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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?

#421

Post by px43 »

I'm pretty sure I made the first website that sold bitcoins directly to users. It was called "btcnow" and it launched in maybe June or July of 2011. I pretty much glued a google checkout widget to a Bitcoin dispenser, but people loved it. You could use your normal google account to buy coins, and three seconds later they were in your wallet. I was selling maybe a hundred or so bitcoins a day for a couple years, but the insane levels of fraud ensured that it was never profitable. It didn't really matter, the goal was always to make it as easy as possible for people to get started playing with Bitcoins.

Eventually BitInstant came around they actually had people that were paid to deal with this stuff, so they did pretty well. Then the dude that ran it went to jail, so I'm pretty happy with the fact that I got out when I did. Coinbase came around shortly after and they did a much better job than I ever could.

It was never more than a hobby project, and I would twiddle with the website, buy coins to restock the dispenser, answer support emails all on the train to and from my day job every day. Good times.

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

#422

Post by oskarahl »

Months of covid confinement and getting stuck in a work visa limbo in Malaysia meant I got the chance to work on my side projects undisturbed the past few months. Not really sure if glitterly.app will work out at all. But had a ton of fun building it. Probably learnt more about UI/UX, marketing, sales, product from doing this than anyplace else.

It all started because I wanted to build a changelog, but one that came with videos of what changed. So I made a simple tool that allows you to zoom in on a video. Friends and family had fun making cute videos of their dogs and whatnot.

Then I grew obsessed, and 3 months of midnight coding later built a second/current iteration - a video editing app for making short animated videos for social media. Hasn’t made any money yet, but I’m trying my best.

App here: https://www.glitterly.app/

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

#423

Post by Aeolun »

staunch wrote: post #195
37ef_ced3 wrote: post #181

NN-512 ( https://NN-512.com ) generates stand-alone C code for AVX-512 neural nets The idea was that user companies (or even the hardware companies: Intel, AMD) would pay me as a contractor to implement deconvolutions, transformers, etc., as extensions to the free/open core I released (which includes very sophisticated support for all forms of dense convolution, fully-connected layers, pooling, batch norm, activation…

I saw this in one of your other posts and it seems super interesting to me. 1. Improve the web site slightly (add a contact method and pricing info) and make it clear that it's a company offering an enterprise software tool. Programmers will be viewing the site, so it doesn't need much more than is there already. 2. Charge a flat $7,500/year for a commercial usage license and increase it as the functionality increase…

> Many programmers can buy a $7,500/year piece of software without their management even asking a follow up question.

I’d like to know where you work.

No place I’ve ever worked would approve that without a lot of questions.

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

#424

Post by neltnerb »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #328
neltnerb wrote: post #136

I have built and continue to build extremely sophisticated LED lights. But there's no market for fancy anymore. I maybe made back my expenses, though I have a bunch of lights at home to show for it I guess.

Are you sure? Twinkly is doing fine I guess. Maybe focus on xmas lights.

I'm sure. You need to mass produce low end stuff or else have the scale to insure serious installations. There's not really an in between that I'm finding other than art pieces. I'm not very interested in commodity stuff honestly, call me someone with no business sense if you like.

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

#425

Post by fapjacks »

ganashaw wrote: post #310
toss1 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about something like a quasi-log scale, e.g.,: $19 for 6 weeks, $39 for 6 months, $79 for 12 months and $99 for three years?

That could work! I'm curious what makes subscription models more attractive from your point of view. Is it just simpler to understand? It seems strictly less flexible than a pay-for-what you need model. I suppose in your example the advantage is that you can get a discount by paying for more up front which is a clear advantage for people who will take multiple trips in a year or are planning a trip far in advance.

They're suggesting a pricing model from the perspective of running this business instead of a pricing model from the perspective of using this service. Subscriptions are worth way more to a (tech) business than one-off purchases.

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

#426

Post by Smerity »

37ef_ced3 wrote: post #181

NN-512 ( https://NN-512.com ) generates stand-alone C code for AVX-512 neural nets The idea was that user companies (or even the hardware companies: Intel, AMD) would pay me as a contractor to implement deconvolutions, transformers, etc., as extensions to the free/open core I released (which includes very sophisticated support for all forms of dense convolution, fully-connected layers, pooling, batch norm, activation…

I work in the space and was impressed with NN-512 as there's a painful gap in inference cost between CPU and GPU that doesn't have to exist. Intel and AMD are really missing a boat here, most other companies have enough cash they just go to GPUs, academics rarely sling low level code even in CUDA let alone AVX-512, and other than Fabrice Bellard's work few I've seen few go that low level.

My suggestion would be to focus on an initial use case where a very limited low cost / high efficiency CPU model can provide massive advantage. NN-512 should be the framework that expands from that Redis like core. The limited use case tactic is what I'm focusing on[1], mainly as I have a particular application and have less technical brilliance than yourself so need to focus ;)

An aged but still relevant example is the early word2vec work which was (and still is) frequently better to throw onto CPUs than GPUs. A well tuned implementation is not only advantageous on CPU but can win out in many scenarios where cost / latency / ... are important.

Congrats on the project though! I'd be curious for your thoughts for the future if you ever want to chat =]

[1]: Initial experiments written up as a tutorial with Rust and ISPC for a specific CPU based NN task - https://state.smerity.com/smerity/state/01E8RNH7HRRJT2A63NSX...

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

#428

Post by Aeolun »

mguerville wrote: post #289

I and a few classmates in business school built a service to print people's top 5 instagram pics (top = #comments + #likes) every month and mail it to them as a nice physical keepsake. I was really flabbergasted that we couldn't get even 10 customers, we spend nearly $1,000 on ads before calling it quits (if we had had 10 customers we may have kept iterating but the setback was big enough to decide to just stop, and…

I’m currently subscribed to a service that allows me to select 8 pictures every month and have them printed and sent to me. They supply new albums at extra cost when the current one is full (have 3 so far, over about 1.5 years).

Apparently there is a market for this kind of thing. Mine is targeted at young parents though, maybe that makes a difference?

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

#429

Post by pontifier »

nevster wrote: post #303

I 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.

Oh man... I have no idea how many domains I've bought over the years. Hundreds... none have gone anywhere.

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

#430

Post by Aeolun »

semireg wrote: post #332
statictype wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar idea for a web based version about 8 years ago. Even ran some Google Ads with a MVP landing page to gauge interest (there was). Finally never got around to building it. Is this a sustainable business for you now? Or just a side project?

Yes, it’s ramen profitable, bootstrapped and growing. It’s just me at the moment and I’m still juggling full-time mobile app and IOT consulting. Since Label LIVE is a React app wrapped in Electron I’ve given a lot of thought to bringing it into a proper SaaS via browser but just don’t have the time.

Wouldn’t it be hsrd to get the browser app to play nice with printers?
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