Ask HN: What has been your most profitable side/weekend project to date? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What has been your most profitable side/weekend project to date?

#161

Post by o1iver » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 6:51 PM UTC

case wrote: post #158

Domainr -- http://domai.nr/ -- a search engine we built for finding available domain names. ~80% of its revenue is registrar commissions from successful referrals (domain name purchases, hosting, ssl certs, etc.), and the other 20% is from ads (from adpacks.com). We launched it in 2008, and both traffic and revenue have been growing slowly but steadily ever since. These days it's covering our respective apt rents (in…

How do you check for domain availability?

Re: Ask HN: What has been your most profitable side/weekend project to date?

#162

Post by alohahacker » Fri, Jul 29, 2011, 10:58 AM UTC

dangrossman wrote: post #65

I wrote a WordPress plugin in about 4 hours to run a website listing web hosting company reviews. Simple affiliate stuff. The plugin was generic, it would add star ratings to WordPress comments and display average ratings for the post and such. I used the plugin to run my own site, then also built it a little site to sell to anyone else that wanted it. In 18 months it sold over $200,000 in licenses before I sold righ…

i think i bought your plugin ;)

what is that wordpress review plugin everyone uses?

Re: Ask HN: What has been your most profitable side/weekend project to date?

#163

Post by petercooper » Fri, Jul 29, 2011, 12:40 PM UTC

Back in 2005 I decided to implement a tag-based source code snippets repository over a weekend. Mostly as a way to keep my hand in with Rails. So I did. It went fine and built up over a couple of years to serious traffic but only about $800/mo in Adsense. I sold it to Dzone for low/mid 5 figures and they still run it (but they have proper big name advertisers).

Re: Ask HN: What has been your most profitable side/weekend project to date?

#164

Post by dangrossman » Sat, Jul 30, 2011, 1:45 AM UTC

alohahacker wrote: post #162

dangrossman wrote: post #65

I wrote a WordPress plugin in about 4 hours to run a website listing web hosting company reviews. Simple affiliate stuff. The plugin was generic, it would add star ratings to WordPress comments and display average ratings for the post and such. I used the plugin to run my own site, then also built it a little site to sell to anyone else that wanted it. In 18 months it sold over $200,000 in licenses before I sold righ…

i think i bought your plugin ;) what is that wordpress review plugin everyone uses?

It was called WP Review Site. I don't know if it's still widely used, the current owner unfortunately seems MIA at this point. He's let the affiliate program balance drop to $0 and go offline, and isn't responding to support questions in his forum.