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?

#291

Post by westoncb » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 12:57 AM UTC

harigov wrote: post #288

westoncb wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can make the visualization easily traversable using simple text queries ... That's a cool idea. I've been working on something similar, but that takes kind of a different angle which I like. What I have at the moment is a way of specifying filters for which properties should be displayed or not. Yes, small enough use case... unfortunately the smallest one I can think of is MASSIVE :P I will document the API…

Redis provides data structures to be stored inside its key-value database. It also allows you to setup hooks to listen to whenever something changes. You can potentially use it to connect client/server. Wrappers around client objects will sync with Redis whenever anything changes, and your visualization tool will listen to changes in Redis to update. The advantage with this is that some aspects of your system will be…

Oh dang, cool! I will definitely look into that. Want me to send you a message or something if I end up doing it? My email is in the contact section on my webpage.

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

#292

Post by garraeth » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 1:05 AM UTC

JayNeely wrote: post #244

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?

Neither my business partner nor I are any good at marketing. And we didn't like how most sites put so much pressure on their users to buy things, click ads, share with friends, send out marketing emails, etc...so the things we DID put in were kind of halfhearted, and always out of the way.

We tried selling the data (amazing data if you think about it!!). Anonymous of course! And/or selling the recommendations (easy enough since everything was organized by UPC/ISBN). But that's something it seems like you need to know people -- CEO's/CTO's of bigger companies. We just didn't have the connections, nor the personalities to kiss that much ass. But we tried for several years. I think they're all of the mindset that they've got "good enough" data on their own...or two guys in their garage are too small peanuts to trust. It's funny that just this week Amazon had a post here about it's 20th year of recommendation engine, ~yey~ -- and they still can't get it right (sour grapes? yeah...).

If we were to do it again, we'd probably focus on core functions (the site did A LOT). And seriously work on marketing aspects. Not dark patterns (https://darkpatterns.org/) but more organized and focused efforts.

Honestly though, if we did it again, it would not be for the money - it would be for a cool product and for our own fun...maybe integrate with Kodi...

We'd be smarter on hosting. We were at Rackspace first for $30k/mo...then realized we were being hoodwinked and found PEER1 for $1200/mo...then realized we could get away with a $300/mo DO droplet by converting everything to open source and optimizing -- granted over the course of the 8-10 years, tech improved. But, no more MSSQL, no paid search engine (we ended up on Solr -- AMAZING!), no Windows and just all open-source. I ran our recommendation engine on my computers at home and uploaded results from there. As with hosting, I think the open source stack has improved a lot.

Smarter on who we hire for PR - I got all our serious PR (Mashable, LifeHacker, Makeuseof, etc). We spend about $30k on snake-oil PR companies. Our first PR company took $20k and literally did nothing (not even a press release blast or PDF) - but suing would cost us way too much time/money so we ate it and went to another referral - who did the job, but it ended up more or less a pointless exercise.

After all that time, going into personal debt -- with creditors calling at all hours, no income in sight, thousands of hours devoted to it, alienating friends and family borrowing from them to survive, we finally decided to call it quits.

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

#293

Post by tuan » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 1:08 AM UTC

I created https://videoplaylist.online a few months ago. The idea was to alow users to quickly tag youtube video using a bookmarklet, and then play these youtube videos. It has a `quick select` feature that allows user to quickly create a temporary playlist and put the entire list on autoplay loop.

I wanted to create this app because I listen to music on youtube a lot, and I usually add the videos that I like to a youtube playlist, but I did not find a way to quickly pick videos from multiple playlists/bookmarks (i.e. mixing) and play them. The `quick select` feature does just that.

Nobody seems to think this is a good idea (and they are probably right). So I'm the only user of my own app :)

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

#294

Post by stretchwithme » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 1:11 AM UTC

saimiam wrote: post #75

Back 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…

In the exception-that-proves-the-rule department: notonmywatch.com is much better than onlyonotherpeopleswatches.com.

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

#295

Post by OJFord » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 1:11 AM UTC

byoung2 wrote: post #187

herval wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were entire groups of people using it for “dating”, uploading nude photos, etc (you could upload a single photo along with your pin). I also found at least one bestiality-oriented group, with “meetups”, so... there was that. :-|

If you had the stomach for it, it would be interesting to just make it a map service for adult content. There are ad networks and billing providers that specialize in this sort of thing, and AWS allows porn (legal, that is).

> (legal, that is)

Is any major platform more restrictive than the regional law?

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

#296

Post by traway3301 » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 1:12 AM UTC

I wrote https://qriusity.com/ as a part time project, I have always wanted to build a quiz app but there were hardly any quiz APIs available for public use, so I decided to take on the effort to build one myself, working on extending the db, right now it has around 17k questions, need to work on the API and content. Suggestions welcome on improving the API and legal aspects of collecting questions.

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

#297

Post by steamer25 » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 1:14 AM UTC

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…

My friend owns a local outdoor recreation equipment/rental/guide shop. He actually said he'd kill for an app like yours based primarily on location. He and his wife like to go on road trips and seeing which areas have more activities available would help them prioritize where to explore. He cited the maps in the MTB Project mobile app as a baseline interface--the shortcoming with that one being that it's too narrowly focused on biking.

He's also big in the local Chamber of Commerce and said that lots of Chambers are willing to spend money to position their town as outdoor-friendly.

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

#298

Post by bkyan » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 1:25 AM UTC

tuan wrote: post #293

I created https://videoplaylist.online a few months ago. The idea was to alow users to quickly tag youtube video using a bookmarklet, and then play these youtube videos. It has a `quick select` feature that allows user to quickly create a temporary playlist and put the entire list on autoplay loop. I wanted to create this app because I listen to music on youtube a lot, and I usually add the videos that I like to a yo…

I created a youtube playlist app, as well, and I'm also the only user of my own app. :) http://play.mindcast.com

Note: It's desktop-only as I use it from my desktop, and since I'm the only one using it, I didn't bother supporting mobile.

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

#299

Post by orthecreedence » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 1:26 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #85

byandyphillips wrote: post #82

I made a simple website that lets you send compliments to your friends (no negativity allowed) http://www.letskudos.com

That is impossible to police even if a committee of humans looks at every message and deliberates for 20 minutes. Negativity can be encoded in communication between two people in ways that cannot be detected if you don't have the private context.

Oh wow, what an GREAT comment. Thanks SO MUCH for your really insightful and inspiring comment that everyone loves...

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

#300

Post by vogt » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 1:32 AM UTC

dejv wrote: post #103

I've build complex app for managing vineyards and wineries. It has tons of features: time tracking, input tracking, harvest and production features, mapping, tons of budget/cost analysis. It turned out, it is hard to convince farmers to ditch their trusty excel sheets and notepads and start typing all those info into computer program. I managed to find few customers, but they haven't stick for longer than one year. I…

How does it handle payments, payable/receivable etc (if applicable)? I have found that in these cases often times the software handles the operations well, but the business logic is still tied up in legacy POS and things like this which makes the software more of a nice to have than a "I'll just do it the old way". I'd also be curious about the UX (am a designer)