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Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

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Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#541

Post by puntofisso »

In 2011, inspired by Colm McMullan's Stats Zone (a football analytics app), I started working at a mobile app for rugby fans. It was my first time on mobile since the J2ME era, and I learned Android and iOS coding from scratch.

The idea was simple: I signed a contract with OptaSports, providers of real-time data from Rugby World Cup and Six Nations matches, and I created real-time visualization of that data directly in an app. Some of the features were a direct translation of Colm's app from football to rugby (for example, showing the location of kicks became the location of passes, etc), but I also added a way to draw a full animation of a game in real-time.

The app was picked up by The Guardian, the Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, it was used on the ITV Wales blog, and got coverage on Italian TV. Success, eh? But I sold a grand total of 140 apps. Luckily, Opta had been very generous because they want to invest in rugby, so I didn't lose a lot of money. A year later, I decided to try the free app route with ads and without using Opta data, and generated all the updates myself, without the visualization stuff but by simply sending text updates during the games. The app got 15,000 downloads, and thousands of concurrent users. I got slightly more excited, but after 6 weeks of usage I netted £100 in ad revenue.

I stopped and accepted that time required vs benefit achieved wasn't good. All in all, it might have been that PR wasn't really my thing, compounded by the fact that rugby has a smaller fanbase than football. With Opta, we even tried approaching several potential media partners, but we never got anywhere.

However, it was fun.

It got me a few contracts as developer and as trainer on mobile development, and it solidified my credentials as an all-round data expert (I used it in my most recent successful job application), so although it didn't directly made me any money I'm happy about it.

If you're curious of what it looked like, I still maintain its webpage at http://liverugbyapp.puntofisso.net/

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#542

Post by px43 »

tinus_hn wrote: post #447
px43 wrote: post #421

I'm pretty sure I made the first website that sold bitcoins directly to users. It was called "btcnow" and it launched in maybe June or July of 2011. I pretty much glued a google checkout widget to a Bitcoin dispenser, but people loved it. You could use your normal google account to buy coins, and three seconds later they were in your wallet. I was selling maybe a hundred or so bitcoins a day for a couple years, but t…

I hope you kept a few of those coins for yourself and are rich now!

I'm lucky to be doing financially better than most in this world, but I just love spending bitcoins too much, so not retired on a tropical island quite yet.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#543

Post by proc0 »

rangelreale wrote: post #103

In 2006/2007 I built HTMLButcher, a C++ desktop application to slice PSD/image website designs made by designers to HTML. In these years sites where made with tables, so for slicing a design I had to cut the images and fit then into borderless HTML tables. I took 2 years to build it, and in this timeframe people started building sematic websites with CSS, and abandoning table-based designs. I managed to sell 100 copi…

I made a plugin for photoshop around 2010 to do the exact same thing. It has a slicer tool, and an API for it, so spitting out HTML was easy, but just used it as an internal tool for one of my first web dev jobs.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#544

Post by proc0 »

gfxgirl wrote: post #380
rangelreale wrote: post #103

In 2006/2007 I built HTMLButcher, a C++ desktop application to slice PSD/image website designs made by designers to HTML. In these years sites where made with tables, so for slicing a design I had to cut the images and fit then into borderless HTML tables. I took 2 years to build it, and in this timeframe people started building sematic websites with CSS, and abandoning table-based designs. I managed to sell 100 copi…

I'm a little confused. That feature has been built into Photoshop since at least CS1 (2003), maybe earlier. https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/slicing-web-pages.ht...

It never worked well. The html was full of issues and the kind of image slicing was for backwards compatibility with email clients. However PS did have a way to write scripts with JS and extend or even change the HTML generation.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#545

Post by tmaly »

I created this site bestfoodnearme.com a few years back. I could not figure out how to make any money with it, but I did teach myself Go in the process. It was a great learning experience.

I am working on nextlesson.com as a way to help kids learn programming. I have not made any money from this, but it is a lot of fun.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#546

Post by seanwilson »

ghusbands wrote: post #529
seanwilson wrote: post #113

It wasn't a big serious project or anything, but for my first income generating project ever I made a small single player word game for Android that I should have tried to monetise more. Android had only been out for a couple of years at the time so it was easier to get noticed then. The game was free with an ad-banner during gameplay. I was making a decent amount in ad clicks and also had players emailing me for a p…

Looks good. On my tablet PC, it's not letting me play by touch. For users with both mice and touchscreens, one has to handle the touch events that browsers have.

