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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?

#171

Post by conductr »

CodeSgt wrote: post #111
DanHulton wrote: post #102

Well, I've spoken about this before, and on here no less, but only really in response to posts like this. I don't do any advertising or speak about mine except in interviews, since it's usually indicative of the kind of requirements they're looking for. I created a SaaS bootstrap for Javascript called Nodewood [1]. It actually started as just a template for me, because there's a lot of setup for each new JS web proje…

I've considered purchasing an application boilerplate like nodewood, but can never bring myself to drop a couple hundred dollars on code of unknown quality using methods or conventions I may or may not like. Do you offer any way to view the source before purchase?

They're tackling that with the 60 day money back guarantee

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

#172

Post by 20220616 »

scrozier wrote: post #69
gottebp wrote: post #29

After my grandfather got Parkinson’s disease circa 2005, I developed hand tremor cancelling software for the mouse [1]. It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer. It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough. I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It fe…

I'm a software developer by trade. I've had essential tremor all my life. Virtually all doctors say, "well, at least it's a benign condition." Right. And it's affected my life in countless ways, none of them good. It's gotten slowly worse over the years. It's not debilitating, but it's frustrating, and it rules out some activities completely. As I type this I randomly touch the touch pad or an unwanted key, and rando…

I know how hard ET is and I really feel for you. My dad’s ET started getting worse at around 40 and when he reached 65 it got to the point where he couldn’t eat without much difficulty, couldn’t write a simple note, use his phone to text, and many things we take for granted and it stressed him out to the point where he started to isolate; he lost motivation completely. It broke my heart and in 2018 I decided to call and email pretty much every doctor around the world who knew anything about ET and after many emails and phone calls I found a surgeon in South Korea and Florida who agreed to see him. A few months later they performed a non-invasive brain operation that totally cured the ET in his dominant hand (they couldn’t do both). It saved his life.

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

#173

Post by mbostleman »

andreilys wrote: post #159
bko wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalping is necessary for a lot of events. For instance, a few years back concert sales used to sell a year ahead of time. Who decides they want to go to a concert a year from now? So after a few days they're all sold out to scalpers. Maybe without scalpers they would get sold out by maybe 6 months. But who plans to go to a concert 6 months from now? It's unreasonable. So the alternative is to never get to go to conc…

Scalpers buy with the intention of flipping tickets for higher prices. They are effectively rent seeking parasites that distort the market and make things worst for regular people. There’s nothing wrong with reselling tickets if something comes up, but if you buy up bulk tickets to flip them for profit that is scummy behavior.

>>[Scalpers] are effectively rent seeking parasites that distort the market and make things worst for regular people.>> I'm trying to understand this sentiment from a totally unsentimental, mechanical view of economics. I've always had a problem with the negative sentiment towards what people refer to as "price gouging" and it strikes me that scalping is similar.

>>if you buy up bulk tickets to flip them for profit that is scummy behavior.>> For me to relate to this, the "buy up bulk" part would have to be qualified. Does that mean buying so many that the market is cornered - hence forming a monopoly? If that's the case yes - I can ethically map monopolies and anti-competitive behavior to "scummy behavior".

But if, for whatever reason, I have some statistically non-significant amount of tickets - say 10 or 15 for a 50k-100k stadium event - and standing on the sidewalk outside, there is plenty of demand for those tickets at say double the original price, it's not clear to me how that is ethically problematic any more than the buying any other asset that you expect to appreciate.

But maybe what I'm describing does not fit the definition of "scalping"?

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

#174

Post by bko »

andreilys wrote: post #159
bko wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalping is necessary for a lot of events. For instance, a few years back concert sales used to sell a year ahead of time. Who decides they want to go to a concert a year from now? So after a few days they're all sold out to scalpers. Maybe without scalpers they would get sold out by maybe 6 months. But who plans to go to a concert 6 months from now? It's unreasonable. So the alternative is to never get to go to conc…

Scalpers buy with the intention of flipping tickets for higher prices. They are effectively rent seeking parasites that distort the market and make things worst for regular people. There’s nothing wrong with reselling tickets if something comes up, but if you buy up bulk tickets to flip them for profit that is scummy behavior.

