Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152

by deadcoder0904 • 5 years ago

540 613 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Previously asked on 2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167

motyar9• 5 years ago

https://bruzu.com

API to generate images on the fly.

Sample https://img.bruzu.com/?a.text=HN3

cinntaile• 5 years ago

I am a developer, Do I need this API? No, if you can build your own rendering system with all these features and able to make it run this fast. You don't need this API.

Your FAQ is great hahaha!

motyar9• 5 years ago

Yes, every developer thinks the same about almost every API/service, that they could build it over weekend.

ASalazarMX• 5 years ago

For the curious like me:

Q: I am a developer, Do I need this API?

A: No, if you can build your own rendering system with all these features and able to make it run this fast. You don't need this API.

zerop2• 5 years ago

Can this be done in Pure JS solution within browser? Why need backend?

dahfizz• 5 years ago

An API allows you to create images from things that are not browsers.

goshx• 5 years ago

The product is an "API to generate images on the fly". How would you create an API with no backend?

johneth• 5 years ago

Very nice. Noticed a small typo - the footer link to Pinterest is misspelled.

motyar9• 5 years ago

Thanks, Fixed.

skurtcastle• 5 years ago

I wont use bruzu till you're one billion MRR. haha jus jokes. I've been following Bruzu since the start. Great product, great dev who is open minded for feedback, etc.

motyar9• 5 years ago

So small small world. Thanks

conqrr• 5 years ago

I've been thinking of building something similar in the past. Did you use Imagemagick or similar for the backend or is it AI based?

motyar9• 5 years ago

Its server side HTML5 canvas.

zowanet• 5 years ago

What's your revenue like?

motyar9• 4 years ago

Its $185 MRR currently, Hit hard by churn this month.

Lord_Zero3• 5 years ago

I have done this before, a bare bones example can be done easily in Lambda with GraphicsMagick and ImageMagick for node https://www.npmjs.com/package/gm see "annotate an image" example.

I understand your service does more that this. I map the POST JSON to GM params to allow the caller to do nearly anything GM CLI can do.

motyar9• 4 years ago

Yes its very easy to build.

techsin10111• 4 years ago

did you built the editor, it must have taken 2 months at least

motyar9• 4 years ago

Yes, using fabricjs for that, we are improving it everyday but yes, it took few days to make the MVP of the editor.

dutchbrit• 5 years ago

Correction, previously asked 26 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095

Obviously still nice to see what people have built who missed the last post!

msadowski3• 5 years ago

I run a robotics newsletter: https://weeklyrobotics.com/

blutack2• 5 years ago

Which is a good read if anyone is interested in robotics/ros/drone stuff

msadowski3• 5 years ago

It depends what you are interested in. My latest find from this week is the Introduction to Autonomous Robots open source book: https://github.com/Introduction-to-Autonomous-Robots/Introdu....

If you were looking for news then sUASnews is great for some catching up on drones. For robotics I often find articles on IEEE Spectrum and The Robot Report interesting.

lormayna• 5 years ago

How do you promote a newsletter to become profitable? I have a newsletter, but it's not getting traction.

msadowski3• 5 years ago

I’ve been rubbing it for over 3 years now and I’m approaching 3k e-mail subscribers. I feature it quite a lot on LinkedIn and Twitter and sometimes I would share some issues on /r/robotics or HN.

So far the best way I’ve found for growing subscribers is trading shoutouts with other newsletters but I didn’t experiment much with paid ads.

eximius3• 5 years ago

https://hoppy.network Hosted WireGuard as a Service with static IP assignment.

asaddhamani• 5 years ago

What’s your server location?

eximius3• 5 years ago

Only Chicago right now. We'd like to expand when the economics makes sense (there is a bit of a chicken/egg problem there where we definitely lose some potential sales by not providing the region folks want - but we need sufficient saturation to pay for the new deployment).

My advice if you want to use our service but in a region besides Chicago: use our service and email us the region you'd prefer. In the mean time, the extra 20ms round trip latency probably won't bother you and we'll let you know when we expand in the future (and your voice will help decide where!).

pyuser5832• 5 years ago

Is this a VPN? How does it compare to, say, NordVPN?

eximius3• 5 years ago

Yes and no.

It is more like we provide you a network interface that, instead of being plugged into your modem for Comcast/AT&T/etc, it's plugged into a datacenter.

You get a public static IPv4/IPv6 connection with Reverse DNS - just located somewhere else.

Making your machine publicly routable is the primary use case (e.g., for email, web, whatever you want if you have trouble with NAT/CGNAT or simply don't want your home IP associated with the service), but it also encrypts your traffic between your PC and our datacenter such that your ISP can't snoop - which is not to say we're a good privacy solution - that is not what our product is designed to do.

konschubert12• 5 years ago

I make this e-paper calendar: https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...

It syncs with Google Calendar.

To be fair, I currently does > 500$/month in revenue not earnings.

If it doesn't count let me know and I will delete my comment.

EDIT: I am currently out of stock sadly. If you want to be notified when I am back in stock, you can leave your email here: https://forms.gle/tNcCcYrNBu5nWKgJ9

jacobmarble• 5 years ago

Very cool product!

financetechbro• 5 years ago

Looks like your form is restricted to org members only

konschubert12• 5 years ago

Whoops, is it fixed now?

tych0• 5 years ago

This is pretty cool, though it would be nice if it worked with caldav instead of just google calendar :)

konschubert12• 5 years ago

I think so too :D

It's definitely something I am having in the backlog, but I cannot promise if and when it will be implemented.

davidsawyer2• 5 years ago

Nice!! How big are those displays, and if you don't mind sharing, how much do those displays cost from your supplier? Last time I checked, e-paper displays were pretty pricey on their own.

konschubert12• 5 years ago

The display is 7.5 inches, from Waveshare. I pay retail.

rPlayer6554• 5 years ago

very cool! I absolutely want one.

searchableguy• 5 years ago

That's pretty cool. Love to see a hardware project.

What's the profit margin like?

E-ink displays are expensive. That price point seems not enough to generate decent income.

kylecordes2• 5 years ago

I read somewhere that the e-ink expense is because the company which controls the intellectual property chooses to make it a low volume, high cost product. Not that it is inherently expensive, and I am surprised they don't try the opposite strategy, make it cheap and everywhere.

hyperbovine• 5 years ago

E-ink displays are expensive.

I was curious... from what I can find online the wholesale price of an e-ink display is not that much cheaper (if any) than buying an equivalently sized Kindle. What is the viability of a business model that involves rooting a Kindle, loading whatever calendar display software you need, and shipping it inside a pretty wooden frame?

thamer• 5 years ago

I was curious about this too. From the dimensions listed on the website, it looks like the screen is about 6.3×3.7 inches, or about 7.3 inches diagonal.

There seem to be 8-inch e-ink displays for sale on AliExpress for $20-$40, actually much cheaper than I expected. No idea about the quality though.

Lucasoato• 5 years ago

If it was available, I'd buy it right now! :)

konschubert12• 5 years ago

If you sign up here I will let you know :)

https://forms.gle/tNcCcYrNBu5nWKgJ9

zzixp• 5 years ago

Oh man I love this! Definitely keeping my eye on it. Any chance at Outlook integration?

konschubert12• 5 years ago

I can say it's in the backlog, but I can't say if and when.

abider• 5 years ago

have you thoughts about offering this as software service for something like the Remarkable?

konschubert12• 5 years ago

I haven't thought about it, no. Not sure if that would be a good spot to be in, as a business.

jliptzin• 5 years ago

Awesome

joshgachnang• 5 years ago

Oh my gosh, I love this. I even love the name. My fiancé and I were even talking about how we wanted to move the house towards more "invisible technology" (magic mirrors, things like this, maybe the Frame TV if we get a good deal and figure out a good spot for it, etc)

evanlivingston3• 5 years ago

Recheck the frame tv. I wanted one until I realized it's just a thin tv thats motion activated to stay on/turn on and show a static image.

challenger-derp2• 5 years ago

I like how minimalistic it looks. Families might want a larger sized one to hang somewhere prominent in their home hah.

konschubert12• 5 years ago

Yea, I keep eying bigger displays but they are $$$$$

moralestapia• 5 years ago

Hi man, beautiful product, if this were an external monitor, or at least a website kiosk, I would buy it in a heartbeat. :D

Graffur• 5 years ago

This is awesome. I would 100% buy a battery operated version

FernandoMax• 5 years ago

100% I agree. Makes non-sense the eInk (low consumption) but power cord.

andi999• 5 years ago

I agree, very cool. Here what I do not like so much:

a) the wood frame seems to be too large (probably there is a technical reason for this), but still. Not much too large though, just maybe 25%?

b) the wood (at least from the pictures) looks cheap (plywood?)

konschubert12• 5 years ago

It's multiplex. The device in the last picture has plywood but it's an older version.

Multiplex is actually nice since it's cross laminated and thus retains its shape. I experimented with solid wood and it started arching after a few weeks.

RussianCow• 5 years ago

Wow, this is great! I was actually just thinking about hacking something like this together on my own, but $200 seems really reasonable for a pre-built product, and it looks much nicer than it would if I built it! :) Any plans to support non-Google calendar accounts?

konschubert12• 5 years ago

I would like to support other formats, caldev, outlook etc. I am limited by time and money, not imagination :D

dionidium2• 5 years ago

Just a heads up: my company blocks this site as malware

kylecordes2• 5 years ago

I wonder if there is a service that (somehow) detects your site has been flagged in various categories by big company firewalls, and alerts you. Wild guess: whatever system feeds into the lists that get blocked in this way probably has a lot of false positives.

konschubert12• 5 years ago

shop.invisible-computers.com?

Any idea what could be causing this? I am at a loss.

aeyes• 5 years ago

It is blocked on OpenDNS as well.

joshu• 5 years ago

does this connect directly to google or is there a proxy?

konschubert12• 5 years ago

It goes through a proxy that handles the authentication towards Google.

drodil• 5 years ago

I made one too with inkplate. The software is open sourced. More details here: https://link.medium.com/DeyY5FlcXmb

raron3• 5 years ago

I am curious: as a HW project how did you go through the CE / FCC certification process and production 0-series batch? Did you have some investor or paid from your own pocket?

Asking as somebody who thought making some embedded / HW projects, but the initial cost seems to much to be paid by myself.

dom962• 5 years ago

Also curious about this.

I’ve done a lot of research on CE/FCC and while it seems possible to do CE yourself (since you can self-certify) you are on the hook if you miss something, like certain required tests (and doing some tests can be very expensive).

PragmaticPulp• 5 years ago

The answer is a big "it depends", but there are ways to get basic FCC certification done for as little as $1K-$2K if you contact enough labs and your engineers are reasonably good at adhering to proper design practices (minimize respins and testing repeats).

CE mark isn't actually required in the US, but you'd need it for Europe and other locations. It's more involved, but all-in testing can be done for <$5K for EU if you're careful.

Did you have some investor or paid from your own pocket?
Asking as somebody who thought making some embedded / HW projects, but the initial cost seems to much to be paid by myself.

Crowdfunding is how it's done for HW products. Investors aren't going to be interested in anything small time (less than $10-100mm potential revenue + recurring subscriptions) unless they're friends and family or something like that.

It's a lot of money, but it's not out of reach for someone with a tech job who uses crowdfunding for the major production push.

go_prodev• 5 years ago

Great job. These look absolutely fantastic and I love the idea. It seems like the perfect use case for e-paper.

dom962• 5 years ago

Really awesome. I’m working on a hardware project myself, nice to see a success story.

I’m curious about the enclosure, do you cut it out of wood yourself or are you using a supplier for it that cuts it/glues it for you?

darkwizard42• 5 years ago

Very cool and love the design of the display

jlengrand• 5 years ago

Yours is a product and mine was just made for fun but I really like your project and had a similar journey last year.

E-paper is a perfect use case for a dynamic shelf calendar

https://lengrand.fr/complete-setup-epaper/

rosndo• 5 years ago

You could work on the aesthetics and increase your prices by 10-100x.

There’s a decent market for vaguely similar artworks, https://shop.madgallery.ch/products/clockclock-24

https://shop.madgallery.ch/products/nixie-time-zone-clock-v2

https://qlocktwo.com/us/qlocktwo-large-creators-edition-glin...

https://clockforward.com/etch-clock/

codegeek3• 5 years ago

https://cronhub.io (a project I just took over). Makes about 1k/month for now.

josephd79• 5 years ago

I use to follow the original creator of this app. Nice to see its still around.

andreygrehov• 5 years ago

This is cool. What's the story behind taking the project over?

codegeek3• 5 years ago

Not much. Original creator just wanted more help on growing it and is busy with a full time job. I on the other hand love the idea of buying SAAS businesses. This is my 2nd one. 1st one I bought has grown to low 7 figures in revenue. Not sure if I can replicate the same success but hopefully that's the idea.

jventura2• 5 years ago

I had a similar idea 2 years ago [1] but haven't been pushing it forward because I thought nobody would need something like this, since it's easy to implement a cronjob in a backend server. Maybe I should revisit this! :)

[1] https://cronbeats.com/

codegeek3• 5 years ago

sure go for it :).

cuu508• 5 years ago

Hi @jventura, I tried to sign up on cronbeats.com but the verification email did not arrive – are your emails working?

About the logo – I'll take it as "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" ;-)

timmaah• 5 years ago

Previously from 26 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095

That said, this seems to be the extent of my marketing desire.

I screen scrape campground registration websites and alert you when someone cancels on a date you want to go camping. Fabulously successful. Now back to my day-job.

https://wanderinglabs.com

Arubis2• 5 years ago

This feels like a good balance to me--you're giving people a heads-up that there's an open block that they can book, without doing the "value add" of blocking it off and then scalping the slot. More power to you.

bfoks• 5 years ago

How much do you earn?

techsin10111• 4 years ago

the UI is just so nice, it's functional and simple. it's not trying win design awards to point of bein completely insufferable like some sites i see today.

thrwy_ywrht6• 5 years ago

I made a background noise website and app

https://asoftmurmur.com

There are a lot of improvements I want to make, but due to life commitments it has been stuck in maintenance mode for far longer than I'm comfortable with

2pir2• 5 years ago

I use this all the time, and I tell everyone else to as well.

michaelbuckbee• 5 years ago

Just wanted to say how much I enjoy the site.

shepherdjerred2• 5 years ago

I used your app constantly before I picked up Sonos speakers and had to restort to Spotify playlists!

abetusk2• 5 years ago

Do you mind going into where your main revenue stream comes from and how it breaks down? Is it mostly apple users? Google play? Do you get any revenue from the website itself?

thrwy_ywrht6• 5 years ago

The basic model is people pay for access to more sounds. For the last few years this bas been separate transactions on the ios app, android app and for the web version. Ideally I'd move to a single subscription-based account that worked across all devices for extra sounds.

