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

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

#171

Post by csallen »

trcollinson wrote: post #167

I've been working on a side project for the last 3 months and it has finally gotten to the point where I am making more than $1000/month with more than 25 active customers 100% through word of mouth. I am working on a Show HN with some of my learning from the process so I won't get too deep into it here but here are a couple of highlights: * You do have time. I work a time consuming job, have a wife and kids, and sti…

I think all of this advice is spot on. It's what I've experienced myself working on Taskforce and Indie Hackers, and it's backed up by what I've learned from interviewing ~40 founders of profitable businesses in the past few months.

Picking a good market might be the biggest thing. If you pick a market you don't understand, it's way harder to build a good product that solves an important problem well. You end up guessing a lot. It's also way harder to get the word out, because you don't know your customers well enough to know where they hang out. If you go to https://IndieHackers.com, sort by revenue, and pick the companies making the least, the most common phrase is some variation of, "I haven't really done much marketing yet," and it's often because they're in a market they don't understand well.

I'm also a big believer in automation. I haven't done nearly enough of it, but I just got into using Buffer for Twitter, and it's a tremendous time saver (I can do all my tweeting for a week in a single 2 hour block of time). I have a ton of other marketing tasks that I could automate as well. Also, Mike Carson of park.io is making like $1.5M/yr as a solo founder/employee, and he claims it's mostly due to automation, so that's kind of hard to ignore :)

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

#172

Post by stockkid »

csallen wrote: post #168

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 rev…

What is the main source of revenue for Indie Hackers? Congrats on hitting 1k/month.

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

#173

Post by stockkid »

triplesec wrote: post #135
maxsavin wrote: post #13

I created Meteor Toys, available at http://meteor.toys It's been very good to me, but also trending down as people seem to be diversifying from Meteor. Certainly not what I expected when I got into it. The story for it is a simple one: I solved some of the annoyances during development for myself with by making a devtool, and then open sourced it. The reaction was very positive and encouraging. Between the opportunit…

when you say 'diversifying from Meteor', what is going on here?

I think he means that the number of people using Meteor to build apps is decreasing.

I migrated my side project away from Meteor and write about why and how: http://stories.remotebase.io/post/rewriting-without-meteor/

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

#174

Post by csallen »

stockkid wrote: post #172
csallen wrote: post #168

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 rev…

What is the main source of revenue for Indie Hackers? Congrats on hitting 1k/month.

Sponsorships account for 97% of my revenue right now. I send out a weekly newsletter, and in the first couple weeks I asked if anyone was interested in sponsoring the site. At least 4 or 5 companies have reached out to me since then.

I've also dabbled in Amazon affiliate links, but those don't seem to be quite worth it yet.

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

#175

Post by stockkid »

csallen wrote: post #174
stockkid wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the main source of revenue for Indie Hackers? Congrats on hitting 1k/month.

Sponsorships account for 97% of my revenue right now. I send out a weekly newsletter, and in the first couple weeks I asked if anyone was interested in sponsoring the site. At least 4 or 5 companies have reached out to me since then. I've also dabbled in Amazon affiliate links, but those don't seem to be quite worth it yet.

I am going down a similar route with my project RemoteBase.

But I am realizing that my scalability is limited because I can have only so many sponsors on the site. If there are too many sponsors at the same time, they start to lose value.

I think it might be worthwhile to diversify the revenue source from sponsorships in my case, and perhaps yours too.

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

#176

Post by csallen »

stockkid wrote: post #175
csallen wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sponsorships account for 97% of my revenue right now. I send out a weekly newsletter, and in the first couple weeks I asked if anyone was interested in sponsoring the site. At least 4 or 5 companies have reached out to me since then. I've also dabbled in Amazon affiliate links, but those don't seem to be quite worth it yet.

I am going down a similar route with my project RemoteBase. But I am realizing that my scalability is limited because I can have only so many sponsors on the site. If there are too many sponsors at the same time, they start to lose value. I think it might be worthwhile to diversify the revenue source from sponsorships in my case, and perhaps yours too.

Right, I've been concerned about the same thing. I can make roughly $1k/mo from every extra 100k pageviews/mo, and I have a lot of room for traffic growth, so I'm focusing on that right now. But eventually I'll hit a ceiling beyond which it's hard to grow traffic, and I'll have to find out what to do from there. Hopefully that won't be before I can pay my rent etc from the revenue!

I'm going to be writing about all my decision-making in a lot more detail on the blog pretty soon (https://IndieHackers.com/blog). Indie Hackers is all about transparency, after all.

RemoteBase is cool, btw! I'd love to feature you on Indie Hackers this week if you're interested.

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

#177

Post by Untit1ed »

trcollinson wrote: post #167

I've been working on a side project for the last 3 months and it has finally gotten to the point where I am making more than $1000/month with more than 25 active customers 100% through word of mouth. I am working on a Show HN with some of my learning from the process so I won't get too deep into it here but here are a couple of highlights: * You do have time. I work a time consuming job, have a wife and kids, and sti…

Got any tips on recognising a bad idea early?

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

#178

Post by NateG »

LyndsySimon wrote: post #157
NateG wrote: post #130

I created an online game called Pit of War ( http://www.pitofwar.com ). It's a strategy/management game that puts you in charge of a stable of gladiators. You train your gladiators, outfit them in armour and weapons and give them a set of strategies to use during the fights against other players. Strategies start off simple and grow in detail and complexity as gladiators gain levels, skills and better equipment.

I've always been at least mildly interested in game development, but what has stopped me cold to this point is my inability to create the necessary artwork. Did you create the art yourself, or did you have someone else do it?

I did some of the UI art myself, but for the character art and gear I hired artists to do that. I directed them but they made the magic happen. If you're interested in making a game but don't want to do the art or can't do the art yourself, consider using a game engine like Unity where you can then use their asset store to buy the art you need. There are also open source art sites out there with free art you can use such as OpenGameArt [1] to get you started. Start with free (or cheap) art assets to test your game ideas and learn, and once you have a fun design and game you can consider hiring someone to make better looking art or something more specific to the style you had in mind.

[1] http://opengameart.org/

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

#179

Post by Lordarminius »

ekwogefee wrote: post #106

Feem ( http://www.feem.io ) is making over $1K/month online; and I'm from Cameroon, Africa. Feem is a great cross-platform way to share files within your LAN.

Looks really cool! Appears to be a potentially useful tool. I'll check it out

Nice finding another west african on this site. I wanted to send you an email but you do not have an address listed in your profile.

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

#180

Post by EpicEng »

imaginenore wrote: post #2

I have a project making $200/month, 100% passively (I just renew the domain every couple of years). But I think it would be so dumb to just tell what it is here. Why would you invite more competition to your niche?

So why post anything at all?
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