Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

191–200 of 272 posts

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

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you make people aware of your site?

My wife is a teacher and I built the materials so that she could use them in her remote lessons. She shared with her colleagues, and growth was purely through word of mouth.

Nice! My wife is becoming a teacher and I already though about this as well.

There are options out there but half good build but not good or easy.

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds more like an algorithm to maximize your benefit from the $15k you spent. As opposed to a "money making business". (Still very cool though).

Curious: at what volume would you consider an individual buying products in bulk and then reselling them individually to be a side business?

Dropshipping?

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

#193

I created an online market for a game that sold in-game items with revenue at its peak of over $300k USD per month. Initially it just used eBay affiliate links, but since I would track the sellers in my database, I reached out to the big wholesalers and encouraged them to go nearly exclusive on my market for a similar cut. It was all built over a few years and it runs mostly on autopilot, all marketing, hosting, and…

To answer with a little more in depth, yes it was an mmo, but everything was above board - no gold selling or similar shenanigans.

Sometimes the profit margin was above 50% because I could source the product myself - but then it became an issue of what was my time worth and did I feel like quitting my day job which wasn't in any way stressful? I also had to consider the lifetime of an mmo, who could say how long the game would remain popular?

In hindsight, I should have gone all in and captured the whole market vertically, but then again it wouldn't have remained a side-gig that was on autopilot.

I'll probably write about it all some day, I think some people would find it interesting. I had to put a lot of hats on to make it work: developer, designer, marketer, customer support, accountant, security, ops, affiliate manager, ...

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

#194
We're hoping we'll be part of future threads like this one with DiffLens (https://github.com/marketplace/difflens) for language aware diffs on GitHub :) The next step for DiffLens is potentially a VSCode extension to make it easier for developers to use

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

#195
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, about half my code and effort is handling stuff that an "app store" usually would.

I don't know much about this ecosystem but do you see an opportunity for a business to supply these tools (or be the app store) for excel/google sheets addons?

I've thought about selling my code snippet for handling payments on something like Gumroad or similar. However, it's not a great solution since people still need to sign up somewhere and then install add-on. Plus they need to subscribe on stripe with their same email that the add-on will use (since the code grabs their email programmatically). As I'm thinking through this, there could be ways to mitigate some of these issues but who knows!

There is someone that built something similar but for browser extensions (https://extensionpay.com/).

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

#196
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes at the moment it makes about $2000 USD per month: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/bank-statement-converte...

Wow, good job! How'd you make people aware of it?

I tried a few different things: 1. Google Ads - Got users, but was losing money on every click 2. Cold email marketing - Got banned from Gmail 3. Writing blog posts - This helped me jump up the rankings

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

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yup! I've already happily made a couple refunds because folks thought it worked a different way or didn't end up having time to build their project or whatever. I've improved the documentation since then to help give a better idea of how everything works, as well, so there are fewer surprises.

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

#198
post #59

In high school I made a site to help students view their AP scores early. It ballooned in popularity over the past 8 years. At it’s peak in 2020 and 2021 it was getting over 1.5 million students in 2 hours on the day of release. It was quite profitable for a side project I started in high school. Sadly I was never able to turn it into anything more than an early scores site on the day of score release, but now all AP…

You must run earlyscores.com! That site was a life saver for me. Sadly anything aimed towards tech savvy high schoolers is probably going to be pretty difficult to monetize.

Not too difficult! Monetized with ads, the project was making a significant profit (>$15k per year; all of it came in on one day) - the difficult part was trying to do anything else with all of those users.

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

#199

Not exactly what you're looking for, but to help populate the thread, in the mid 00s I had a big chunk of accidental income that I didn't want to talk about at the time, but can now. I put Adsense on my blog early on and I'd make maybe $10-20 a day with no shenanigans. I wrote a post recommending a route planner I'd found (pre Google Maps). A month later my income jumped to $100-200 a day and it turned out to be due…

Classic Peter. . I hope all is well old friend.

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

#200
A guy I worked with a guy in a utility company who had, somehow or other, full control/ownership of a significant proportion of the customer meter data under his consulting company. I have absolutely no idea how he acquired it, but it paid him a six figure salary for five or ten hours work per month just patching a MySQL database. And he could basically name his price, as the company didn't have any other source of meter data for those customers.
Post reply on HN