You didn't address any of my points as to why they exist. You're just using charged language to describe people working in a system that is kind of shitty for event goers. They're providing a service for people like me that may not want to buy tickets a year ahead of time, but rather keep that optionality to go open closer to the date of the event even if it means a higher price

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

#175

Post by voisin »

scrozier wrote: post #69
gottebp wrote: post #29

After my grandfather got Parkinson’s disease circa 2005, I developed hand tremor cancelling software for the mouse [1]. It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer. It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough. I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It fe…

I'm a software developer by trade. I've had essential tremor all my life. Virtually all doctors say, "well, at least it's a benign condition." Right. And it's affected my life in countless ways, none of them good. It's gotten slowly worse over the years. It's not debilitating, but it's frustrating, and it rules out some activities completely. As I type this I randomly touch the touch pad or an unwanted key, and rando…

Any idea what causes this?

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

#176

Post by daenz »

exceltrading wrote: post #13

I sell an excel add-in that integrates with some popular trading software. It makes life easier for traders. It has a couple thousand users paying around $10 a month. That's about as specific as I want to get. It required a little domain specific knowledge to create, and a recognized name among trading forums to initially market. Otherwise it's super simple and I'm continually surprised that there are no real competi…

How did you do marketing?

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

#177

Post by voisin »

20220616 wrote: post #172
scrozier wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a software developer by trade. I've had essential tremor all my life. Virtually all doctors say, "well, at least it's a benign condition." Right. And it's affected my life in countless ways, none of them good. It's gotten slowly worse over the years. It's not debilitating, but it's frustrating, and it rules out some activities completely. As I type this I randomly touch the touch pad or an unwanted key, and rando…

I know how hard ET is and I really feel for you. My dad’s ET started getting worse at around 40 and when he reached 65 it got to the point where he couldn’t eat without much difficulty, couldn’t write a simple note, use his phone to text, and many things we take for granted and it stressed him out to the point where he started to isolate; he lost motivation completely. It broke my heart and in 2018 I decided to call…

Can you elaborate on what the non-invasive brain operation was?

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

#178

Post by mbostleman »

Around 2006 - 2008 I was playing around with SecondLife and found the only thing that interested me there was coding objects with their LSL scripting language. I happened to fall in with a content creator (eg. a really good artist that could create cool looking things from the in world primitive object tools) that sold "campers" which were objects on which you could basically park your avatar in some kind of pose and your account would be sent a small amount of money each hour. This was useful because the discoverability of locations in the world was substantially increased by the presence of avatars. A lot of people at your place meant your place was popular. So the typical implementation of campers was that a place would build a bar with 10 or so barstools and embed a camper script in them, so people could come up, choose to camp on a stool, and get their couple of bucks a day. But these implementations were pretty lame because without any kind of activity by the real life user, avatars would timeout and just slump forward over the bar. So these places, while technically having a higher presence of people, looked like a terribly depressing place with a bunch of passed out drunks.

So this content creator I met had the idea of working a little hard on the product by creating a little scene of things (as opposed to just dropping a script in a barstool) and then also writing the code to animate the avatar in some kind of loop. So for example, she created a little patch of garden and a wheel barrow, and when someone chose to camp on it, their avatar got on all fours and appeared to be working on the garden, like weeding or whatever. Another one was a ladder that could be placed by a window and the avatar would climb up it and appear to be washing the windows. We had 5 or 6 different campers like this. For obvious reasons this product blew up. I don't remember what she sold them for but at the peak I was pulling in $100 a day and my cut was only a fraction of the total cost. This continued for at least a year before we had a falling out about another product and she dumped me from the cut.

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

#179

Post by 35mm »

gottebp wrote: post #29

After my grandfather got Parkinson’s disease circa 2005, I developed hand tremor cancelling software for the mouse [1]. It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer. It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough. I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It fe…

I would have loved to have had this for my grandfather when he was around.

In terms of marketing (if you’re not already doing it), you could write blog posts about different topics around Parkinson’s + tech use.

The use a tool like Surfer SEO to make sure you’ve covered the search term topic cluster well, and then more people will find it via Google.

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

#180

Post by jclardy »

ronyfadel wrote: post #84

Mission Control Plus [1] and Batteries for Mac [2] make about $3k per month and need little maintenance. Thankfully Apple hasn’t Sherlocked them (yet). [1] https://fadel.io/missioncontrolplus [2] https://fadel.io/batteries

Wow, Mission Control Plus is one of those "super-obvious" once you are shown the idea, ideas. On an iPad you can close windows in the app switcher by swiping, the Mac does nearly the same thing but has no way to close windows. And I had to check for Batteries as well, seems so obvious that it exists on Mac coming from an iPad...but it just isn't there. Well done.
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