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Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

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Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#31

Post by jamestnz »

osrec wrote: post #25
quakenul wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your niche? What is it that makes you succeed in this crowded space?

We do in-house deployments for corporate clients, which many other providers do not offer. Our app is loved by our customers, and especially so because it's a light PWA that feels native. We also offer a free forever tier and are also integrated with UK tax authorities to submit company taxes online (this will be mandatory from 2019 onwards). Our support is considered to be really good, because we bend over backwards…

Very impressive! I must say, writing an entire accounting/bookkeeping package seems like a lot of work, especially as a side project. Can I ask what domain-specific knowledge you had before you decided to embark on it? For example, did you already have experience in small business financials to guide you? Did you have someone like a Chartered Accountant or Tax Lawyer advise you?

Also, just FYI -- your FAQ contains an outdated reference: API currently in beta, but will be available by mid November 2017

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#32

Post by westoncb »

marianattestad wrote: post #12

http://omgenomics.com/circa Circa is an easy-to-use tool for building circos plots with genomics data. I built the visualization piece (and most of the UI) with D3.js and made it into a desktop app with Electron. Initially sold it for $25 per user (one-time cost), which made about $750 a month. Then some professors told me it was way too cheap, so I increased the price to $100. Since then, it has made about $1,500 ev…

That's pretty cool—congrats. Especially interesting for me to see, because it's the kind of tool and business model that interests me. One thing I wonder though is how it can be sustainable using the one time cost model. I suppose if the market were large enough, then you could just charge for new major versions every couple years and that might be sufficient. But maybe some kind of more expensive licensing for specific types of customers?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#37

Post by zygotic12 »

marianattestad wrote: post #12

http://omgenomics.com/circa Circa is an easy-to-use tool for building circos plots with genomics data. I built the visualization piece (and most of the UI) with D3.js and made it into a desktop app with Electron. Initially sold it for $25 per user (one-time cost), which made about $750 a month. Then some professors told me it was way too cheap, so I increased the price to $100. Since then, it has made about $1,500 ev…

Just out of interest. Has anyone offered you a job because of this post? And to the wider world why not?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#38

Post by 300bps »

Probably not what you're asking, but my side project is working on software projects for a couple local businesses. I work about 12 hours per week on the side at $150 per hour so I make about $7,200 per month.

Having W2 and 1099 income like this is advantageous as well. First, I max out my social security tax at my main employer which means my side income is social security tax free. Second, I max out my 401k employee contribution of $18,500 at my main employer. I then have an Individual 401k with Vanguard where I take about 20% of my profits and deposit that as the employer portion which lowers my federal taxes substantially. I take a good portion of what's left and deposit that in a 529 account for my kids which my state gives a tax deduction for that on state taxes.

My smaller client was just a friend that I met through my kids' school. My larger client I met while studying for a programming certification at a baseball clinic my oldest son attended. A guy who owned a local business saw me with a thick book and approached me with, "Are you in IT?"

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#39

Post by osrec »

jamestnz wrote: post #31
osrec wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do in-house deployments for corporate clients, which many other providers do not offer. Our app is loved by our customers, and especially so because it's a light PWA that feels native. We also offer a free forever tier and are also integrated with UK tax authorities to submit company taxes online (this will be mandatory from 2019 onwards). Our support is considered to be really good, because we bend over backwards…

Very impressive! I must say, writing an entire accounting/bookkeeping package seems like a lot of work, especially as a side project. Can I ask what domain-specific knowledge you had before you decided to embark on it? For example, did you already have experience in small business financials to guide you? Did you have someone like a Chartered Accountant or Tax Lawyer advise you? Also, just FYI -- your FAQ contains an…

Thank you! I'm an ex investment banker, so understand financials pretty well. I've also grown up helping with family businesses, doing the taxes from age 13 onwards, so it's sort of in my blood. I also wrote a little PHP toolkit so my parents could track inventories based on their invoices (that was 16 years ago!). That was probably the first version of Bx right there!

Despite everything I thought I knew, the project was significantly more challenging than I expected. Writing accounting software itself is conceptually not that hard, BUT, putting a scalable analytics framework around it is hard. Optimising queries to get the most of your metal is hard. Writing a PWA and making it feel native is hard. These are not obvious considerations when you think about writing accounting software, but take up a lot of time when you're faced with them during the development process.

Almost all the things I thought were minor considerations were actually very challenging projects in their own right. They were also excellent learning experiences.

And yes, the API is in fact now live, but only for corporate clients. We found most small businesses don't really need it, and some people even tried to game our rate limits, so we disabled it. We're releasing a new, more robust API very soon.

Also, now that we have some cash, we're also going to improve the landing page, add some tutorials, maybe even start a blog and do some marketing.

P.S. I never really involved an accountant for advice because I wanted to stay away from accounting jargon in the app. No journals or ledgers etc. Just simple terminology anyone can understand. I showed it to my accountant a couple of months ago, and he was actually very impressed. In fact, he's started using it with his clients to record their sales and purchase more efficiently. I can't really ask for a better seal of approval :)

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#40

Post by conorpp »

This is a hardware project I started when I was a senior in college. U2F Zero, a open source U2F token / two factor authentication device.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01L9DUPK6 https://conorpp.com/designing-and-producing-2fa-tokens-to-se...

Brings in around $500-$1000 per month of revenue (when in stock haha). I started just to learn how to lay out a circuit board and make my own embedded device, just kind of took off.

Using the U2F protocol is nice, since it's a standard and the PC side infrastructure is all there for the users to use it. I just have to do the hardware development :)

Also, I'm working on a new U2F token. It supports FIDO2 (password replacement protocol, upgrade to U2F), NFC, USB-C, and will have a nice case. If you're interested, sign up here, we'll be releasing more news soon :)

https://solokeys.com/

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