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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

#551

I did not like any Kubernetes UI so I built my own https://aptakube.com It went from side project to my primary job in less than 6 months. Everyone was saying that $99 was too much for “an API wrapper”, but here we are, 2 years later and with hundreds of small to enterprise companies using it :)

That UI looks nice, do you blog anywhere about tech you used to make it?

It uses Tauri https://tauri.app/

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

#552
post #381

I buy & sell pixels (hats) in a video-game - Team Fortress 2. I'm currently making $10k-15k per month; I'm one of the largest sellers on the game's main third-party marketplace ( https://marketplace.tf ). Less of a side project and more of a part-time job, since it's ~4-6 hours of work per day.

Only TF2? Or do you also do other markets like CS?

I'm curious to know how much actual knowledge about the game makes compared to just being a good "trader"?

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

#553
post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of carapace? Its a tool to create spatial lines for drawing

Taking a look. For the past two years I've been thinking about drawing. Why it's difficult, how its possible for people like Kim Jung Gi to draw from their imagination. My theory is that it's a learned thing (as opposed to innate ability), but that it's not taught from primitives well. For example, rotating a cube is something that you cannot really find an explanation for. I think the actual difficulty in drawing (r…

Forget it. There's very little that can be taught about drawing.

Drawing from model is about being the kind of character that enjoys spending hours tweaking at tiny details and measuring measuring measuring. Anybody willing to sit 3 hours in front of the model every day can learn it, if he understands that he must measure.

Drawing from imagination like Kim Jung Gi on the other hand is about doing that every day most of the day since you were a little kid, and you probably need an innate ability to boot (and that might be some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder / autism...).

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

#554

https://blog.labsbell.com/blog/SkippiesPart2 selling 4.99$ shoes, strangely fun to see the inner workings of ecommerce. I dont understand how amazon sellers make any money.

Amazon is ruthless for some product categories, with a lot of competition and thin margins.

For you a healthy margin might be 3$-6$, for others they're happy with 1$... and Amazon puts pressure for cheaper and cheaper prices to make their users happy, but they refuse to cut their margins :P

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

#555

I made an AI chatbot for OnlyFans models. Their fans can speak to "them" via a third party messaging app. It's currently pulling ~15k USD MRR. I built my own GPU infra for inference and I run Llama 3 with a fewshot prompting to get the model to respond like a given OF model, typically using their actual DMs with fans. I don't have a website for obvious reasons, but if you're in the biz you've no doubt heard about my…

Please forgive my ignorance, but what are the obvious reasons for you not having a website?

Never really needed one, I started the business because a few friends asked if a solution existed and all the marketing has been word of mouth. We send out a weekly analytics email to clients breaking down subscriber usage and some topics analysis, but nothing too complicated.

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

#556
My side project is about market making in a very particular way / or niched between decentralised exchanges and centralised one. The good thing is that this industry is so big that even as a small competitor I can do a lot. I don't have a product, just a basic page that's broken here and there https://asset.plus/, my actual revenue comes from my bots trading. I am currently expanding my infrastructure, but I really have to take care of costs because servers for low latency are expensive.

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

#558

Made https://meeteffective.com/ for useful 1 on 1 meetings. Not charging for it though right now

Sorry if this is unsolicited feedback, but reading:

> Conduct your most crispest and productive 1 : 1s

Feels awkward to me.

> Conduct the most crisp and productive 1:1s

Could be more organic?

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

#559

I did not like any Kubernetes UI so I built my own https://aptakube.com It went from side project to my primary job in less than 6 months. Everyone was saying that $99 was too much for “an API wrapper”, but here we are, 2 years later and with hundreds of small to enterprise companies using it :)

Any architecture advice on making receiving payments from small-to-medium businesses streamlined? Struggling on how to go from an employee trying the free demo to their company paying that employee’s subscription… like no PO request nonsense, is there a “master” account you bill and they dole out the seats?

Are you saying that you don't want to deal with Purchase Orders?

Is that because you don't want to provide a product in advance of payment or just the overhead of creation/tracking?

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

#560

I built custom electric cars, and now I am sharing my knowledge for free in a knowledge base and in a YouTube series: https://foxev.io/batteries https://youtube.com/@foxev-content I hope this helps someone :) My knowledge is EV and renewable energy knowledge from first principles and for an open source tool. https://openinverter.org lets you re-purpose the drivetrain from any EV, like Toyota Prius or Tesla Model S an…

Nice work!

Thank you!
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