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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

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Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#341

Post by nspeller »

abtinf wrote: post #327
nspeller wrote: post #116

I built an interactive Music Theory course 8 years ago over a winter break and it continues to bring in enough to pay my rent each month. I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives. It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos. I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that i…

> I built…over a winter break This site is extremely well done. You built it, and all of its content, in a couple weeks ? That’s amazing.

Ah, yeah that is misleading. Let me clarify.

The landing page is what I built over the winter break, including those first 7 lessons. Since then that page has remained largely unchanged.

However, when it started getting a lot of traffic I added a pre-order form for a full course. THAT took me 6 months to code up all the additional lessons. Building all the interactive pieces (drum synths for rhythm lessons, an ear training game for intervals, a virtual guitar, etc.) was really fun but a lot of work. For example, the interactive guitar uses samples I recorded note-by-note from my acoustic guitar in my bedroom. Afterwards I couldn't look at it for months. And then over the years I've added more.

So not quite an overnight success.

Thank you for the kind words though!

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#343

Post by vincefutr23 »

johnjungles wrote: post #340

I built https://check.supply with a friend - it’s an iOS app that is like a cash app experience for mailing a check. Old school landlords, paying gardeners, or other people still only accepting checks. We use plaid to connect your account, then press send, then track the printing, mailing and delivery of the check. Only iOS App here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/check-supply/id6475490646

Do you have risk loss / fraud issues?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#344

Post by _hnlo »

I've worked on and run [link redacted] and the related subreddit and forum for 15+ years.

I've generally done everything alone as an exercise in scaling utility for others with constrained time on my part.

Have used AI heavily in the last few years, which has been the greatest force multiplier of my career for sure: scraping, evaluating, summarizing, organizing, indexing, moderating, writing, ... I've coded so much alopecia related tech at this point it could probably be patented.

I can recommend giving yourselves big, sprawling projects like this and working on it a few hours every weekend. It adds up!

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#345

Post by mickael-kerjean »

sofixa wrote: post #308
melvinmelih wrote: post #300

Thanksgiving last year, after GPT-4 was released, I realized large language models were finally good enough to bring my idea to life: an AI book generator. Over the holiday weekend, I built the prototype for https://instabooks.ai , to allow anyone to instantly generate 200+ page books on any topic. I sell them in pdf, epub and print form and they take about 30 minutes to complete. Since launch, over 10,000 books have…

This sounds cool, but why? Why would anyone generate a book ?

Write a few dozens chat gpt powered books, and during your next interview you might say: "actually I wrote a book on xxxx, you can buy it on Amazon"

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#346

Post by nspeller »

ipaddr wrote: post #295
nspeller wrote: post #116

I built an interactive Music Theory course 8 years ago over a winter break and it continues to bring in enough to pay my rent each month. I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives. It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos. I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that i…

After seeing your landing page I finally understand what a landing page should be.

Thank you!

Over the years I have run a few A/B tests on the landing page. I tried some variations I thought MUST improve the conversion rate. However, this one, which is basically the original one, is still the best performer.

If it ain't broke.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#347

Post by mickael-kerjean »

I built Filestash (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash), an open source Dropbox like frontend for any cloud storage / protocols (S3, SFTP, FTP, SMB, NFS, etc...). This was made as a reflection of the Dropbox launch top comment with the infamous FTP guy as I was wondering what was missing from the FTP specs to be able to make a great interface to a protocol like FTP.

The money come from customisation and enterprise plugins (SSO, audit plugins, etc..). The entire product was made so you can quickly build custom file management solution by assembling a bunch of lego blocks (aka plugins)

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#348

Post by henrygabby »

busterarm wrote: post #263
henrygabby wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I am following your question but can you clarify if what you mean is if: I take a portion of the proceeds to send customers gifts, take them out to dinners, etc to ensure the relationship remains strong? If so, then not really. Usually these clients just want smooth problem free services. I am working with him on holiday gifting ideas but that's really the extent of it. I also incur some expenses such as mark…

No, I meant if you need to discount or give them service gratis to smooth over an unhappy customer. In a former life I was a support drone. Days were full of us taking calls from abusive a-holes who just wanted to get over on someone and also people who had legitimate grievances and deserved relief. We typically weren't empowered to do anything about either of them.

Ah, no, never had to do that. There are cases sometimes when the janitorial staff breaks say a light fixture. What we've found is that immediate and direct communication about what happened, how it happened, what will be done to prevent it from happening again, and how we're going to fix is usually is well received and the partner compensates/credits them for the damage. Of course the invoice amount is smaller for the "repair" so therefore my scrape is less. I've tried to explain to my partner that there is a very select type of client he wants and he for the most part has received it well. The larger industrial type facilities are better than the smaller in my experience.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#349

Post by giancarlostoro »

nadermx wrote: post #326

Made https://www.pdf.to since one day I had an issue with a PDF and figured why not since the domain was available. But because previous owner had it as a book torrent site, only gets traffic via Bing as it seems to be blackballed in Google

Maybe buy pdfto.com if its not already taken

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#350

Post by giarc »

Scoundreller wrote: post #211
giarc wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can message it privately, don't really want to post publicly. 99% of orders are local pick up, shipping is just a hassle as most pieces don't fit in regular box (plus Canada Post is on strike right now). EDIT - messaged you on your IG.

Depending on where you live in Canada, get on Stallion Express or Chitchats Express, which will be cheaper than Canada Post. They’ll either get you better rates through Canada Post, or access to the 3rd-party couriers like Amazon uses (FleetOptics, UniUni, ICS & others).

It's not always the cost that is prohibitive (although sometimes the shipping is the same price as the piece of wall art). What stops me from really exploring shipping is finding packaging for each, the time it takes to package and drive to CanadaPost etc. It probably sounds like I'm just making excuses, and you'd be right :)
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