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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

#561

Post by predictand »

I have been working on Heuristica for the last 1.5 years, which pays for my rent. It is a subscription-based, AI-powered concept mapping tool that helps visualize learning and research.

As I started to make money, I was able to start hiring freelancers to help with certain aspects of the site, like the design, SEO, and some independent coding tasks. It is rewarding, but due to the pace of developments in the AI space, it feels like I need to improve the product constantly to remain competitive, which can get a bit burdensome.

https://www.heuristi.ca/

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

#562

Post by sunsetonsaturn »

guico wrote: post #61

Just launched Story Treasure a way to create illustrated children's books, motivated by the fact that I'm a portuguese dad raising two bilingual girls in Germany... very hard to find portuguese books around here! https://www.storytreasure.ai/

Can you provide some figures, in terms of profitability? How much did it cost to put together, what are the monthly costs to keep it afloat?

I write a book and give it away for free on https://book.railean.net, but it wouldn't hurt to turn it into a revenue stream.

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

#563

Post by meiraleal »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #484
burningChrome wrote: post #472

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. Se…

Can you clarify what you mean by “leads” here - is this the sort of “we found fifty names and emails that might be interested”, or is it a landing page that collects a email and phone number for when someone enters them? I am not trying to accuse you of something weird - it’s I hear a lot of lead generation as a basic business need and I never quite understood the real mechanisms - I only get the slightly passive lan…

> Can you clarify what you mean by “leads” here

Not GP but leads in this case were people that found their websites on Google and showed interest in buying their product.

> I only get the slightly passive landing site approach or cold calling

what would you expect to be a lead that would be different than that? A lead goes through steps of qualification until it becomes a customer.

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

#566

Post by laylower »

cccybernetic wrote: post #71

I built a web app that extracts data from documents, like PDFs, Word, etc. I've seen people say "GPT wrapper", but it consistently outperforms similar tools in the space. My main customer is a private equity fund that randomly reached out. I didn't know much at all about fintech, but it works and gets the job done. I don't have a proper marketing site yet since I've been focused on building the app, but it's coming s…

Could you please link your website?

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

#567

Post by vidyesh »

wtf242 wrote: post #483
vidyesh wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you go into more details, when was it built and how much time have you spent (approx) on creating the content? or is it all generated? And the traffic's gradual organic increase? Interesting to see Adsense revenue still being so high, I imagined this category being so competitive and diluted the CPM would be very low! I noticed your purchase modal only shows Amazon pricing, are you using their API to get prices o…

I built it in 2008, and have rewritten it twice now since them. I have spent quite a bit of time adding new lists. It's definitely a labor of love and I do spend quite a bit of time on it. I do use Gen AI now to generate genres, descriptions, and to grab other data. Previously years ago i would just scrape it or manually set it. Amazon has a nice product API with up to date prices. I am working on bookshop.org integr…

Thank you for replying. I am (on and off) building a regional price comparison website for various regional online bookstores. I do want to build a more fairer and honest monthly/yearly list something like yours and the price comparison as the main USP but more so I really like reading and enjoy exploring books even if I don't read all of the ones I wan to.

Your website is quite inspiring to me and have given me more ideas to explore. Thank you for sharing your ranking algorithm, very fascinating (and still understanding the intricacies of it).

I asked you about Amazon API because I noticed some of your prices are stale which is against their Pricing Display guidelines.

Its been a challenge for me to work with Amazon as their API is not easy to get access to, I mean I have an affiliate tag for A website but from what I've read as per their TOS I am only allowed to use it for A website and not for B. And for B I have to apply again for a new tag with a new website (which is still under development!)

I will end up working on a scraper or a few workers anyway as most online bookstores do not have an API, none have replied back to my emails inquiring the same.

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

#570

Post by ruzig »

I wrote scrapers to scrape data from Google, Bing, Walmart, eBay... I work with clients, support them to integrate all data into their workflows. Basically, I'll provide private APIs, specific to their use-cases. Not many clients, only 2, about 600 USD/month cause clients are testing the market. It's fun cause I can debug and get feedback directly, in real-time, from clients about the results.
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