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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

#661

Post by I-M-S »

greenie_beans wrote: post #585
I-M-S wrote: post #121

I'm making a fiction podcast (that actually launched on HN) that is now earning ~$1100 USD monthly. I just wrote the latest report documenting how I got there, which you can find and discuss at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42380474

wait you just talk about fiction? do you interview writers? i'm trying to understand how you built that audience, i've seen a lot of podcasts about fiction struggle to break past like 1k streams

No, it's an audio drama in a podcast format. Think radio dramas of the old but made for modern audiences! Here, hopefully https://programaudioseries.com/ paints a better picture.

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

#662

Post by denz88 »

I built an online course catalog / aggregator many years ago. It's my first web project after learning how to code using courses from edX and Treehouse. My goal was to build something that I'd want to use myself. It's undergone a few iterations since then.

The site gained initial traction on Reddit where I shared my experience learning and building in the r/learnprogramming subreddit. That was enough momentum to get me ranking on search engines. I eventually set up affiliate relationships with several of the major online course platforms.

Although I've built a handful of apps using React, Vue, etc. this one's a classic Flask app using Jinja templating. There's just a few tiny JS scripts I wrote for basic interactivity (like updating the state of the "Save" button). Feedback is most welcome!

https://opencourser.com

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

#663

Post by kmoser »

ludston wrote: post #435
kmoser wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm impressed! Every couple of years I come across a different music theory website and I try to follow along, but inevitably after a few sentences I'm completely lost and the rest becomes incomprehensible. I got really far along in yours, which was great, until I got to 6 (Keys): "When a song says that it is in the key of C Major or D Minor this is simply telling you which of the 12 notes are used in this song." You…

You have to understand that music theory is not a set of rules to follow, its a set of ideas that sound good to western ears and therefore are very commonly found in most music. Not every song, but much western music, especially pop music and nursary rhymes, will stick to the same major or minor scale of notes for the whole song. Going outside of this scale is quite normal too and changing the scale/key multiple time…

I certainly understand that in any system (not just music), some rules can be broken at certain times for various reasons (safety, aesthetics, etc.). To combine what you're saying with what I was saying, I would like to see, at least in this case, a better explanation of what exceptions are commonly made to these rules (e.g. using non-standard chords) and when they are made (e.g. in music from region XYZ).

In fact, I'd argue that such explanations are critical even when you're learning any kind of theory since it tells you when the theory breaks down, whether that's because it simply doesn't fit the task, because people like to get creative, etc.

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

#664

Post by cdosborn »

Rendello wrote: post #653
cdosborn wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Drawabox is based on doing exercises to improve your mark making (the accuracy of the marks you draw on the page) and eventually leads to you drawing hundreds of boxes in perspective as a consistent exercise. A lot of people swear by it. I enjoyed the first week of it but decided that drawing is not a priority right now. https://drawabox.com/

It is a good resource. Drawabox doesn't actually teach you how to rotate cubes. That was pretty frustrating to me.

I created a little game which doesn't explain it, but allows you to practice and get feedback: https://cdsb.itch.io/draw-cube

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

#665

Post by rohitweasley_ »

audiala wrote: post #512

I have built https://audiala.com which creates audioguides for historical and touristic places in cities all over the world. It brings a bit over $500/month in in-app purchases. I got the idea in 2023 as I was solo traveling Florence, Italy and thought it would be much nicer to listen to stories about the monuments around me instead of having to read a guide. There is also so much more to be done: next, my plan is to…

Will definitely check this out. Our go-to guide whenever travelling Europe has always been Rick Steve's books and audio guide app. Those are like having a personal guide with you as he will tell cool things like "take few steps to the left, now the point you are standing is where Hitler stood and made a painting of this church (in Vienna)" or "Leonardo da Vinci used to stare at this artistic metal door for inspiration (in Florence)". Those audio tours are one of the most fun things we remember from our trips as he is a great storyteller.

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

#666

Post by audiala »

lippihom wrote: post #657
audiala wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a RAG pipeline based on content from wikipedia and relevant websites. Getting the list of relevant places might the trickiest part of the pipeline but for this I settled with a not-perfect solution where users can manually request missing places.