Revenue breakdown is roughly equal between android, ios and web, somewhat surprisingly. Android converts worse but has higher user numbers. Web converts much worse, but converts at a higher price (justified by the fact that hosting/maintaining the web stuff take a lot more time and money)

voiprodrigo• 5 years ago

Amazing, didn't know this existed. This plus my NC headphones, bliss. Enjoying it while I type this. Thank you!!

gateless• 5 years ago

I'm curious about how much work goes into recording high-quality, looping sounds like this?

thrwy_ywrht6• 5 years ago

I'm curious about how much work goes into recording high-quality, looping sounds like this?

When I started the site, I mainly used CC0 licensed sounds others had recorded.

Then I started recording my own sounds. How much work it is is very situational - if you regularly find yourself in an environment which has the sound you want to record, and not many other sounds around, then it's pretty trivial. For example, you want to record rain in the forest, and you regularly walk in a forest where it rains and there aren't many other noise sources (e.g. other people, planes overhead, singing birds, etc). The actual recording itself doesn't take much work, because I shoot for a level of sound quality that will satisfy 80%-90% of people, rather than a real "audiophile" quality level.

On the other hand, if you want to record something that only happens occasionally and with lots of other noise sources nearby, it can be a ton of work. For example, you want to record the sound of thunder, but you only get occasional storms, you live in a city with lots of other background noise, and it usually rains when it storms and you want rain on the recording. In that scenario, you might have to travel far and burn a ton of time trying to get the right conditions for recording.

juancampa• 5 years ago

I've been using it for hours and hours for the past few years. Thank you!

notamy• 5 years ago

I use this constantly, oh my gods. Thank you so much for making it!! <3

ahmed_ds2• 5 years ago

This is a pleasant surprise. I remember using your app ages ago. I want to say at least 7 years ago when I believe you launched your website first on reddit. My memory is a bit hazy.

I really liked your app. We had a construction project going on for the longest time and I would mix up your rain, storm, sea and the singing bowl sound everything together and blast it on my soundbox!!

Thank you.

thrwy_ywrht6• 5 years ago

Haha thank you for the nice memory! I've been running the site for 8 years, it's crazy that it's been that long

RandomWorker• 5 years ago

That's awesome! I've had that part of my favourites for years now. Every clean browser install I put your site in my fav bar.

udfalkso2• 5 years ago

My brother started Podcast Notes in 2015. I help out on the tech side. We now have a growing community of Premium Members, 35k Twitter Followers, 25k email subscribers.

https://podcastnotes.org

akudha4• 5 years ago

There is a typo in the URL :)

udfalkso2• 5 years ago

Thx, fixed!

budadre75• 5 years ago

I've been writing my own notes for various things including some podcasts. I'm curious who are the writers or note-takers for your website?

scarecrowbob3• 5 years ago

I play music in bars. Or busk an accordion. Fun times. Definitely not passive income, but it's work I like.

midiguy• 5 years ago

Hey fellow accordion busker! I find my busking income has diminished vastly with age, despite my skill rising. Everyone wants to toss a coin at the 10 year old playing decent accordion. Not so much the 30 year old playing good accordion.

vorpalhex• 5 years ago

I realize you can't exactly do exit interviews but have you tried talking to "users"?

scarecrowbob3• 5 years ago

Well, I'm 43....

Not to say that this is your issue, but I find it helps if I dress up a lot.

I have nice, embroidered pearl snaps, custom cowboy boots, fancy hats, and a couple nice vests.

That is to say, it's pretty easy for folks to confuse me with panhandlers. I have no problem with folks panhandling, but my tips are way better if I look like a performer.

anonymouse0082• 5 years ago

Are you using Venmo for tips? I used to have an itch for digital tip jars, but never figured out the right set of features to really drive adoption...

This was well before Patreon, and PayPal was pretty much the only API game in town. Since then, I've felt like Venmo handles 9/10ths of the live performance problem (unleash the appreciation (money) locked in digital form).

650REDHAIR• 5 years ago

I never have cash on me and when I see a QR code I usually give 2-5x more than I would if I was carrying cash on me because it feels weird to "drop in" $1-4 on Venmo and I guilt myself into more.

Anyway, accordion OP you should get a QR code for tips :)

scarecrowbob3• 5 years ago

TBH, I am not super on point about that-- on some level I still rationalize busking as a mode of practice where I don't have to annoy the neighbors in my apartment.

I should probably look into that... it seems like a reasonable idea.

I will say, the one time that someone asked me directly about it, when I told them I didn't have venmo they gave me a $100 bill. Not to say that will ever be repeated.

ultrasounder2• 5 years ago

Awesome

bojanvidanovic• 5 years ago

I run a nerdy product discovery website: https://devandgear.com

buttscicles2• 5 years ago

We're making about $600/mo right now working on Oku, which we're building as a social book tracker (and more) and hoping to replace Goodreads with.

https://oku.club

Here's my profile for example: https://oku.club/user/joe

shepherdjerred2• 5 years ago

Do you provide a way to export data in case the site closes down? I don't use any app/site to track what books I read, but I see that it could be interesting.

buttscicles2• 5 years ago

We do but it's not fully automated just yet, it'd involve sending us an email.

Similar story with csv imports, it's half supported but not in the UI yet.

agacera• 5 years ago

That is pretty landing page!

Just read that the meaning of oku [1] is 1) private, intimate, and deep; 2) exalted and sacred; and, 3) profound and recondite

anyway, your brazilian users will find this funny since oku has the same sound of "o cu" that literally means "the butt hole".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oku_(theory)#:~:text=3%20Bound....

pedrogpimenta• 5 years ago

Not really, because the O is only open when alone, or a longer word. This reads Óku, not Uku. At least that's how I read it being Portuguese.

The defunct social network Orkut is a good example of this. It's Órkut, not Urkut.

Of course, none of this matters :)

snarkypixel• 5 years ago

Looks neat. Why do you think oku will replace goodreads?

DarkCrusader2• 5 years ago

What is the source for book data? I was recently looking for a TMDB equivalent for books but couldn't find a good one. There is OpenLibrary but they don't have covers and only do dumps once a month.

ghostbrainalpha5• 5 years ago

I like the design, but what's would you like to improve over Goodreads?

msimav• 5 years ago

I believe there is a turkish speaker involved when you are naming the product :)

"Oku" means read (in imperative form)

pbnjay• 5 years ago

Things have tapered off quite a bit since 2021, but it's still over the threshold: https://virtualpostersession.org

It's a platform for virtual scientific and research-oriented poster session hosting. Pretty simple but desperately needed when all the conferences were cancelled!

ronyfadel3• 5 years ago

I’m making ~$4k a month, from a small macOS and iOS app portfolio:

- macOS apps: https://fadel.io/

- iOS apps: https://apple.co/3fqcWfO

TrueGeek• 5 years ago

I bought Batteries For Mac when my mouse died without warning. It's funny how much a simple little widget actually helps out.

ronyfadel3• 5 years ago

Thank you for being a fan of Batteries! :)

anyfactor• 5 years ago

This is what I aspire to do. Building small apps that is super specific to solving a problem.

MailNerd2• 5 years ago

I built an email forwarding service - not for your own domains, a lot of those exist already - instead you can choose an email at any of our 150+ domains and we forward it to your existing account, no migration required. You can even send from this address with many providers.

https://www.mailbox.my

techsin10111• 4 years ago

what do you need to learn to run your email servers, im assuming you run your email servers?

MailNerd2• 4 years ago

Yes I'm running my own servers.

You should know your way around Linux (if you already know Ubuntu, you can use it on the server as well).

You need some software: - For receiving and routing mails: I use postfix - For authenticating: Dovecot - For serving mails via IMAP: Dovecot is a popular choice

There are some good guides on the net how to set up these on Ubuntu or Debian (which is pretty similar), just google for e.g. "postfix ubuntu".

It's critical that the mail you route arrives at the other end, so you must prevent spammers from abusing your systems. Otherwise you get blacklisted. As a start you need to implement state-of-the-art things like: SPF, DKIM, DMARC. MTA-STS, TLS-RPT are also useful. None of these are hard and there are also good tutorials out there, it's just a bit of work.

yboris• 5 years ago

I created Video Hub App - browse, search, and organize your videos - "like YouTube for videos on your computer".

It's a commercial project / charityware that is turning 4 years old next month. I sell it for $5 per copy and give $3.50 to a cost-effective charity. If you go to the blog you'll see the history of sales. As of now I donated almost $13,000 to charity thanks to this project. It's averaging around 100 sales per month for over a year now.

https://videohubapp.com/en/

Also open source MIT: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

charles_f• 5 years ago

Selling perpetual licenses for software that runs on your machine?! How quaint!

Ruthalas• 5 years ago

Offering perpetual licenses is a huge plus in my book, and often drives my purchasing decision. Thank you.

disqard• 5 years ago

I recently purchased VHA -- thank you so much for making this!

techsin10111• 4 years ago

one customer segment that can reaaaally benefit from this is people who edit videos, they need to have repository of 1000s of sound effects, memes, and clips from general media. There really needs to be a tool to find gifs, images, videos and audios by typing general word and it even should match synonym tags.

daneeveritt• 5 years ago

I've been making a pretty consistent amount off my open-source side-project Pterodactyl through company sponsorships.

https://pterodactyl.io

rooster212• 5 years ago

I recently got Pterodactyl setup on my home server and I just wanted to say that it's an incredible project and it works great. I run various game servers on a whim and it's been easy to spin them up. Many thanks for your hard work.

kareemm• 5 years ago

I make https://www.savio.io.

We help SaaS CS and Product teams use product feedback from Intercom, Zendesk, Hubspot, Help Scout, etc to understand and build what customers are asking for.

kouteiheika7• 5 years ago

I'm running a website for people learning Japanese and currently making ~$590/month from Patreon donations: https://jpdb.io/

This is an entirely spare-time project on which I've been working publicly for the past year.

Here's some info about the tech stack I'm using: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693959

NTARelix• 5 years ago

Upon initial login I'm definitely impressed by the interface, the existing content, and the potential to finally brush up on my Japanese.

I ended up linking to my Google account, but I spent a long while trying to "sign up" with my email only to be given an message about failing to meet the password requirements (no mention of character limit and no special characters allowed). At first I thought I just needed to adjust my password generator to get a valid password (usually 64 chars with alpha-numerics and special characters), but even the simplest passwords failed with the same error message.

kouteiheika7• 5 years ago

I ended up linking to my Google account, but I spent a long while trying to "sign up" with my email only to be given an message about failing to meet the password requirements (no mention of character limit and no special characters allowed).

This is strange; I don't really have any special password requirements. What's the exact error message you were getting? The only requirements are that it's at least 6 characters long and different than your username, and in each case it should tell you exactly what's wrong.

jjice2• 5 years ago

Looks fantastic, and I especially love the simple tech stack. How do you handle updates out of curiosity? scp and rerun?

kouteiheika7• 5 years ago

Yep. Copy the executable (plus another file which is a big blob containing the dictionary, examples, etc.), and then just do `systemctl restart`.

There's nothing extra running on the server; no reverse proxy (the app itself automatically fetches/renews the HTTPS cert), no database, nothing. Just the app, the SSH server and the default system services.

mzmoen• 5 years ago

This is quite cool. One suggestion would be to have the pronunciation listed in addition to the kanji and audio (at least when I searched I didn't see it, so the only way to learn to pronounce is to use audio). Do you know of something similar for Chinese by any chance?

kouteiheika7• 5 years ago

One suggestion would be to have the pronunciation listed in addition to the kanji and audio (at least when I searched I didn't see it, so the only way to learn to pronounce is to use audio).

Sorry, I'm a little confused? The pronunciation is listed for every word; that's the hiragana next/on top of the words. (:

Do you know of something similar for Chinese by any chance?

Alas, I do not. Maybe I'll make something like that in, like, 20 years if I'll ever be able to make a living off of this. (:

cmeacham98• 5 years ago

Hi, if you're still around:

jpdb looks really cool, but will it work for somebody who is a complete beginner?

I want to learn Japanese, and intend to commit time to doing so sometime in the upcoming 2-3 months. However, right now, I'm literally at zero.

Is there somewhere else I should go to learn things like basic grammar and sentence structure first, or will jpdb help with that sort of thing too?

kouteiheika7• 5 years ago

A complete beginner? Nope. Well, at least not yet!

Eventually I do want to make it a one-stop-shop which will teach you everything and take you from a complete beginner to someone who can immerse in native media as soon as possible. We're not there yet, and the site works best if you're at least an advanced beginner. The bare minimum requirement is that you know hiragana and katakana already.

Your best bet would be to start with a textbook of some kind and/or some actual lessons with real teachers to learn the basics. The more of a beginner you are the more the human touch helps; the more advanced you are the more you can depend on apps.

Joe2337• 5 years ago

I'm creating a free Japanese course that ships as a flashcard deck for Anki. It completely starts from zero, maybe it helps you: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/911122782 I guess this format is similar to what jpdb offers, maybe you can even import it there. The deck currently covers most grammar and a little more than 800 words on ~1800 flashcards. It's mostly based on anime though, so at least some interest in this is beneficial ;).

asdf3243245q• 5 years ago

Wow, that looks great!

My main complaint is that I haven't known about this until now. I frequently search for Japanese resources and specifically did searches to find pre-made decks of Japanese content from Japanese language media, but never encountered your site.

