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Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

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Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#1

Post by notoriousarun »

A friend pointed out a bunch of the 'tell us about your successful side project' threads suffer from a survivorship bias. They're still great for inspiration, but I suspect we could learn a lot about challenges and wrong approaches from each others' failures. So what's a side project you built hoping to generate revenue from it, that hasn't actually earned you much / any money?

Why do you think it hasn't been as successful as you thought it would be / what would you do differently if you did it again? How much time/money did you spend building it, and what kind of iterations / improvements did you make to try and salvage it?

Appreciate any and all answers!

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#3

Post by notoriousarun »

Recent Failure

-- I'm not getting customers.

I love reading online content. It is tough to read quality long-form content online.

So, I built https://pipecontent.com

-- By Sharing your article collection(One-tab, Toby, Notion, Google-Docs, Twitter-Threads, Evernote, Dropbox, Website Link)

-- Receive clutter free ready to print PDF OR A high quality printed magazine.

Feedback appreciated.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#4

Post by koellewe »

I built a Tinder-like matchmaking app where users log in with their Facebook account and the app then auto-matches users by their FB likes. I thought taking the hassle out of swiping could give my app an edge over Tinder.

It was working fine for a week or so before Facebook caught up and revoked my API keys (effectively killing the app). They didn't give any reason besides some vague recommendation to review their Terms of Service. A few months later at their F8 developer conference they announced they'll be launching their own matchmaking service which will work pretty the same way I built my app.

Moral of the story: never trust big tech.

P.S. I open sourced the app a few years ago: https://bitbucket.org/stonepillarstudios/workspace/projects/... Feel free to fork & revive.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#8

Post by stanislavb »

https://99remotejobs.com a job board focused on remote jobs. I have promoted it on both LiHunt (software dev audience) and SaaSHub; however that didn’t help. Not a single sale :)

As a result, I’ve decided to make it FREE and open source the code. Hopefully in a few months.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#9

Post by truetaurus »

stanislavb wrote: post #8

https://99remotejobs.com a job board focused on remote jobs. I have promoted it on both LiHunt (software dev audience) and SaaSHub; however that didn’t help. Not a single sale :) As a result, I’ve decided to make it FREE and open source the code. Hopefully in a few months.

Something similar: https://launchafrica.io but still have hope! Jobboard for startup and tech jobs in africa

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#10

Post by tomwojcik »

StavrosK wrote: post #5

I have the opposite problem: I built https://imgz.org to not make money and it does. Not a lot, but not zero. I'll have to fix that. By the way, we're hiring: https://imgz.org/blog/2020/12/23/haha-suckers/

"... are ashamed of what Imgur has become?"

I'm no expert but I think one could say you might get into trouble for defamation if you write something like that on your product page.

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