Interesting - how heavily are you utilizing AI generated content? Pages like this for example: https://audiala.com/en/germany

We rely on AI for most of the content and correct if mistakes are spotted, but they seem quite rare. 99% of the content is directly coming from our AI pipeline.

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

#667

Post by audiala »

rohitweasley_ wrote: post #665
audiala wrote: post #512

I have built https://audiala.com which creates audioguides for historical and touristic places in cities all over the world. It brings a bit over $500/month in in-app purchases. I got the idea in 2023 as I was solo traveling Florence, Italy and thought it would be much nicer to listen to stories about the monuments around me instead of having to read a guide. There is also so much more to be done: next, my plan is to…

Will definitely check this out. Our go-to guide whenever travelling Europe has always been Rick Steve's books and audio guide app. Those are like having a personal guide with you as he will tell cool things like "take few steps to the left, now the point you are standing is where Hitler stood and made a painting of this church (in Vienna)" or "Leonardo da Vinci used to stare at this artistic metal door for inspiratio…

Thanks for sharing. This type of storytelling is what I want to achieve, even if I am not there yet. But I am confident this is achievable already.

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

#668

Post by ssiddharth »

josho wrote: post #636
ssiddharth wrote: post #262

I’m building Sink It for Reddit ( https://gosinkit.com ), a Safari/Chrome/Firefox/Edge extension to make Reddit usable on the web. It’s similar to RES (Reddit enhancement suite) but supports all of Reddit’s designs and is being actively developed with around 300k users, mainly on the Apple platforms. It was built during the Reddit API shenanigans last year and is making four figures a month. 99% of the app’s feature…

I suspect you can increase your conversion rate to paid quite easily. I've been using the free version for sometime. And I have no idea if the paid version gives me the improvements that I care about. I'm sure a 7 day trial, or an explainer video that walks through the differences would go a long way. For what it's worth, there's a lot of functionality that I want removed from reddit. I've never crossposted, yet ofte…

Good feedback, thank you. I’ll look into how to surface the premium features (a lot) better.

Re: feature additions, almost all of them are in the backlog and in various stages of development. Should ship soon!

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

#669

Post by ssiddharth »

coldtrait wrote: post #596
ssiddharth wrote: post #262

I’m building Sink It for Reddit ( https://gosinkit.com ), a Safari/Chrome/Firefox/Edge extension to make Reddit usable on the web. It’s similar to RES (Reddit enhancement suite) but supports all of Reddit’s designs and is being actively developed with around 300k users, mainly on the Apple platforms. It was built during the Reddit API shenanigans last year and is making four figures a month. 99% of the app’s feature…

Any chance there's an android app planned? Also, wondering if an edge extension is in the works too. Most chrome extensions work directly on edge but some don't.

Chrome on Android, unfortunately, doesn’t support extensions. I have a Firefox version for Android and I reckon Brave should pick up and install the desktop version for Chrome too.

I do have a version for Edge too though it’s often a few versions behind as the Edge team takes too darn long to approve. If anyone on the Edge team is reading this, please DM. https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/sink-it-fo...

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

#670

Post by kasperkamperman »

I created a site (https://zwemindex.nl) with all the pools and open water places in The Netherlands (it's in Dutch). It started off with the idea that I wanted to do a places search but without Google Places. I learned about GIS, build a lookup array with placenames, slugs and latlon. Just simple PHP and autocomplete.js.

I started out with some Open Data from the Dutch governent on all open water swimpots. I thought the current site (still is) not user-friendly on mobile. I also added all the public pools.

I got some traction because I got interviewed as an example project and I reached out to news sites.

Actually my backend is a Google sheet, which I sync to MongoDB (works nice with geo). Did a write up on that: https://www.kasperkamperman.com/blog/web/import-csv-in-mongo...

Rest is all vanilla PHP, cached to HTML, Bulma css. Running on shared hosting, with Cloudflare cache in front.

I really worked on accessibility too, allowing keyboard navigation (press TAB) and making sure everything is readable and with good contrast (Bulma 2.0 fixed that).

I make about $500 with some affiliate links (waterparks with hotels, wellness) which really fit with the search intent of the user. The last thing I want is stuffing the site full with Google ads.

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