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Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

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Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#521

Post by DeltaCoast »

mikkelpaulson wrote: post #496

initiative.sh[0], a web-based text interface for creative D&D play. After a promising response on HN[1], I had hoped that I might be able to monetize the project, but traffic has since crashed to almost nothing. I would say that after six months of full-time development it is about halfway to being complete as a freemium product, so instead I've opted to open-source it.[2] It turns out that the challenge with launchi…

Nice work! Saw your previous post about jumping to doing your own thing full time in 2021, kudos on shipping.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#522

Post by pmlarocque »

zucker42 wrote: post #409
xPaw wrote: post #196

SteamDB: https://steamdb.info/ I've been running it for over 10 years now, it's a database of Steam games, their updates, price history, charts, and a lot more. In the early days we took monetary donations but stopped a few years in. It costs less than 100$ a month to run. Cloudflare reports 552.2M requests in the past 30 days, and 6.09M unique visitors.

Why do you not take donations?

He does: https://steamdb.info/donate/ link is just above footer of main page.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#523

Post by zadjii »

Cardinal7167 wrote: post #491
zadjii wrote: post #103

This isn't public yet, and almost feels like the kind of thing I'll never ship. I've been working for a while now on the idea of a card / board game. The concept was bouncing around in my head for a while, and I started taking a lot more notes on the idea after my second kid was born (4mos ago). All of a sudden, I had a lot of time to sit quietly in a dark room with my laptop (and help the kiddo get to sleep). I even…

Funny, I did almost the exact same thing for a MTG app I’ve been working on, and similarly also started messing with the idea of using the same software to soft launch my own rtcg. I would be very interested to see how you did yours.

Honestly, I would almost rather _not_ share the code, because it's Bad. Like, I just have one big element and redraw all the entities (cards, tokens, etc) anytime there's input. It's got terrible performance for being what it is.

I'd kinda rather that no one in their right mind copy what I did.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#524

Post by markjerz »

Imitate Email: https://imitate.email

A little tool for testing out email flows as you build/test apps - comes with an embedded widget so you don't have to context switch (see https://imitate.email/demo) for example.

Earns nothing - spent far too much time researching chameleons, finding and, thanks to AI, creating Chameleon pictures :-)

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#525

Post by BowBun »

xPaw wrote: post #196

SteamDB: https://steamdb.info/ I've been running it for over 10 years now, it's a database of Steam games, their updates, price history, charts, and a lot more. In the early days we took monetary donations but stopped a few years in. It costs less than 100$ a month to run. Cloudflare reports 552.2M requests in the past 30 days, and 6.09M unique visitors.

Avid user for years, so cool to see you on the social web! Thanks for your work! I'm annoyed for you at all these people trying to tell you what to do with your project, after you've been doing it successfully for 10 years and they have not. Y'all really think this person hasn't thought about monetizing? Take it easy startup-stans!

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#526

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #513
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #214

PoachMe.Dev: https://www.poachme.dev/#/devLand?reqCode=HNGOBRRR Premise: Recruiters spam left and right, so we decided to create a website just so they could get a familiar calendar-like interface but asked them to pay for your time. As soon as we exposed the external version with the URL, we decided to make an automated template ("Great. Please book a slot on my calendar and we can chat more about this. You'll recei…

I really like this idea, where I'm from recruiters are the absolute worst.. Being that this is your app can you disclose that the model works? Like are people making some money with this? I'd hate to take this line and get no bites, or worse alienate myself from the opportunities. Edit: I just remembered the title of the thread :), I guess not?

> get no bites, or worse alienate myself from the opportunities.

Each person can do it however they see fit. I tend to use it as a way to get the critical info needed (company name, salary, remote or not). Recruiters who send me messages with enough info don't get a link from me. If you're still reluctant to give me enough info to make a decision can book at $100/hr, and about 5% of those book.

It's up to you, if you're getting shitty recruiters, send me them the link.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#529

Post by kevinbowman »

shon wrote: post #124

Wanting to experiment with Shopify, I decided to make a t-shirt shop for cyberpunk and sci-fi stuff. So I registered a short sci-Fi sounding domain: https://hex7.org and proceeded to toil (many many mouse clicks) away stocking my shop with with hand-designed shirts and coffee cups and then waited. 2 years in, not a single sale : Partly I wanted just to add products and see if the combination of Shopify, Google, and m…

You have a sale. Maybe the most expensive mug I've ever bought :) I look forward to it.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#530

Post by MattDemers »

I've launched a Substack about two topics, and I currently have no paid subscribers, but a sick URL. https://mattd.substack.com

I have two sections:

"Linked" is about our relationship with the Internet. I found that I wanted to do more writing about Internet culture that's fallen out of favour (forums, gaming clans) and also how people are using the Internet to enable their dreams (Twitch, "wanting to be an Influencer") and the psychology behind that. https://mattd.substack.com/p/i-dont-want-mmr-i-want-self-est...

"Ranked" is about competitive psychology, self-esteem, and people who play multiplayer video games to make a number (their skill rating) go up or down. This includes chess, and my own experiences trying to be more comfortable "learning by losing." A pretty apt headline is "I don't want MMR, I want self-esteem." https://mattd.substack.com/p/i-dont-want-mmr-i-want-self-est...

If those are things that interest you, I'm going to be publishing 1-2 times a week, as well as other stuff (thoughts on media, manga, anime, TV, etc) in a third "everything else" section.

I've been blogging for over 10 years, but I've always resisted centralization, and that's kind of hurt my ability to grow. After running Patreons, multiple blogs and other venues, this is my attempt to go "Okay Matt, everything's in one place, stop adding so much overhead when all you need to be doing is writing.

Even posting on this thread is really difficult for me in terms of getting over the self-promotion hump, but I'm hoping I can learn and grow as a person as I do it.

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