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

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

#241

Post by kidproquo » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 10:34 PM UTC

roryisok wrote: post #115

bdukic wrote: post #8

I built Thrail ( https://thrail.io ) 6 months ago wanting to solve my own difficulty to find and book quality outdoors activities in a certain area, especially when coming to a new place (tourism or recent relocation). I think there are multiple reasons why it wasn't successful as I believed it might be, most importantly because I built something without first researching the market enough, and failure to do so got m…

Marketing is hard. Is there some kind of service out there where marketers will help you sell your app for a share of revenue? I'm not trolling here, just in case I've missed a really obvious one

Crowd Supply[0] is one service that I know of. Mainly focused on crowd-sourced projects.

[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/

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

#242

Post by eejdoowad » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 10:35 PM UTC

aerovistae wrote: post #13

I thought probably Hands Free for Chrome would see some donations given how much it could help someone who was disabled, and given how many donations I've seen more ordinary & simple extensions receive, but I only got $10 the past 3 years, and that was a single donation from a friend who felt bad seeing it at $0. https://www.handsfreechrome.com/ Barely any users, just around 400 or so.

Awesome job with the extension! I think the idea has great potential.

Judging from my five minute test drive, you could probably increase adoption if you made it 'discoverable'. It's hard to determine what to do once it's installed. Turns out, you have to click the browser action to start listening for user input. After that, you have to refer to the website to find out what commands are available. It would be great if there were on-screen suggestions of commands to voice. Using it was really frustrating and unreliable until I read the instructions on the web store page to disable 'ambient noise reduction' on macs. Showing an 'instructions' page on installation would help a lot. An instructional video would be great too.

Other nitpicks: * I couldn't get dictation to work. * More tab manipulation commands would be nice * I'm not a huge fan of the link hints placement and styling

I'm actually developing my own keybinding extension like Vimium/cVim/VimFx/Surfing Keys

https://github.com/lusakasa/saka-key

with the intent to use the codebase to later create a voice commands extension like yours.

After all the work I've put into my extension, I can see why only $10 in donations for your efforts is disheartening. Good luck!

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

#243

Post by roryisok » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 10:36 PM UTC

ineptech wrote: post #140

ineptech wrote: post #89

I made Word Nazi, which is essentially just a dirty version of Taboo (in the same way that Cards Against Humanity is a dirty version of Apples to Apples) in app form. Lessons learned: * I should've paid someone to do some decent graphics, turns out "minimalist aesthetic" is not the same as "no effort put in to design" * Making it a free demo, with the full game available as an in-app-purchase, sounds like a good deal…

For those checking out the ineptech site, please don't miss the poetry compiler joke! It's the bit I'm the most proud of. It's in an unlinkable modal so actually I'll just paste it here: Upon a stack of bits, about so tall, // Boolean[] isprime = new Boolean[n]; just think, O traveller, what we could do // Arrays.fill(isprime, true); if every other bit was set to false // for (int i = 4; i (You may have figured out t…

+1 for jokes in code. I have a thesaurus plugin with an ASCII T-Rex in the source.

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

#244

Post by JayNeely » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 10:39 PM UTC

garraeth wrote: post #63

I built itrackmine.com ( http://mashable.com/2008/12/26/itrackmine/ ). And its killer recommendation engine (books, movies, and music) -- we knew what you owned from all stores, not just what you //bought// at Amazon (or single store) so ours were extremely accurate. Along with a "user A is this similar to user B" system...and the whole tracking, sharing, mobile app, barcode-scan, manage-your-stuff-package. Made $10…

Why do you feel it didn't really generate revenue?

What would you do differently if you were going to do it again?

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

#245

Post by roryisok » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 10:40 PM UTC

ineptech wrote: post #89

I made Word Nazi, which is essentially just a dirty version of Taboo (in the same way that Cards Against Humanity is a dirty version of Apples to Apples) in app form. Lessons learned: * I should've paid someone to do some decent graphics, turns out "minimalist aesthetic" is not the same as "no effort put in to design" * Making it a free demo, with the full game available as an in-app-purchase, sounds like a good deal…

> spline reticulation

Classic. I miss simcopter

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

#246

Post by mandatory » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 10:49 PM UTC

westoncb wrote: post #139

I've maxed out a couple credit cards and spent all my severance pay etc. trying to finish building this '3D abstract visual debugger,' which I'm calling Lucidity [video]: http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd I started working on it in 2014 and it's been on my mind ever since. I applied to YC with it a long time ago (was not accepted, and I can see so much wrong with the application I sent now...) I was laid off in Nove…

I'm in love with this, I have nothing constructive to add but you should be really proud of this work. Reminded me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4

Think you're on to something that this talk points out very well.

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

#247

Post by kidproquo » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 10:50 PM UTC

Hmm, this is going to get depressing. Oh well. Here goes.

I think my main problem is that I create solutions that are great for my problems.

Flaming Notes[0] - iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Web game to learn music notation. Total revenue: 10 USD over 2 years.

MelloNote[1] - Android app to sync audio files with text (lyrics, guitar chords, etc). Think 4-track subtitles that can be used by a band. Earnings: 6 USD in 1 year.

Tasktopus[2] - Desktop kanban app (Windows, Mac and Linux). Earnings: 500 USD in 1 year.

See N Tell[3] - A web-based sentence construction game to help 5-10 year-olds to learn words via images from Google Image Search. Earnings: 0

[0]: http://www.adhyet.com/flamingnotes

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adhyet.mel...

[2]: https://gumroad.com/l/ADWm/tasktopus

[3]: https://seentell.me

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

#248

Post by averageweather » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 10:57 PM UTC

http://www.averageweather.io

I have no content, thus no SEO, which has dramatically limited traffic.

Paid search is extremely effective to get people on my site, but AdSense doesn't cover the costs.

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

#249

Post by rgj » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 10:58 PM UTC

http://www.sifrgenerator.com was made to generate SIFR fonts, way before webfonts were commonly used.

I spent a lot of time generating Swf files using PHP and learned a lot. The site got a lot of traffic but apparently it didn't target an audience that clicked any ads at all.

It made less than $150 in Adsense in about seven years. I did sell a backlink for $250 and I ended up with around 150,000 font files that were uploaded over all those years... ;) Still need to build a find-and-download-a-font site and attach it to the upload database...

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

#250

Post by danielsg » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 10:58 PM UTC

roryisok wrote: post #237

danielsg wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying a similar approach. I developed an Electron app called First Novel App which is supposed to help writers silence their inner editors. It's available free to download at http://www.firstnovelapp.com which redirects to a Gumroad store.

That's a really interesting concept - the snippets idea reminds me of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. No chapters in that book, only paragraphs

Thanks! I'm also working on a web app version of it.