ls ~/projectsAsk HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
371–380 of 600 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#372I made a face mask and t shirt website filled with items I designed. Let's just say that I haven't quite met my quarterly sales goals... https://ronamerch.co
the animations and aesthetic are lots of fun, assuming you intend them to be a kind of retro hip nod to an older web era. all these people hating on it have no sense of joy. but i think it might not be right for a site that sells medical gear for a pandemic. also, its hard for me tell based on the masks whether you are extremely online and irony poisoned (very likely) or a right wing grifter (very unlikely but possible)
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hm.. I worked on a piece of software with similar needs of polling random people for their opinion. Have you considered using Amazon Mechanical Turk? I imagine some bias would be there, but probably manageable. In return you'd get the ability to poll way more than 50 people for a very reasonable price.
It says on their site they are using Mechanical Turk: > To do this, we take your question and use Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform to survey 50 random people.
Thanks! This is why I keep saying that all my good ideas are already taken! ;)
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#374In 2004 my brother and I developed a buttplug shaped like George W. Bush - we called it the Bushplug. Manufacturing was more expensive than we had expected but we sold about 100 of them - presumably as novelty gifts. Our price point was too high for a novelty gift and the nose was a little too pointy to be an enjoyable sex toy. We made our money back and had some fun with being featured on BoingBoing and Fleshbot. So…
Right idea, wrong time. My friend owns a sex shop in Provincetown, MA and has sold tens of thousands of Trump-plugs over the past 4 years.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#375I built a really simple way to poll 50 random people in the US. It's called This or That and functionality is currently very simple. You submit a question along with two images via SMS and you get your answer back usually within the hour. I've had a few people use to test new logo ideas, to ask which of two TV shows to watch, or which outfit looks best. So far no one has paid for it, only a few hundred free users, bu…
I like this idea! And not only because I have a long-running art project called This Like That.
But I'm not sure about using Mechanical Turk. If the goal is to have unbiased opinions, is that a good place to source them?
I would assume MT participants are trying to complete tasks as fast as possible. If I'm on MT and you ask me "A or B?" my incentive is to give you an immediate answer. I have no incentive to align that answer with my actual opinion.
Also I wouldn't expect MT to give me a particularly random sample. I mean, if I'm wondering how my B2B SAAS logo is perceived, is an answer from MT going to overlap much with the opinions of my target audience?
It seems like a fun thing to try as a toy, like rolling dice only with humans. I'm just not sure I'd use it for any question I really cared about.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#376I made a bot that bet on horse races. The strategies were succesful but ultimately I spent more than it earned on AWS fees. I might turn it on again next year.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Super interesting. Any other ideas from your testing, or feedback from the YC interview on where there could be traction here? If you're willing to share, of course :)
Hmm certainly willing to, but I don't have much. Mostly just that professional graphic designers didn't seem like the right audience since they already have networks of peers who can give better feedback. Oh, and the apparel-industry-specific stuff from below. But something like an engineer asking a colleague which web design they just hacked up looks better would be a much better fit.
I had an idea once about something similar, I called it Design Picker, where you'd basically use some combination of crowdsourcing and "algo" to help you make design decisions. I had the domain for years, but I could never come up with a version of the concept I thought actual designers would actually use, so I never built it.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#378Recent startup failure was ZguideZ - an app that allowed locals to create their own digital tours, charge what they want, and then collect the majority of the profit on tours sold. It failed because it was a far bigger project than I was able to manage as a solo founder - though I tried. It was beyond my ability to code it and I didn't have funding to recruit quality developers. I hired a budget team and we cut corne…
AirBnB has something like that called "Experiences." I'm not saying that to be critical; if anything it should be affirmation that you were onto something, i.e. there really is a market for such things. https://www.airbnb.ca/host/experiences During the pandemic, AirBnB has also been helping people organize online experiences.
Amazon has recently launched a virtual experienced platform and it’s actually quite fun. (when not hamstrung by technical difficulties)
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#379I probably have about 20 domains registered that I've never done anything with. Eg wherewasthistaken.com - the idea being you have a photo, eg from your parents, and you don't know where the photo was taken. So you post it on the website and people can comment if they recognise where it was taken.
So, something like GeoGuessr?
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#380In 2006/2007 I built HTMLButcher, a C++ desktop application to slice PSD/image website designs made by designers to HTML. In these years sites where made with tables, so for slicing a design I had to cut the images and fit then into borderless HTML tables. I took 2 years to build it, and in this timeframe people started building sematic websites with CSS, and abandoning table-based designs. I managed to sell 100 copi…
I'm a little confused. That feature has been built into Photoshop since at least CS1 (2003), maybe earlier.
https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/slicing-web-pages.ht...