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

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

#221

Post by ipaddr »

wnolens wrote: post #144
gottebp wrote: post #29

After my grandfather got Parkinson’s disease circa 2005, I developed hand tremor cancelling software for the mouse [1]. It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer. It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough. I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It fe…

Thanks for posting, a real inspiration. This is peak development to me: to write high quality software to solve a problem I care about and make it available for others. If this sold zero copies, it would have all been worth it.

What about zero downloads?

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

#223

Post by sokoloff »

jerome-jh wrote: post #207
sokoloff wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like this put the "a 30% cut is outrageous!" into a different perspective for me.

It is still outrageous because those two big ones make a huge economy of scale. They did not develop a payment method for a single app but for millions.

Services are frequently priced by value to the buyer more than by cost to provide the service; I don't see a problem with that.

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

#224

Post by tailspin2019 »

MattyMc wrote: post #33
tailspin2019 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wrote an electron app to auto-price and market those tickets under face value Could you elaborate on this a little? I think I can imagine, but am curious to hear a bit more about how this worked!

For sure. Generally, the electron app would pull face value prices and availability from [baseballteam].com, current resale prices from hubstub.com ( Next, I had collected a list of email addresses from friends and a few posts on Facebook and Craigslist. The app had a button create/update a Google sheet with games/prices, pull in the emails, and batch email people (in groups of <50) the information along with the gam…

Very cool :)

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

#225

Post by ericshotbox »

20220616 wrote: post #172
scrozier wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a software developer by trade. I've had essential tremor all my life. Virtually all doctors say, "well, at least it's a benign condition." Right. And it's affected my life in countless ways, none of them good. It's gotten slowly worse over the years. It's not debilitating, but it's frustrating, and it rules out some activities completely. As I type this I randomly touch the touch pad or an unwanted key, and rando…

I know how hard ET is and I really feel for you. My dad’s ET started getting worse at around 40 and when he reached 65 it got to the point where he couldn’t eat without much difficulty, couldn’t write a simple note, use his phone to text, and many things we take for granted and it stressed him out to the point where he started to isolate; he lost motivation completely. It broke my heart and in 2018 I decided to call…

Deep brain stimulation. Brainwave entrainment. This is technology that really should be talked about more. Look it up on Google Scholars to see the research and results it has on many things such as, sleep disorders, concentration, learning, even found to reverse Alzhiemsers. It is so simple you can treat yourself from your cell phone. Deep brain stimulation is the same only they use magnetic pulses. Please look this up.

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

#227

Post by DantesKite »

ronyfadel wrote: post #181
jclardy wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, Mission Control Plus is one of those "super-obvious" once you are shown the idea, ideas. On an iPad you can close windows in the app switcher by swiping, the Mac does nearly the same thing but has no way to close windows. And I had to check for Batteries as well, seems so obvious that it exists on Mac coming from an iPad...but it just isn't there. Well done.

Thank you! Both had been things that had been bugging me on macOS for a long while, so one day I went out and fixed them.

These are some amazing utilities. I hope you continue to build more of them.

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

#228

Post by difflens »

awillen wrote: post #42

I was wondering why I had a sudden bit of traffic coming from HN this morning... for anybody interested in the dog treat business I answered some questions about in the original thread ( https://coopersdogtreats.com/ ), I did about 150k in revenue last year and roughly broke even on that. This year I expect to do a bit better and turn a bit of a profit. That said, I've got manufacturing and fulfillment mostly outsour…

Hi! Your comment about managing ad spend on facebook caught my eye. I've worked on AdTech before, especially reducing acquisition cost by using the Conversions API from Facebook. Just wondering if you've already tried that? If not, and you want someone to set it up for you, feel free to email me at support at difflens.com. I have some time and am willing to help out :)

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

#229

Post by verigit »

brad0 wrote: post #165
verigit wrote: post #160

I wrote a Git server with an iCloud backend: https://easygit.app It is making approximately $0 per month :)

This sounds really interesting from a technical point of view! What was your motivation in building it?

When I first created it, GitHub did not allow any free private repos (or allowed just one? I forget), so this was an easy way to store small private repos that I didn't want published to the public.

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

#230

Post by devilsbabe »

slivanes wrote: post #193
slivanes wrote: post #76

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…

> no gold selling or similar shenanigans

So the marketplace you're describing is not RMT then? You're facilitating in-game trades with in-game currencies, and making money some other way? (ads?)

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