Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

I have had a bunch of little websites that didn't do much of anything. Some problems that have plagued my projects (especially health-related ones):

1) Credibility.

I am getting well when the world says that cannot be done. Most people don't want to believe this at all. So I get called crazy, a charlatan, etc.

2) Inherent monetization challenges in the problem space.

I am convinced that part of what is wrong with modern medicine is that money gets made off of treatment, not off of positive health outcomes. This is a conflict of interest for healthcare providers who have no motive to actually get you well and lots of motive to give you just enough improvement to keep you willing to keep paying for more.

3) I'm a woman.

This has made it hard for me to network, etc. A lot of men who know what I want to learn either will talk to me to hit on me or won't talk to me because they don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. Trying to make connections has been really hard.

4. I know how to get well, I don't know how to do business.

I know how to accomplish a thing, but I don't know how to accomplish all the stuff that goes into turning that into a money-making venture.

5. I'm very eye catching.

I have a long history of attracting a LOT of attention. I have really struggled with figuring out how to get the attention off of ME and onto MY WORK. It is getting better, but this has really been frustrating.

There are no doubt other issues, but those are a few things off the top of my head.

Negotiate With Us (https://negotiatewith.us)

I was running a career coaching business and this was a stab at automating the training of people for salary negotiations.

Soft launched it a couple months ago so maybe it's too early to say "it won't make money".

When Google Cardboard first came out and the Oculus Rift DK2 was first shipping, I had already been making AR apps and anaglyph stereo apps in the browser. I packed up a bunch of code I already had for Device Orientation API in mobile browsers, write a new side-by-side rendering effect for myself, and made it all into a simple framework to make stereo WebGL/Three.js demos easier to throw together quickly. It basically became the first "WebVR" framework, a few months before Mozilla and Google had announced anything about officially working on the API. I called it Pyschologist.js.

It got a little attention, but the biggest surge was when I created a text editor inside of it that rendered to a texture, rather than using CSS3D transforms of existing, content-editable text editor components like a few other demos had done. I called the text editor Primrose, but people seemed to respond to that branding better than Psychologists, and nobody seemed interested in a myriad of small components, just a single, integrated solution, so I sunk the text editor into the framework, rebranded everything as just Primrose, and spent a ton of time writing a website and basic documentation.

I've been trying to build a business around VR ever since. First, I tried to sell the framework. Made $10 on one license sale. I tried consulting services. Made about $2000 for a company I had joined that pledged to sponsor my development and do marketing and sales for me. I tried building a WebRTC teleconferencing app, but couldn't get enough focus from the company to push it well. After a year of no movement from the sales team, I'm back to being on my own now and back to trying to figure out my own path.

I think the teleconferencing app idea still has merit, and I have a few other idea that have some potential, but I don't really know anything about marketing and selling SaaS. So I guess that is my next project, to learn.

https://www.primrosevr.com

I still do occasional work in ColdFusion so I thought it would be nice to have a Package Manager. So I went and built https://cfpm.io. We used it internally for a couple of things, but it never took off. Most likely because who uses ColdFusion still, or maybe it just wasn't easy enough to use.

My official diagnosis is "atypical cystic fibrosis."