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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

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Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#461

Post by hotdogsalesman »

dudeWithAMood wrote: post #451
hotdogsalesman wrote: post #350

kitecourier.com - the end-to-end certified mail platform that makes sending legal notices as easy as sending email. Revenue is very spiky. Some months ~$10k, some ~$100. Inspired by this Patrick McKenzie thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7135833 Certified mail is weirdly powerful leverage. I decided to productize that.

That's original. How'd you come up with an idea for that?

I had medical debt to dispute, which requires certified mail. Every time the debt was resold I had to print, sign, stuff an envelope, and go to the post office again.

I built it so people could push back without the logistics.

Then I realized that nobody wants to deal with mailing at all and certified mail is used for way more than debt disputes, so I expanded it into a general legal-notice service.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#462

Post by akudha »

flet wrote: post #441

Hey! Late to the party, but a friend and I have been plugging away at CineQuote https://cinequote.net a daily movie quote guessing game that uses audio quotes. We've been running the web site for a few years now (just past 1000 daily games!) and we just launched iOS and Android apps in the last couple months! Its been quite a learning experience for sure!

This is fun! Where do you get the audio from?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#463

Post by 12ian34 »

kilroy123 wrote: post #236
agotterer wrote: post #78

A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business. Since 2023 we’ve been to 4…

Wow! I've thought so long about doing the same thing in London. I wouldn't do it to make money persay, but to meet amazing people and connect folks. Would love to chat sometime.

I host Supper Clubs in London :)

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#464

Post by hankmh »

TCSoft wrote: post #422
hankmh wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a lot! My assumption would be the best marketing, given you are a team of 1, would be demand capture campaigns. And it seems that your Capterra results bear that out. But, your SEO agency would probably have focused on high intent keywords for demand capture, and presumably that didn’t work so well. Anyway, seems like an interesting marketing challenge targeting a niche market that frankly I don’t kno…

This is great, thank you! I had to look up "demand capture campaigns" and that makes a lot of sense. Yes, I totally agree that property managers can be a source of growth. I'm very lucky to have a property manager user out of Michigan helping guide me with what she would need from a property management perspective. Their needs are just different enough that it will require some serious dev work and I'm "so very tired…

Nice, glad to know I'm not totally off my rocker. Good luck! (Also I know the "so very tired" feeling well.)

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#467

Post by flet »

akudha wrote: post #462
flet wrote: post #441

Hey! Late to the party, but a friend and I have been plugging away at CineQuote https://cinequote.net a daily movie quote guessing game that uses audio quotes. We've been running the web site for a few years now (just past 1000 daily games!) and we just launched iOS and Android apps in the last couple months! Its been quite a learning experience for sure!

This is fun! Where do you get the audio from?

Thanks!

We handcraft each game my pulling audio quotes from different media available on the internet and also from the original sources. We also have a workflow to pull clips from clip.cafe via their API (with a workflow process to extract the audio only and generate subtitles and other cool stuff) but we usually still trim and normalize those by hand too.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#468

Post by gaws »

agotterer wrote: post #291
VoidWhisperer wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, if you don't mind sharing, what is the sort of profit you see on that 126,000 as i'm assuming alot of that goes to paying the restaurants?

Most of it goes to paying for the meal. We make around a 20% margin. Our cost to operate the business is quite low, but we do invest a lot of our personal time into it. It’s a labor of love. Our biggest cost center is when we guarantee a minimum number of seats and come up a little short. Doesn’t happen often, but when it does it eats into the margin fast.

> we do invest a lot of our personal time into it

What's the process like?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#469

Post by petit_robert »

I built an accounting app :

https://compta.libremen.com

Did not intend to at first, but having quit Windows, I had to replace the Access application I had built with an accountant friend of mine to manage my small business. Looking around the web, I could not find something I liked.

I ended up re-writing the thing as an SaaS for my own use, but then figured that if I'm using it, others might want to, and all I had to do was to add an 'id_client' field to the database. It turns out to be a bit more complicated than that, as users tend to come with different needs, and to think of ways of using your app you did not anticipate.

Also, when I tell an accountant that I wrote an accounting application, his eyes pop, his head tilts slightly, and he appears to be evaluating whether I'm the dangerous kind of crazy before ending the conversation. Must be due to the horrors they have to deal with all day.

It's a hard sell, revenue is closer to $500/year than $500/month, because I have very low fees and very small clients. But I take great pride in counting one accountant using it in his professional practice. It's also great fun to tune as the number of lines grows, however odd this may sound.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#470

Post by agotterer »

gaws wrote: post #468
agotterer wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of it goes to paying for the meal. We make around a 20% margin. Our cost to operate the business is quite low, but we do invest a lot of our personal time into it. It’s a labor of love. Our biggest cost center is when we guarantee a minimum number of seats and come up a little short. Doesn’t happen often, but when it does it eats into the margin fast.

> we do invest a lot of our personal time into it What's the process like?

My partner and I divide and conquer. He focuses on front of house and I handle the backoffice.

The process starts ~3 months before the event. We start by picking a theme or region. Then contact some restaurants that fit the criteria and pitch them the event. That kicks off the back and forth on cost and menu.

Around 4 weeks before the event we send a save the date + previous event recap email. We summarize the last event and tease the next event, without giving away the actual resturant or type of food.

Over the next week we prep the invite email and payment forms. This requires putting the dishes on our menu template, research and writing about the history of the dishes, the region, and the resturant. Some of this content also goes onto our website.

Three weeks out we send the invite, which is a lottery system. Members have 5 days to request a seat and place a credit card hold. 5 days later we run the lottery (I wrote some basic software to randomize assignment, conver the card auth to capture and release any cards that didn't get assigned a ticket). Then we send an email to everyone who got in with which night they recieved and another email to anyone who was waitlisted. Everyone is added to a spreadsheet to track.

1 week before the event we send a reminder email and a last chance to cancel before the ticket is non refundable.

At the event we play host and check each guest in and say hi to everyone. Then we give a prepared ~5 min intro about the food, restaurant, celebrate any milestone members, and make any general house keeping accounments. Our 20 club members get a branded apron.

At the event we take video and pictures. Over the course of the next 4 weeks we post dish pictures with descriptions and history of the dish on our instagram. We also make a 1-2 min recap video of the event which also goes on our instagram and website.

Separate from the actual event related work we have to manage the books, handle members emails, and review membership requests. More recently we started selling shirts, so there's a little work in managing that as well.

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