Thank you for the effort to revamp the Heisig kanji keywords - makes me wish I didn't already learn it the RTK way. The way to teach new kanji by introducing the enclosed primitives first is smart - it's a good compromise between "primitive first" and "usage first" approaches.

kouteiheika7• 5 years ago

Thanks!

Yeah, it's still pretty much a very niche resource that many people do not know about. (:

Indeed, Heisig's keywords can be janky. Mine are not perfect, but in general they should be better than Heisig's. Well, at least for most of the really common kanji; I still need to change/improve the keywords for some of the more rare kanji and tweak a few more common ones. (As you can imagine doing that manually for a few thousand characters is a lot of work, so it has been slow going.)

wodenokoto• 5 years ago

Thumbs up for revising the keywords of remembering the kanji.

I don’t follow his book but I do refer to it when studying and sometimes his keywords really can be far out. If I remember correctly he never clarifies if the kanji for “can” is “can do” or “can of soup”.

CobrastanJorji• 5 years ago

Really neat! Business-wise, is it meant to compete with sites like Wanikani and Bunpro, or is it meant to be more complementary?

kouteiheika7• 5 years ago

Eventually it's meant to have enough content/functionality to be a replacement for both.

niftylettuce• 5 years ago

Forward Email - Email Forwarding Service

We're the only service that respects your privacy and never stores your emails.

https://forwardemail.net

kerryritter• 5 years ago

i <3 forwardemail. thank you for building this!

Jack5500• 5 years ago

[snip]

2pir2• 5 years ago

Be honest, were you inspired by Drawful?

careersaas• 5 years ago

We have built a remote job search https://app.careersaas.com/portal that scrapes and indexes more than 2 million jobs. Currently offering sponsored listings - lets a user define a location for their job and whomever is searching near that geocode will see the result, according to their job experience, etc.

data4lyfe• 5 years ago

Originally a side project two years ago, now I'm full time on it: https://www.interviewquery.com/

We help data scientists land jobs by being the Leetcode for data science.

dana_janssen• 5 years ago

We built https://tadum.app, an online meeting agenda that rolls forward incomplete agenda items to the next agenda. This ends up creating a low effort paper trail, saves on meeting prep time, and keeps agendas consistently formatted/organized. It's intended for recurring weekly/monthly/quarterly meetings--we built it based on how we run meetings with our clients and are happy to see other teams jump in and have success with it.

StayTrue• 5 years ago

I make visualization tools for bicycle wheelbuilding and I'm making >$500 profit but not enough to live on. My site is https://www.islandix.com

davidkuennen2• 5 years ago

I'm working on an event based stock portfolio/investment tracker. Currently at 10k MRR.

https://stockevents.app

Edit: Just noticed this thread was merged/resubmerged? Now I have a duplicate answer here. :-/

throwawayffffas• 5 years ago

How do you monetize? Ads? Subscriptions?

klohto• 5 years ago

IAP

davidkuennen2• 5 years ago

Yearly subscription. Some users asked me to make it free and serve ads, but I refused. I wanted to make it ad free with regards to privacy.

superphil0• 5 years ago

How do you get the data?

cushychicken9• 5 years ago

I launched www.rtljobs.com in October and had my first month of $500 in revenue in December.

It's a job board that caters to a very specific subset of electrical engineers - specifically, ones that work with FPGAs and logic design for chips.

Need help hiring FPGA or RTL engineers? Let's talk. fpga.rtl.jobs@gmail.com

specialist• 5 years ago

Cool. I predict (hope) specialized jobs boards will become more the norm.

cushychicken9• 5 years ago

It's a thesis I'm banking on myself.

axg112• 5 years ago

This is an interesting thesis. How would HR/People/Recruitment teams work effectively in a world where there are many specialized and actively used job boards?

Today, HR teams usually post jobs on LinkedIn and perhaps one or two more platforms. A world of fragmented job boards would be difficult to navigate for non-specialists.

handzhiev• 5 years ago

Looks cool, I love this kind of niche projects. How do you / did you drive traffic and job postings to it?

cushychicken9• 5 years ago

Indexing hiring companies' job sites, and providing helpful comments to people who are seeking jobs in the sector (primarily on Reddit). More on that here:

https://cushychicken.github.io/grow-your-mailing-list-by-bei...

We're seeing a steady and growing trickle of organic traffic, too.

1thrasher• 5 years ago

How do you generate revenue if you only aggregate jobs or post them for free?

cushychicken9• 5 years ago

By selling Featured Posts, which get prime real estate on the site for 30 days, and a blast out to our mailing list.

rthomas6• 5 years ago

Please add Huntsville, AL to your board. I'm an FPGA engineer currently working there, and there are a lot of us, at a lot of companies.

cushychicken9• 5 years ago

Rocket town, USA!

I see that name pop up on all sorts of queries and I'm shocked it's not in the db. Digging into that presently. Thanks for the suggestion.

kmetan• 5 years ago

Thanks for sharing this... How did your paying customers became aware of you?

cushychicken9• 4 years ago

Almost entirely thru word of mouth from an engineer at their company, or thru posting on Reddit.

Lord_Zero3• 5 years ago

Whats an RTL job?

cushychicken9• 4 years ago

RTL is shorthand for "register transfer logic". It's a term of art for "digital design at the gate level".

hansy3• 5 years ago

Web comic newsletter: https://funnies.page

Full disclosure - $500+/month in revenue, but not profit. The majority (95%) goes to the creators I work with.

agentdrtran• 5 years ago

Wow, you only take about 2%? (assuming 3% for processing?)

hansy3• 5 years ago

Yup that's about right. I don't mind though; I view this project as a labor of love.

andkon• 5 years ago

Oh man, you gotta charge more! This is insanely cheap. The average substack charges $5 a month, and you usually get an email a week at best.

hansy3• 5 years ago

Ha I appreciate the thought, but it's hard to compare novel writing from thought leaders to funny images. I wish I could charge more, but I don't think the value is quite there yet. Maybe if I was strict about exclusive content (which I don't want to be; I like giving artists flexibility on where/how they distribute their work), I could get away with charging higher as well.

tr3ntg• 5 years ago

I'm building a journaling app for couples (iOS): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/twig-journal-for-couples/id145...

I originally made it for my long distance girlfriend (now wife) and myself. It averages $450 - $550 monthly.

hazza_n_dazza6• 5 years ago

Very nice, I think there is a great future betweeen social and private.

mjaques• 5 years ago

A friend and I made a repository for high-quality, affordable language learning flashcards around a year ago.

https://deckmill.com

Made using a mix of ML (translation and TTS) and human translators.

hobo_mark• 5 years ago

Cool, but I can't seem to find the pricing anywhere? Edit: there it is, I must have gone blind.

Ostrogodsky• 5 years ago

Get access to all our decks for just €14.99. All our content for one low price - buy it and it's yours forever. Forget trivial badges, locked levels and guilt-tripping owls, and say hello to actual language skills.

undefined_user6• 5 years ago

FWIW, I also couldn't find it at first. Took me like a minute to find it.

dirtyhand• 5 years ago

Stock market and crypto currency bot for Slack and Discord https://beeper.fyi/

davidsawyer2• 5 years ago

How does this make money? I don't see any pricing info on the site.

elliottcarlson• 5 years ago

How are you earning revenue on this? Don't see any pricing or signup requirements

par2• 5 years ago

I built Meta Meme, an iPhone meme making app. It nets approx $3-5k monthly. https://metameme.app/

typon• 5 years ago

A really good app and generally adding positivity to the world :)

par2• 5 years ago

wow thank you so much :)

ryanyl• 5 years ago

Working on a few projects, but the ones that actually took off and make money are:

Commotion (https://commotion.page), Forms + Mail Merge for Notion

Reslant (https://reslant.com), Discussion Boards for Customer Feedback

camgas3• 5 years ago

I retrofit old phone-based intercoms with software-only solution: https://www.DropBy.io

a bit above $500/month ARR, stable and sticky. Started a few years ago, now have 2 other partners.

FlyingAvatar2• 5 years ago

Your pricing page seems to have no prices on it and your sign up page doesn't load for me.

camgas3• 5 years ago

We removed pricing, one reseller wanted that out. But good point, I think we should add it again and be transparent since his business is good but not good enough to do so.

What happened when you git Sign up?

Thanks a bunch for the feedback!

sambroner2• 5 years ago

Wow... this is so validating. I worked on a project I called "Buzz Me Up Scotty" (Or something like that) to do a very similar thing. Just glad someone proved the vision.

Melatonic4• 5 years ago

I used to have a decent side hustle making this much money but the tax changes this year have de-incentivized my work ethic

UncleOxidant• 5 years ago

What tax changes?

Melatonic4• 5 years ago

Previously companies like eBay, Venmo, Paypal, etc were not required to officially report transfers to the IRS. A few years ago they changed that rule where if you appear to be making more than $20,000 dollars in a year period then they send forms to the IRS directly. If it is only for personal use (like say you are sending money via Venmo to a roomate) there is no tax to pay. But for actual sales you would be.

This year they lowered that $20,000 to $600. So anyone who receives more than $600 in one calendar year will trigger Venmo/Paypal or whoever to send the IRS the proper tax forms. If it is for personal use of course you are still not required to pay any tax.

As far as I know none of the loopholes for taxing the uber rich have been changed so this is really just going along with the IRS' current policy of increasing revenue from small time outfits vs going after the bigger fish (who can often afford to hire expensive accountants and lawyers to fight the IRS)

I am not against paying taxes but having to wrangle the info from a bunch of different sources and then also deal with manually adjusting for other factors just makes this whole thing a huge pain.

x13pixels• 5 years ago

RemedyBG, a from-scratch Windows debugger. https://remedybg.itch.io/remedybg

dheera2• 5 years ago

I do a lot of landscape astrophotography which involves a TON of signal processing to get rid of various sources of noise.

https://instagram.com/dheeranet

People ask to buy prints from time to time. Not quite $500/month just yet but getting there.

Then there's this web-based function plotter I made in 2007:

http://fooplot.com/

It once made upto $900/month but since then, mobile apps have gotten better, and today it makes about $100-150/month in ad revenue.

Melatonic4• 5 years ago

I have seen your astro work for awhile now and it is awesome - had no idea you could reliably make anything close to that money wise. Sounds like I need to actually take my processing a bit more seriously and actually create the new site I have been meaning to work on.

Personally I am going to probably focus less on getting the perfect processing (generally I just do a few stacks for noise and sometimes combine with a star tracker) and more on getting to unique locations most people do not have the skills to get to. That is more my personal preference though given I really enjoy backpacking and mountaineering already.

Have you ever messed around with the automated pano heads? I was recently looking at buying a used gigapan (one of the smallest ones) given that mirrorless cameras are so much lighter now. Shooting stacks + a manual pano head can get a bit tedious when you are already far out into the backcountry and tired and just want to relax. I believe Daniel Stein uses them and his work is pretty spectacular!

What I really want though is something that is both a star tracker AND can automate the panos themselves. As far as I know that does not exist and one basically has to put something like a gigapan on top of a star tracker and of course make sure that its all capable of controlling the camera itself.

edit: Now that I think about it you might even be able to make a decent side hustle providing a "processing as a service" type thing to other astrophotographers

dheera2• 5 years ago

I haven't played with automated pano heads, but I made a DIY scanning digital back for a 4x5:

https://dheera.net/projects/4x5/

My original intention for this is gigapixel images, but I ran into some issues cancelling the CRA correction that the Pi HQ cam does, and also, my newly bought Sony A7R4 can shoot 240 MP shots with pixel shift so it's suddenly less interesting again since it's already within an order of magnitude of a gigapixel, and if I got a shift adapter mount and shot with a medium format lens I could probably easily exceed a gigapixel with the A7R4. I might try to shoot 4x5 film some time though.

matthall28• 5 years ago

A tiny API for embedding weather forecasts as an image: https://weatherembed.com/

Makes around $500/month from various subscriptions through RapidAPI. Built on a whim during the pandemic. Uses Google Cloud Run + NodeJS.

xd1936• 5 years ago

Excellent idea!

ajitgoel• 5 years ago

subscribed to the (free) service through RapidAPI and tried testing it, getting { "message":"This endpoint is disabled for your subscription" }

for all the three endpoints.

kevingrahl• 4 years ago

FYI; The example image currently only shows its alt text.

yakshaving_jgt4• 5 years ago

I run a B2B lead generation SaaS for the UK market.

It provides up-to-date data from Companies House, but also allows you to sort and filter businesses by:

- where they are located

- when they registered

- what SIC (standard industrial classification) code they use

- their operational status

- their accounts category

Businesses typically use this to find new businesses to try and market/sell their services to.

It’s written in Haskell and Elm, and it’s been running for about five years now. Several businesses have been happily paying to use the service every month.

https://newbusinessmonitor.co.uk/

If you’d like to sell your services to UK businesses then do write to me; I’d love to hear from you :)

usgroup• 5 years ago

You know it’s illegal to use CH data for direct marketing right?

yakshaving_jgt4• 5 years ago

To the best of my understanding, that is not true. It is illegal to directly market to consumers without their prior consent. It is not illegal to market to businesses, though it is illegal to send marketing communication that is misleading, and it is not permitted to send direct mail to businesses who have indicated they wish to not receive marketing communication through the Mail Preference Service.

Do you have a source to support your perspective?

akudha4• 5 years ago

I wonder if it is possible to do this in other countries? I am not aware of any API or data downloads for the U.S that is available on a daily basis.

Nilef2• 5 years ago

That's really interesting - Do you do all the letter-sending yourself or outsource that?

yakshaving_jgt4• 5 years ago

Thank you, I'm glad you think so!

I don't handle the fulfilment myself. I wrote a software integration that connects NewBusinessMonitor with a direct mail company in the UK. They have special machines that can print, envelope, and send all the letters automatically, at large scale. The letters are printed in colour (on rather nice quality paper), trimmed by guillotine (for full-bleed printing), folded in half and inserted into a windowed envelope, before being dispatched 2nd class, usually the following business day.

I typically don't need to manually intervene in any part of the process; I just try and do hand-holding with people when I onboard them, because I think good business is about building relationships with people, and many (most?) of my users specialise in areas outside of computing.

montenegrohugo7• 5 years ago

I start tons of projects, and it's always a bother naming them. I didn't find existing domain generators at all useful, and since my background is in AI, I made my own.

