Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#361

Post by utf_8x » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

I've been working on a videogame project for the better part of a year now (a construction and management sim inspired by Factorio, Stardew Valley and similar games, combining concepts and mechanics from all of them), writing my own engine on top of SDL2.

It's not the most original idea and I doubt it will ever actually see the light of day but the main point of this project was to get into C++ (coming from Java) and I think it served its purpose very well.

In reality it didn't cost me anything but I technically "wasted" many thousands of dollars of my time on it...

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#362

Post by captn3m0 » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

endoflife.date: https://endoflife.date

Created it because I was frustrated having to lookup information on multiple sites, and having to dig deep and read through terribly written support policies. No Ads, no tracking, all hosted cheaply on Netlify OSS Plan.

Now at 100+ contributors, with 3-5 maintainers on the project. We have a long roadmap for the next year[0]. A contributor wrote a EOL Scanner that is based on a fork of grype[1].

[0]: https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/issues/2108

[1]: https://github.com/noqcks/xeol

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#363

Post by stickfigure » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 7:11 PM UTC

shon wrote: post #124

Wanting to experiment with Shopify, I decided to make a t-shirt shop for cyberpunk and sci-fi stuff. So I registered a short sci-Fi sounding domain: https://hex7.org and proceeded to toil (many many mouse clicks) away stocking my shop with with hand-designed shirts and coffee cups and then waited. 2 years in, not a single sale : Partly I wanted just to add products and see if the combination of Shopify, Google, and m…

I run a SaaS service for large POD merchants (basically, people doing what you're trying to do, many of whom are making a living at it).

Shopify does not give you organic traffic. You don't want to start with Shopify unless you already have a dedicated audience.

If you're just getting started, places like Redbubble and TeePublic are the easy way. Low margins, but it's "fire and forget". Amazon Merch used to be the hot ticket but it's pretty saturated. I would say that Etsy is the most popular place to make money in POD right now - it's a little more involved (you pay listing fees) but you control your pricing.

I've been in this space for about 6 years now. Happy to answer any questions.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#364

Post by captn3m0 » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 7:13 PM UTC

zadjii wrote: post #103

This isn't public yet, and almost feels like the kind of thing I'll never ship. I've been working for a while now on the idea of a card / board game. The concept was bouncing around in my head for a while, and I started taking a lot more notes on the idea after my second kid was born (4mos ago). All of a sudden, I had a lot of time to sit quietly in a dark room with my laptop (and help the kiddo get to sleep). I even…

For playtesting, this might be helpful: https://boardgamelab.app/

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#365

Post by KerryJones » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 7:15 PM UTC

ExxKA wrote: post #322

KerryJones wrote: post #125

https://stockoptions.io/ I'm a value investor and found that most options trading tools out there are focused on day/momentum traders and were missing the necessary skillset that value investors use when selecting options, so I made this. My friends and I use it daily, it's helped us considerably with our trades (and in that way has made us lots of money), but we haven't done the marketing necessary to get this tool…

Really interesting. I have been looking at building something similar to just educate Apes. Also interested in building an audit trail (portfolio tracker) for financial analysts in mainstream media, to keep it more honest. Think trustpilot for analysts but with a portfolio tracker curated by volunteers when they recommend trades

I love the idea of tracking people's predictions or buy/sell calls because I believe 99%+ are doing poorly and getting people hyped up just to lose money, it would be great to be able to show them their own record (I think many don't even track their own record).

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#366

Post by and-not-drew » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 7:15 PM UTC

ExxKA wrote: post #308

and-not-drew wrote: post #139

https://beatyourbookie.app/ Website for tracking betting lines and finding arbitrage between betting sites. I'm currently collecting all the data myself and am working to build a public API to allow others to access that data. It's currently costing me ~$150 a month between DB, servers, and telemetry. Even if it never makes a dime I'm really enjoying building it though. At work I switch to a role where I no longer wr…

Look up Better Collective, a Danish bootstrapped startup on the same premis which is now worth billions.

Oh, nice! I'll take a look. Ty!

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#367

Post by achempion » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 7:18 PM UTC

masukomi wrote: post #347

achempion wrote: post #340

https://fluent.im Learn a new language by creating a mind palace. It used to be a flashcard app with dictionary and English only, but now it's for more languages and has different learning approach. I'm working on it for 4+ years, trying to build a good product people use before placing a price tag. https://nofuss.io Blogging platform I built as New Year hacking project, it doesn't have registration and all interacti…

re nofuss In case you're not aware, Posterous used to do blogging via email for ~3yrs befoer they pivoted to something else tangentally related (i forget what), and then they went out of business. It's a great idea, and there may be enough business to support a single person. It was enough to keep them going for 3 yrs before the pivot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterous in tangentially related news which might b…

Thanks for sharing, I've found out they started https://posthaven.com/, what basically is more polished version of nofuss.

What I find interesting, they sell blogging platform but don't have a blog themselves. I wonder how many blogs they're hosting and how do they acquire new customers.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#368

Post by alecco » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 7:18 PM UTC

pjmq wrote: post #353

alecco wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if you could make the DJ a bit more like the ones in GTA radios, in particular Vice City. I would pay for that!

This is literally my dream for the service. A personal GTA radio station. I'm entirely all ears if you have any suggestions on how to pull that off!

ChatGPT

> Write a Grand Theft Auto Vice City in-game radio advertisement.

> "Attention all Vice City residents! Are you looking for a new ride to cruise the streets in style? Look no further than auto dealership, "Tommy's Auto Sales"! We've got a wide selection of sleek sports cars, rugged off-road vehicles, and everything in between. Plus, with our no questions asked policy, you won't have to worry about where you got the money to pay for it. And for a limited time only, take advantage of our special offer: steal any car on the lot and bring it to us, we'll give you a substantial discount. So what are you waiting for? Head on down to Tommy's Auto Sales and step up your ride today!"

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#369

Post by juicyj24 » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 7:18 PM UTC

Astory: https://astory.dev/

I started this website about two years ago. Astory’s goal is to reinvent the process of building software to start with the design first. The idea is to have a dev tool which displays a live representation of a system. Astory will create development tasks as a result of altering the system design rather than creating tasks on a board and attempting to visualize the effect.

I hope to make this website collaborative and allow for multiple ingestion formats to create a system design rather than just drag and drop like cloudformation or terraform templates.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#370

Post by majodev » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 7:19 PM UTC

google webfonts helper - https://gwfh.mranftl.com

According to the Cloudflare December monthly stats, I had roughly 57k unique users, 15m requests, 1,3TB traffic. Though, most requests are likely to be bots/integrators spamming the API...

Running on a bare metal k8s cluster (libvirt) on top of a single dedicated Hetzner server, ~70€/month. Not going to monetize it, but will maybe accept donations/sponsorings in the future...