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Ask HN: Those starting new side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

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Re: Ask HN: Those starting new side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#21

End of last year released an experimental custom postcards web app: https://www.cardwhat.com . Currently about to release an update for it https://cards-nrhwdfdpsx.now.sh/ . Later in 2018, I want to extend this to a custom t-shirts app.

Neat idea. The website looks pretty good too.

Re: Ask HN: Those starting new side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#23
post #8

Manypixels - Unlimited premium design services for startups from $159/month (100% money back guarantee) https://www.manypixels.co I started this in December 2017 as a side project but given its success it has now turned into almost a full-time job.

Sounds like a powerful service. What have you done to market it and find customers?

Thanks! Right now -- only direct sales via niche Facebook groups (SaaS lifetime discounts is an example), which was a great way to understand if our value proposition was interesting for our target market. This resulted in about ~$5k MRR.

We also did a little bit of content marketing (Reddit, Indiehackers) which resulted in ~$2k MRR. We should normally hit $10k MRR and will launch a v2 of the site pretty site (right now it is just a landing page that I created in 5 hours to launch ASAP & let the market decide if our productized service was worth it!)

Re: Ask HN: Those starting new side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#24
post #10
post #8

Manypixels - Unlimited premium design services for startups from $159/month (100% money back guarantee) https://www.manypixels.co I started this in December 2017 as a side project but given its success it has now turned into almost a full-time job.

How do the economics work out for the clients? let's say we're just doing landing pages all month long (for example). If they turnaround in two days, that's about fifteen landing pages, which at $160 for the month comes out to about $11 each. Obviously this is a contrived and unrealistic example, but am I getting the math right? I guess this is unlimited the way my data plan is unlimited: with rate capping?

Thanks for the interest!

Turnaround is 1 to 3 working days depending on complexity of the landing page. So you can expect 7 to 20 landing pages per month. If you want to complete a full website with the same design guidelines that might be done quicker (for example if you want a Home, Pricing, About us page, this will be done much quicker than doing 3 different homepages). We also often have clients requesting us to work on separate design styles in parallel (they can decide to pick the landing page they love the most).

Here is a work in progress we're currently doing for a popular SaaS (like Buffer) so you can gauge the quality of our work: https://invis.io/ZXF811CP2

Re: Ask HN: Those starting new side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#29
I did release my side projects at the end of 2017, but these are ever-evolving projects, so I am posting it here to show and tell for 2018 as well.

https://callmeprivate.com - great for entrepreneurs, startups, and businesses; masks your real phone number behind a virtual number with incoming and outgoing call functionality.

https://textmeprivate.com - same as above, but SMS-virtual numbers only.

I've since built a feature so you can now use the same virtual number on both services.

Since release about a month ago, I've had over 50 signups, about 5 paying customers, and a company in China just recently contacted me and wanted to purchase numbers from Text Me Private in bulk, in order to receive confirmations from various websites, but were unable to do purchase numbers, as I hadn't taken into consideration that when I released these products into the wild, that they would make it all the way to China in just a month. China doesn't use the traditional credit card system. So I've agreed to build it in if they could give me a few days to do so.

Never know.... something you create could end up around the world... and more importantly, could be very valuable to a company in another country.

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