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Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

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Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#71

Post by snird »

It's probably not what you meant, but I recently created a weekend project bot that scans facebook for apartments rental ads. Thanks to this bot, I landed an opportunity I wouldn't have catch otherwise, saving me 6,000$ a year. Assuming I will hold my new apartment for 3 years, this is a net savings of 18,000$. I haven't sold anything, but yet I created something that "generated money" for me.

My code is open source by the way, and I wrote about it here: https://snir.dev/blog/apartments-bot/

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#72

Post by jolmg »

hbarka wrote: post #61
awillen wrote: post #2

I really don't like talking about my side projects, so I guess they all qualify, but I'm particularly excited about one at the moment. Right now I'm working on a dog treat business - I make a treat mix that you add water to and freeze for a meat-based frozen treat. I feel really good about the product and the packaging design (and this is the first time I've ever worked on any kind of a physical product, so it's real…

Sincere question—how do you handle legal, especially with consumables?

I wonder if the FDA (or equivalent in awillen's jurisdiction) would care about non-human consumables.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#73

Post by bemmu »

I wanted to learn iOS dev, so made the simplest game I could think of: a card game where you just draw a random card and win if it's between two values. Then I made another app that just transliterates your name into Japanese characters and displays that. That one made $33 / year.

Together they almost covered the Apple Developer fee :-)

Things continued like this for years, until one day Apple started getting harsher on gambling. While my game has no other players, and the "money" you win doesn't save anywhere or get you anything, it was still gambly enough that I could no longer have it in the store as an individual developer. Then the Japanese name app was also removed because it wasn't substantive enough (I don't disagree).

I don't mention them usually, because the loss didn't mean much to me and I'm still fine with developing for iOS in the future. But here you asked especially for projects that made money but that we wouldn't usually talk about.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#74

Post by CrackpotGonzo »

It’s very small at the moment, but I built a simple way to stand up a landing page, collect payment, and send out a link.

Primarily have yoga instructors using this as a better way to collect payment for Zoom classes compared to collecting payment on Venmo or using another tool they’re not comfortable with such as Gumroad.

Only charging .6% on top of Stripe’s fees and no monthly. Only making a little money at the moment but it’s scaling and seeing interest from lots of random online instructors.

ClassUp - https://www.classup.io

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#75

Post by FigmentEngine »

I created an AWS poster, like the periodic table but for services:

https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/~hello-world/

it was something to do after i left AWS, and also a way to test a model for computing i wanted to build.

Unfortunately with Covid 19 few people need a poster for their office at the moment, so focusing on tooling etc using the underlying model.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#77

Post by mattkevan »

I sell prints of public domain artwork on Etsy [0]. I’ve automated the print production and fulfillment, so all I need to do is set up the artwork and maintain the product listings.

It consistently brings in around £100-300 per month and if I put any time at all into marketing it could probably do a lot better.

I also maintain a directory of UX tools, resources and information [1]. It currently doesn’t bring in anything but it’s more of a repository for stuff I find interesting than a commercial venture.

[0] https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/TheDoveAndTheSeagull

[1] https://www.uxlift.org/

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#78

Post by awillen »

ryanar wrote: post #59
awillen wrote: post #2

I really don't like talking about my side projects, so I guess they all qualify, but I'm particularly excited about one at the moment. Right now I'm working on a dog treat business - I make a treat mix that you add water to and freeze for a meat-based frozen treat. I feel really good about the product and the packaging design (and this is the first time I've ever worked on any kind of a physical product, so it's real…

My feedback, product looks great, packaging looks great. I would not want to buy the Beef & Cheddar. Compare the label of Beef & Cheddar to Turkey & Cinnamon. Turkey & Cinnamon have four simple ingredients, Turkey, Yogurt Powder, Whole Wheat Flour, Cinnamon. Compare that to Beef & Cheddar, there are so many things in that ingredient list by comparison. When I think of food that is 'good for you' I want to see simple…

Thanks for the feedback! All the extra stuff on the B&C comes from the cheddar cheese powder - for the most part they're natural ingredients (excluding things like the yellow color, etc.), but you're right, it doesn't look great.

Once we get low on my current supply of cheese powder, I'm going to look into getting a food dehydrator to make my own cheese powder.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#79

Post by awillen »

XIVMagnus wrote: post #66
awillen wrote: post #2

I really don't like talking about my side projects, so I guess they all qualify, but I'm particularly excited about one at the moment. Right now I'm working on a dog treat business - I make a treat mix that you add water to and freeze for a meat-based frozen treat. I feel really good about the product and the packaging design (and this is the first time I've ever worked on any kind of a physical product, so it's real…

What service are you using for shipping? If you don't mind answering what are the costs of offering free shipping?

It's a Shopify site, so I'm just using their integration to print labels from whoever's cheapest - so far it's always been USPS. Honestly the shipping is something I need to figure out... I'm charging flat shipping per product right now until $50 because I don't want shipping costs to be too discouraging, but I am losing money shipping to the East Coast.

For the most part my margins are pretty decent and at this point I'm more interested in proving that there's product-market fit than optimizing for profit, so I don't mind losing some money when my shipping charges don't cover it or people hit the free shipping threshold. Definitely something I'm going to need to get a better handle on long term, though.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#80

Post by awillen »

4636760295 wrote: post #55
awillen wrote: post #2

I really don't like talking about my side projects, so I guess they all qualify, but I'm particularly excited about one at the moment. Right now I'm working on a dog treat business - I make a treat mix that you add water to and freeze for a meat-based frozen treat. I feel really good about the product and the packaging design (and this is the first time I've ever worked on any kind of a physical product, so it's real…

This is great and it's something I'd definitely buy for my dog.

Thank you, glad to hear it!
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