Thanks! Hmm, which OS and browser? When I test with the "laptop with touch" dev tools device on Chrome + Mac it works as expected so not sure how to replicate.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#547

Post by benibela »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #86
benibela wrote: post #58

My German library app to track books borrowed from a library: http://www.videlibri.de/ It was doomed from the start, because basically no one goes to public libraries anymore. But you cannot go to a library without it. Like this week I saw a post of someone getting a 150€ late fee bill from the library while having no idea why, that would never happen with my app. That should have been well monetarizable, pay for my…

> because basically no one goes to public libraries anymore Is this a German thing, an urban thing, or really a true statement universally? I ask because prior to covid lockdown, we made at least weekly trips to our public library and it always had a steady stream of patrons.

Compared to almost anything else not involving libraries

There are more people reading books than there are people reading books from a library. If I had just made a tool (in English) to keep a list books without involving (German) libraries, it would probably be much more successful and only take a hundredths of effort.

And worse, I did not target libraries in general, but libraries in my city. Anything limited to one city has a too low user base. I planed to expand it city by city, by selling it in one city to cover the travel cost to the next city, so I can lend books there, actually test it, and make sure everything remains bugfree.

The alternative option, expert users can use it with any library, by editing the config XML files to include their webpage URL and server parameters, seems to have been too confusing for people

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#548

Post by benibela »

saberdancer wrote: post #514
benibela wrote: post #58

My German library app to track books borrowed from a library: http://www.videlibri.de/ It was doomed from the start, because basically no one goes to public libraries anymore. But you cannot go to a library without it. Like this week I saw a post of someone getting a 150€ late fee bill from the library while having no idea why, that would never happen with my app. That should have been well monetarizable, pay for my…

I haven't been in a library for a long time, but in 90s I never had this issue. We had a "card" where librarian would stamp the date. Books had a paper on the back where they would stamp the issue date and return date. It was trivial to know when you had to return a book. Is this done differently in Germany? I like the app but I believe people won't buy/subscribe to an app that helps you only if you forget to return…

>It was trivial to know when you had to return a book. Is this done differently in Germany?

It should be. The due dates are all listed on the webpage

And some libraries even send reminder emails before the due date

But that is how they got me. I got used to their reminder mails, and then - "Our mail server had a failure and now you have to pay 60€"

>I like the app but I believe people won't buy/subscribe to an app that helps you only if you forget to return a book in time. Most people will believe they will return it in time and won't invest in this type of "insurance".

I wish someone had told me that before I wrote it

But there is also the secondary feature of keeping a record of read books. I read a lot of incomplete series before I had it, and now I want to read the rest of the series, but I do not remember what the series was.

>You could/should look whether university/free libraries are interested.

They are the worst. They have much less patrons than public libraries, and almost never answer emails. I think I might have gotten email PTSD from them.

>Hope you enjoy working on it.

I enjoyed it 13 years ago. But not anymore.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#549

Post by ghusbands »

seanwilson wrote: post #546
ghusbands wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks good. On my tablet PC, it's not letting me play by touch. For users with both mice and touchscreens, one has to handle the touch events that browsers have.

Thanks! Hmm, which OS and browser? When I test with the "laptop with touch" dev tools device on Chrome + Mac it works as expected so not sure how to replicate.

Chrome latest on Windows 10. The key point/problem is that because I have both mouse and non-faked touch, the touch events aren't necessarily converted into mouse events, as happens in many other circumstances. Though a lot of this is conjecture.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#550

Post by yonixw »

awinter-py wrote: post #311
yonixw wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I searched for something like that, all I found was to hide my serverless behind RapidAPI, which also include costumer facing payment processing.

hadn't heard of rapidapi, thanks for the tip what made you specifically search for rate limiting?

fear of serverless cost getting out of hand, mainly at the start. In AWS, you charges for each call even if blocked by WAF or whatever, so all logic may only protect your app but not your wallet from abuse
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