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Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

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Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#101

I built https://markdownbin.com/ because a friend was complaining something like this doesn't exist. Nobody uses it and probably that's why it doesn't exist.

Well, there's StackEdit [1], and we use it (at work, for an end-of-sprint automated list of finished stuff for the demo)

[1]: https://stackedit.io/

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#102

Like everyone here, I get ideas for side projects that might be profitable. At some point, I started looking at the likelihood of success, the time I'd invest, and how much I'd make. The answer is almost always that I'm better off dedicating the time to my day job, or even just relaxing so I'm better at my job. That said, I get it. You get some financial freedom, you get to explore a project that interests you for yo…

There's also that many people have pretty fixed salary and evolution in their company.

I won't make more money by dedicating more time or energy at my day job. It's fixed.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#103
post #78
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feedback, product looks great, packaging looks great. I would not want to buy the Beef & Cheddar. Compare the label of Beef & Cheddar to Turkey & Cinnamon. Turkey & Cinnamon have four simple ingredients, Turkey, Yogurt Powder, Whole Wheat Flour, Cinnamon. Compare that to Beef & Cheddar, there are so many things in that ingredient list by comparison. When I think of food that is 'good for you' I want to see simple…

Thanks for the feedback! All the extra stuff on the B&C comes from the cheddar cheese powder - for the most part they're natural ingredients (excluding things like the yellow color, etc.), but you're right, it doesn't look great. Once we get low on my current supply of cheese powder, I'm going to look into getting a food dehydrator to make my own cheese powder.

Food dehydrators are a fun rabbit hole. Florists use them for wedding bouquets. You will also find a TON of info about scrappily acquiring them on prepper websites. I've seen several posts by Mormon families (food preservation and supply is encouraged by the religion), and a lot of the good ones get into taste, methods for preparing food, and doing it in bulk (which you'd care about). But the se sites will have a large cross with militia and shtf type folks. So conversations will go not where you think sometimes.

I think the most informative one I read was on something like shtf fourms. It stayed tame, other than everyone wanting to buy the dehydrator after the author was done.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#104
post #71

It's probably not what you meant, but I recently created a weekend project bot that scans facebook for apartments rental ads. Thanks to this bot, I landed an opportunity I wouldn't have catch otherwise, saving me 6,000$ a year. Assuming I will hold my new apartment for 3 years, this is a net savings of 18,000$. I haven't sold anything, but yet I created something that "generated money" for me. My code is open source…

Interesting. I've never heard of apartment posts in facebook groups but I'm in the bay area.

Do other people here in the US have this experience as well? I was thinking it'd be Facebook marketplace, craigslist, and apartment sites (like apartments.com)

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#105

Like everyone here, I get ideas for side projects that might be profitable. At some point, I started looking at the likelihood of success, the time I'd invest, and how much I'd make. The answer is almost always that I'm better off dedicating the time to my day job, or even just relaxing so I'm better at my job. That said, I get it. You get some financial freedom, you get to explore a project that interests you for yo…

There's also that many people have pretty fixed salary and evolution in their company. I won't make more money by dedicating more time or energy at my day job. It's fixed.

I'm in the same boat in that my next big increase will be from a promotion, but it's the time and energy that will make that happen. Another commenter was talking about a review site where they'd stay up all night watching infomercials to get a list of products to review, and then post the reviews on a site with ads. I respect the drive, but not getting a full night's sleep would definitely impact my performance at my day job.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#106
post #2

I really don't like talking about my side projects, so I guess they all qualify, but I'm particularly excited about one at the moment. Right now I'm working on a dog treat business - I make a treat mix that you add water to and freeze for a meat-based frozen treat. I feel really good about the product and the packaging design (and this is the first time I've ever worked on any kind of a physical product, so it's real…

The idea is pretty solid. I’d totally buy if it were grain free.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#107
I don't talk about my side projects at work hours, even if someone asks.

However, I built Pixmap for Android to learn Android dev. It makes a couple dollars a month... :)

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

I built FastComments as a tool for myself, but it's starting to gather bigger and bigger customers.

https://FastComments.com

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#108

I made almost 6 figures a year on an affiliate website promoting natural health products, when they were extremely popular back in 2006. I would stay awake some nights and jot down every product mentioned in overnight infomercials (before I knew what TiVo was). then write a review on them the next day. Thousands of people would search for “X review” in the days after watching those infomercials and I would rank #1 be…

Where the reviews entirely fiction?

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#109
We have been building on the side for quite some time a image enlarge/upscale service based on convolutional neural networks algorithms:

https://deep-image.ai

More details about the technology side:

https://teonite.com/blog/deep-image-thanks-to-machine-learni...

Now we’ve just launched payments - so we have to see some time about the results.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#110

I used to sell extra naughty bikinis online, in addition to being a consultant for distributed real-time machine learning. People had a hard time combining the image of a nerd in the basement with that of a flashy sales guy surrounded by models. So I usually didn't mention the bikinis to allow me to charge full nerd pricing for my coding. This site project brought in roughly €500 monthly with almost no work, because…

That’s quite interesting combination.

How did you charge the marketing contractor?

I wanted to reached out to marketing contractor but haven’t had much information

Thank you!

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