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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?

#41

Post by joshwcomeau »

I built Uncover (https://uncover.cc/), a service to track your favourite authors' newest releases. It's monetized with Amazon affiliate links.

I wasn't expecting much from it; my goal was to break even on server costs and domain, so ~20$/month. To date it has made $0*

(*technically it did make ~$2 in revenue, but Amazon deactivated that account, I had to sign up for a new one. So my actual received total is $0)

Ultimately it's not a huge deal; I built the project for myself, and it serves me well. I've already discovered 3-4 books I likely would have missed, so I'm super happy to have put in the time!

Lessons learned: When you build a super-niche product mainly for yourself, don't be surprised if it doesn't automatically attract a following. Also, don't set yourself up for disappointment: build stuff because it's fun, not because it's a means to an end.

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

#42

Post by mabbo »

joshwcomeau wrote: post #41

I built Uncover ( https://uncover.cc/ ), a service to track your favourite authors' newest releases. It's monetized with Amazon affiliate links. I wasn't expecting much from it; my goal was to break even on server costs and domain, so ~20$/month. To date it has made $0* (*technically it did make ~$2 in revenue, but Amazon deactivated that account, I had to sign up for a new one. So my actual received total is $0) Ult…

Amazon emails me directly whenever me favourite authors release a new book.

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

#43

Post by JayNeely »

aerovistae wrote: post #13

I thought probably Hands Free for Chrome would see some donations given how much it could help someone who was disabled, and given how many donations I've seen more ordinary & simple extensions receive, but I only got $10 the past 3 years, and that was a single donation from a friend who felt bad seeing it at $0. https://www.handsfreechrome.com/ Barely any users, just around 400 or so.

I'm curious if other assistive software solves this need at the OS level, or if you other similar tools are already known to the community that it would be useful for.

Windows has built-in speech control that lets you scroll and click, doesn't it?

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

#44

Post by JoshTriplett »

fnbr wrote: post #31

I built https://bugdedupe.com/ last year- the idea was to make it easy to remove duplicate bug reports by using some academic research I worked on involving machine learning. The system worked well, but I struggled to find users, and it died a sad, lonely, death.

Who did you shop it around to?

This sounds like a really useful idea; I've seen piles of duplicate bug reports arise when a common issue hits many people at once. One suggestion (if you didn't already try this): you could go to major Linux distributions and projects that get a huge number of bug reports, ask nicely if you could try it over their bug reports, see if you can get good results, and offer to provide it to them for free if they'll mention that they're using it. Then show the results to companies with projects that get similar volumes of reports, and ask them to pay for the service.

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

#45

Post by davidw »

Before I made LiberWriter, which has made money, I created a site called "Squeezed Books" with the idea that it'd be an open-source wiki type book summary thing. Book summaries are handy for popular business books that could have been a 5 page article rather than drawn out into a book.

The lesson: Advertising revenue is not a sustainable thing unless you get massive amounts of traffic and have low costs.

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

#46

Post by joshwcomeau »

mabbo wrote: post #42
joshwcomeau wrote: post #41

I built Uncover ( https://uncover.cc/ ), a service to track your favourite authors' newest releases. It's monetized with Amazon affiliate links. I wasn't expecting much from it; my goal was to break even on server costs and domain, so ~20$/month. To date it has made $0* (*technically it did make ~$2 in revenue, but Amazon deactivated that account, I had to sign up for a new one. So my actual received total is $0) Ult…

Amazon emails me directly whenever me favourite authors release a new book.

So, for myself I needed something for audiobooks. Audible is owned by Amazon but AFAIK they don't offer a similar service.

Also, I don't want email notifications. I get too many emails, and ignore anything in the "Promotional" tab. Plus, I'll see the email while I'm at work, which isn't when I'm looking to find my new book.

I wanted a thing I could check when I finish my last book, to tell me right away what has come out since.

EDIT: But yeah, I also recognize that this is an extremely niche set of circumstances! Amazon's email notification service is probably what most folks would want.

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

#47

Post by JayNeely »

hayleox wrote: post #38

Nothing major, but I put a few sticker designs up on StickerMule's marketplace: https://www.stickermule.com/user/1070831731/stickers It's been a couple months, and my $20ish investment (you have to place an order for a sticker before you can sell it) has turned up $43 of profit. So technically it was profitable, but I don't think I've even reached minimum wage for the time I spent on it.

Could you talk a bit about what you've done to promote it? Or has it been a hands-off, 'whatever traffic the marketplace provides organically' kinda thing?

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

#48

Post by rb808 »

I created a library that helped developers. It made a few hundred $ in revenue but nothing like I hoped.

Its an experience I've seen a lot. You think if you create a great product and advertise a little it will go viral - but in reality getting people to use it in the beginning is the hard part.

Next time I'll try to build the community before the product. Spend more time on marketing and less on coding.

Plus I think selling to developers sucks, esp now so much free and open source stuff around. Non-tech Users are probably better customers.

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

#49

Post by cploonker »

I built a corporate 360 degree employee feedback system. It is basically google-page-rank-algorithm applied to feedback system and few other mathematical tricks to auto-normalize. Not sure though so many HR heads liked the idea but i could not make them write a cheque. You can look at the first video on this page:http://www.groupraisal.com/ to know the details.

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

#50

Post by nbrempel »

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!

Initially I planned on sending affiliate traffic to sites to earn a small side income as well as possibly some display advertising.

After getting rejected from the Amazon program, I lost a bit of steam (although I believe I could flesh out the site some more and still be accepted into the program).

If I were to put some time into it again, I would add many more sites to scrape and integrate with a couple more larger store APIs. Then I would add a "price drop notification" feature to try to get visitors to return to the site.

I spent a couple months building it in evenings and weekends, plus many months thinking about it before that. The only money I spend on it is $7/mo for heroku costs.

I still think it has some untapped potential but I don't have much spare time to think about it right now.

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