Interested in this also, in what industry are you working? Maybe we could brainstorm some issues together?
The idea I want to work on now is a micro-fintech but I've been busy with work. Honestly won't mind a partner!
Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
191–200 of 219 posts
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#192I was constantly looking for flights. Cheap flights. It was my obsession (I've visited 80 countries pre-covid) and friends came to me for hacks/cheap flights.
So I started a website/blog/newsletter. Then I added a widget to sell flights. Then I integrated a fully fledged flight search tool. Niched on the Australian market. Then I added hotels.
Revenue fell off a Grand Canyon-like cliff when covid struck, obviously, as nobody was flying, but has improved markedly this year.
Site is https://beatthatflight.com.au/
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#193I created https://screen.studio and it made 30k in first month after releasing it. It allows you to create beautiful screen recordings in minutes. Idea: my own pain both individually and when working with team. When you create any kind of app you often need some video of it, either for promo, landing, social media posts, tutorials, etc. It was always taking way too long and was quickly getting outdated as app UI chan…
How do you deal with heavyweight competition like Camtasia?
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#194A image versioning tool: https://www.gitimage.app I was asking myself why the benefits of version control was not used more outside of the software industry, and decided to work on a MVP to prove/disprove it's usefulness in another hobby - photography
I see the concept of Hash Diffs here, are you using DataVault modeling for your warehouse architecture?
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#195How do you all decide on which idea to focus on? I use Google Keep to write down ideas, but then I am unsure on how to decide which one engage first..
I like Stephen King's advice. He says he doesn't keep a writer's notebook, because that's where you can immortalize bad ideas. The good ideas stick around in your head, and that's what he decides to work on. So, specifically not writing down your ideas can lead you to the best ideas.
I love this. The idea that the ones that won't let you go are the ones you should hold on to.
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#196Does anyone know of any good books to help stimulate idea generation and brainstorming?
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#197I make about $7000 a month with a web app that extracts transaction data from PDF bank statements. I built it because my bank only provides PDF statements and I wanted to analyse my spending over the last few years. I wrote some Kotlin code to work with the PDFs, found it incredibly difficult to implement so I figured other people would have this problem and turned it into a web app.
Do you have a way of selling this as a service? PDF interpretation is notoriously difficult in a number of industries.
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started off by buying Google Ads, but I lost money running them. Eventually I stopped running the ads and focused on writing blog posts. Also I think the domain sort of helps. I wrote a bit more about the start here: https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-02-25-zer...
Question for ya if you don't mind: I had to do some PDF scraping a while back as part of a side project collecting alternative social/economic datasources. Even within a single site, there were often errors at the fringes, especially if things like layout/styling changed, and my concern about giving bad data to users (or needing to constantly be checking data quality and adjusting custom parameters for each target si…
Usually banks have a template so the edge cases aren't so edgy. Had to do this with Canadian banks and each one had their own template, but once you parsed it, generally, it worked until they updated their template again.
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#199How Lunar ( https://lunar.fyi/ ) became a necessity: New job, more stuff to do, so I got myself a 4K LG Monitor to extend my small Macbook screen. I had set up my home office right on an interior balcony where I had lots of natural light. That meant that the monitor brightness and contrast needed to be constantly adjusted to have the screen visible in sunlight and to not blind me when the clouds/night came. If you ev…
I have no use for this, but the design of the website is immaculate!
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#200I make about $7000 a month with a web app that extracts transaction data from PDF bank statements. I built it because my bank only provides PDF statements and I wanted to analyse my spending over the last few years. I wrote some Kotlin code to work with the PDFs, found it incredibly difficult to implement so I figured other people would have this problem and turned it into a web app.
Wow, I've been doing this for nearly 10 years with multiple banks and auto-mergjng the output into my accounts, as well as to update memberships of an organisation using membership fee transactions from those files.
It never occurred to me to think of offering it to others through a front end, or that there's a side income's worth of interest in that kind of bank PDF scraping.
A fun thing I discovered doing this was when my software reported some mismatch errors when I merged in a bank-generated PDF for a date range partly overlappong what I'd already loaded. Turns out the bank PDFs were missing a random subset of transactions over a large date range - as was the online banking transaction history! This went on for a few months until the bank fixed their systems.