→ https://www.namy.ai

It currently has a modest but pretty consistent 200-300 users daily, almost all of it direct traffic (my SEO skills are very lacking). I'm assuming people recommend it to their friends, and that's where the traffic is coming from.

It's not yet at $500/mo, but it's getting close. Server costs are significant though, since running an AI model is a bit expensive.

Ideas and feedback are welcome.

ramoz• 5 years ago

Love it. Explainability would be a nice feature. I.e word definitions, origins, etc.

adamddev1• 5 years ago

That is fantastic, I wish I knew about it earlier. I used another popular name-finding site (can't remember what it was) but it wasn't nearly as intelligent and the results were not that good. It also would be great to check for the availability of the name in Twitter/YouTube/etc.

hooande• 5 years ago

great site, well made. congrats

coder543• 5 years ago

"Only show available" doesn't seem to work except on the homepage... but I think it's because the homepage is the only place where any domains are actually marked as already being registered. (when most of the suggested domains on search results seem to be registered already, based on a quick sampling.)

On the same line of thought, it would be awesome (but probably difficult/expensive) if you could show the price of each domain directly in the results.

Otherwise, it seems like a neat tool!

montenegrohugo7• 5 years ago

You guys are overloading the domain checking API :(

Good problem to have I suppose ^^

cheriot• 5 years ago

Looks really cool. The first two results I clicked on where registered a long time ago, though.

https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results/?doma...

montenegrohugo7• 5 years ago

Thanks! Yeah, I did NOT expect HN's traffic. It's overloading the domain checking API and making it fail

thom• 5 years ago

I’m getting a lot of false positives but this has already generated some great ideas!

montenegrohugo7• 5 years ago

I'm sorry! I didn't expect the HN hug of death. About 200 concurrent people right now, so the domain check API is failing :(

davidatbu• 5 years ago

Have you thought about deploying the ML model on the edge, using something like TensorflowJS or ONNX-runtime?

Haven't done it myself (looking into it right now!), but my impression is that model quantization (and possibly prunning) can give you a palatable model size that doesn't affect performance too much.

cploonker• 5 years ago

Works surprisingly well.

montenegrohugo7• 5 years ago

Thanks! Was a fun project to do. I have a bunch of ideas to make it better, but I decided to let it rest for a bit and focus on other stuff. Might put in a bit more effort if it keeps getting the interest it's getting now!

truculent2• 5 years ago

This is fantastic! If I may be crass, how does this make money? Just through referral links?

montenegrohugo7• 5 years ago

Not crass, I like sharing! We're all here to learn from each other.

The monetization model is just referral links to Namecheap, where I get a 10% commission. I want to make that a bit more elegant (especially for people with uBlock Origin, which it doesn't track), and also add a few other referrals (logo makers and maybe hosting).

Couldn't think of other ways to monetize this without making it obnoxious (I hate ads, and making it pay-to-use also seems restrictive to me). If you have any ideas, I'd be open to hear them!

somenewaccount1• 5 years ago

Buy a server with a good graphics card, your server costs will equal out in 3-6 months and then you will actually have revenue.

kingcharles3• 5 years ago

This is great! I tried "chicken burgers for aliens"* and it came up with some fantastic options.

* not currently a real business plan

montenegrohugo7• 5 years ago

Wait until we make first contact (I'm sure this is scheduled later in 2022)

skr53• 5 years ago

Why are the server cost high ? Can you not run inference on CPU ? Perhaps on an hertzner auctioned machine ?

RobKohr• 4 years ago

Cool, I made one called https://mixmatchdomains.com but it never really got much traffic (single digits per day). Maybe the AI thing makes it more marketable, or just being able to type in an open textbox for pure simplicity.

sippndipp• 5 years ago

We're doing an newsletter dedicated for Android developers:

https://androidweekly.net/

- it was four years without making any money

- with ~100k subs it's generating money

- everything grew organically

catonmylap• 5 years ago

How much is the revenue with 100k subs?

waterside81• 5 years ago

Personalized kid's e-books http://www.littleheroes.com

Web + app store purchases

Up for sale if anyone's interested

henning3• 5 years ago

I sell covered calls on Robinhood.

chillel• 5 years ago

how much does that make you?

bradwood• 5 years ago

Getting rekt mostly?

showbufire• 5 years ago

one of us :)

henning3• 5 years ago

#thetagang

mailjenil• 5 years ago

I do Put Credit Spreads. More riskier but rewarding

AwkwardPanda• 5 years ago

Built Shopping Saga:

Real-time Online Shopping Deals by Product Category | Thoughtful Gifts for Every Occasion, Recipient, Category

Gifts:

1. Daily-updated gift products catalog 2. Direct Amazon and Etsy product links for gifts and deals 3. Browse and filter by price, category, recipient, occasion, popularity

Shopping Deals:

1. Grab online shopping deals as soon as they are available 2. Category-wise segregation of deals 3. Deals updated half-hourly

Initially, it was only web and android, but now I have released iOS app as well.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mysticpeak...

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1604578567#?platform=iphone

The web version was pretty basic, so I've taken it down currently. Learning Vue JS to enhance the frontend/UI.

The apps have pretty clean UI.

ChrisArchitect• 5 years ago

800+ comments recently

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095

nonrecursive• 5 years ago

https://jobs.braveclojure.com/ - a Clojure job board! Usually #1 search result for "clojure jobs"

jason_zig• 5 years ago

I build products to help improve my main e-commerce businesses so I think this counts as a side-hustle. The latest (earliest stage one is):

https://www.zigpoll.com

"Bite sized" polling software as a service that I use for post purchase surveys, contact us forms, and email campaigns when I want feedback on what to do next. Most customers are currently through our Shopify App but have a few SaaS businesses that integrated it independently.

nakodari• 5 years ago

https://jumpshare.com

Visual communication tool with screen recording, screenshots and GIFs for macOS and Windows. Fully native apps without using Electron. I started Jumpshare as a side project many years ago and turned it into a full-time job.

thedangler• 5 years ago

I have a side business that does payment processing. I clear an extra $2k-$3k a month. Currently looking for outside sales reps while I develop open source payment options that aren't available yet. If you are a developer, good at sales, or want to try it, let me know.

jasondigitized3• 5 years ago

Do you have a link?

gisho3• 4 years ago

link please

techsin10111• 4 years ago

Isn't payment processing highly complex?

qnk• 5 years ago

I've been working on Newsletterss, a newsletter reader for web, iOS and Android. I'm making about $2k/m with about 30% of that going to ads and infrastructure costs.

You can check it out at https://newsletterss.com

lucasfdacunha• 5 years ago

Is there a way to submit my newsletter to your database of newsletters? I run a curated gaming content newsletter(https://www.thegamingpub.com/) and being part of those databases it's what help people find my newsletter.

Let me know if that's possible, thanks!

buf9• 5 years ago

I make about $50k/mo on https://www.closingcredits.com

I found that most teaching platforms for voice actors out there are run by a bunch of celebrities who are pushing edutainment, not education.

So I wanted to make something specific for voice actors. I will try to branch it out to other creators later.

jckahn• 5 years ago

Wow, congrats on the success! Is this a solo project for you, or are you working with a team?

buf9• 5 years ago

Just me, but I do revshare with the instructors and I have a support staff on contract to handle tickets.

nati0n2• 5 years ago

Dug a little into your background, read some of your posts. Appreciate the different perspective with "Choose Money First." I think a piece of that will stick with me forever now, just because it hit a little different. So I guess just.. thanks for the thoughts.

buf9• 5 years ago

Thank you! In person I'm a bag of laughs, but on text I really come off as aloof, so it feels good to read that someone was impacted by something I wrote.

I've got so much more that I'm afraid to publish. Might have to reconsider.

cercatrova• 5 years ago

Link?

brajmohan• 4 years ago

I really loved this article. Why I have choosen CS? when people ask I give same answer as written in this.

"Make decisions that will give you more choices, not fewer."

Chinjut• 5 years ago

You make $600k a year from a side project?

buf9• 5 years ago

Technically I don't work currently, so I'm not sure if this is a side project.

I was the founding engineer and Head of Eng at Reforge the past 4+ years while I was building Closing Credits. I left in August 2021. So, it was a side project for nearly 5 years.

If I have 3 side projects and no full time job at this exact moment, where do I stand? I'll delete my post if I'm violating the side project rule.

holler2• 5 years ago

Very cool, how long did it take from idea to working v1? Anything you'd do differently in terms of getting it to PMF faster, tech choices, or lessons learned?

buf9• 5 years ago

I already had a different side project with 300k users so it was incredibly easy to find PMF fast because I just emailed them.

Tech choices: I never reinvent the wheel. I just take working pieces from other work that I've done and glue it together. Anything custom, I'll read how others do it.

Lessons: I probably should've chosen a different market. If I had targeted companies and taught their employees professional education rather than poor amateur voice acting hobbyist, I'd probably be making $20M ARR. But I don't mind, this is still fun.

chainwax• 5 years ago

The discussion around this thread got my attention, and you've gotten a fan. Looking forward to reading through your blog posts.

buf9• 5 years ago

Thank you. :)

DantesKite2• 5 years ago

On your website you say you were pardoned out of a felony conviction. What was it for?

buf9• 5 years ago

Assault w/Deadly Weapon - took 15 years to get it pardoned and expunged. The hardest battle I've fought in my life. It makes startups look easy. I'll write more about it one day, but I don't want to screw it up.

moneywoes• 5 years ago

How did you land your first 5 customers and validate your idea?

lifeplusplus• 5 years ago

As an ESL person I wanted to sign up for this to improve enunciation but price was bit too much

daibo• 5 years ago

Not really a side project, but I haven't quit my job for it so..

I'm building a Search as a Service like Algolia. Currently earning $700 a month from an early customer. Anvere.net

elikoga• 5 years ago

CORS apparently breaks the site for me

shtack• 5 years ago

I've run http://olodolo.com (it mostly runs itself) since 2018, which lets people buy things on AliExpress using crypto. I often describe it as the only non-scam crypto website :)

It's badly in need of fixes and updates, but I still do about $1500-2000 in sales and $300-400 in profit monthly.

ctrlaltdylan• 5 years ago

What's the biggest cost? The disparity between the rev and net are pretty big

chossenger• 5 years ago

That sales number would likely be the value of goods bought through the platform, not total revenue

no_time• 5 years ago

Back in the day(2014-2015) I regularly used a service that does the same thing but for steam games.

I try not to think about the exchange rate difference compared to now :^)

mgz2• 5 years ago

I built an app to control what my kids watch on Youtube: https://kidstv.family Makes $1500/month

ghostbrainalpha5• 5 years ago

How long did it take you to build this? Do you do any advertising?

mgz2• 5 years ago

It is a hobby project for 3 or 4 years.

No advertising except for $20/month for Apple Search Ads… I guess I should advertise more.

vbcr• 5 years ago

Interesting product. Do you play the videos from YouTube, if yes how do you embed them in your app. If no, do you host these videos on your end and how are they licensed from those content creators.

leros• 5 years ago

Fyi - The image under your Aaron Francis quote is broken.

qrohlf• 5 years ago

I run a design asset generator based on my open source library, Trianglify:

https://trianglify.io/

It currently does about $500/mo from a combination of asset purchases and ethical (Carbon Ads) non-tracking advertising.

TheJoeMan• 5 years ago

I went super niche with an iOS vehicle counting board for civil engineers to conduct intersection studies, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/traffic-count-tmc/id1553635289

I never did any advertising and it was gaining traction, but lately plateaued at a handful of downloads / day. Not sure where would be a good place to spread the word haha.

strzibny• 5 years ago

I wrote an ebook on web application deployment. It does over $1000/month, but obviously it's not recurring revenue.

https://deploymentfromscratch.com/

I did a SHOW HN awhile ago which sold 100+ copies in a single day:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29540808

porsager• 5 years ago

I created an enhanced multilingual T9 keyboard[1][2] for iOS in 2014 to play around with Swift. It's been doing 600$ on average since then, still going strong. Still use it everyday myself and can't live without it [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/typenine-ultimate-t9-style-k... [2] https://medium.com/porsager/a-better-iphone-typing-experienc...

adamcao• 5 years ago

I started making Power-Ups (add-ons/plugins) for Trello in July last year: https://www.tinypowerups.com

It just hit $500/month on Monday and it seems to be increasing by $100 in MRR per week.

I'm only charging $1 per user per month for unlimited access to all of my Power-Ups. I'm thinking about increasing this price to $2 or $3 next month (existing customers get to keep the $1 price tag).

Some of the Power-Ups I offer:

- File Manager: lets you search through and bulk download files on a board.

- Board Chat: adds a simple chatroom to your Trello board

- External Share: creates a link and snapshot of a Trello board that you can send to clients so they don't need to sign up for Trello to see the board.

- Office File Viewer: lets you preview .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files directly in Trello

- Card Approvals: adds a "approve" and "decline" section to a Trello card

launchiterate• 5 years ago

Nice! :D

rozenmd10• 5 years ago

I'm not quite there yet, but I'm up to $300/mo iteratively building an uptime checker: https://onlineornot.com/

I started with literally just a Lambda function that checks if static websites were still online, added an email alert if it's offline, wrapped authentication around it, integrated Stripe, and shipped it.

Eventually, I added Slack/Discord/SMS alerts, team invites, support for checking APIs for both uptime and correctness, support for checking JavaScript apps, and more.

My trick for launching into 200 competitors providing the "same" service and still getting customers?

- I work two hours a day, every weekday on OnlineOrNot, and no other side projects. I've had this streak going for about nine months now.

