Created SAAS to automatically generate trading strategies from price/volume data. The strategies are optimized to achieve high Sharpe ratios. However, it turned out that Sharpe ratio had little value in predicting out-of-sample performance. Abandoned the project before trying to monetize it. The app is still up at http://turboquant.com
Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
261–270 of 600 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#262I made a recursive version of Google Alerts. It was cool and it worked as intended, but it was difficult to explain to non-technical users and the payoff for using it is very slow, so it didn’t get any user traction.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#263In 2004 my brother and I developed a buttplug shaped like George W. Bush - we called it the Bushplug. Manufacturing was more expensive than we had expected but we sold about 100 of them - presumably as novelty gifts. Our price point was too high for a novelty gift and the nose was a little too pointy to be an enjoyable sex toy. We made our money back and had some fun with being featured on BoingBoing and Fleshbot. So…
This is hilarious. Thank you for the laughs.
You should look up the pictures of it - there must still be some out there...
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#264loooong list culminating in ratelimits.dev some holes in the ultra-niche cloud services tools market are holes for a reason
When I searched for something like that, all I found was to hide my serverless behind RapidAPI, which also include costumer facing payment processing.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#265Recent startup failure was ZguideZ - an app that allowed locals to create their own digital tours, charge what they want, and then collect the majority of the profit on tours sold. It failed because it was a far bigger project than I was able to manage as a solo founder - though I tried. It was beyond my ability to code it and I didn't have funding to recruit quality developers. I hired a budget team and we cut corne…
This idea seems really similar to Detour, created by Andrew Mason and later acquired by Bose: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/24/bose-acquires-andrew-mason...
The idea of running it through a pair of AR sunglasses is wild! We were doing it strictly on smartphones - some of the biggest headaches came as a result of Apple's App Store process - we had to rework everything and since the back end was independent that meant we had to rework the android version as well.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#266I am fascinated by hardware with poor software support so I built two highly unsuccessful native mac apps: MASS and LabelScope to work with weight scales and label printers. You can read their defunct websites at https://semireg.com/mass/ and https://semireg.com/labelscope/ Both worked in novel ways. MASS “floated” the current weight above all apps and when double-clicked would insert the current weight at the focuse…
I had a similar idea for a web based version about 8 years ago. Even ran some Google Ads with a MVP landing page to gauge interest (there was).
Finally never got around to building it.
Is this a sustainable business for you now? Or just a side project?
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#267Recent startup failure was ZguideZ - an app that allowed locals to create their own digital tours, charge what they want, and then collect the majority of the profit on tours sold. It failed because it was a far bigger project than I was able to manage as a solo founder - though I tried. It was beyond my ability to code it and I didn't have funding to recruit quality developers. I hired a budget team and we cut corne…
AirBnB has something like that called "Experiences." I'm not saying that to be critical; if anything it should be affirmation that you were onto something, i.e. there really is a market for such things. https://www.airbnb.ca/host/experiences During the pandemic, AirBnB has also been helping people organize online experiences.
Definitely a market for it. Another Hawaii company, Shaka Guides has a similar concept though with voice-actor recorded tours and they seem to be doing well. Our concept was to have locals sharing their history and knowledge on a self-guiding tour.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#268https://app.scrollkeeper.com a subscription SaaS for storing, managing and sharing academic papers. I wrote it because everyone I knew had a problem storing their papers. I did manage to get one yearly paying customer though and I have enjoyed using it to manage my own papers.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#269It wasn't a big serious project or anything, but for my first income generating project ever I made a small single player word game for Android that I should have tried to monetise more. Android had only been out for a couple of years at the time so it was easier to get noticed then. The game was free with an ad-banner during gameplay. I was making a decent amount in ad clicks and also had players emailing me for a p…
Neat web version, but yikes did that thing light up my laptop's fans and make FF use nearly 100% of two 2.8ghz i7 cores here. Seems a bit ridiculous considering what's going on.
Argh, I'll look into it because it shouldn't do that. It's using DOM + simple hardware accelerated animations intentionally (over something like canvas) and no polling to keep CPU usage down. Runs fine on Chrome on Mac.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#270An app for finding the best hotels for traveling with kids.
It was basically crawling the booking.com API and then applying an algorithm to figure out if a property was suitable for families with children or not. It would do the usual. Parse descriptions and try to find keywords there, parse and count the number of comments mentioning family-related topics, up-score hotels with certain facilities and then push the images through Google Cloud Vision APIs to re-order the images putting first the ones with children, pools, playgrounds, etc.
With that done, just an app to find hotels by searching anywhere.
It was more built for personal use but ended up being quite attractive. But marketing apps is hard so never really pushed it. Then, also... covid happened.