My 10 Year Side Project Story

https://dateful.com/2021/10/27/my-side-project-story.html

138 47 5 years ago

I made this post but credit to kw_dev who inspired this with his https://kwcodes.com/how-i-failed-5-side-projects-in-6-years-... HN post from a few days ago.

hu3• 5 years ago

Thanks for sharing! Inspiring little project that made the world a better place and earned you some ROI.

jonathanberger12• 5 years ago

I appreciate the comment and "world a better place" is exactly how I like to think about it.

rgbrgb• 5 years ago

very cool, thx for sharing and for making a useful thing on the internet! I know it's gauche, but I'd love to get a rough feel of how much you're making from that ad. You think you'd ever go full-time on this type of side project?

jonathanberger12• 5 years ago

Thanks! My dream actually is to do it full-time but there's only so much I can reduce my personal burn rate by. I also sent you a direct message.

kristaps320• 5 years ago

thanks for sharing! the story is very inspiring and i like your product especially the domain name you chose, could you share more about how you used google trends to decide the domain name to take?

jonathanberger12• 5 years ago

My original domain was www.thetimezoneconverter.com. I can't remember what my original search was 10 years ago but I tried out a number of queries on Google Trends to see which variation of "time zone", "time zone calculator", "timezone converter", etc. (different spaces and such) were most popular. Then I named the site that and got that domain.

Many years later (and just a few months ago) I switched over to a new domain "Dateful" as I had accumulated a number of different features for the site that went beyond just timezone conversion. "Dateful" isn't based at all off Google Trends, I just like the name.

dolphenstein3• 5 years ago

Can relate. I built a little web utility back in 2009. Did practically nothing with it (occasional updates every 2/3 years) and it slowly accumulated inbound links and google ranking. Then finally in 2019 I decided to put a bit more effort into it. Now I make my living from it! :-)

hihihihi1234• 5 years ago

What is your web utility, if I may ask?

dolphenstein3• 5 years ago

https://www.ezyzip.com/

rajasimon• 5 years ago

You mention making living from it. Can you tel me your MRR?

hbn5• 5 years ago

I made a very small and simple scraper utility for a photo sharing website (it's one of those sites that doesn't let you download through the app or easily on the website, similar to Instagram). Grab the link, throw it in a box on my site, and it gives you the full-res image you can right click -> download.

It's doing pretty decent in traffic, ranking around number 4 in a fairly generic search for this utility, and gets about 1200-1400 invocations of the download functionality per day. I'd like to monetize it but I'm not really sure what I can do. I put some ads up from a small ad network that's slowly been building up a couple cents per day maybe (and Adsense isn't really interesting in my type of site -- I tried), but I'm not even really sure how valuable my traffic is anyway.

If someone has suggestions for a better way to monetize, I'd be willing to hear you out!

forgotmypw17• 5 years ago

Donation button in a visible but non-intrusive spot.

Share a little bit about yourself to humanize.

It will probably make you more than the ads.

hbn5• 5 years ago

That's worth a shot, I'll consider it. Thanks!

jonathanberger12• 5 years ago

I had trouble getting AdSense "interested" also. Depending on what Adsense is telling you I'd have varying suggestions if ads were still the way you wanted to go.

The best ways I know to monetize something for consumers: ads, app stores, donation buttons.

I tried an iPhone app to monetize the time zone converter but in my case the ad performed better. I tried a donation button for a few weeks and it brought in more than I expected.

hbn5• 5 years ago

Thanks for the reply! The reasoning Adsense gave for rejecting me seemed kinda difficult to disprove for my site. Here's the exact rejection reason:

Google-served ads on screens without publisher-content
We do not allow Google-served ads on screens:
* without content or with low value content,
* that are under construction,
* that are used for alerts, navigation or other behavioral purposes

I'm thinking I'd probably fall into the first category. From the research I did, it seems like they want actual unique content, like a blog or something. Though if you managed to get a single-purpose-serving site onto Adsense, it gives me hope maybe I could as well. I might look into it again. The donation button seems worth a shot too. Thanks!

sedibles• 5 years ago

I too wanted to use adSense in order to drive traffic to my side project. I made a small calculator for estimating dosage in cannabis edibles, which gets a few clicks here and there (https://www.scientificedibles.com).

It turns out that adSense, will not touch any cannabis content with a 10ft pole so it pretty much ruled out getting any traffic via them. There were some more niche advertisers but for those you needed substantially more funds.

In the end, I found that SEO and content were a good alternative (and free!).

hbn5• 5 years ago

I tried a donation button for a few weeks and it brought in more than I expected.

I figured I'd come back and update that I removed all the ads from the fairly sketchy-looking ad network I joined (which had accumulated something like $8 of unpaid payout over the past year or so) and added a donation section to my website, and just a couple days later I already got someone that tossed me $10.

