I have a whole bunch of registered domains I haven't done anything with. For example : http://www.procrastinationjournal.com/
Gonna get around to it any time now.
Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
261–270 of 476 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#262I tried to make an IMDb for politics a few years ago. I got to some interesting places - I was consuming the records of the California state government; elections and house/senate records, to see who was in office when and what they did (to a limited extent).
I got a mentor, and we pushed me to try to put out any kind of product for the... 2012? election, so I figured out a neat way to make word clouds of the legislation written by a person; I figured it'd be a decent bad way to find out what topics they're active about. I put it up as an IndieGoGo, and had some fun with friends and family exploring the database, seeing what interesting statistics we could pull out. Made maybe a grand from 3-10 donors.
Ultimately, as far as I could get as a one-man team, I couldn't actually take it anywhere solo. Theoretically, one can, with all the tools that are out and about - but I'd run into the motivation / momentum issue. Carrying an entire thing on just your own shoulders doesn't work out very well.
I spent a year-ish building it off-and-on, starting as a side project during the last couple months of regular employment; but I also skipped the country to hitch-hike for three months, and otherwise didn't dedicate myself to it like a real job while I was unemployed and "trying" to make it work.
However, I basically taught myself web-dev / RoR in order to do it, and now I'm a nearly-senior RoR dev, so that all worked out pretty well in the end!
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About a year ago, I started making a little mindfulness widget. You'd sign up on the website, give it your phone number, and it'd text you mindfulness questions throughout the day.
Currently, I'm working on what's basically dependency management for cosmetic ingredients (cosmetics are made of stuff that's made of stuff and you need a breakdown at that 2nd level), specifically for a friend who's a chemical process engineer and needs more than spreadsheets can deliver. This one I'm doing properly as a side-project, rather than trying to do it "full-time".
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The big take away from these for me is: Have a team before you try to make it more than a side-project. Doesn't have to be other programmers - it can be you and a "primary customer" - but you need other people to share the emotional burden of keeping momentum.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#263I kind of want this to be a periodic HN topic, like "Who's Hiring" - "What's Stalling", maybe?
Get us talking about projects that we're working on that need a boost of any kind.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#264Thimble for Mac ( https://thimblemac.com ) It's a plugin to bring gesture-shortcuts to graphic design tools (Sketch, Photoshop, etc.). I've worked on it in bursts of my spare time for a few years, and took a break from development the past several months. At some point I started calling it more of a 'passion project' because I just really wanted to see other forms of UI in the world outside of the sandboxes of gaming…
this looks really good!
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#265Spent about three calendar months (logged 120 hours IIRC) and few hundred EUR building a simple hardware product- small dongle to stream drone telemetry over WiFi (MAVLink to WiFi bridge). Could sell just 5 of them, still have about 30 in stock, so commercial failure, but at least got two things out of it: 1) Bragging rights about having sold something to large aerospace organisation. 2) Finished something from start…
> 2) Finished something from start to finish.
Solid!
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#266Back in 2007, I made neverplayalone.com to find activity partners. Within a few days of launch, someone pointed out three things - Meetup was gaining traction, URL sounded risqué, and never to use negative words like never in the URL. In 2010-11, I worked on lug-it.com to let people carry stuff in their luggage for others. It leveraged FB's social graph to engender trust. I just wasn't ready to market and grow the us…
"because my cofounder decided that he was going to be the "vision" guy and I was going to do all the work."
:-) This happens more often than not. All the success and visibility, but none of the work.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#267Arcade game developer here. I loved the game concept of ABA's "Defeat Me": http://wonderfl.net/c/9ykQ . SHMUP where each enemy is a copy of you. Round 3 you fight a clone of Round 1, Round 2, mirrored. but I disagreed with several major design decisions: 1) Rounds were too difficult (a deadline came in very fast, the bullets were nearly the size of the ship) 2) Player movement & weapons changed rapidly (speed & numbe…
I just played your game, it is extremely fun but I think there is a lot of missed potential and to be honest I would never buy it in its current state. It feels like a tech demo rather than a full game. My unsolicited advice is as follows: The art is boring. Most bullet hell games either have a mecha or anime art style with a lot of flashy effects. The closest in style to your game is probably geometry wars but your…
Thank you for your feedback!
