Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make?

I record on Windows using Visual Studio and Atom with the atom-typescript extension. I recorded the video using Camtasia and bought a nice mic with a pop-screen and boom arm (Rhode podcaster USB). It was about $600 for the Mic and Camtasia. (Note I made this investment back easily and I have it forever now). Camtasia includes all of the video and audio editing capabilities required for Pluralsight, but I also used Audacity to do some of the audio editing because there was a nice compressor plugin that another author recommended. PowerPoint is required for the slides. Many authors use Macs and Keynote and similar software is fine - they just take mp4 files as the final deliverable.

Any interest in doing an interview for https://IndieHackers.com? I'd love to feature your story on the site! I spent many many hours as a kid trying to make my own RPGs, and IH could really use more indie game dev related stuff!

Even if you can create the art it's a lot of work! More work than coding the game, even.

Seriously, I started learning Blender so I could make assets for my own games and even though I have some training in art it is one hell of a learning curve. Not Blender itself, no. The first three weeks were a bit slow but then I started to get a workflow going and now I'm confident I can make decent-looking characters.

No, the real hard part. The serious drain on time is the art part. If you haven't had years of experience making art on a very regular basis you're going to have a slow go of it. Not only that but experienced artists will look at your work and give you a handful of tips that will make you feel both stupid and inadequate.

Art is a skill that can be learned... Just like programming. However, just like programming you're going to spend the first few years making absolute garbage. It takes time to be a decent artist.

You can learn to make one kind of art pretty quickly. For example, I successfully mastered the art of creating 3D anime girls (which are for the game idea) in about a month. Can I animate them with any semblance of, "that looks kinda natural"? No. I'm still working on getting the hair right. I've yet to even begin animating walks or arm movements!

...and for those who've done this: Yes, I'm using Rigify to save time. I'm in the process of writing a Python script that works like the Ragdoll script for hair or rope-like structures (because I'll be damned if I have to spend any more hours positioning a pony tail by hand @60 FPS!).

Edit: I had to take a break for a while to work on non-art stuff but here's where I stood three weeks ago:

https://imgur.com/a/I5YwR

Note that she has eyes but they weren't showing up in the Cycles render output for a reason I haven't figured out yet :)

The entire head was made from scratch by me. The hair was my focus when I was last working on it (the animation thereof).

https://IndieHackers.com is a side project of mine that recently hit $1k/mo. I launched it here on HN a couple months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269425).

It's pretty meta to be posting this here, because Indie Hackers is basically a huge collection of interviews with developers who are making money from their apps and side projects. I only include interviews with people who are willing to share revenue numbers, employee count, etc. There's also a forum/comments section where you can ask your own questions to the interviewees if you find my questions lacking :)

I started a (strictly e-book) publishing company. We publish public domain titles on Amazon, and Apple's iBookstore. GooglePlay has gone by the wayside just like all of their "cool projects."

We don't just copy-pasta public domain titles. We actually go through it, and create a really nice table of contents, include flourishing images to chapter headings, link any footnotes, and re-typeset so there's pleasant vertical rhythm to the paragraphs. We really pride ourselves on creating a great user experience rivaling titles from major book publishing companies that have delved into the foray of e-book publishing. CSS for e-books is a repeat of browser compatibility problems reminiscent of the 90s unfortunately.

Our average price is usually $0.99. Our genre is theology, so we publish books from Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin to name a few.

We make over $1K/month, but sales are on a downward trend. The hype of e-readers has faded in the past 2 years. It's not that e-reading isn't cool. It totally is. Just like the mp3 player was a great successor to the Walkman. The problem is that there isn't One Great Device for e-reading (like the iPod was).

A review of e-reading devices:

iPad: No person with eyeballs can read on an LCD screen for more than 2hrs, but I can read a physical paper book as long as I want. Dead-on-arrival in my opinion. Sales from this market never overtook sales from the Kindle store for my company.

Kindle: Better than the iPad. That's not saying all that much because they're only better because they use e-ink. That's it. Navigating and whatnot is still really janky. The worst thing about the Kindle is that all text is justified. There aren't any settings to change it to left alignment. It's nuts. You have to see a screenshot of some text to see how absurd this design decision is.

Kobo: These guys make the best e-readers. They are e-ink like Kindle, but they have this revolutionary technology called "left alignment of text" instead of justified-only text on the Kindle. You don't have the sophisticated backend infrastructure like Apple/Amazon for synchronizing your books/bookmarks/highlights/blabla. But it's not that important really. Just sideload your e-books, and dupe your e-book library on your computer. That's an end-to-end backup plan. You may not have heard about Kobo because they don't have the marketing budget like their competitors.

My company is called Fig, because I started the company on Fig St in Escondido, CA while I was in seminary. Here's some of our titles on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dd...

Footnote: I probably went too far with this off-handed hardware review, but I'm drinking wine and felt loquacious.