Perhaps I underestimated the generosity of people! Thanks for the advice!

sloreti• 5 years ago

As someone with a couple side projects kicking around, enjoy posts like this. Would you be willing to share what kind of ad revenue a tool like this can generate with 1M views per month?

jonathanberger12• 5 years ago

I'm hesitant to share publicly but if you send me a message I always love to discuss side projects. :)

sneilan1• 5 years ago

Check out https://www.google.com/adsense/start/#calculator The numbers on this seem inflated though. From what I've googled/read, I've seen numbers as low as $1k/month per 1 million pageviews. Unsure if number of unique visitors effects that number however.

xupybd• 5 years ago

"another said it should have taken an hour not a weekend to create."

I hate comments like that. Maybe someone could make it in less time but I suspect the commenter hadn't even tried. Why throw your estimate out there as better than someone's real effort? That level of arrogance is frustrating.

is_true2• 5 years ago

I guess it could be either: Different constraints or ignorance.

debarshri• 5 years ago

I used to be of mindset where I used to think why did people take months or years for something which I thought would have considerably less time. Until I started building my own product. Building something with insights, care, robustness and building something right is function of time and money. Therefore as an indie dev, take your time to build it. Rushing a solution and doing a half ass job often backfires when you reveal it to the world.

thrashh• 5 years ago

I think it’s because some people grew up having to make time estimates and deciding whether to do something based on the estimate.

If they were in the same boat, they might have not done it if they expected it to take a weekend.

mbrodersen• 5 years ago

I think it usually is a combination of lack of experience and a deep desire to impress others. In other words: they are immature and lack self confidence.

marginalia_nu• 5 years ago

I think it's easy to overlook all the little things.

Sure, you could probably whip something up in an hour that did a large part of of what it needed to do, but it would be kinda crappy and half-assed.

You almost always do 80% of the work in the first 20% of the time, the rest is a lot slower, but every bit as important.

People absolutely can tell when they are using something that has thought and effort put into it, and you can't fake that.

marcos100• 5 years ago

In brazilian portuguese we have an expression called "engenheiro de obra pronta" (something like "engineer of a completed construction").

It means that's easy to talk about a finished work, it's faults, how it could've been done better and, if one were to replicate it, he would take a lot of less time.

Of course he would, someone else took the trouble to plan everything and fix the all the problems to reach a reasonable architecture/design. And obviously, that person will never do it because "it's trivial".

is_true2• 5 years ago

Hi Jonathan. Love the simplicity. In the spanish translation I would change "Realimentacion" to "Comentarios" or "Enviar comentario".

jonathanberger12• 5 years ago

Thanks, fixed.

travisgriggs• 5 years ago

The site now has more than a million visitors a month and earns a nice side income from a small ad.

So when it says that, what does that mean? It pays for hosting costs I assume. Are we talking enough to pay for a couple of meals out a month? Or enough to retire on?

jonathanberger12• 5 years ago

It means I didn't want to get too specific about the amount involved. But I can see there's lots of interest in this question.

I wonder actually if something like https://www.levels.fyi could be built or exists but for ad-supported websites (side project idea?). It'd be really useful for people to understand more broadly "if you create site of type x and it gets y amount of traffic you can expect this level of ad revenue".

One reason the amount involved in my case would only be so useful is that sites can wildly vary (by as much as 100x I'm told) in how much $ per visit is generated (the industry term is "RPM").

infecto• 5 years ago

I wish I remember the site from a decade ago but I feel like this existed sorta with a site that used to hold auctions/sales for people selling their website. I wish I could remember the site now, would be fun to look at it in wayback machine. I remember things like traffic numbers, sources, revenue etc.

Nextgrid• 5 years ago

It means I didn't want to get too specific about the amount involved.

Is this because you don't want to reveal anything about your personal financial situation or is it because knowing the amount would somehow help someone compete and encroach on your "territory"?

ttymck• 5 years ago

Indie Hackers basically does this (and some are verified by stripe integration), although most of the companies are probably product-based. If they don't have it already, an "ad-supported" tag would be useful.

dillondoyle• 5 years ago

CPMs can range, but if it's high quality and or niche they could be fairly high for something like a 'sponsored' ad on a super target forum/email list.

Still not a lot of impressions though. it would be 1,000,000 / 1000 = 1000 * __ x.

Where X I might guess anywhere from $.5 cpm to maybe even $10 if it's super unique and high quality niche. banners are cheap for a reason.

Though someone like Axios where they do a more 'sponsored' big higher quality ad probably gets more. I think some jobs or industry email lists able to get sponsors to pay big. Video gets more.

It's all about niche & quality. I'd rather spend more on a higher quality ad than touch any open market banner crap.

slickbackiq• 5 years ago

very easy to use!

jonathanberger12• 5 years ago

Thank you.

pkdpic• 5 years ago

Just wanted to say this was super inspiring, practical, unpretentious and to the point. My favorite HN read in a long time.

jonathanberger12• 5 years ago

Thanks so much.

pipeline_peak• 5 years ago

Besides, that’s what your day job is for.

Someone had to say it.

johnx123-up• 5 years ago

    The site now has more than a million visitors a month and earns a nice side income from a small ad.

SCR, interested in the actual number if possible

My 10 Year Side Project Story

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