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Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

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171–180 of 476 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#171
post #51

choosejarvis.com -- not really a side project, but doesn't make much money. has revenue of a few hundred dollars per month. Would sell it instantly for $15,000 even though we invested $100k in development. converthero.com -- would sell this for $10-15k. It's a opt-in popup maker. > Why do you think it hasn't been as successful as you thought it would be? Marketing is hard.

You should be able to sell Jarvis to PR, marketing, and communications companies -- at a price point much higher that you're currently selling on your homepage.

Have you conducted any cold emails/sales call campaigns to those clients? I'm pretty sure you could find buyers at $100/month, if not more. I see the immediate value.

How have you been marketing this so far? What audience have you been targeting? What routes have you been using, i.e., PPC, direct outreach, cold calls?

I would be interested to work on this with you: j@greenaway.me

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#172

I made Word Nazi, which is essentially just a dirty version of Taboo (in the same way that Cards Against Humanity is a dirty version of Apples to Apples) in app form. Lessons learned: * I should've paid someone to do some decent graphics, turns out "minimalist aesthetic" is not the same as "no effort put in to design" * Making it a free demo, with the full game available as an in-app-purchase, sounds like a good deal…

> If you'd like to contact me, and you are not spam, you can do so by combining 'dick' and 'ineptech.com' with an at sign between them.

> Ineptech is a Very Large and Serious Technology Company

Seriously though, I think ineptech would get up and running with a little effort.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#173
post #75

Back in 2007, I made neverplayalone.com to find activity partners. Within a few days of launch, someone pointed out three things - Meetup was gaining traction, URL sounded risqué, and never to use negative words like never in the URL. In 2010-11, I worked on lug-it.com to let people carry stuff in their luggage for others. It leveraged FB's social graph to engender trust. I just wasn't ready to market and grow the us…

Wouldn't this have many issues when going through customs or security checks?

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#174

I made Word Nazi, which is essentially just a dirty version of Taboo (in the same way that Cards Against Humanity is a dirty version of Apples to Apples) in app form. Lessons learned: * I should've paid someone to do some decent graphics, turns out "minimalist aesthetic" is not the same as "no effort put in to design" * Making it a free demo, with the full game available as an in-app-purchase, sounds like a good deal…

For those checking out the ineptech site, please don't miss the poetry compiler joke! It's the bit I'm the most proud of. It's in an unlinkable modal so actually I'll just paste it here: Upon a stack of bits, about so tall, // Boolean[] isprime = new Boolean[n]; just think, O traveller, what we could do // Arrays.fill(isprime, true); if every other bit was set to false // for (int i = 4; i (You may have figured out t…

Code poetry is drastically underappreciated. I truly enjoyed this.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#175
post #103

I've build complex app for managing vineyards and wineries. It has tons of features: time tracking, input tracking, harvest and production features, mapping, tons of budget/cost analysis. It turned out, it is hard to convince farmers to ditch their trusty excel sheets and notepads and start typing all those info into computer program. I managed to find few customers, but they haven't stick for longer than one year. I…

Did you figure out why customers would leave? I've been thinking about doing something in the "most people use a spreadsheet" space and hearing that people went back to it after a year of using a dedicated product is a little worrying.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#176

I built a cash forecasting app ( http://www.money-stew.com ) that I use religiously to verify that I won't have any trouble paying my bills. I actually managed to get some traffic and ad revenue ($100 I continue to try and improve on it, but it rarely gets the bulk of my free time. Its been difficult for me to get _any_ feedback on it, so I bounce back and forth between feeling like its a worthwhile venture or its ju…

I'd maybe look at the UI of your website, it looks too boilerplate or wordpress-y. Maybe remove the pink and just make the content fill the rest of the page for a start. I like the premise but the website has a gut "cheap"feeling.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#177
post #75

Back in 2007, I made neverplayalone.com to find activity partners. Within a few days of launch, someone pointed out three things - Meetup was gaining traction, URL sounded risqué, and never to use negative words like never in the URL. In 2010-11, I worked on lug-it.com to let people carry stuff in their luggage for others. It leveraged FB's social graph to engender trust. I just wasn't ready to market and grow the us…

>let people carry stuff in their luggage for others

There is no possible way that could go wrong. Especially when TSA or Customs asks: "Are you carrying anything for someone else?"

Then you go on to explain, "Oh yeah, I am, but I know them. They are paying me to do it."

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#178

I wrote, edited, and published-as-EPUB an entire fiction novel. It made about $22, before taxes. I then decided not to bother publishing it in print, due to obvious lack of demand. It didn't really cost me anything but my leisure time, though. I'm still working on a second one (but I don't feel quite so motivated to finish it in a timely fashion). If I cared at all about making money off of it, I'd have to hire someo…

Is the novel still available?

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#179
post #145
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I meant hosting. In hindsight, the domain was actually my best asset (it’s a PR 4 domain), so I should’ve kept that :( )

what was the name?

A google search of "myguestmap" finds articles which match the story and suggests the domain was likely http://myguestmap.lorca.eti.br/index.jsp

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#180

Arcade game developer here. I loved the game concept of ABA's "Defeat Me": http://wonderfl.net/c/9ykQ . SHMUP where each enemy is a copy of you. Round 3 you fight a clone of Round 1, Round 2, mirrored. but I disagreed with several major design decisions: 1) Rounds were too difficult (a deadline came in very fast, the bullets were nearly the size of the ship) 2) Player movement & weapons changed rapidly (speed & numbe…

I just played your game, it is extremely fun but I think there is a lot of missed potential and to be honest I would never buy it in its current state. It feels like a tech demo rather than a full game. My unsolicited advice is as follows:

The art is boring. Most bullet hell games either have a mecha or anime art style with a lot of flashy effects. The closest in style to your game is probably geometry wars but your game lacks all of the color, warping, and particle effects that makes geometry wars look cool. You should invest money in the art.

It is very interesting that whenever you die in the game you are essentially killing yourself, or some sort of past version of yourself is killing a future version of you. There should be some sort of narrative element to highlight and expand upon this idea. I think it is way less interesting to sell it as "your enemies learn from you" when you could be selling as "a battle against all your past selves", way more emotional content in the latter, you're fighting all of your mistakes, all of your hubris, all of your near-sightedness, and every shot you take is another nail in your coffin.

To expound on this emotional element your character should be some sort of actual character, not just a green triangle... This doesn't mean you need a big backstory or cutscenes or anything major like that, something as simple as a drawing of a cute girl with a couple lines of dialogue will suffice. the thing you actually control can still be a spaceship but the player should know there is a character inside of it and they should know what they look like, you could make it so off to the side of the screen the characters face could pop up and react to what is going on. Go to tumblr and ask some type of fan artist to draw you a 'time traveling spaceship pilot that battles her past self and is really cute" and pay them for their work. Then when you die you can see that same character pop out of the space ship that killed you and celebrate ;)

You should rethink the gameplay progression and how the levels work. It doesn't seem clear to me why you split up the gameplay into discrete levels rather than having continuous play with 'respawning' enemies. I don't see why I have go through the weapon type progression linearly each time either (shouldn't I be able to collect or switch weapons or something?), reminds me of my main issue with geometry wars which was that I had to play for about 15 minutes before the game really became fun and that I had to redo that boring 15 minutes every time I died. Just start me with the fun gameplay or make the ramp up period very short.

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