Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 476 posts

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

#11

Post by devopsproject »

ianleeclark wrote: post #4

I have a project which may never generate revenue, despite the fact I spent 2 months after hours working on it. I did a dumb thing and dove directly into the project without first finding a fit or customer base for it. More or less, it's a scheduling application that allows a user to set when they're open and allow anyone to book that time for however much the original scheduler valued that slot of their schedule. It…

my inlaws would never be able to type in or remember "kronikl.io". They would go to "cranikal.com" and their browser would be infected by malware and their computer would die and I would get a call in the middle of the night.

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

#12

Post by sfennell »

I built a cash forecasting app (http://www.money-stew.com) that I use religiously to verify that I won't have any trouble paying my bills.

I actually managed to get some traffic and ad revenue ($100I continue to try and improve on it, but it rarely gets the bulk of my free time.

Its been difficult for me to get _any_ feedback on it, so I bounce back and forth between feeling like its a worthwhile venture or its just a pet project that is useful to nobody but me.

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

#13

Post by aerovistae »

I thought probably Hands Free for Chrome would see some donations given how much it could help someone who was disabled, and given how many donations I've seen more ordinary & simple extensions receive, but I only got $10 the past 3 years, and that was a single donation from a friend who felt bad seeing it at $0.

https://www.handsfreechrome.com/

Barely any users, just around 400 or so.

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

#14

Post by mw_goodjava »

I spent a couple years building https://infiniquest.org in my spare time. This is a site where you can both create and play interactive fiction games, using an engine I built entirely from scratch. I mainly built it to prove to myself I could complete a large project start to finish. I also had the motivation that my son and I could make games for each other, but by the time I finished, he was big into Minecraft and had no interest in text adventure games. :D I had hoped to make some income with it thru ads and paid features, but I never tried too hard to build up a user base, and now it sits there largely unmaintained for the last several years. Last year I completed a proof-of-concept integrating it with the Amazon Echo - that was kinda neat, but there's a lot of work to be done to finish and polish it... and considering there were no users to begin with, I lacked the motivation to undertake that.

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

#15

Post by sfennell »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #9

Not answering the question directly but one issue is that as a developer you can often make a product for almost free (and it might even be a really good product) but marketing is almost never free. Sure you can market with sweat equity. Forums, Show HN, Product Hunt, etc but to get real money you often have to advertise. And advertising is not cheap. I do actually have a product in this category but I don't want to…

Just out of curiosity, why wouldn't you want to post it here - why use a throwaway account?

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

#16

Post by crush-n-spread »

nikivi wrote: post #5

I have not built this project with the main goal to earn money from it but just to build something that I thought was missing in this world. I am trying to visualise all of world's knowledge with interactive mind maps focused on learning anything in a linear way. Here is the search engine that searches all of these interactive maps : https://learn-anything.xyz/ Both the search engine and the maps are open source so I…

Hi, I noticed the initial load time is quite poor... Maybe I had a bad connection but you might want to do some testing on initial load times for your site.

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

#17

Post by ianleeclark »

ianleeclark wrote: post #4

I have a project which may never generate revenue, despite the fact I spent 2 months after hours working on it. I did a dumb thing and dove directly into the project without first finding a fit or customer base for it. More or less, it's a scheduling application that allows a user to set when they're open and allow anyone to book that time for however much the original scheduler valued that slot of their schedule. It…

Consensus seems to be an awful name :)

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

#18

Post by ianleeclark »

devopsproject wrote: post #11
ianleeclark wrote: post #4

I have a project which may never generate revenue, despite the fact I spent 2 months after hours working on it. I did a dumb thing and dove directly into the project without first finding a fit or customer base for it. More or less, it's a scheduling application that allows a user to set when they're open and allow anyone to book that time for however much the original scheduler valued that slot of their schedule. It…

my inlaws would never be able to type in or remember "kronikl.io". They would go to "cranikal.com" and their browser would be infected by malware and their computer would die and I would get a call in the middle of the night.

This is all part of my master plan to have y'all trapped in a vicious cycle of using my product

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

#19

Post by calafrax »

I have done a handful of side projects that have lost money and lots of side projects with time spent on something that has not be productized.

I don't really thing you should do a side project with the anticipation of making money.

My focus on side projects is doing R&D and building skills or tools that will pay off in my paid work. From that perspective I don't really consider anything I have done to be a "loss."

I do open source but only to demonstrate something I plan to sell later or to establish ownership of IP.

Spending money on R&D is a great investment since you can deduct on taxes and get an automatic 30% return. That is much higher and guaranteed return compared to "investing" in stock market.

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

#20

Post by jpobst »

I built https://communiroo.com because I couldn't find a quick and simple single website to expose bug/feature tracking + SO type questions + forums + support requests for my other things I was building. It seemed (and still seems) like it fills a need for mine and everyone else's side projects.

I think the biggest issue is marketing. I tried a few Twitter/Facebook ad campaigns that didn't really pan out, and an HN submission that didn't make the front page. But really I haven't done much to market it, and it just sits there chugging along with few users other than myself while I work on other stuff.

Post reply on HN