I will have to think about the art. I went for minimalist approach where nothing but core mechanical data is shown.
I see that this kind of minimalist approach isn't super popular (you + others have commented, I forgot to put that in my first comment).
In my next game (a 2P versus game, also available at www.Combo.Zone ), I experimented with excessive particle effects but art is a major weakness of my development.
Characterization + avatar: Spot on points, thank you.
There is poem at the end that sort of explains the story, but it's very tacked on. What I'm taking from your feedback is that some sort of context - no matter how thin - is critical to keep players engaged.
Levels: Thanks for bringing this up. Fully continuous gameplay felt a little too confusing + overwhelming - by clearing a wave down to the last enemy you get a moment of relief.
It takes under 5 minutes to get through all of the levels, at which point the game changes and you get a continuous set of 8 clones (still kill from 8 to 1, then the 1st in the list is replaced by your last pattern) with random weapons. It's the most fun part of the game IMO but it's difficult without knowing what all the weapons are (identified by color).
I tried a weapon unlock system where you scored points for killing enemies + could purchase a weapon between stages to upgrade. More accurate shooting gave you more points faster so you could skip the easier parts quicker the more experienced you were.
I'm sorry to hear you found the first parts boring so quickly.
If you want to try the more fun part, open up game.js in the source and change line 626 to " this.quantumpilot = true" ... to make the weapons random every level.
And ah crap, you helped me find a bug. With the new 2 color scheme for each stage, the final stage would still have all the enemies the same color instead of being differentiated. Thanks stranger.
I will send your comments to an artist I know and get their take on it.
I'm leaning towards leaving the game as is though, and moving onto new projects. My next big project is all about characters - a Choose Your Own adventure where you see the same events from different perspectives. You start as a barista in a coffee shop and whoever you give coffee too is who you play as next until they return.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#268https://vidgen.io It's a web app that generates summary videos of online articles/content. I launched it in February and it hasn't made a dime. I was charging ~$3 per generated video, but since it's had zero traction, the videos can now be downloaded for free. The main feature it's lacking is a way to customize the generated videos. Once I get this implemented I will try promoting it again. Spent about 3 months build…
There's a germ of a really interesting idea in here, esp with video sort of becoming the de facto standard of content consumption these days ( at least in short form across social media ).
Maybe take a breather from the tech side and go out to some possible users, and I would almost start super niche-y with this type of thing. Don't bother developing some type of customizing generated video tool yet. I bet there's a substantial group of people out there that either have historical content that they would pay to put in video form to distribute across social, or some group that's forced to produce content in standard text format, but would love an easy 'to-video' button solution. And in both cases, I would imagine they would have very specific requirements for you in terms of transforming their content, how the output should look, etc, etc, etc. It would probably be all kinds of specific code that you would be loathe to write for a single client, but you should. And from that maybe it will help guide you w/ whatever next tech thing is worth implementing. Anyhow, 2 cents from internet stranger so take it for what it's worth ;)
I am curious though, what is the bulk of your costs in hosting that's pushing it to 2K in 3 months -- or am I mid-reading that?
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#269Last year, on college, I started working on a bot to consistently win money in daily fantasy basketball. I think I went negative before I paused working on it.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#270Probably doesn't count, but I'll post anyways... I've written the beginnings for two games, but didn't flesh out and complete the game mechanics because I haven't wanted to deal with the legal expenses involved in establishing an LLC and trademarking my assets, so I haven't been motivated to complete and release them. I don't want to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on legal protections and then only make…
Why do you feel the need to trademark your assets at this point?
I mean, it sounds like your blocker to making them worth something is that they're possibly not worth anything...
...so why not make it, and then if it starts making money, pop the trademarks? People aren't likely to notice (and steal) unless it's successful enough anyway.
...plus, AFAIK, you can't protect game mechanics; it's something like they're considered the same as math: can't copyright, can't patent.