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

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

#531

Post by Benjamin_Dobell »

koonsolo wrote: post #447
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #373

I helped my wife (a primary school teacher) start a social emotional development book & activity subscription service. https://mybookbag.com.au/ It's slowly growing, but to be honest the pricing needs to be increased. Profit margins are paper thin (ha!). Still though, it's been fun putting together the website, integrating Stripe etc. Biggest issue is book publishers. Wow their ordering systems are archaic! We can't…

That is a cool service! My wife recently published such an emotional development book in Slovakia [0], and it became a bestseller there. She's now translating and expanding into other countries. It would be nice for our wives to connect :). [0] https://www.sebavedomie.com/knihy-pre-deti/

Your wife's book looks fantastic!

A long term goal for us would be to work directly with authors. We'd love to publicise authors writing quality books, and I imagine it'd be helpful when doing a print run to have 100% confidence X books are going sell.

Unfortunately, we don't yet have enough subscribers for this to work. Because we only use a book once, and our subscribers are split across four age brackets (with different books), we're currently only ordering a small number of each book.

However, we really want to make this happen.

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

#532

Post by Rainymood »

czue wrote: post #289

I have two! An app for making wedding place cards that does about $1000/mo https://www.placecard.me/ A boilerplate for making SaaS apps with Python/Django that does $5k/month (highly variable) https://www.saaspegasus.com/ I also have a third that does around $150/mo. It's an app that adds analytics to GroupMe which is a WhatsApp alternative. https://chatstats.co/ I keep complete revenue and effort data here if you're…

I love this so much. No frills, just software solving (boring) problems in a scalable way. All the best :)

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

#533

Post by seangp »

verve_rat wrote: post #529
seangp wrote: post #235

Friend and I have recently launched a side project where we give away high quality, royalty-free music. Early days but we’re making ~$800 per month from YouTube’s content ID payments alone. https://bluefoxmusic.com

You appear to be content Id claiming the add revenue of the people that use your music for "free". Calling that "royalty-free" and saying that the music is "free in exchange for a credit/attribution" feels a little misleading. It is royalty free if they stump up the up front cost, but the idea that using this music will cause you to lose ad revenue on your YouTube videos should be front and centre.

Nah, we're pretty clear about it right there on the homepage of the site. If we don’t register our tracks with YouTube’s Content ID, then malicious actors will register our music as their own and monetise our user’s videos.

Many of the people using our tracks are small YouTubers that aren't even eligible for monetisation. The bigger YouTubers who want to monetise are happy to buy a $39 license.

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

#535

Post by seangp »

TecoAndJix wrote: post #246
seangp wrote: post #235

Friend and I have recently launched a side project where we give away high quality, royalty-free music. Early days but we’re making ~$800 per month from YouTube’s content ID payments alone. https://bluefoxmusic.com

Colossus and Good Days are catchy! Fantastic work

Thanks!

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

#536

Post by hemmert »

Aulig wrote: post #448
hemmert wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I am really happy paying the App Store/Play Store the commission, by the way, as they handle the global tax management - I wouldn’t want to send a tax report to every country in which some user made a $1.99 in-app purchase…)

Definitely a valid point, which is why I use Paddle on my website. 30% is still a huge fee for that, Paddle only charges 5% for example (and that includes payment processing fees).

For App and Play Store that commission is down to 15% for 'smaller' businesses (< $1 million per year) actually.

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

#537

Post by eloisius »

adrianN wrote: post #466
asdev wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m on the fence about whether this is scummy. On the one hand, it is diminishing an institution that families like my own relied on to have halfway-decent things for our home. On the other, thrift stores could sell these things themselves and have more revenue to support charitable causes if that’s what they should be doing. I don’t think GP is a scum bag, but when a VC backed iPhone app shows up to gig-economize mass thrift store raiding and selling online I’ll be bothered.

That said, I don’t think “we shouldn’t let everybody shop there then” is meaningful. Means testing is itself expensive and would likely penalize the very people who need thrift stores. Some things depend on the members of a society having a shared sense of what is and isn’t decent. Halloween candy is free but if I organize gangs of kids to empty out every candy bowl and sell it online, Halloween won’t be any fun.

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

#538

Post by tetek »

hydershykh wrote: post #444

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…

wow, that's mad. Congrats. How the heck do you keep both iOS and Android apps up to date just by yourself?

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

#539

Post by biztos »

ipinak wrote: post #500

My latest side project is a link management system. It gives you one place for all your links, you can use it in social media as a bio link, instead of posting non usable links each time you want to direct your audience to a specific content. I sell it via agencies for now and I make a little less than $300/month. https://krok.link/

> I sell it via agencies

What sort of agency do you use?

Sorry if it's a stupid question, but I can't wrap my head around this -- are there "sell your web service" agencies or what?

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