My partner and I started roasting and selling coffee ( https://tinywaffle.co ). My day job matches donations 2:1 so I've been funneling in proceeds to max the $10k benefit. It's been fun learning about coffee, marketing, and design.
Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
11–17 of 17 posts
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#12I built a system to help people take payments with Google Forms. It was very much an MVP but I lucked into a niche that hadn't been filled, so each week a few people found it and started to use it. I charged 2% of the transaction volume (later lowered to 1.5%) and made about $3k before shutting it down at the end of last year to focus on other things. Interestingly by that point there were much better, cheaper altern…
You would have considered gifting the business to another dev, perhaps in the developing countries.
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#13Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#14I don't talk about my zines ( https://kradeelav.itch.io ) and artwork to people IRL -- it occupies a very liminal space in my mind and soul where I can mention things a bit too raw or depraved for office spaces. ;) While I don't make zines to make money, per se (going as far to give a free digital copy on my site), there's still evidentially enough people that buy them that it technically counts.
Just chiming in: your art looks amazing! I can totally imagine some incredible game cutscenes in this style.
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#15I built a system to help people take payments with Google Forms. It was very much an MVP but I lucked into a niche that hadn't been filled, so each week a few people found it and started to use it. I charged 2% of the transaction volume (later lowered to 1.5%) and made about $3k before shutting it down at the end of last year to focus on other things. Interestingly by that point there were much better, cheaper altern…
You would have considered gifting the business to another dev, perhaps in the developing countries.
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#16My partner and I started roasting and selling coffee ( https://tinywaffle.co ). My day job matches donations 2:1 so I've been funneling in proceeds to max the $10k benefit. It's been fun learning about coffee, marketing, and design.
This is highly interesting. Would you share some more details about all this, your setup and how you do it? I'm expecting you to do this in a much lower scale than "regular" coffee roasters, and I'm sure more people might be interested in this.
I roast about 4oz at a time but you can get an extension or get the larger FR to roast about a lb. For context, bag are usually 8, 10 or 12oz.
Smoke is mininal with the FR but I'm def getting irritated. I live an apartment so it's been a little tricky with venting.
You control two variable, fan speed and temp. With those, you control the temperature curve and it takes about 15 mins each bag from prep to cool down.
We sell for $10 a bag but half goes to green beans and packing and we donate $5.
Def learning a lot about scale. The typical commercial roaster is 10-15kg. Yep... Those cost about 15k.
Next would probably be improving our packaging to make it more attractive.
Lots of content on youtube and podcasts. Hit me up if you have more q's!
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#17My partner and I started roasting and selling coffee ( https://tinywaffle.co ). My day job matches donations 2:1 so I've been funneling in proceeds to max the $10k benefit. It's been fun learning about coffee, marketing, and design.
That's really interesting - what kind of equipment do you need for roasting? Is this something you can do from home?