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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

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461–470 of 866 posts

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#461

I make Mac utilities at https://fadel.io/ and iOS apps ( https://podbuddy.app/ ). I’m at $4k/month and revenue is growing. I do iOS consulting as well, but I’m inching closer to going indie full time.

You have so many of them. How much time do you use for customer support? I'd like to publish multiple apps, but I'm afraid that customer support will take all my time.

I get about 10 support requests per week. If I get many of the same, I add info to the FAQ.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#462

I've been drawing pictures and publishing them as desktop wallpapers for ~20 years now, selling Vlad.studio accounts with unlimited access to downloads [0]. In 2021, I earned $4761, which means ~$400/month. It's not horribly little amount, especially for Russia (where I live), given it's a side project. However, I feel I need to do something more active, rather than just drawing new pictures. Promoting and marketing…

Hi Vlad, I love your pictures and I'm using your wallpapers for more than 10 years for sure on all my devices (including mobile phone). Hmm I did not check your page for some time, I think I know what I will be doing today .

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#463

I make Mac utilities at https://fadel.io/ and iOS apps ( https://podbuddy.app/ ). I’m at $4k/month and revenue is growing. I do iOS consulting as well, but I’m inching closer to going indie full time.

Would you mind sharing what the revenue breakdown looks like between these? Do you find Mac or iOS is more lucrative?

The iOS app is much newer and much more niche, but it’s starting to break ground.

For now most of the revenue is in macOS but my ultimate goal is to make iOS be my #1 platform in terms of revenue. That’s because, simply, I’d rather offload a lot of marketing and deployment/payment bandwidth to the App Store to focus on the products.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#464

I designed a healthier men's dress shoe and was able to gain close to $100K in preorders in a Kickstarter this past September; https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oaka/oaka-the-worlds-he... . Hopefully it doesn't stay a side project for too much longer, fingers crossed.

This is great! I messed up my ankle when I began taking transit and walking to the office in a pair of terrible dress hoes.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's only $29 inc worldwide shipping Oh yeah, thanks for pointing that out. The one time I'm not in a shilly mood (Christmas and all) and the post actually gets interaction. Murphy's Law! >Any plans to add an EU or UK distribution point? Sorta kinda maybe. I did have one, but a whole lot of VAT compliance bullshit caught up with me. In most countries, GST/VAT is handled automatically by large eCommerce platforms (if…

Have you had a look at the EU One Stop Shop scheme for VAT? (It's only been introduced with the VAT overhaul this summer) https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/vat/vat-e-com...

I have not! Thank you so much!

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#466
post #346
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who used to have to buy everything secondhand, this makes me sad. I can't tell you how exciting it was to find something that you wanted but knew you couldn't afford going for a reasonable price at the thrift store. I feel like by buying up all of those quality items, you're depriving people in less fortunate situations from experiencing the same sort of happiness.

agreed, this is scummy. thrift and secondhand stores exist to serve a certain underprivileged segment of the population. not to facilitate arbitrage. but to each their own.

If we want thrift stores to act as some kind of welfare institution we shouldn't let everybody shop at them.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#467

I have about 6 years of applied AI experience and I have been trying to work on something that can use that experience and be useful to others. Ended up building an analytics based platform that uses data analysis techniques to generate trade ideas for retail investors [0]. Started it as a hobby July 2019, but it ended up growing quite big. The plan was to generate about $1k/mo but we are generating about $120k/mo th…

That’s so exciting, congrats! How did you approach user acquisition? How did that change as you grew?

Initially, just posted in a bunch of subreddits on reddit to get engagement. But the retention was quite low. I still used that engagement to get a couple hundred followers on twitter.

Afterwards, realized that twitter had the most solid trading community out of any other platform. So all I've been doing for the last one year is build a community on twitter now (and of ofcourse discord too since everyone's there these days). I try to post ideas from the system every day, and when people see them work and make some money off of them, they subscribe to the paid plan.

Discord has a massive portion of the overall trading community, so I created discord bots to pull data from the web product, and every data item had our logo on it. That helped quite a lot in expanding the brand name and reaching more people. We're in about 250 discords and reach about 100k members in them overall.

Finally, 12 hours of sitting in front of a laptop every day lol.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your day job is OK with this? I forgot what I signed, but I believe my contract has a clause that says they own all the technical output of my brain. Did you tell your manager you have a side hustle? I've been thinking of something similar if I can build a sufficiently relevant specialty knowledge.

Why would anyone ever sign such a contract? I'm certain it would not be considered legal where I am from.

>Why would anyone ever sign such a contract?

Because they want a job?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#469

My little hardware book, Computer Engineering for Babies launched on Kickstarter a few months ago and blew my mind by raising almost $250k. It’s a simple book with buttons and LEDs to demonstrate different logic gates. I just shipped out the first batch of books a week ago and now waiting for the next batch of books. It’s gotten pretty demanding pretty quickly but I’m really excited about it. I’m hoping I can soon em…

>I’m hoping I can soon employ my little sister to manage all the shipping.

Be careful about this. It changes the dynamic you have, and can cause issues if you hire non-family in future. Same applies for close friends.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#470

Forward Email is doing several thousand per month now just one year in. Site: https://forwardemail.net Open Startup: https://forwardemail.net/open-startup

Quick question that I couldn't find in your FAQ: Can you reply to forwarded emails? As in can you communicate back and forth with someone sending emails to an alias? I've used a free email forwarding service which didn't give me this functionality (maybe this isn't common practice).

That is not possible with forwarded emails. You need an actual SMTP server to send emails from your domain.
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