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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

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Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#291

Post by agotterer »

VoidWhisperer wrote: post #109
agotterer wrote: post #78

A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business. Since 2023 we’ve been to 4…

Out of curiosity, if you don't mind sharing, what is the sort of profit you see on that 126,000 as i'm assuming alot of that goes to paying the restaurants?

Most of it goes to paying for the meal. We make around a 20% margin. Our cost to operate the business is quite low, but we do invest a lot of our personal time into it. It’s a labor of love.

Our biggest cost center is when we guarantee a minimum number of seats and come up a little short. Doesn’t happen often, but when it does it eats into the margin fast.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#292

Post by laurentiurad »

davenci wrote: post #232
laurentiurad wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that development has become easier and the barrier for entry is generally lower due to AI. However, without distribution it's still pretty much impossible to get clients. You also need to have some engineering background since AI cannot solve everything for you. Important to mention, IMHO not many people are willing to sacrifice their time and energy to start something that doesn't have a clear path to profit…

That makes sense. And I guess distribution/marketing is an ever moving target in which those being the most clever and willing to put in the time and energy wins regardless of AI getting better? Like, say AI makes distribution and marketing easier, now it’s easier for everyone, but they still compete for the same clients. So while your signal is getting stronger, so is the noise (the signal of all the other competito…

Exactly, and currently I'd say that AI is not too helpful with distribution/marketing. I still do copyrighting myself as with AI it really feels impersonal and "artificial". By distribution I also refer to social media following and users that trust you to test/buy your product. IMHO this is still the most challenging part to solve, as it takes a lot of time to improve your social media presence to reach a state where it's guaranteed that you will have customers from the moment of the launch of your product.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#293

Post by kelvindegrees »

crobertsbmw wrote: post #19

I’m still selling Computer Engineering for Babies. And I just launched a new book called Simple Machines Made Simple on Kickstarter a month or two ago. Both books are basically just simple interactive demos for kids and adults. https://hackylabs.com

One of my favorites! The baby likes it. The grandparents are confused by it.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#294

Post by agotterer »

kilroy123 wrote: post #236
agotterer wrote: post #78

A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business. Since 2023 we’ve been to 4…

Wow! I've thought so long about doing the same thing in London. I wouldn't do it to make money persay, but to meet amazing people and connect folks. Would love to chat sometime.

We never intended to make money. The first dinner was with 13 of our friends. We just organized the location and menu.

From there people started to tell their friends, who told others, then the local newspaper wrote about us, and people started talking about us on Facebook food groups and posting on Instagram. The community grew very organically, we never spent a penny on marketing. Most of the original 13 don’t come anymore, and we have grown into an incredibly diverse community.

Happy to chat, email is in my profile.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#295

Post by insin »

I'm selling browser extensions on the App Store, but the main money-maker is currently https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-twitter

When Twitter killed off third-party apps, the browser extension I'd been developing ever since "New Twitter" launched in 2019 suddenly became one of the few ways to make Twitter more tolerable to use, and the number of users of the Chrome version tripled from 30k to 90k in a fortnight (mostly in Japan).

When they confirmed third-party apps had been killed on purpose and jacked up the price of the API to discourage new ones, I started selling it on the App Store the next week and it's made more than $500 per month ever since.

Before the end of the year I'm hoping to roll out a single paid subscription which works across all my extensions when you sign up for it, which enables syncing settings across all your browsers and devices, unlocks additional subscriber-only features, and will enable creation of extension-specific APIs if there are future features which require one. Between Control Panel for Twitter and https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube I have ~390,000 users, so, y'know, please like and subscribe.

That will _eventually_ include my free Hacker News extension ( https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news ) so things like new comment counts, user notes and muted users can sync across every browser and device you use Hacker News on.

If that takes off, I hope to make the App Store versions free and figure out how to give anyone who bought it 3 months of the subscription per extension they bought as a thank-you. If anyone's done something like that before, I'd be happy to hear about it via any communication method in my HN profile!

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#296

Post by peterspath »

mmoustafa wrote: post #87

Right about $500 now, down from $5K at peak AI assistant in your iMessage group chats https://olly.bot

How did you make a bot that can send iMessages? I want to make a service on my Mac that can send notifications through iMessage. (preferable multiple chats, different topics for different notification types)

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#298

Post by agotterer »

thefolks wrote: post #115
agotterer wrote: post #78

A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business. Since 2023 we’ve been to 4…

Love the communal aspect. Curious about the economics of this, how do you typically split revenue with the restaurant, and what’s the average ticket price per guest?

We negotiate a per seat all in cost with the restaurant inclusive of food, one drink, tip, and tax. We sell the tickets directly to our members and add some margin on top. Average ticket is $115.

5 days before the event we lock the head count with the restaurant. At this point the ticket is non refundable (we allow transfers). Then we pay the restaurant one lump sum. At the event the guests are only responsible for their bar tab (outside the one included drink), we don’t get a cut of that.

Sometimes we have seat minimums we need to hit and eat the cost if we are short (that rarely happens). We don’t allow ordering any other food outside of what’s on our menu.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#299

Post by dustypotato »

rahulmax wrote: post #151
laurentiurad wrote: post #135

I built and run several SaaS platforms: - https://dave-bot.com -> a full-stack AI platform where you can generate videos, images, music, code, 3d objects with frontier Gen AI models. - https://headsnap.io -> a platform that you can generate images of yourself based on 4 selfies. - https://quantiq.live -> a service providing financial and historical data for stocks, as well as government trades. - https://aivestor.tec…

Headsnap is such a scammy and/or crappy website. I paid to purchase credits for $5, tried to train a model to generate a headshot. Nothing. It just refreshes and comes back with nothing. Will not recommend.

you can just do it with nano banana for 1/100 the price

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#300

Post by martylamb »

miller_joe wrote: post #290
martylamb wrote: post #275

https://martiansoftware.com/chatkeeper/ I built ChatKeeper because I wanted to treat my ChatGPT history like a local knowledge base, with local-first access to my data. It’s a command-line tool (GUI in progress) that takes a full ChatGPT .zip export and syncs it with local Markdown files. You can move and rename them freely and they will stay in sync on future runs. It pairs well with tools like Obsidian and lets you…

I’ve been looking for something like this for Claude

Yep, you're not the only one, and I want to add support for more formats/LLMs. Right now ChatKeeper's internals are very ChatGPT-specific, but I have a plan to change that and Claude (which I also use frequently) will be the first one I add support for.
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