishes your chances of getting a freelance gig.
In my experience, for a lot of things that would harm my chances at getting gigs, people never asked. So I didn't say anything myself either. They often come up in the course of normal conversation later once you already have a relationship with the client, but by then they no longer care.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
You have $50K in collections debt, no insurance, no credit, no bank. Any money you have, you carry with you.
Getting paid is a pain in the ass, because even though you could conceivably receive money through an online service that does not require a credit card or bank acct, actually extracting the money as cash is quite difficult. Nobody wants to Paypal a client, anyway, and nobody wants to learn how Bitcoin works, much less figure out potential tax issues. You apologize profusely for making the client send you your fee via Western Union.
You pay for a prepaid cellphone. You need internet with a sizeable data cap, which isn't very affordable or reliable via mobile, so your first stop for internet is probably libraries or cafes, which you can only work at for a certain period of time before you're not-so-politely asked to move on. Just getting your work done or having a regular video call can be troublesome.
You carry your possessions with you, and the more you carry, the more homeless you look, and the more homeless you look, the more people have a kind of ick-response to your presence and want you gone. If you ever have to put your stuff down for a moment you risk your only valuable possessions disappearing.
You don't have enough yet to cover first, last, and security on an apartment, but that doesn't matter anyway because nobody will rent you an apartment without proof of income. You have no permanent address, so getting billed (among many other things) is an issue. Your options for housing are dangerous and filthy weekly or monthly rate rooms in the equivalent of a halfway house or crack motel. A shelter is sometimes a better option, when a bed is available.
Getting to your semi-housing is not easy, because it's invariably located on abandoned stretches of US-1 or a highway (and obviously you have no car). You are very lucky if there is public transit that goes from your shitty motel to a place where you can use wifi regularly. You may have to pick between paying for taxis (no, Uber doesn't run out there, but will charge you a pretty penny to take you there) with the little money you have, or walking a couple hours each way. If you have an in-person client, you obviously need to be presentable, so now you're spending as much as you can on a place with a shower, taxis to and from the job, and maybe an upgrade to a place with wifi.
All of this for basically one or two clients that occasionally hand you a small piece of work at a very-sub-standard rate. Because of your bad credit, lack of recent work experience, lack of a bank account, lack of transportation, etc etc, few people want to work with you. When they do, the work is infrequent, and done when you can actually get to doing it, due to the aforementioned impediments.
You pray your stuff doesn't get stolen, that you don't get mugged, that you will get another contract soon. You don't haggle over payment because you're lucky someone will deal with your awkward payments, and what if you lost that client and had to start over? Without some kind of miracle, there is no math that puts you in stable housing any time within the next year.
The answer "It's complicated" isn't satisfying, but it's often reality.
I actually spend several hours a day at a library with wonderful and supportive staff who do not hassle me. I do resume work online( http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/) and I work for a writing service and I blog. In recent years, ad money has dropped across the board for websites, not just mine, due what I call The Adblocker Wars. Most of the traffic on my personal blog is from HN and the vast majority of it uses adblockers. People on HN tend to not want to tip. Remarks on HN over and over indicate that if you don't like starving, instead of writing, you should go get a real job (like programming, apparently). Meanwhile, they expect good quality content to be available. I have bitched about this on my blog:
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/on-writing-a...
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/so-you-are-t...
So even with arranging my life where I have regular access to the internet, have no need to meet clients in person and so forth, I still have a lot of trouble turning my work into an adequate income stream. This is in spite of having six years of college and enough mojo to garner more than 19k karma on HN in spite of my gender. As far as I know, no other woman has karma in the 5 figures. They are all below 10k. (And before the hecklers tell me this is not evidence of anything: MEN on hacker news are routinely told they must be really smart, because they have a lot of karma on HN. I am the only person that says that about me and, inevitably, someone shoots it down instead of going "Holy Cow! Because you are a woman, your karma should be assumed to be worth like triple what it is for a man!")
But thank you for chiming in.
Having a car can be a huge benefit (after you pay for the mandatory registration and insurance and gas), until it gets stolen or robbed (which happened to my friend six months ago and she's still trying to work her way back to a replacement vehicle). And another friend, now that I think of it... And another, heh. Assuming it wasn't totaled, the fee to get the stolen car out of impound, plus a fee for every day it sits in the yard, on top of the repairs for bullet holes, smashed in windows, etc can make it more feasible to just save to buy another used car.
I think another thing that isn't stressed enough is how homelessness can drag on your mental health. You have constant stress, and dealing with obstacles and unfairness on a daily basis can feed depression, make you more irritable, lose energy, etc. Not being "chipper" enough can be a big burden in terms of getting clients (especially for women; thanks, male chauvinism). I am of course not trying to tell you this, but for other readers to consider.
Thank you for telling your story, I hope your situation improves soon. Have you considered applying to a TED talk on bias or invisible burdens for people with lack of resource security?
Having a high score on an Internet forum has zero value for someone who wants to purchase a service from you, I don't see how this is relevant.
And capacity. Many people on the street have serious health problems or other obstacles to productivity. I lack neither intelligence nor a work ethic, but I do have health problems. I have been homeless 5.5 years, though I blog, do freelance work, etc.
Edit: You also need opportunity. Being homeless can be a huge barrier to opportunity, both in practical terms and due to stigma. People don't want to hire homeless people.