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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

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751–760 of 866 posts

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#751

I've been working on Newsy this year https://www.newsy.co It's a tool that lets you create content sites based on your unused domain names. It's been growing steadily.

Not to sound rude, but isn't this kind of a generator to produce spam sites? Easy template, draw others' content through RSS and that's it? Does anyone actually pay for subscriptions and why if the only content is other site feeds?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#752

3 years ago I started a newsletter about robotics ( https://weeklyrobotics.com/ ) and about month ago I opened it to advertisers and started earning about $600 a month from ads.

How did you manage to acquire subscribers for this niche topic? Which measures had the greatest impact?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#753
post #289

I have two! An app for making wedding place cards that does about $1000/mo https://www.placecard.me/ A boilerplate for making SaaS apps with Python/Django that does $5k/month (highly variable) https://www.saaspegasus.com/ I also have a third that does around $150/mo. It's an app that adds analytics to GroupMe which is a WhatsApp alternative. https://chatstats.co/ I keep complete revenue and effort data here if you're…

Just curious- how did you advertise/market your saaspegasus solution? I Google “boilerplate python and Django SaaS app” and your site is not front page, so I figured SEO probably isn’t the answer.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#754
post #289

I have two! An app for making wedding place cards that does about $1000/mo https://www.placecard.me/ A boilerplate for making SaaS apps with Python/Django that does $5k/month (highly variable) https://www.saaspegasus.com/ I also have a third that does around $150/mo. It's an app that adds analytics to GroupMe which is a WhatsApp alternative. https://chatstats.co/ I keep complete revenue and effort data here if you're…

Just curious- how did you advertise/market your saaspegasus solution? I Google “boilerplate python and Django SaaS app” and your site is not front page, so I figured SEO probably isn’t the answer.

That's odd. It's mostly SEO and content, actually.

I believe it's in the front page for Django SaaS, Django boilerplate and related terms. I haven't gone as hard after Python keywords, though I probably should...

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#755
post #289

I have two! An app for making wedding place cards that does about $1000/mo https://www.placecard.me/ A boilerplate for making SaaS apps with Python/Django that does $5k/month (highly variable) https://www.saaspegasus.com/ I also have a third that does around $150/mo. It's an app that adds analytics to GroupMe which is a WhatsApp alternative. https://chatstats.co/ I keep complete revenue and effort data here if you're…

Where did you get the art for your place card business?

Mostly royalty-free image sites, e.g. pixabay.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#756
post #735
post #289

I have two! An app for making wedding place cards that does about $1000/mo https://www.placecard.me/ A boilerplate for making SaaS apps with Python/Django that does $5k/month (highly variable) https://www.saaspegasus.com/ I also have a third that does around $150/mo. It's an app that adds analytics to GroupMe which is a WhatsApp alternative. https://chatstats.co/ I keep complete revenue and effort data here if you're…

Hi Cory—your dashboard is really impressive. Did you have to reboot the wedding place card app? Because I remember you commenting somewhere—I can't remember where—that it had tanked. But obviously since this is an end-of-year report that can't be true, right?

It tanked for the first six months of the pandemic. It's started coming back as the world has started having events again

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#757
post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I am really happy paying the App Store/Play Store the commission, by the way, as they handle the global tax management - I wouldn’t want to send a tax report to every country in which some user made a $1.99 in-app purchase…)

Definitely a valid point, which is why I use Paddle on my website. 30% is still a huge fee for that, Paddle only charges 5% for example (and that includes payment processing fees).

To be fair, from the consumer side, the fee is not 30% because you can top up your account using discounted cards bought in physical stores.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#758

3 years ago I started a newsletter about robotics ( https://weeklyrobotics.com/ ) and about month ago I opened it to advertisers and started earning about $600 a month from ads.

How did you manage to acquire subscribers for this niche topic? Which measures had the greatest impact?

I’ve occasionally posted some issues on hn and /r/robotics. Every week I share the issues on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. From these LinkedIn seems to have brought the most interactions so far.

On a couple of occasions I traded shout outs with some newsletters and I think this was the most effective method for obtaining new subscribers.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#759

Have a saas I built for a large company to manage their marketing and advertising. Deployed about 8 years ago. Two employees, myself and my brother. Built it in php, and javascript and was the first web based app I had ever built. Got paid about 150k to build it and then we have been netting ~$2500 a month (we then split it 50/50) for the last 8 years. No upgrades or additional work done. Most months all I do is send…

Sounds like you had a decent run. Is there a way to make it more general and onboard new customers? Or somehow find companies that have the exact same need?

Its a pretty specific niche product. The code is also terrible :) Every time I had to make a change i was terrified, so many files with redundant functions and just spaghetti code. I hadn't programmed for a little over 4 years when I wrote it and it was my first time coding anything outside of c++. It did make me love web development though and set me off on my current career. Actually excited to build something new, future is bright :)

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#760
post #276
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome project. I initially youtube'd you, and there was no mention of your card game. I then startpage'd you and found a kickstarter page with a pretty well-made video... why don't you crosspost your video to youtube? and why don't you get someone to review it?

good point... I'm not sure why we never made the youtube video public. Thanks for bringing it up! This is why I feel like making that first game was good practice, I won't make these mistakes for the second one.

When it comes to boardgames, I use two resources:

1. Does it have a good rating / breakdown in the BoardGameGeek forums?

2. Does it have a review on YouTube that showcases the main game mechanic?

Ideally, a third party review is always better. The board game community is not a harsh one (it's not like you have oceans of "this game sucks!" reviews -- there is a lot of love for the art) but a third party just seems more... relatable. They are also just trying to have fun.

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