- I focus particularly on features that solve my customer's pain (and I ask my customers what that pain is)

- I'm ruthlessly iterative. If I can't get a feature done in two hours, I figure out how to cut scope down to a two hour block, and ship that. Then iterate on it.

nahtnam• 5 years ago

Do you use any tools like Linear, Notion, and/or Github Projects to keep track and organize new features?

rozenmd10• 5 years ago

I've tried a few tools, the only one I kept using habitually was Trello.

endomorphism2• 5 years ago

What was your motivation for building it? As you said, there's a lot of competition, did you anticipate that it would be difficult to differentiate?

rozenmd10• 5 years ago

I didn't see any competitors in the space solving the problem the way I would solve it (good UX + a focus on developer-experience), I wanted an uptime monitor that didn't piss me off with my own freelance clients, and I figured if there was room for a 200th competitor, chances are there would be room for a 201st.

barcoder• 5 years ago

I admire you diligence with cutting down features to hit the self imposed deadline.

I've been ferociously learning game dev and have allowed myself unlimited time to jump down rabbit holes. Now that I'm actually building a game I need to remind myself to just build it with what I know.

It's an interesting switch in mind set. Still learning obviously, only now I'm pulling together knowledge buried deep within rather than from tutorials.

I'll keep in mind scope and remember your inspiring diligence next time I'm tempted to peek in a rabbit hole.

wkimeria• 5 years ago

Ok, this is really cool! (I also love the ruthlessly iterative mindset)

vram222• 5 years ago

So you ship every weekday? Nice.

starik36• 5 years ago

Very cool. Looks very professional like there is a large team behind it.

How do you market it?

rozenmd10• 5 years ago

Mainly content marketing.

grwthckrmstr4• 5 years ago

Love your focus and commitment, especially the 2 hours a day every weekday for nine months streak.

I'm going to try building a similar discipline with my side projects. Not much would get done in 1 day obviously, but the amount of things that can get done over a longer timeframe like 6-12 months is huge!

Thank you and wish you the best!

rozenmd10• 5 years ago

Cheers!

Especially worth noting how things can snowball after several months of consistent shipping.

You're not just starting from scratch every two hours, you've already got work to build on top of, to keep you growing.

halpert• 5 years ago

How did you acquire your customers?

rozenmd10• 5 years ago

Scrappily - any way I can, whether that's content marketing (my preferred means), commenting on forums, twitter, facebook, broadcasting my domain URL via my phone's hotspot, merch/stickers, etc.

I'd recommend the book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg for ideas.

skr53• 5 years ago

The website is beautiful. What is your tech stack ?

Going to sign up now.

rozenmd10• 5 years ago

Thanks!

It's Next.js, so React + Node.js, written in TypeScript.

Lord_Zero3• 5 years ago

My trick for launching into 200 competitors providing the "same" service and still getting customers

I feel like this wasn't really answered. I think its just a big space and you market well and have a solid landing page.

rozenmd10• 5 years ago

I look at it from the perspective of having a successful React blog, having started writing consistently in 2020.

I have different experiences to others on the market, thus I resonate with some more than others.

astroalex5• 5 years ago

I made ~$1000 in earnings in a weekend selling algorithmically generated posters of my art: https://spacefiller.space/prints

This was a test run that went surprisingly well. I paused sales so that I can focus on reworking my process (it was very manual, hoping to make it completely automated) and design more posters.

nati0n2• 5 years ago

Curious what the rough process is to generate art algorithmically... I've heard of ML that attempts to generate art based on its training pool. What concepts does this sort of art use?

astroalex5• 5 years ago

Thanks for your question! I began writing a technical explanation of the art here: https://notes.spacefiller.space/living-wall/

It's a very early draft, but hopefully provides a glimpse into the techniques I use.

(tl;dr: it's way more low-tech than ML generated art.)

idiotsecant• 5 years ago

If you want to restart with someone to do the grunt work let me know :P

astroalex5• 5 years ago

If you're serious, send me an email at alexmiller@spacefiller.space! I would honestly love to hire someone to do a bit of grunt work.

yumaikas• 5 years ago

These are a amazing pieces of computational art!

Might I ask what you built it with?

astroalex5• 5 years ago

Thank you! They're made with Java-based Processing (https://processing.org/), although I have a new JavaScript/WebGL version in the works.

uptown2• 5 years ago

Curious who you use for printing. I've got an idea I'm working on with poster-sized output that I'd like to tie into a printing/shipping API if possible.

astroalex5• 5 years ago

I used printful.com. Their matte prints are surprisingly high quality.

d33k4y• 5 years ago

Does it count as a side project if I have been in grad school full time while I proposed and developed this application?: Environmental flow monitoring application: https://dkhydrotech.com/entry/11/. I wish I could share more info / visuals but alas.

squaregrouper• 5 years ago

im an embedded software developer, and would love to get a side hustle going. does anyone on here do embedded development freelance? are there any embedded developers that have a side hustle going, that wouldnt mind sharing what they do?

chasd00• 5 years ago

I know the guy (well know online) who made these altimeters for the rocketry hobby.

https://flightsketch.com/store/catalog/flightsketch-mini_1/

he went from idea to prototype in 6 months i think. Pretty amazing if you ask me.

Edit: oh i was just looking at the images scroll by and saw a screenshot. I did a rework of the mobile app for him, i totally forgot about that. (i used ionic)

zh3• 5 years ago

Really common to do it in spare time as an intro to doing it as a consultant. Esp. if you have electronics skills it's not hard to find work. As a "side hustle" though, it's generally about selling a hardware product, a tool, or your skills (SkillaaS).

Embedded is a broad term though, say a bit more about your experience and interests and maybe someone will pop up with pointers.

techsin10111• 4 years ago

if you can build a small watch circle like thing that vibrates every 30 mins if you haven't moved it'd be great

jdlshore4• 5 years ago

My JavaScript screencast, letscodejavascript.com, made over $10K net profit per month at its peak. It costs $25/month for unlimited access to over 600 videos.

I stopped producing videos in April 2018, but the site is still up, and still gets occasional new subscribers. (There's been an influx lately, in fact, and I have no idea why. Maybe because I have a new book out.) It's still netting more than $500/month, although not by a lot. But it requires nearly zero effort from me, so I'm happy with it.

Edit: To clarify, it wasn't a side project when I was producing the videos. But now it's passive income.

dqv• 5 years ago

Do people ask for support? What I mean is like "x package isn't working" or "I'm having trouble setting this up on my machine", do you help them troubleshoot? Or is it just the videos.

jdlshore4• 5 years ago

Each video has a comments section, and some of the early videos did get the types of comments you're talking about. I put the answer on the comment page and (in some cases) updated the videos. But I updated the README in the repo and improved the videos, and it stopped being an issue pretty early on.

Now all I get in support requests is the occasional account management email, and those are pretty streamlined at this point. (I could eliminate nearly all of them by creating a proper account management page, rather than directing people to email me, but given the number of requests I get, the cost of doing that is way higher than just handling it by email.)

It helps that the screencast is aimed at more advanced developers. But that's also why it didn't end up being viable in the long term, I think. That and the "long play" format, I suspect.

pajamasam• 5 years ago

$10K/month to $500/month seems like such a big drop. Why do you think that happened? Because you don't upload new videos anymore?

jdlshore4• 4 years ago

It happened very gradually over the course of the show’s 6-year run. (Started 2012, last video 2018.) As for why, I’m not entirely sure, but I think that part of it was that people are more interested in tutorial videos about the latest tools, and my show was almost exactly the opposite: it was about design, creating maintainable code, and avoiding fads. So as the initial audience dropped off, I didn’t have the word of mouth marketing juice to attract replacements.

techsin10111• 4 years ago

I'd really would like to know how do you go from video idea to a finished video, especially audio part. I tried making tutorials and just ended mumbling 70% correct facts and rest wasn't actually correct.

jdlshore4• 4 years ago

The main channel was the “Recorded Live” series, which was basically livecoding with me thinking out loud. That didn’t require any real prep, as I had enough experience with a previous livecoding show that it came out pretty well. The main thing I did was edit out pauses and gaps while I was thinking so that it flowed nicely. I would also announce a pause when I needed to go research something (which was fairly common) and edit a “fade to black” into the video.

The “Lessons Learned” channel was more elaborate. The video at objectplayground.com [1] is my most popular example. For those, I would make slides and animations in Keynote, then record while playing the slides. I had an outline, but not a script, as I felt that made the narration less stilted. Sometimes that resulted in minor mistakes going into the video. For more serious ones, I would record a new line and edit it into the video.

In all cases, I would edit out pauses, and if I misspoke or stumbled over my words, I’d just repeat myself and edit out the mistake. I got pretty good at editing—because there was no video of my face, I could make cuts that were basically invisible. My livecoding videos each had hundreds of cuts, typically just half a second or so. It would take a 20 minute recording down to a 15 minute final video. It took about 4 minutes of editing per minute of final video.

[1] The video on objectplayground.com isn’t showing up on my phone for some reason. You can find it here instead:

http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/comments/lessons_learne...

techsin10111• 4 years ago

do css and golang

antonhag• 5 years ago

I built https://blunders.io, a profiling tool for JVM applications. I think that I have a decent product but I'm not a great salesman :)

joelrunyon3• 5 years ago

15 minute mobility routines - https://movewellapp.com

Basically - everyone has a foam roller. No one knows how to use it. Pick a routine based on what your goals are (working out, recovery, general low back pain) and we show you the movements to guide you through a routine in 15 minutes or less.

noja3• 5 years ago

I like this, but I am reluctant to start paying for it without a trial. There are a few non-pro workouts, but could you consider a day pass or three day trial?

joelrunyon3• 5 years ago

The app is free to download and you can try a bunch of the free workouts (?) no questions asked. Is that not enough of a trial?

DanHulton• 5 years ago

I make Nodewood: https://nodewood.com/

It's a SaaS starter kit/boilerplate written in Node.js and Vue 3. Made almost _exactly_ $500/month last year. Would have/should have made more with proper marketing, but I've been doing probably too much engineering instead. The next release should be the one to take it out of "beta" (honestly, an arbitrarily-chosen label, especially compared to some competitors with fewer features/work put into them), and then it'll be a bit easier to work with some potential partners who would prefer to promote non-beta software.

hazza_n_dazza6• 5 years ago

That is very nice, maybe in future you can have a non-commercial use version for a lower free / fee?

justsocrateasin• 5 years ago

I have a fondness of writing summary articles on to cap off a big work project (for instance, completing a database migration). A few of them get 'traction', but mainly I like the challenge of eloquently describing my problem/solution and giving myself a zitgeist of work I've done. It's satisfying.

Recently, I had an old colleague of mine reach out and ask if I had the time to be a part-time contractor/advisor for his tech consulting start-up, since their client needed to do a database migration. He had remembered me because of the articles I wrote. It's a nice bit of money on the side ($500-$2.5k a month depending on how much I work) and I'm always learning something new.

traverseda• 5 years ago

I just sell this calendar puzzle online: https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1012906584/wooden-calendar-p...

pranjal_soni• 5 years ago

This is literally gold

oleksii88• 5 years ago

Working on https://folge.me - desktop app for creating step by step tutorials and guides. Unlike modern SaaS businesses I decided to charge one time price, which makes revenue very unpredictable, but usually keeping around 400-500 USD per month

robtherobber• 5 years ago

Although I see the benefits of SaaS, I very much like this model.

nyellin• 5 years ago

If anyone has a devops/Kubernetes related project that isn't making money but has decent traffic/users, please consider messaging me!

We (http://robusta.dev) are interested in sponsoring open source projects and popular Kubernetes bloggers to raise awareness about what we do. It's a rare win-win. We're mostly open source and extremely flexible if you have any special requirements.

vittor1o7• 5 years ago

I've launched a couple months ago https://linkz.ai

Linkz.ai is hyperlink auto-previews that keep visitors on your website. It's heavily inspired by Wikipedia & Google Docs link preview popups with special extras. For example, when you click on a YouTube hyperlink, it does not take you to Youtube website, instead it opens lightbox with Youtube video on your website. All with just one line of code.

$500+/m in a first month

Demo page: https://linkz-ai.webflow.io

asadlionpk2• 5 years ago

how do you get your users?

vittor1o7• 5 years ago

A few channels right now:

- Participating in the web dev communities

- "Powered by Linkz.ai" footer in the Link preview popups

- Campaigns on Product Hunt, Reddit & similar

- Soon: Affiliate, LTD, targeted ads for Webflow/Squarespace ecosystems

sambroner2• 5 years ago

Super interesting, I added this (albeit way less pretty) to my personal site and generally got poor reviews. That being said, I'm really enthusiastic about the idea.

Example here: https://blog-545pd1vjp-sambroner.vercel.app/

vittor1o7• 5 years ago

Try adding Linkz.ai previews on your blog posts, and get another round of feedback :)

vasilakisfil• 5 years ago

this is really good idea, how comes not many sites/companies/people use it?

vittor1o7• 5 years ago

I've just started this product late last year; the response has exceeded my expectations.. give it a few more months for sites/companies/people to adopt :)

idreyn3• 5 years ago

This has some neat use cases but I dearly hope it doesn't become the norm...

vittor1o7• 5 years ago

Can you elaborate a bit?

Technically rich link previews save visitors from the tab-overload.

adrianvincent• 5 years ago

I really like the logo and web design.

skr53• 5 years ago

What a great idea ! Why .ai though ?

vittor1o7• 5 years ago

Hyperlinks with artificial intelligence ;)

robmerki2• 5 years ago

I wrote a book about adult ADHD last year & make ~$500/mo from it between Amazon, Audible, & Gumroad: https://adhdpro.xyz/

Recorded the audiobook myself too.

jason_riddle• 5 years ago

The site looks very polished! What did you use to build it?

Also, what did you use to write your book? And how long did it take to write?

robmerki2• 5 years ago

Thanks! I built it with Gatsby + TailwindCSS. Sent a lot of time tinkering & editing copy over and over.

