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Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

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Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#381

Post by greysteil »

KenCochrane wrote: post #375
greysteil wrote: post #356

I built Dependabot ( https://dependabot.com ), a service that checks your dependencies are up-to-date every morning and creates pull requests for you if they're not. Intention was to make dependency management suck less, whilst also adding a bit of runway to a bigger startup I wanted to do. * Spent 2 months building it - much longer than I'd thought. The work required to get from a prototype (2 days) to a SaaS produc…

That's pretty cool, I have been thinking of building something similar, but for Python. How hard is it to add new languages? What is the tech stack? Does it cost much to keep it running?

Thanks!

Adding new languages is as easy as the package manager makes it... which is normally still quite hard! The core logic for Dependabot is open-source here, including all the language-specific logic for Ruby, JS and PHP, and a starter (lots of work still required) for Python: https://github.com/gocardless/bump-core.

For the app itself, we used Ruby (because we'd built the original core gem, which was https://github.com/gocardless/bump, in Ruby at a work hackathon years ago).

Costs under £50 a month to keep running at the moment, creating about 2,000 PRs a month. We could really do with getting it into the GitHub marketplace so we can start charging people and cover those costs!

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#382

Post by ComputerGuru »

After Google bought FeedBurner then killed Google Reader, I launched a FeedBurner replacement [0] complete with FeedBurner stats import and all.

I figured Google would kill FB soon enough, the writing was on the wall: killed Adsense integration, broken stats, halted development, disabled new cnames for a while, disbanded the team, etc.

I liked to think even one big client from FB (cough CNN cough) switching over after Google finally killed the plug would be worth it. They never did. It's been years now and FB still languishes neglected, but it seems that it is fated to die by attrition and nothing more.

[0]: http://feedsnap.com/

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#383

Post by archit3cture »

nbrempel wrote: post #50

I built http://bustaprice.com as a shopping price comparison search tool. It searches several APIs like Amazon and BestBuy and and also scrapes product prices from various shopping websites. The results are presented ordered by price. The Amazon access has been revoked for lack of original content and a few of the scraping rules are now stale, but it wouldn't be too difficult to update those. It still works though! I…

what level of traffic do you have ? comparison websites were hit seriously when google shopping started to occupy the top of the serps.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#384

Post by dejv »

ToJans wrote: post #360
dejv wrote: post #103

I've build complex app for managing vineyards and wineries. It has tons of features: time tracking, input tracking, harvest and production features, mapping, tons of budget/cost analysis. It turned out, it is hard to convince farmers to ditch their trusty excel sheets and notepads and start typing all those info into computer program. I managed to find few customers, but they haven't stick for longer than one year. I…

This is a common mistake: building a product based on assumptions, and not on the market's demand. I've learned not to add a feature before I have someone who paid an advance. Secondly: your product might be to overwhelming and doing to much; experience has thought me that complicated products are a though sell. Try to reduce it to it's most basic use-case, and sell that (a simple app that doesn't require any explana…

You are right. I am currently building another product, which is lite version of what I have and which is applicable to broader market: not just wine farmers, but all farms and consttuction companies.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#385

Post by covercash »

CamTin wrote: post #225

I built https://callmom.pro/ this year in anticipation of a Mother's day rush. The idea is that we'll call you and your mom once a week at a set day/time in such a way that your phones both ring and when you pick up, you're talking to each other. The site is janky AF because I'm still in the neophyte stages of front-end/css. I do still think it's a good a idea, so I'm planning a revamp of the sales site in time for a…

What's the flower delivery app from an earlier YC batch, Bloom? They should partner with this and insert a small audio tag on the child's line before connecting, "Calling mom every week is great, but don't forget to occasionally send her flowers too, use this phone number at Bloom checkout for promotionaloffer. Don't just tell mom you care, show her!"

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#386

Post by dejv »

vogt wrote: post #300
dejv wrote: post #103

I've build complex app for managing vineyards and wineries. It has tons of features: time tracking, input tracking, harvest and production features, mapping, tons of budget/cost analysis. It turned out, it is hard to convince farmers to ditch their trusty excel sheets and notepads and start typing all those info into computer program. I managed to find few customers, but they haven't stick for longer than one year. I…

How does it handle payments, payable/receivable etc (if applicable)? I have found that in these cases often times the software handles the operations well, but the business logic is still tied up in legacy POS and things like this which makes the software more of a nice to have than a "I'll just do it the old way". I'd also be curious about the UX (am a designer)

Product integrated with 4 major accounting systems, so it was more like frontend for those legacy stuff. Major thing was warehouse/logistics system which was my own.

In wine business thats quite complex thing: you might want to sell bulk wine, you might blend different stock together or bottle one lot in multiple times. There is strict requirements by govt about declaration of those thing. Each country qlso have different requirements and reporting formats.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#387

Post by dejv »

fghvbnvbnfe wrote: post #175
dejv wrote: post #103

I've build complex app for managing vineyards and wineries. It has tons of features: time tracking, input tracking, harvest and production features, mapping, tons of budget/cost analysis. It turned out, it is hard to convince farmers to ditch their trusty excel sheets and notepads and start typing all those info into computer program. I managed to find few customers, but they haven't stick for longer than one year. I…

Did you figure out why customers would leave? I've been thinking about doing something in the "most people use a spreadsheet" space and hearing that people went back to it after a year of using a dedicated product is a little worrying.

It was hard to get all the company to use it. If you use it just for small subset than it is not that valuable.

Say you are tracking work done in vineyard, but nothing else. Then your calculation of price of produce is off, because you havent add the price of input. There are multiple roles in the company and they are usualy using they own systems for reporting.

Also quite a lot of production tracking have to be done on paper using special notepad with marked pages (another funny story) and people dont want to do this bookkeeping twice.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#388

Post by techaddict009 »

chad_strategic wrote: post #112

I wanted to practice a little more more with nodejs. To me it's pointless to learning a programming language without a project. Eventually, I will convert it from PHP (codeigniter) to angular 4 so that I can learn angular 4. I also was banned from adsense, for machine generated content. Regardless, I really like amazon and my product you can't really use adblock, so I put together a website that monitors amazon daily…

Whats the current traffic? You might be earning good via amazon affiliate.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#389

Post by techaddict009 »

averageweather wrote: post #248

http://www.averageweather.io I have no content, thus no SEO, which has dramatically limited traffic. Paid search is extremely effective to get people on my site, but AdSense doesn't cover the costs.

This is pretty good project. I can help you out in SEO. I have done various projects where main source of earning is Adsense. If you wish to colloborate and grow it mail me vivek at eyuva.com

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#390

Post by dotmanish »

nikivi wrote: post #22
crush-n-spread wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I noticed the initial load time is quite poor... Maybe I had a bad connection but you might want to do some testing on initial load times for your site.

Sorry about this. We only have one server and it is based in Amsterdam. We will try to expand to other continents soon so the load time is fast everywhere.

Getting a 502 Gateway error right now, so can't check the site. However, general advice: run the site through Google's Page Speed checker and see if a CDN + gzip compression etc can improve things to some extent before relocating primary servers.
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