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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

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Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#471

Post by aecorredor »

nspeller wrote: post #116

I built an interactive Music Theory course 8 years ago over a winter break and it continues to bring in enough to pay my rent each month. I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives. It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos. I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that i…

I’m a customer and it’s awesome. I think we’ve even exchanged emails about some questions I’ve had. When I paid for the premium version I thought it was super good for what I was getting. You must be getting a ton of traffic for it to still be paying rent after 8 years! Congrats!

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#472

Post by burningChrome »

My side project is managing several clients websites on a subscription based service. My buddy and I started a web design agency for small companies. It was just us two and we bootstrapped everything and were in the process of building several apps for the dozen or so architectural firms we were working with when he died suddenly of an aortic aneurism. It was such a shock to me and so I just shut the company down.

Several clients begged me to keep going because we did such a good job doing the SEO, their sites were generating a ton of great leads and we had built a way to track the leads and send out first response emails with a phone call follow-up with 2 hours of the firm getting the email. Because of the fast turn around, they were beating other firms to the punch and we unknowingly had created a significant business advantage for them.

Those 4 clients pay me for 8 hours of work a month at $65.00/hour. If you do the math, I'm clearing about 2K/month just to manage their sites, send out analytics and make content suggestions. It was a nice side hustle to have a few years back when I was laid off and was able to lean on this income until I got hired again.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#473

Post by lisp2240 »

crush_robo_1536 wrote: post #459

https://rockyai.me/ - a chrome extension that lets you chat with any webpage using LLMs. Just a simple side project that I wanted to build for me and my friends. Don't intent to monetize it

If you have not monetized it how does it have a $500/mo revenue?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#475

Post by epaga »

cwing50 wrote: post #162
epaga wrote: post #16

I made SmoothTrack, a no-equipment head tracking app for iOS and Android which lets you control the game camera in sim games (like MSFS 2024 for example) with your head - basically like TrackIR, just without any equipment and for $15 instead of $150. I originally made the app just for myself to save myself the money of buying a TrackIR system, but then /r/flightsim begged me to release it as a full app. Last month, I…

Made an account just to say thanks for sharing this, just bought it and it seems super cool. I'm looking forward to trying it out tonight!

Awesome, thank you. Please let me know how it goes for you!

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#476

Post by Soupy »

gcanyon wrote: post #451
Soupy wrote: post #117

I run https://pastmaps.com as a lil' solo bootstrapped labor of love. Think Google Maps, but for OLD maps. It has 185K+ fully georeferenced high-res maps covering all of America, as well as satellite, LiDAR, and 3D layers to enable exploration through space and time. History is cool yo. And apparently lucrative - it currently makes ~$5000/mo and is slowly but surely growing through word of mouth

> tiny husband and wife company based in Seattle, WA. Are you in any way associated with that map shop near Pike Place? I had to look it up, I guess it's Metsker?

No but I love that shop! I actually introduced myself to the owner there and told him about how I also run an online map shop and he got immediately super duper weird. Lol. Cut-throat business I guess?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#477

Post by mrexroad »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #133

In 2023, I started selling solid wood rolling trays designed by my little sister and I on Etsy (The Stoned Craftsmen). Almost immediately I was making $1200-2000 per month. Some months can be big months (especially around Thanksgiving/Christmas) where I'm getting $75-200 a day in sales, but some months can be dogs (July and August this year were literally $0 months - the only 2 on record - I think an algorithm change…

How much of your woodworking is CNC? I’ve been thinking about selling a slightly different take on fountain pen trays, but I’m just routing by hand and/or with jigs.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#478

Post by Soupy »

kmoser wrote: post #415
Soupy wrote: post #117

I run https://pastmaps.com as a lil' solo bootstrapped labor of love. Think Google Maps, but for OLD maps. It has 185K+ fully georeferenced high-res maps covering all of America, as well as satellite, LiDAR, and 3D layers to enable exploration through space and time. History is cool yo. And apparently lucrative - it currently makes ~$5000/mo and is slowly but surely growing through word of mouth

Possible minor bug: I searched for "New York, NY, USA" and it showed 41 maps of only Staten Island. I had to search for "Manhattan, New York, NY, USA" to get the maps I was looking for.

Thank you! It's actually a bit embarassing but my search uses the central lat,lng returned from Google's places API and then finds all intersecting maps. It's just not the right approach for a broad place based search. I'm in the process of integrating full geometry data globally from https://overturemaps.org/ as I type to fix this across the board and to use the definitive boundary geometry for the under-the-hood map lookups

Thanks for the report and for checking out the site!

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#479

Post by Soupy »

registeredcorn wrote: post #218
Soupy wrote: post #117

I run https://pastmaps.com as a lil' solo bootstrapped labor of love. Think Google Maps, but for OLD maps. It has 185K+ fully georeferenced high-res maps covering all of America, as well as satellite, LiDAR, and 3D layers to enable exploration through space and time. History is cool yo. And apparently lucrative - it currently makes ~$5000/mo and is slowly but surely growing through word of mouth

At a guess, you probably have a very large base of genealogists on there! Old maps are incredibly useful for genealogy because it helps you do lots of stuff. Say someone lived on "House #3 Country Road" in (county), but County Road no longer exists, and all that can be found is a brief description of "County Road is now Main Street, Bank Avenue, and Church Road" It would serve as a vital clue as to where their ancest…

You hit the nail on the head - my primary use-case is genealogy research!

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#480

Post by Soupy »

saomcomrad56 wrote: post #394
Soupy wrote: post #117

I run https://pastmaps.com as a lil' solo bootstrapped labor of love. Think Google Maps, but for OLD maps. It has 185K+ fully georeferenced high-res maps covering all of America, as well as satellite, LiDAR, and 3D layers to enable exploration through space and time. History is cool yo. And apparently lucrative - it currently makes ~$5000/mo and is slowly but surely growing through word of mouth

Do you have any old maps for Panama? Perhaps the canal zone?

Soon! I currently only have coverage for the US but I am expanding globally in Q1 2025. Just not enough hours in the day
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