I wrote it with Microsoft Word. I initially tried a few different apps but all of the organizational tools they provided got in the way. I broke most conventions and just wrote the book straight from start to finish, and re-read it countless times until I felt satisfied. Then I sent it to a ton of friends who helped me edit. A professional editor would've been a better idea, but I didn't really have the money for that at the time.

metadaemon• 5 years ago

Do you by chance sell the audiobook outside of the Audible pro subscription?

swiftsalary• 4 years ago

Nice idea. How did you go about marketing the book/getting reviews?

maxencecornet2• 5 years ago

My side project https://playtoearn.one/ is not making $500/month yet, but it's getting there: a tiny bit more than $400 for this month

It's getting around 250-300 visitors a day, and in a high paying niche

I started using "classic" ads - which were/are making next to nothing - but just signed a deal with a direct client for 400$ for 3 weeks of displaying his game on the site, on the top banner

There are so many play-to-earn games popping up at the same time that projects are fighting for visibility, which playtoearn.one can bring

So now, I've hired a designer to make a great looking UI and I'm getting motivated to turn this side project into something more than this

EDIT: Traffic for the past month:

https://simpleanalytics.com/playtoearn.one?period=month&coun...

ternaryJimbo• 5 years ago

How are you getting visitors, are you putting up google ads?

maxencecornet2• 5 years ago

No it's mostly organic google traffic

HEHENE3• 5 years ago

My side project currently grosses close to $1,400 per month through Patreon.

I run a modded Grand Theft Auto: V roleplaying server with around 1,500 members (around 300 really dedicated MAU.) If you're not familiar with GTA RP, it tries to emulate real life as closely as possible while still recognizing that GTA is an arcade game. Players live lives as if they were real people, buying cars and houses, holding jobs, opening businesses, receiving medical treatment, being arrested, etc.

I've spent around three years working on the gamemode and spend, on average, 30-60 hours per week on it. It's really a pure passion project. Players support the project through Patreon in exchange for priority queue access (when the server is full, players are held in a queue until a slot opens up for them), custom license plates on their vehicles, custom phone numbers, and other cosmetic perks.

krat0sprakhar• 5 years ago

Wow, this sounds really interesting. As someone who used to be an avid GTA V player, I can imagine how much fun this can be. Do you have any videos on the mod and/or on the playing experience?

HEHENE3• 5 years ago

FiveM is the most popular platform for this type of modding, and is the one I use. nopixel is the most popular server on the platform and usually a good place to start getting a feel for what's possible on a modded GTA server.

If you check out https://nopixel.hasroot.com/, they maintain a list of all Twitch streamers currently streaming nopixel.

nb: I have no affiliation with nopixel.

Drblessing• 5 years ago

This is so cool! In my free time I love watching GTA RP, especially NoPixel.

mrbad101• 5 years ago

My son plays FiveM almost exclusively when he is on the computer gaming. He has been enamored with it for years now. As a parent who is also a gamer, I can't help but chuckle when I hear the conversations going on between everyone. Although it is not my cup of tea now, when I was that age, I would have killed to have such a world available for me to engage with.

Thank you for such a killer "side" project!

HEHENE3• 5 years ago

The conversations can be interesting to put it mildly. When I get the chance to play, I mainly play a police officer and it has caused more than one moment of confusion when I didn't realize my partner had taken a work call and their co-workers could hear me barking out "lawful orders" from the other room.

Roleplaying games are really great for exercising your social skills and creative expression though, that's for sure.

swyx• 5 years ago

you should rebrand your server as a Metaverse and sell it to Microsoft for 1.4 million

Arubis2• 5 years ago

I mean, yes, you're being flippant, but this is _not a bad idea_

hazza_n_dazza6• 5 years ago

https://fivem.net/

Great idea!

hazza_n_dazza6• 5 years ago

I had a look at the servers for rent through your affiliate, and I did not like that they have 'drip'pricing - starts out at 7.40AUD or so, then the add ons come, like server location or decent RAM. Then on logout they offer e 50% off coupon, so I go back, choose a server and nowhere to put the discount code! SO awesome service, Ilove it I'm going to set up a a server, but maybe look for a better server provider with clear pricing. Also their servers in Sydney were down, so thats a flag also.

crazypython• 5 years ago

AI that explains code, at a high business logic level. I originally designed it while working on a complex physics system for a game engine, and needed to understand it myself and also explain it to non-technical people. Try it on your own code: https://denigma.app

Fermat963• 5 years ago

Twitter Archive Eraser https://delete.tweets.app/, allows users to reliably delete old tweets.

Makes around $5k/month now (down from $7k/mo previously), fully passive income as I haven't worked on any new features in the app for the past 1.5 years or so.

2bitencryption• 5 years ago

Wow, this is kind of the ultimate side project for passive income.

It does one thing, that people need, and does it well, for a fair price. I assume it requires minimal maintenance, except to keep up with Twitter's API (honestly I don't know if this requires much work, I guess it depends on how much the API fluctuates).

pbowyer• 5 years ago

Nice work, this looks like something I need.

baristavibes• 5 years ago

In the EU don't they have an obligation to let you remove all posts due to GDPR?

nokya• 5 years ago

No, you are entitled to request to "have your data deleted" but the interpretation is basically left to the data controller. In practice this means that the controller as many options to make your life as miserable as it can/wants when you try removing your data from its systems, and more particularly when you want to remove specific portions of your data.

Twitter is a perfect example: removing "some" of your tweets is purposefully made cumbersome for users so that they get discouraged to manage their tweets. Searching through your tweets by date range or by keyword, and a button to delete all results? "Nah, too complicated for us silicon valleyers" :)

One thing to remember with GDPR is that it is not a law that protects customers. It is a legal framework that specifies a set of requirements, which companies must abide to in order to do whatever they need/want with your data. Once you understand this, GDPR becomes much clearer :)

alexmingoia• 5 years ago

Where does your traffic come from? Is it SEO from domain match of “delete tweets app”?

anilshanbhag• 5 years ago

I run Dictanote (https://dictanote.co) and Voice In (https://dictanote.co/voicein/)

Dictanote is a note-taking app with built-in voice-to-text integration. Writers use it to write their books, students use it to take notes, etc. Dictanote automatically syncs your notes to the cloud and makes them available on all your devices.

Voice In is a chrome extension that lets you use dictation to type on any website in Chrome. Use it to type emails in Gmail, enter data into Teladoc, write blogs in WordPress, etc. Think of it like budget Dragon Dictation.

Currently makes about $7000/m net - somewhere between a full-time job and a hobby project. Figuring out how to grow it.

jasondigitized3• 5 years ago

What does your stack look like? Curious how you don’t go broke while offering a free plan.

jimaek• 5 years ago

https://anycasted.io/

A niche product, I gather data about anycasted IP addresses and sell the database. No idea how to market it but it makes more than $500/month

ade5hmukh• 5 years ago

naice! curious about the customers/target audience though?

dawiddr• 5 years ago

I've been making $500-1000/month on an iOS app for work time tracking – https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flexishift-work-hours-pay/id11...

When I started the project, the category seemed quite crowded already, but I couldn't find anything good for tracking my hours in a flextime arrangement. I had no iOS experience at that time (I was a C++ developer) and now I do iOS development as my full-time job too.

MisterSandman3• 5 years ago

How long ago did you start this project?

nice_scott3• 5 years ago

I built an iOS sex tracking app, Nice.

https://nicetracker.app/

There were no sex tracking apps on the App Store that weren't focused the menstrual cycle, so I built my own. It now includes cool features such as syncing across iCloud devices, location recording, STD/STI tests, and most importantly, stats!

ronyfadel3• 5 years ago

I thought it was cute, then saw the number of reviews which blew my mind! Is monthly revenue as low (<$5k) as SensorTower suggests?

nice_scott3• 5 years ago

On average it brings in about 3k monthly, and then it always doubles for the month of January. I suspect people set new years goals/resolutions to have more sex.

xvector• 5 years ago

Wait, people have enough sex with enough different people to make this worthwhile? Damn, I'm missing out.

hazza_n_dazza6• 5 years ago

you don't need the STI checker either, oh well ;)

ghostbrainalpha5• 5 years ago

The real question.... are you having more sex since it was released?

nice_scott3• 5 years ago

funny enough, yeah! My wife loves trying to keep up a high score and keep the 'longest streak' stat going.

askhn000• 5 years ago

I sell repackaged open source software on AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace and offer support as part of the monthly software cost.

It's the same software but the Azure offer sells a lot better. Monthly income is about $1000 from both.

Very few support requests come in, so it feels like mostly passive income. All I have to do is answer the occasional ticket and keep the images up to date.

cooldrcool3• 5 years ago

Thats awesome! Do you just rebrand the opensource software?

ThomasRedstone• 5 years ago

I don't believe there is any rebranding.

Ultimately somebody needs to provide these images and if nobody else does it I guess you can make okay money from it!

It's probably automatable with some effort!

gremlinsinc4• 5 years ago

What sort of open source software are you repackaging? Like odoo, or more like laravel stuff like invoice ninja?

anon1094• 5 years ago

My side business, Freelancer's Handbook, currently does about $10,700 ARR.

I've documented many of the stats here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QrN9ya-t7Vr42T-wL9q1-HX6...

It's a blog, community, and newsletter focused on useful and practical content for remote freelancers.

I'm looking to pass over the mantle to someone passionate about the freelance space and have been passively searching for a buyer. Contact information in the Google Doc above.

sergei_ws3• 5 years ago

I'm working on http://talevideo.com - The easiest way to create a video of your SaaS or website. It's not subscription, but got about 300$ in revenue from January.

Talevideo - is a desktop application where you can create video directly from website, without screen recording. And animate any element on page, like fadeIn and etc.

Example result of video/gif at my github: https://github.com/ssleptsov

Example_2 video directly from reddit website: https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/ra7inj/app_to_...

challenger-derp2• 5 years ago

Looks cool!

sergei_ws3• 5 years ago

Thank you so much!

0x008• 5 years ago

Great job! Any hints what technologies you are using?

sergei_ws3• 5 years ago

Thanks! Yea, sure.

It's Electronjs with vue3/typescript, threejs, tailwind2 and konvajs for timeliner(because canvas render much faster then html update, so it's keep high FPS on edit mode). And vitejs for tooling.

dools• 5 years ago

I have 2:

BenkoBot is like wayscript but with a focus on making Trello automations (although you can use it for generic HTTP API interaction):

https://app.benkobot.com/

And BenkoPhone is the only virtual mobile number outside of North America that does voice, TXT and pictures:

https://www.benkophone.com/

jonkratz• 5 years ago

My side project, FormTester 365 https://www.formtester365.com has been doing a little over $700/mo now. Many customers are agencies who want to be alerted if a client's web forms stop working.

It tests website forms daily (currently as a Gravity Forms plugin add on) and confirms that they were successfully submitted. I'm working to add support for general web forms in the next few months. Feel free to send me an email if you're interested in being notified when that feature rolls out — jon (at) creativeculturemedia.com

snailmail2• 4 years ago

This is offered as a service? How do you find customers?

sarora27• 5 years ago

We launched this last year: https://kbee.app

Kbee turns a Google Drive folder into a searchable wiki for you and your team. We're currently doing ~$1500/month in MRR

0x4a42• 5 years ago

What is MRR?

gregorkas• 5 years ago

Monthly recurring revenue.

perakojotgenije• 5 years ago

sshreach.me - a Zero-Configuration, remote-controlled, secure tunnels to your computers.

https://sshreach.me/

ryangilbert2• 5 years ago

I am currently making >$1,000 per month with sponsorships for my twice-weekly newsletter https://www.workspaces.xyz/

Workspaces brings you inside the workspaces of entrepreneurs, designers, developers, etc.

Currently a mix of inbound and outbound work to gather the sponsors for each edition.

boeingUH60• 5 years ago

May I ask how you get sponsors? I have a newsletter/blog with reasonable traffic (>100k page views per month) but can’t seem to find any direct advertisers..

ryangilbert2• 5 years ago

Definitely!

I recently added a "call for sponsors" blurb in the intro of one of my newsletters once I felt I hit a level of subscribers where it made sense. I immediately had a few readers reply with interest that ultimately led to my first few sponsors.

From there, I did some cold outreach via Twitter DMs and email. My newsletter is very workspace item/tools centered so I put thought into what sort of sponsors made sense there and it led to the next batch. Think: companies who would organically be featured by a guest anyway... show them the value.

I'm pretty transparent with the growth/numbers on Twitter as well so I think that helps when doing the Twitter outreach for sponsors. They are easily able to look back at the Twitter engagement if they don't already know what Workspaces is.

kalev• 5 years ago

Offtopic: funny to see the first five or so links I followed were all marketing websites made with TailwindUI. It’s a bit like a decade ago when all websites looked like a Bootstrap website.

brandonhorst• 5 years ago

I wrote and maintain Lacona, a Mac productivity App (https://lacona.app). The majority of my revenue comes from being a part of the Setapp subscription service.

c_ma_gee3• 5 years ago

My wife always compained that there was no suitable time tracking app for breastfeeding our little baby. Within three weeks I developed a simple app with proposals from her which fits her needs. After a few weeks using it we were suddenly overwhelmed with inquiries from our friends searching for such an app as well.. Within another week, I made it ready for the AppStore and the PlayStore and now it does around 400 € a month :-)

https://www.stillapp.de - although the page is in german the app is translated into english as well.

AussieWog933• 5 years ago

Any reason you haven't translated the page into English? Sounds like you've got a popular app!

c_ma_gee3• 5 years ago

Just didn't find the time to do it :-) But you are right - I should do it!

puregram• 5 years ago

This feeling when only I make zero profit projects without success :-)

gisho3• 5 years ago

you are not alone

pyrrhotech8• 5 years ago

Monetizing the algotrading models I've built over the last 2+ years: https://grizzlybulls.com

I've traded them with my own capital successfully since April, 2020, and I've averaged 75%+ annual returns with much lower volatility than the overall market. My starting capital was small (500k) so in addition to growing with my own capital, I'm now providing the signals (3 free, 4 premium).

105 total members, MRR is currently $1397/month, just launched exactly 1 month ago today. Still in the google sandbox so I'm not seeing much organic traffic. We have a small community on reddit, rest of users from social media, Seeking Alpha and Stock Twits.

