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Ask HN: Has anyone here successfully earning side income from an app?

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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here successfully earning side income from an app?

#21

Post by adithyasrin »

lelandfe wrote: post #13
adithyasrin wrote: post #2

I have been building a job board for more than a year now. It makes decent money, more than I expected it to. It's somewhere around 1.000€+ on good months. On the other hand, it's not quite so passive. I constantly work on it, because I really enjoy working on it. Be it sales, marketing, SEO, building it - love it. This is also my way of putting the work in to progress my career. I'm learning a lot; experimenting wit…

Your Sentry JS script is brutalizing your first contentful paint times, which directly impacts bounce rate. Death to blocking external resources. If you inline, it will reduce what is likely your median FCP by nearly a full second and probably get you passing Core Web Vitals. Before (FCP 2.1s): https://www.webpagetest.org/video/view.php?tests=220208_AiDc... After (FCP 1.3s): https://www.webpagetest.org/video/view.php…

That's both good shouts. Pretty funny someone spotted this in two days. Introduced it recently and it's scheduled for removal today.

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here successfully earning side income from an app?

#22

Post by adithyasrin »

guinness74 wrote: post #18
adithyasrin wrote: post #2

I have been building a job board for more than a year now. It makes decent money, more than I expected it to. It's somewhere around 1.000€+ on good months. On the other hand, it's not quite so passive. I constantly work on it, because I really enjoy working on it. Be it sales, marketing, SEO, building it - love it. This is also my way of putting the work in to progress my career. I'm learning a lot; experimenting wit…

Do you scrape the job listings or ...?

Nope, almost all of it is directly from companies.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here successfully earning side income from an app?

#23

Post by adithyasrin »

throwjs51009 wrote: post #11
adithyasrin wrote: post #2

I have been building a job board for more than a year now. It makes decent money, more than I expected it to. It's somewhere around 1.000€+ on good months. On the other hand, it's not quite so passive. I constantly work on it, because I really enjoy working on it. Be it sales, marketing, SEO, building it - love it. This is also my way of putting the work in to progress my career. I'm learning a lot; experimenting wit…

That's a really beautiful site!

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here successfully earning side income from an app?

#24

Post by rozenmd »

I've built a few:

- https://onlineornot.com (a SaaS)

- https://maxrozen.com (info products)

- https://deploywithflags.com (another SaaS, started recently)

The effort to build a SaaS is immense, and I imagine building a SaaS to be like building an app on easy-mode. While building a SaaS, you're in full control of the entire customer journey - from discovery and getting their email, to convincing them to trial, to converting to a paid customer. While building an app, you're stuck with whatever your walled garden lets you do.

The learning curve to convincing people to spend a recurring sum of money with you is very steep compared to getting them to pay for something once. Consider writing what you know about a topic for a blog, then use that blog as marketing while you write a small book on how to solve a thorny problem for that topic. Significantly lower time investment for a decent pay-off (a few thousand bucks if its your first time, and it's a valuable problem to solve).

That being said, the part that makes it "worth it" for me is how much I've learned about running a business, marketing, sales, and product management. Things I never get a chance to explore as part of my day job as a frontend software engineer. If I purely measured hours spent vs money earned, no, not worth it, but sometimes things are worth doing for reasons other than money.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here successfully earning side income from an app?

#25

Post by seanwilson »

I bootstrapped this myself:

https://www.checkbot.io/

"Checkbot is a Chrome extension that tests 100s of pages at a time to find SEO, speed and security problems before your users do. Test unlimited sites as often as you want including local development sites to find and eliminate broken links, duplicate content, invalid HTML/CSS/JavaScript, insecure pages, redirect chains and 50+ other common website problems."

> I frequently think about doing writing an app or web service, but then talk myself out of it by thinking that the effort is much greater than it sounds and those efforts would be better off trying to progress my career.

It's a lot of effort to launch stuff but with that you get a lot of rounded experience and perspective from it you might not get elsewhere even if you don't make a profit. For example, you'll have to do at least a little marketing, content generation, web design, UI design and product design on top of regular programming. This all helps your next app launch be successful and maybe your future career is working for yourself. Not everything is about money either.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here successfully earning side income from an app?

#26

Post by lelandfe »

adithyasrin wrote: post #21
lelandfe wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your Sentry JS script is brutalizing your first contentful paint times, which directly impacts bounce rate. Death to blocking external resources. If you inline, it will reduce what is likely your median FCP by nearly a full second and probably get you passing Core Web Vitals. Before (FCP 2.1s): https://www.webpagetest.org/video/view.php?tests=220208_AiDc... After (FCP 1.3s): https://www.webpagetest.org/video/view.php…

That's both good shouts. Pretty funny someone spotted this in two days. Introduced it recently and it's scheduled for removal today. Thanks!

Your performance is excellent otherwise! Nice site :)

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here successfully earning side income from an app?

#28

Post by MarcelOlsz »

maxilevi wrote: post #6
MarcelOlsz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should collaborate! I've also been building a job board but for the north american market mostly. I have an engine that scrapes and organizes job listings automatically. I haven't worked on it in months but it's still going strong scraping and archiving. It also has a backend to subscribe, apply, save, sort listings & companies etc, has a few minor things to finish up otherwise it fully works. Let me know how to c…

Which sites do you scrape from?

WWR/RemoteOK but its pretty trivial to add new sources. I was using those for development with the purpose of adding a couple more right before launch.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here successfully earning side income from an app?

#29

Post by MarcelOlsz »

adithyasrin wrote: post #7
MarcelOlsz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should collaborate! I've also been building a job board but for the north american market mostly. I have an engine that scrapes and organizes job listings automatically. I haven't worked on it in months but it's still going strong scraping and archiving. It also has a backend to subscribe, apply, save, sort listings & companies etc, has a few minor things to finish up otherwise it fully works. Let me know how to c…

Interesting, thanks. I'm only focusing on Europe / Remote and will reach out if I come up with something.

Cool. Mine is only for remote jobs and has worldwide listings. Sounds good.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here successfully earning side income from an app?

#30

Post by ilaksh »

maxilevi wrote: post #10
ilaksh wrote: post #8

Recently had some success with a service where I collect about 4 cents per item. This is only feasible because Algorand fees are like 1/10th of a penny. People mint hundreds or thousands at a time so it's adding up a little bit. It's really more my main thing along with a few tiny contracts but those are hopefully also spawning two other services with per-transaction fees.

I am curious, can you share a link to the dapp?

https://algonfts.art
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