Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 476 posts

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

#391

Post by dotmanish »

ronbeltran wrote: post #361

Last year around November(2016) I finally had the time to build my first mobile app. My goals are: to learn React Native and build a mobile app and publish it to Google Play. At my previous work I'm pretty much knowledgeable in integrating CRMs (ie.Salesforce, SugarCRM and Highrise.) into Gmail via chrome extension so building API backend wont be a problem. I noticed at that time that only Highrise CRM has no officia…

This general space has a lot of long tail CRMs that companies subscribe to - and they don't have a good mobile support (still in 2017). You may want to see if you can make a "general purpose" interface in the space with minimal common functionality and integrate it with others.

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

#392

Post by stereobit »

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…

I've build a wine tasting event app a couple month ago. Replacing the tasting sheet for tasting events with a simple web app to make it easier for the organizer to collect and analyze feedback and market after the tasting.

Got a few hundred users but no real traction yet :-/

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

#393

Post by dotmanish »

wheresvic1 wrote: post #132

I'm building https://ewolo.fitness/ - it's a no-frills workout tracker that's built from the ground-up to be mobile friendly. I decided to do it after seeing a total lack of decent workout trackers that work well on mobile and provide a web interface. It's made using React, Redux and I don't expect it to make any money :)

I liked the simple page. If you can articulate on that page what you saw lacking in the space, it will help convince users who are just starting to start using it.

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

#394

Post by dotmanish »

binarymax wrote: post #146

In 2011 at a hackathon I built rsvp.io (now points to a silly game of mine) to allow wedding couples to easily create a custom wedding invitation rsvp page. A unique code could be added to a paper invite, or the page used on its own. After the hackathon I spent another month or so refining the site. I never took it far enough, but might have made a little money had I tried. Some ideas that I never took forward were p…

I can visualise this being used - you can have a cute-looking QR code (surrounded by a shape/design of your choice to not make it look "standard") to rsvp. You can even have stickers printed (instead of complete cards) that can be stuck on everybody's physical wedding card.

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

#395

Post by dotmanish »

docsapp_io wrote: post #319

I built DocsApp ( https://www.docsapp.io/ ) two years ago and launched around 8 months ago. So far no revenue because I focus on building features. While DocsApp already launched 8 months ago, I still don`t see any growth in term of active users. So far only one active user with two sites and few users sign up to test then abandon completely, possibly go to competitor site with much expensive pricing. Here is what I…

> So far no revenue because I focus on building features.

You can possibly reverse the funnel. Reach out to mailing lists / IRC channels / Slack channels to get feedback from developers and then develop features accordingly.

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

#396

Post by dotmanish »

icey wrote: post #60

I've been working on https://docsift.com for a couple of months but have been having a hard time finding users to offer any feedback. It's meant to make it easier for journalists and citizen activists to review bills, document dumps, etc (and on the pay side, help law firms read through and review discovery materials). A challenge has been that I'm neither a journalist or a lawyer, just someone who is motivated to he…

> * I started building it without knowing people directly impacted by the problem I was trying to solve*

You can still search for journalists on Twitter / websites and reach out to them for feedback.

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

#398

Post by dotmanish »

dejawu wrote: post #332

I got fed up with Evernote Web and built my own: https://nanote.co It used to have a payment form but I felt like it wasn't polished enough, so now it just says to email me for a (free) account. I still use it every day for my own notes, so I suppose it was a success in that regard. I've also got a few friends on it too.

I liked the page and the clear explanation.

Does it need to be an Evernote replacement, or can this be a Chrome extension / etc that eventually stores in your Evernote account itself? I did read the text at the bottom of the website, but one thing to do note is that people trust the 'Evernote' brand for their data storage. You can offer this on top of Evernote/Onenote as a separate extension/layer.

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

#399

Post by dotmanish »

meesterdude wrote: post #331

I created a service for behavioral and cognitive changes ( http://willyoudidyou.com ). Spent many months working on it, had a handful of beta users, but traction has not been there overall - despite pushing in various marketing efforts.

You may want to:

(1) check how many visitors are scrolling 6 pagefuls to understand the 6 pictures. You can use crazyegg, etc heatmap kind of tool to measure. I personally would've preferred to just be told in a single picture, but that's just me.

(2) I'm not sure how helpful is the "Help us Launch" callout at the top. You may just want to put the e-mail form up there. And instead of using "Help us" phrasing, a blunt "Get notified of our launch timeline", etc. probably would convert better.

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

#400

Post by lukego »

westoncb wrote: post #139

I've maxed out a couple credit cards and spent all my severance pay etc. trying to finish building this '3D abstract visual debugger,' which I'm calling Lucidity [video]: http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd I started working on it in 2014 and it's been on my mind ever since. I applied to YC with it a long time ago (was not accepted, and I can see so much wrong with the application I sent now...) I was laid off in Nove…

Cool project, with beautiful presentation!

I'm working on something similar, with similar motivation. I often need application-specific diagnostics and I haven't had a framework for building them. So I decided to make one.

I'm approaching LuaJIT diagnostics in a really similar way to you. I instrument the VM to snapshot key data structures (e.g. JIT code) and log them to a file. Then I make a UI that visualizes them as a graph. My snapshots are raw C data structures straight out of memory with only a subset of references crawled. The UI decodes the objects the same way as GDB i.e. using DWARF debug information.

LuaJIT example: https://github.com/raptorjit/raptorjit/pull/63#issuecomment-...

My main project for the tooling (early days): https://github.com/studio/studio

Anyway. Maybe our paths will cross further down the line. Looks to me like your work is more targeted, more polished, and that you are likely to find an excellent niche e.g. Redis as another commenter suggested. I am more interested in breadth i.e. object graphs are just one of many problems I am interested in and so I'm always looking for 80/20 solutions so that I can move on to the next thing.

End braindump. Once again - great work, and great presentation! Open an issue on the Studio repo if you want to share your work there some time btw :)

Post reply on HN