RyanShook• 5 years ago

Just curious, why sell your model if it's working so well for you?

pyrrhotech8• 5 years ago

I've thought about this a lot, and to answer 100% honestly, I'm not sure I always will, but for now:

1. These are not HFT models. They trade once every 2-4 weeks on average. They scale to billions in capital, so selling them does not inhibit my own returns. 2. There's a lot of demand. Part of the reason I decided to launch is I had some friends IRL begging me to let them use my models as well. Seeking Alpha has over 15M MAU and hundreds of thousands of premium subscribers, and in my opinion this service provides more direct value and wastes less of your time with noise. 3. All the money I make from this goes back into my own bot and compounds. Sure the $1400/month doesn't add up to much right now, but 1000+ premium subscribers one day would make a huge difference to me financially. 4. I believe we are at a precipice with passive investing, and the next bear market which could be right around the corner will dishearten a lot of folks. The more money investing smartly in the market at a reasonable fee makes the markets and overall economy less fragile. More automated smart investing saves society the drag of lots of suits on wall street mostly playing a big marketing game without producing much alpha or liquidity or any other measurable benefit in contrast.

Also, on a lighter note, running a business is just a lot of fun. I love seeing people use my product and get value from it.

mockingbirdy3• 5 years ago

The performances of the models are almost unbelievable. I only saw something similar with alphahub.us in the past (but higher max. drawdowns) - what do you think of them?

I'm interested in running the Gold Plan, are there any resources on how to set up a fully automatic trading system with it? I'd love to connect.

pyrrhotech8• 5 years ago

Alphahub looks interesting, but their algorithms are quite different from mine. Theirs are picking individual stocks and sending out a signal at a regular frequency, every day, telling you what they think will be the best performing for that day.

By contrast, our models only send out signals on average of once per 2-4 weeks depending on the model. Our signals are always macro signals--they have an opinion only on where they see the overall market (S&P 500) heading next. The signals are irregular. During extremely calm times like in 2013 or 2017, there can be months without a signal. On the other hand, during highly volatile times like the COVID crash in 2020, there can be multiple signals per day, but there will never be more than 1 per hour.

Naturally, their drawdowns will be worse because individual stocks are inherently more risky than the index. As far as which will be the best absolute performer over the long term? I guess we'll have to wait and see :)

One last note about ours that could make a difference depending on your account type and country of residence. Since our models are macro models, if you live in the USA and implement them exactly by trading the S&P 500 Futures, you'll save money in taxes as all gains are taxed at 60% long term and 40% short term regardless of holding period. Alphahub gains will be taxed always at 100% short term rates unless held for more than a year which is unlikely with their systems.

I'm glad to hear you are interested in setting up your own automatic trading system! I'm in the process of writing some docs on exactly how it works, but in essence, we'll give you an access token for the API and then you can call it from your bot locally or in the cloud to get the live signals for all the models you have access to.

kolbe2• 5 years ago

So, let's assume you started on April 1st with $500k. That was 1.8045 years ago. At a compounded 75% returns, you now have $1,936,655 and you expect to make $124,904 this month alone on invested capital. And yet you bother to broadcast your secrets and (waste your time by selling subscriptions for $1397/month. If you did this for 5 years, you'd have $82mm, and you want to risk getting that edge traded away for $1397 a month. Huh.

Smells fishy.

pyrrhotech8• 5 years ago

Healthy skepticism is warranted and welcome of course! My account is currently at 1.4M. Taxes and living costs are taken out regularly. I'm not giving anyone access to the source of the models, only the output signals and trade history. I do give brief descriptions of some of the indicators that each take into account, but none of the details of how the complex system works which is the tricky part. You can find huge list of potential indicators for algotrading for free lots of places online.

Lastly, the 75% is a bit of an anomaly. As you can see, the top model is only expected to return about 60% pre-tax. It's unusual that in live trading we have exceded the back test--2020 was a bizarre year and we also started after a big bear market so we benefited for a huge bull that year + nailed the June and September crashes (check the trade history). 2021 was a below average year by contrast, and over the long term, any algotrader should expect the live results to be a bit under the backtest as despite our best efforts (and I consider my anti-overfitting engine to be the biggest accomplishment here), all systems are to some degree overfit to past data.

Lastly, as I mentioned in another comment, I make no guarantees of always publishing this site and signals. If I decide in the future (perhaps once my account is to that 50-100M range) that the site is more of a liability for me than an asset, I may close it, with or without grandfathering. However, obtaining 1% of Seeking Alpha's userbase would be 5M+ per year in revenue from the site which is a few multiples of my current net worth. Even with a hypothetical 50M net worth 10 years from now from 40% post-tax, post-living expense returns, 5M is still meaningful. If we fail to gain that much traction, or the bot does so well that I hit that kind of figure much earlier than expected, I may halt the publishing.

As of now, and for the forseeable future, the site makes financial sense to me, and it's been a lot of fun, so it also makes pleasure sense for me. Life is about more than money of course.

jussi666• 5 years ago

"Over the last few years we have built and refined seven algorithmic trading models. I did work on this full time for over 2 years before recently starting a new job. I've traded them with my own capital successfully since April, 2020, and I've averaged 75%+ annual return. Monetizing the algotrading models I've built over the last 2+ years."

Lot's of conflicts there. You need to polish up your story. Nobody, NOBODY is going to put 500k on a bot which is still in development. Also how come you had exactly 500k? Not 497K or 502K for example?

I've been developing cryptocurrency bots since 2013 and I don't see any reason to sell the signals to anyone ever if they turn out to be profitable. Last year, It seems, I finally made a few profitable bots but let's see how it goes. If they all turn out to be bad, I'm not going to start selling them like everyone else. I'm going to try again.

Beating the SPX500 on bull runs is easy. Just buy the index future with higher than 1x leverage. It will work until we get another market crash. Have you backtested your bots during 2000-2006? How does the P&L curve look?

Sorry, but I get pissed off at people who sell bots to people who doesn't understand how hard it actually is to make them profitable. Yeah, they may be your customers for a few months but then they are going to try another bot hoping it would be better.

pyrrhotech8• 5 years ago

My bot was in full time development for more than 3 months before I started trading live with it, I had traded manually previously for 15+ years, and I was highly confident the bot was better than me. Why not put money into it? The execution framework is extremely stable.

My models do not use any leverage, and they perform better in volatile markets than stable ones. In fact, the only way they can gain alpha is from avoiding drawdowns because during long signals they get exactly the same returns as SPX.

And yes, you are right, it is incredibly difficult to make a profitable bot. 2020 isn't the full story, that's when I decided to give it my full time effort of 80+ hour weeks.

As long as the bots continue to perform near the backtest, yes eventually I would become wealthy with them without other monetization, and as mentioned in other posts, a net worth in the high 8 figures, probably dwarfs what I can make with this website and service so I make no guarantees that it will always be around. That said, I'm enjoying running it and having real people use my product, and it does not hinder my own returns, at least not at our current scale.

Side note: FWIW I think it's probably harder to make a successful crypto bot than equity bot because crypto is far more speculative and doesn't have as much fundamental and macro backing it up--would have to be mostly TA, sentiment and there's bound to be more inherent randomness to the movements since it is so new and speculative.

heneryville2• 5 years ago

I've made about 50 Amazon Alexa skills. The most popular 5 earn rewards: https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/gr...

At first it was around $2500 per month, but has slowly ramped down over the past 4 years to about $900 per month. Totally passive income at this point.

jacobrussell• 5 years ago

Do you mind sharing what some of them do?

heneryville2• 5 years ago

Sure. Some of my most successful are:

Bark Like a Dog -- https://www.amazon.com/Iguana-ASD-Bark-Like-Dog/dp/B07C1BKWK...

Truth or Dare -- https://www.amazon.com/Mitchell-Harris-Truth-or-Dare/dp/B073...

The Song that Never Ends -- https://www.amazon.com/The-Song-That-Never-Ends

and my personal favorite, but doesn't make much is Rap Battle -- https://www.amazon.com/Mitchell-Harris-Rap-Battle/dp/B0742JQ...

nunez3• 5 years ago

I made two LinkedIn courses. One has paid off its royalties; the other is on its way there. Should be >$500/month combined soon!

I'm also working on an app that allows you to set a universal status across multiple platforms. I use it to automate my Slack statuses from my TripIt trips, but I want to add integrations for Google Calendar and WhatsApp. It's really rough right now but my future intent is to find a way to monetize it when it's cleaner.

bmitc4• 5 years ago

What does it mean that one has "paid off its royalties"? Do you have any description or advice for the general process for teaching a LinkedIn course?

nunez3• 5 years ago

I meant “paid off its advance through royalties”. Sorry!

Everyone’s path is different, but generally speaking, if you publish enough blog posts (especially on LinkedIn), someone from a content shop will notice and ask you to write a book or create a course. Both flows are similar, but I’ve only done courses and can speak to that in detail.

You propose a course. The content manager you work with decides if it fits their learning plan or whether there is demand for that kind of material. If they think people will view the course, you’ll be asked to come up with a course summary. DevOps and Kubernetes are super hot right now, so these were easy for me to think up.

Here, you’ll pitch the course. What is it? Who’s meant to view it? What will you cover? This gets reviewed. If it looks good, you’ll be given a producer, and they will ask you to write scripts.

Sometimes the content manager will ask for a demo of how you’d present a course. Here, they want to see whether you have enough “presence” to instruct. Sometimes they’ll provide feedback for you to fix, but this didn’t happen in my case.

You’ll also get an advance, with the first half being paid out around this time. These advances aren’t like the music industry where you use the money to pay for production and marketing. It’s literally money in your pocket.

Script writing can take FOREVER. especially the first time. It took me three months to write enough scripts for a two hour course. There’s a lot of back and forth. Since my courses are very hands-on, I also write lots of code and test everything while putting the scripts together. Very difficult to do all of this with a full-time job, doubly so when that job is demanding!

Once the scripts are cleared, you’ll be asked to record. There are lots of different ways this can go. Mine are audio-only with a terminal walkthrough, so I just recorded and screen capped everything. Some courses have live-action and acting. These require studios. I haven’t done one of these yet, so I can’t speak to it.

Beta testing happens after recording. People internally go through your course and make sure that everything gels. Sometimes you’ll need to fix stuff after this.

Once beta tests complete, your course goes live and starts racking views! You also get the other half of your advance.

You get paid royalties for every learner who views your course. I don’t know the specifics of this, but it’s kind of like YouTube’s ad platform. However, you don’t earn anything until the grand sum of your royalties exceeds the advance you were given. Depending on how your course performs, this can either never happen or it can happen very quickly.

qecez• 5 years ago

I'm trying to dispel the myth that all good dotcoms are already taken and/or unaffordable with https://zlipa.com

It's passive income in the sense that I add new brands in the weekend and mostly doing this for fun.

dionidium2• 5 years ago

This looks really cool! Nice job.

enraged_camel• 5 years ago

I previously posted about PriceTable (https://pricetable.io), where I’m the cofounder:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26855726

Since then we’ve gotten up to $3,500/mo. and will be hiring our first salesperson soon. Exciting and nerve-racking at the same time! (If you know anyone, please have them reach out to me at ege@pricetable.io)

outcoldman• 5 years ago

https://loshadki.app, between $800 to $2000 a month. Year ago decided to learn macos development. Made 4 apps, two of them make the most OpenIn and ShellHistory.

funksta• 5 years ago

Made around $1500 in a month from https://hyperpaper.me/

It's a customized dayplanner pdf for large eInk devices like the reMarkable 2. I built it for myself initially but realized I could provide a customized build for other folks. There's still a small amount of manual work to generate them, but I should be able to automate it end-to-end soon.

I don't expect it to make much at all over the next 10 months, but I'm already excited about other things I'm planning to add for the 2023 version

ahmed_ds2• 5 years ago

Not a product or something exciting, it is a service. I run a VA firm (tbh I work as the VA) and I kinda almost make $500/month. https://www.ITNAdigital.com

Trying to scale up the business to cater to data and software businesses. But working in real estate industry for a while now.

arilotter• 5 years ago

I made a p2p NFT trading webapp that's totally free & open-source over the course of a month or so of evenings and weekends, and I've received a couple thousand $ in various cryptos as donations from my in-site donation link.

https://vaportrade.net/

XCSme• 5 years ago

I make between $500 and $2000 per month with UXWizz[0], a self-hosted analytics platform that I have been working on for around 9 years.

Hopefully I can grow it more this year as all the Google Analytics related news should make more people consider self-hosting their analytics. I stopped providing any cloud-hosted version and focus purely on self-hosting.

[0] https://www.uxwizz.com

consultantrhys2• 5 years ago

I run getrhys.com

I productized myself and made myself on-demand (easily available) to struggling SaaS businesses.

Currently doing $5K+ per month for working one day a week doing short 30 min calls with clients.

syngrog66• 5 years ago

beware of copycats, folks. this post can be a trap for the gullible

consultantrhys2• 5 years ago

I run getrhys.com

I productized myself and operate as an on-demand marketing consultant for SaaS businesses.

Currently do $5K+ per month working one day a week taking short 30 minute calls with my clients.

BorisTheBrave• 5 years ago

I sell an game development tool on the Unity Asset store. Since the peak died down, it's now somewhat under $500/mo, but still does well in occasional sales.

ghostbrainalpha5• 5 years ago

I make a little under $500 selling sunglasses for Dogs and Cats.

_w6y32• 5 years ago

I make around $500 per month running a gaming VPN service - [link redacted]

I initially built it to route PUBG players in Australia (myself included!) onto the fastest links to overseas servers as the Australian servers did not have enough players. It was strung together with OpenVPN and a Discord bot as I never expected more than around 20 people would use it... mostly figured it would be me and my squad mates. Within three months I had around 350 users by word of mouth paying $5 per month. Most of my users came from established competitors as my service was a lot simpler to use. The user numbers died down over the following year mostly due to competitors offering an aggressive referral system and I was focused on other projects.

Last year I decided to expand to other games and regions. I rebuilt it as a standalone Electron based Windows app using a kernel network driver that can route individual Windows apps through my WireGuard VPN servers. I built everything except the network driver which was done by a Windows networking specialist - https://ntkernel.com

I currently support PUBG, DOTA 2, iRacing, Apex Legends, Rocket League, Final Fantasy XIV, Super People in Australia/New Zealand and PUBG and Rocket League in North America.

