Making Money with Data $cience

Tony Tran

About me● Spent time doing Data Engineering in Ad-Tech

● Currently consulting

● Organizer of SF Bay Area Machine Learning meetup group:

○ www.meetup.com/SF-Bayarea-Machine-Learning

○ Met A LOT of interesting people working on interesting things

● Interested in creative ways people make money.

This Talk:● about real Data Scientists who have found creative ways to make money

that doesn’t involve being a full time employee.

● Some stories/names have been modified for privacy reasons.

Quick Survey: how many people here ...● Have a fulltime job?

● Have external activities that bring in extra income?

○ pet projects

○ passive income

○ freelancing on the side

● Want to make extra $$$?

Story 1: Frankie

Story 1: Frankie the Teacher

Story 1: Frankie the Teacher● Summary

○ Left full-time job as a developer.

○ Started an after school program teaching kids how to code.

○ Income dependent on number of children enrolled.

○ Time investment includes: teaching the course, preparing material, grading assignments,

marketing classes.

Story 2: Jamie

Story 2: Jamie the workshop-aholic

Story 2: Jamie the workshop-aholic● Summary

○ Had a full-time day job, but periodically taught workshops during evenings and weekends

at places such as General Assembly, Galvanize University, etc.

○ Income dependent on number of students enrolled.

○ Time investment:

■ teaching the course

■ preparing material

○ Benefits:

■ No grading required.

■ Marketing and venue taken care of by academies, but they take a percentage of

revenue.

Story 3: Ricky

Story 3: Ricky the Udemy instructor

Story 3: Ricky the Udemy instructor● Summary

○ Started off with in person workshops.

○ Decided to recorded the content from workshops and posted lectures online (Udemy.com)

○ Time investment:

■ creating content

■ recording and editing course material (Udemy may be picky with sound and content

quality).

○ Benefits:

■ Write once and collect money (hopefully)! #passiveincome

■ Udemy takes care of “Marketing”

How you can replicate their results1. Brain storm topics that you can teach

a. Examples: “Intro to Javascript”, “Intro to Python”, “Data Science for Designers

b. See what courses are popular by checking past event listings.

2. Reach out to Bootcamps/Academies regarding workshops:

a. General Assembly

b. Galvanize University

3. Record lessons and post to Udemy

Story 4: $herm

Story 4: Sherm the shirt hustler

Story 4: Sherm the shirt hustler● Summary

○ Really liked t-shirts!

○ Created a t-shirt brand.

○ Used data science to develop twitter/instagram user engagement strategy.

○ Built software to automate user engagement and user growth for t-shirt business.

○ Licensed software and marketing service to clients.

How to replicate:● Tooling:

○ Scrapper

○ Numerical/Scientific analysis

○ Twitter and instagram client library

● Come up with a bunch of user behavior models and test!

○ collect data

○ test models

○ automate strategies that work

● T-shirt validation:

○ https://teespring.com/

Story 5: Dan

Story 5: Dan the day trader

Story 5: Dan the day trader● Summary

○ Has a fulltime job.

○ Had some money to play around with.

○ Came up with some trading strategies.

■ back-tested strategies

■ coded up execution engine

○ Making money$$$

How to replicate:● Algorithmic Trading:

○ Check out Quantopian and Quantiacs

■ Has great introductory tutorials on algorithmic trading

■ If you write your code in Quantopian’s environment, you can run your strategy on

interactive-brokers. In other words, you won’t need to develop your own execution

engine.

○ Check out Computational Investing on Coursera

● Brokerage with $0 trade fees (https://www.robinhood.com/)

● Podcast: Chat with traders

● Social Media:

○ Twitter

○ Stocktwits

Summary:● A LOT of ways people are making money

○ Mentioned: teaching, trading, monetizing software

○ Other ways: recruiting, writing books, blogging, referral sites, etc...

● Don’t wait until tomorrow, you can start today.

Keep in touch:Let me know about:

● Stuff you are working on.

● Crazy ideas you have.

● If you want to know more about anything we’ve discussed today.

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Twitter: @quicksorter

Email: tony [at] sfbayml.com

Question/Challenge: How would you go about making $100 by next week?

To hear about more stories/events ⇒ http://bit.ly/datamoney