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Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make?

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Re: Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make?

#241

Post by erikrothoff »

aerialfish wrote: post #240
erikrothoff wrote: post #34

I made http://feeder.co , a Chrome extension to simulate Firefox's RSS live bookmarks back in 2010. Now it has 500,000 active installs on Chrome and our cloud hosted service is netting around 1500 USD each month after costs (1700 subscriptions). Me and my twin brother have had it as a passive income thingie for years. After a failed attempt at selling it (SaaS metrics are NOT easy) we met a guy who saw some potential…

Wow didn't expect to see you here! I've been a paying customer for years (though I had a paying hiatus when a iOS app update left many of my blogs poorly rendered). I had no idea it was just a side project. Keep up the good work.

Wow! Thanks, cool to hear. We're really trying to improve our communication and get our shit together. If you're still a user, or want to talk, we're listening at support@feeder.co.

Re: Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make?

#242

Post by erikrothoff »

marktangotango wrote: post #223
erikrothoff wrote: post #34

I made http://feeder.co , a Chrome extension to simulate Firefox's RSS live bookmarks back in 2010. Now it has 500,000 active installs on Chrome and our cloud hosted service is netting around 1500 USD each month after costs (1700 subscriptions). Me and my twin brother have had it as a passive income thingie for years. After a failed attempt at selling it (SaaS metrics are NOT easy) we met a guy who saw some potential…

If you don't mind; How much are costs? What does the backend do? Thanks!

Our servers are costing us around 600 usd per month, Linode and AWS. Here is a screenshot of Linode manager and AWS billing console: http://imgur.com/a/UUQ65. The names of the servers perhaps give it away, but we use redis for message passing, 4 servers that crawl around 100 000 feeds every 10 minutes, 2 cassandra databases storing posts, 1 mega MySQL database for metadata and users (post lists, unread post lists, etc). AWS for SES (e-mail notifications) and S3 (extremely cheap key value store for large items, post contents).

Then we have additional costs of http://chartmogul.com (love. required to know your SaaS metrics) http://intercom.io/ (love love love, awesome product).

Edit: Oh, and after a really bad downtime we're paying for pingdom and statuspage.io. So our total expenses are now probably around 1000 USD per month. Braintree and PayPal also take around 5%-19% of each payment.

Re: Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make?

#243

Post by erikrothoff »

justanton wrote: post #216
erikrothoff wrote: post #34

I made http://feeder.co , a Chrome extension to simulate Firefox's RSS live bookmarks back in 2010. Now it has 500,000 active installs on Chrome and our cloud hosted service is netting around 1500 USD each month after costs (1700 subscriptions). Me and my twin brother have had it as a passive income thingie for years. After a failed attempt at selling it (SaaS metrics are NOT easy) we met a guy who saw some potential…

Pardon my ignorance: but how one actually earns money with chrome extensions?

You can either sell your users data (we get a lot offers for that...). It is not scalable and does not feel good in the tummy. We've been approached by fairly large reputable companies wanting click stream data, and smaller companies wanting everything from DNS misses to adding affiliate links in webpages. These are not good for your users and will not scale. Also Google is constantly cracking down on these schemes and rightfully banning extensions that do this. It hurts the rest of us.

We're focusing on building a great product and a scalable business. Making money from our users should be off something that benefits them as well, like a pro service with more features.

Re: Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make?

#244

Post by erikrothoff »

justanton wrote: post #222
RaitoBezarius wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ask the user to pay a subscription fee to use the extension. (a freemium model for example). Then, the user, in fact, pays only for using the back-end API. The front-end, of course, is like a website, """open-source""".

does Chrome Web Store have this feature built-in (to offer and process payments for extensions)?

And yes, Chrome web store allows payments. We have http://braintreepayments.com and http://paypal.com. Having them play together is hard enough...

Re: Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make?

#245

Post by alexjv89 »

csallen wrote: post #171
trcollinson wrote: post #167

I've been working on a side project for the last 3 months and it has finally gotten to the point where I am making more than $1000/month with more than 25 active customers 100% through word of mouth. I am working on a Show HN with some of my learning from the process so I won't get too deep into it here but here are a couple of highlights: * You do have time. I work a time consuming job, have a wife and kids, and sti…

I think all of this advice is spot on. It's what I've experienced myself working on Taskforce and Indie Hackers, and it's backed up by what I've learned from interviewing ~40 founders of profitable businesses in the past few months. Picking a good market might be the biggest thing. If you pick a market you don't understand, it's way harder to build a good product that solves an important problem well. You end up gues…

Thanks for the comment. Two things - 1) Finding Indiehackers.com interesting .. digging deep into it. 2) ""I haven't really done much marketing yet," - and it's often because they're in a market they don't understand well. - makes sense..

Re: Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make?

#246

Post by fodoj »

touchingwood wrote: post #238
fodoj wrote: post #234

I made a platform where people can hire a mentor to learn programming (ruby/rails, frontend, devops, big data). I've focused on mentorship with a per-week payment, so not a 1hour tutor or 15min "solve concrete task" service, but a real, long-term mentor dedicated to sharing all the knowledge with students. Initial customers base grew from the free ebook I wrote and various blog posts available on the website. Lots of…

Love this idea. How do you vet the teachers and how do you make sure they keep going through your site (and not just go direct)?

I am very careful with picking mentors and I generally just trust them to do their job. :-) It might not scale well long term, but that's the problem I don't need to solve right now. Right now if some lead tries to go directly to mentor, mentor always 1. Reports it to me; 2. Tells this lead to pay through mkdev.me.

It's simply much more convenient to mentor through mkdev.me than to do it on ones own.

Re: Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make?

#247

Post by malcolmocean »

I run a productivity app called Complice (https://complice.co/), which is currently making me about $3k/mo. If you want to learn tons more about the process of getting to profitable, you can read my profile on IndieHackers from back in August: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/complice

Re: Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make?

#249

Post by streptomycin »

taphangum wrote: post #233
streptomycin wrote: post #10

https://basketball-gm.com/ is a basketball management sim video game (sorta like football manager), and it makes more than that from ads.

Where did you get the initial traffic?

https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1j1e6q/i_made_a_single... got some initial traffic, and then it grew steadily for a while (although it seems to have reached a plateau this year).

Re: Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make?

#250

Post by _asciiker_ »

marktangotango wrote: post #226
_asciiker_ wrote: post #36

I've launched Sentopia ( https://www.sentopia.net ) as a side project and it is still easily making over 1K with just 2 medium sized clients but it is not passive income, requires some maintenance & customer support but still very much worth it. This year we're launching new features and a simple API: ( https://sentopia.net/apidoc/ )

Very nice, what did you use to generate your api docs?

Thank you! I used apiDoc (http://apidocjs.com/)
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