The service is stable and relatively scalable so this year I'm hoping to focus on the marketing in between other projects. Part of that will probably include a name change as I figure it doesn't make a lot of sense to people outside Australia

zakki• 5 years ago

I am curious, how is a VPN solving a latency issue?

asadlionpk2• 5 years ago

take the shortest path instead of cheapest-to-ISP path I am guessing?

goatherders• 5 years ago

I'm not an engineer outside of the occasional WP site, but that's enough. Cold email is my bag and I'm a good (and proficient) writer. In October I started cold emailing internet, marketing, and SW companies asking if they needed any help with their blogs. In the intervening months I've added 7 clients that pay, on average, $700/month for various help with content. MOst of it is blog posts but I also do press releases, eBooks, etc.

techyes23• 5 years ago

Recently launched a website where users can design their own Desktop Garden. Only a few sales so far but hoping to slowly scale for some decent side income :) Please check it out http://gardensofkyoto.design and open to any feedback!

pryelluw• 5 years ago

Beautiful yet heavy on my iOS device. Couldn’t get through process of purchase.

akudha4• 5 years ago

It might be a good idea to make this a monthly thread? There is intense interest in the topic

h4t• 5 years ago

I got something better. Trade crypto derivatives after learning elliot wave. Turn 500 into 50,000 in 3 months. Quit day job. Do it full time now. High 6 figures 10 months later.

akudha4• 5 years ago

What is elliot wave?

joshuaheard• 5 years ago

I'm building a crypto-trading bot right now. Care to share any details?

mark_story• 5 years ago

I run https://stickler-ci.com While it is not currently at 500/month but it has been there in the past.

I started this as a way to improve review speed at a previous position and it was well received, so I converted the prototype into a it's current form and have been running it for a few years now.

mattmar96• 5 years ago

Https://htwins.net/sotu2

I ported the flash app Scale of the Universe to WebGL. I asked for payment as a portion of ad revenue and make about $500 a month.

nevster• 5 years ago

Make between $500-$1000 per month from http://www.auctionsieve.com/ - old school desktop app I started in 2003. It's a front-end for eBay to quickly filter search results.

I have all sorts of interesting collectors using it - some guy who buys old porsche parts, a famous comic book artist who collects comics, etc etc

josecastillo• 5 years ago

I made an Apple Watch app and complication a few years ago that averages $800 a month. I don't put any money into marketing or search ads, and it's been feature-complete since 2019:

https://www.betterday.app/

The app is built around two small, simple features: today's date with a customizable format, and a three-year calendar so you can see what weekday dates fall on outside of the current month. It also supports several alternative calendar systems including the Islamic and Hebrew religious calendars, which I think may be another use case that drives sales.

Anyway: it's a one-time, two-dollar purchase that lots of folks are still finding and finding useful.

p3rls• 5 years ago

My team makes this https://kpopping.com

It's a platform for following what's happening in kpop that we've been building for five years. It makes about $1500 a month through advertisements and subscriptions these days, but we want to expand and experiment with other revenue sources.

slappin_basses• 5 years ago

I made an incredibly simple Safari content blocking app for iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/liberate-website-blocker/id121...

~$750/month lately. $32.5k lifetime and have spent <40 hours conceiving, implementing, and updating it.

pipewrench• 5 years ago

A quarterly magazine — $2K/mo: pipewrenchmag.com

Two membership tiers, one paid, one barter: pipewrenchmag.com/backer-barter

We publish one longform nonfiction feature every quarter, surrounded by a constellation of reactions, asides, and art inspired by the core story. Our latest issue is about bringing in "outside food," and the art of smuggling snacks into movie theaters: https://pipewrenchmag.com/making-concessions-movies-and-popc...

semireg• 5 years ago

This year marks 3 years working on Label LIVE, an electron app for designing and printing labels. Think: import a spreadsheet and print barcodes to a zebra printer.

In 2021 the profit eclipsed my consulting income. My 2020 goal is to double revenue. Today it’s making mid 4-figure MRR but adding in one-time-license-sales the annual revenue is healthy 6-figure.

The last few months I’ve been focusing on marketing and integrations. Today you can trigger label print jobs via the command line, MQTT, and now HTTP.

If label printers are your jam you can read more here: https://label.live/features

insaider4• 5 years ago

I make $3-5k a month with my golf betting algorithm: https://www.golfforecast.co.uk

I'm a data scientist/software engineer and I started the project 5 years ago as part of my masters thesis. Never intended for it to be gambling-oriented but that's just the best way to monetise!

Questions/feedback appreciated - cheers

msaharia• 5 years ago

Looks cool! What kind of models are you using? I would have thought this is a very tight space. Did you develop the models yourself?

insaider4• 5 years ago

Thanks! Yea there's lots of competition for sure. It was originally just XGBoost and ARIMA, now it's an ensemble of several.

riantogo• 5 years ago

In the UK are you able to straight up create a gambling website/app? As an example, could I create a blackjack app and accept/payout money using, say, paypal or stripe? No other hoops to jump through?

zeepzeep• 5 years ago

As long as you don't have a UK company...

insaider4• 5 years ago

You would need a gambling license for that which is quite expensive. My site doesn't facilitate gambling, I'm not a bookmaker, I just give tips.

Loocid• 5 years ago

I'm always skeptical about these sorts of products. If the edge you have is real, why not just bet yourself? Theoretically each client you get lowers the edge of all other clients. If you have enough people following your tips, the lines will move. Sports betting is just another market after all.

insaider4• 5 years ago

I do bet myself. I think there will always be enough people who just bet for fun without any system to offset such effects, but it's a good point.

s-xyz• 5 years ago

Just launched https://umbrellatoday.app, which is inspired from my personal frustration with umbrellas. The tool allows you to create alerts for rainy days, warning you to bring an umbrella.

The assumption is that we want to minimize our interaction with umbrellas; if you buy a big umbrella, it is a hassle to drag along and you will most likely loose it after a few afterwork drinks. Other way around, a small and cheap umbrella does not cover you enough, and breaks easily.

As said, just launched, lets see how it goes. Happy to hear your feedback.

ezl• 5 years ago

I started a wholesale bakery.

It does about 20k/mo in revenue (we are not profitable).

It's been super fun and rewarding. It's much more like building a software / tech startup than I expected it to be.

suls• 5 years ago

Amazing. I am at the stage of thinking/dreaming about a weekend-bakery .. but I am completely lost when trying to work out the economics of this.

How did you tackle this at the beginning? What were your demand/cost projections when you started out?

aprdm• 5 years ago

How much did you invest?

popfastful• 5 years ago

I made two webapp: https://www.alovez.com and https://www.snapfeel.com about $300~600/month

terrancem• 5 years ago

https://www.goodbooks.io

Books recommended by successful and inspirational people.

grwthckrmstr4• 5 years ago

Always curious about book recommendation sites. If you don't mind sharing, how much revenue and traffic does your site generate?

grwthckrmstr4• 5 years ago

I have two such side projects that run almost passively, neither is an app though.

1- An extremely simple habit tracker spreadsheet template that I also use myself - https://www.preetamnath.com/habit-tracker-template

Makes ~$100/mo but this month it's on track to make $200, probably due to new year's enthusiasm?

2- Learn Programmatic SEO, a straightforward course to help people identify repeatable keyword patterns and use that to drive traffic to their business, website, projects etc. SEO beginner-friendly - https://www.preetamnath.com/programmatic-seo

The course makes between $300-$500/mo.

I don't have any costs other than website hosting and Gumroad fees. I do think these projects have scope to improve and grow. Would love feedback from anyone who finds them interesting!

ohlookcake• 5 years ago

These are both really unique and interesting! Curious to know how you've publicised it so far, and if you think spending more time/money on publicity can get them to grow a lot more

grwthckrmstr4• 5 years ago

All sales comes via organic search traffic. I plan to try and drive more traffic this year through content.

jbirer• 5 years ago

I am working on a multiplayer adult metaverse game that's running on two blockchains, and so far it has earned me over 1000$. https://coomiverse.xyz

I guess it will leave the side project status once it gains even more traction but for now I consider it a side job.

sudoit• 5 years ago

I made a platform for publishing and purchasing photoshop files/effects, music, high res images etc. https://crate.as/

The main gimmick is that it’s a native Mac (and very soon Windows) app, so once you buy a file, you can drag it directly out of the app and into other programs as if it were file explorer.

I’m not at $500/month yet, but the project is well over 1k a month and I have a percentage of the income.

a5y• 5 years ago

www.bini.vision made us a few hundred quid before we went fulltime on it

Coxa• 5 years ago

I am currently at around $300/mo so still a bit off the $500 unfortunately. My side project, ErgStudio[0], allows people to use their rowing machine to do remote workouts together. I had the idea already a while before the pandemic started but when it hit I finally pushed myself to implement a MVP. My wife helped a lot doing the admin and as a photographer (we took all the promotion pictures ourselves to save money). This was also the first project for me which I took from greenfield to people-can-pay-for-this, which I am pretty thrilled about. At the moment, a bunch of university clubs in the US and smaller rowing clubs in Europe are using it. As a gimmick, when you see the meters rowed counter changing on the website, someone is actually working out somewhere in the world, using our app.

[0] https://erg.studio/

gettingcreative• 5 years ago

I launched Vilke (https://vilke.co/) back in 2018. It's an anonymous, adult-oriented, NSFW website where people can post teasing pictures or videos of themselves, and engage with others. Think Jodel or Yik Yak with an adult twist.

Originally I wanted to learn PWAs. At the same time, people were posting teasers on Jodel but suggestive material is banned according to Jodel's community guidelines. Hence, I decided to smash two flies at the same time by building something that people wanted.

Currently it's Finnish-only but it's making around ~200 $ / month. Have wanted to internationalize it for a while now but my day job is taking too much time.

haensi• 5 years ago

I currently teach computer science at a local high school. Topics range from algorithms and data structures to AI and societal impact.

I do it to encourage young people to use software to make a change in their and other’s lives.

Currently making $500 with 90min/week effort. I already got the syllabus material ready so I do not necessarily have to invest time here.

Right now they’re writing an exam.

philo012• 5 years ago

https://apps.shopify.com/quotify nearing $1k, earnings increase every month without doing any advertising.

I also launched https://unlock.sh/ earlier this month.

gremlinsinc4• 5 years ago

on the demo app/store... if you click "request quote" it gets a 401 error.

philo012• 5 years ago

Thanks for letting me know. It works fine for me but will investigate. Would you mind sharing which browser and OS you are using? Thanks!

lewisflude• 5 years ago

I design and sell ultra-high end mechanical keyboards https://instagram.com/handengineering, https://hand.engineering

eg312• 5 years ago

Time is money and https://reactivedoc.com/ saves me ~500 minutes/month and I also have a paying user. I made it because I needed a simple, self-hosted tool to create documentation with "parameters". The output is a self-contained html file. Coupled with an external runner, it's a great automation tool for simple tasks.

abareplace• 5 years ago

I wrote a tool for replacing text in multiple files with regular expressions under Windows. Currently, it's making less than $500/month, but there were months when it made more. It's one of the first regex tools that displays the search results immediately, without pressing a Search button.

https://www.abareplace.com/

lucas03• 5 years ago

I have a $200 in MRR side project.

It coded that website 8 years ago as a master's degree thesis. I am an investor myself, trying to achieve financial independence before retirement, so I kept using the site myself and hopefully will never stop. Stripe is there for the past year, I try to keep costs as low as possible. Only pay for a domain, hosting, and an affiliate program. It's a dividend growth investing tracker - digrin.com

palidanx• 5 years ago

I make about $1,000 - $1,500 a month passive income with https://www.menutail.com

It is a website to make US nutrition facts label which had a huge pivot from a website on learning how to cook. Website is only updated when new government regulations come out which is pretty rare considering how long it takes (in the years really)

notanextrovert• 5 years ago

I went from 0->40k+ followers on TikTok this year with NO prior social media experience.

Most people see it as a teenage dance app type thing, but for techies wanting to build a personal brand or teach people it's a killer tool to rapidly grow.

I consistently make ~600/mo selling a 'newbie' TikTok course on appsumo. It's a no-frills recorded presentation and associated set of slides that I do very little marketing for with the goal of getting people to 1k followers on tiktok in 30 days or less.

https://appsumo.com/products/your-first-1000-tiktok-follower...

sandeep1338• 5 years ago

That's pretty cool and love to see more information on it.

doaki• 5 years ago

Made an WordPress based affiliate site couple of years ago (took couple of evenings) with no additional upkeep. The affiliate deal brings in money as long the customers who registered through me use it. Thanks to one big customer made avg $720 last year.

jborak• 5 years ago

I build a secure tunneling service called Packetriot ($2k/mo) https://packetriot.com.

Similar to ngrok with our own differences and approach. I also publish another product called Spokes Gateway which builds on the tunneling server and includes support for service meshes, high-availability, clusters and some other features.

I'm building a separate website for Spokes and its related software, hoping to publish it soon. It's eventual home will be https://spokes.network.

momciloo• 5 years ago

I make this video to printed flipbook online shop. flpbk.io: https://flpbk.io I've done nothing to promote it (except posting this comment) for more than a year. It's around $500/m revenue

zoltron3000• 5 years ago

Getting close with https://www.onward.ly/. A course + journal for getting clearer on yourself. Helps form mental models and habits around being present, leaning into what you want, and saying no to the rest. Basically show up as yourself not what other people expect you to be.

dizzydiz• 5 years ago

Made this Amazon product ideas search engine: https://amalytics.com

Not sure where to take it next as there’s well funded competition and conversions/revenue have plateaued…

wazels• 4 years ago

I sell random generators for Dungeons & Dragons games.

https://www.herebetaverns.com

To be fair - I did spend full time on this when it launched but it’s been a side project for the last 6 months.

The sales fluctuate a ton but usually above $500 a month, almost pure profit and almost 0 hours work.

I have a plan to increase revenue this year by going all in on SEO

etattva• 4 years ago

Helps students find the best-fit Graduate programs. Guaranteed to find the right college, else money back. Net revenue around $400 a month https://www.collegehippo.com/

caviv• 4 years ago

I have been running a Gematria website in Hebrew called https://gimatria.co.il - reaching just a bit more that $500 USD per month from Google Ads.

Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

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