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Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#91

Post by pryelluw »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #84
pryelluw wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sell something similar but charge at least a hundred times more per project / site. You should really promote this as the "local" (country based) solution and raise prices. For £75 you will only get annoying cheapskates.

That's interesting because in the end I gave up because I felt like the space was too over crowded with lower cost alternatives already. I had managed to get a few potential clients but ultimately they all decided to go with other companies that would offer them a fully custom site for a fixed price of anything between £1000 and £4000. We had limits on how much we would customize the sites because of how the engine w…

Sure thing. Mine is in my profile in case you need to whitelist it to avoid hitting the spam filter.

Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#92

Post by pryelluw »

andai wrote: post #78
pryelluw wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, turns out the average dev doesnt really know much about marketing. Some are even against learning it. I simply work with them to establish an online presence, a core brand (based on their skills and goals), a content strategy (what to write about in order to get the markets attention), visual branding (logo and website design), and time based plans to help them take action. Its like a sort of marketing makeover…

That last part got my attention! I'm currently studying internet marketing and there's so much stuff out there that makes me uneasy... have you found any resources for ethical marketing?

Ethical marketing is the result of having strong ethics. I personally care more about how I make money than how much I make. My reputation is priceless. So, always listen to your gut and never do anything that you are not comfortable doing. You have a choice.

Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#93

Post by pryelluw »

perlgeek wrote: post #88
andai wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last part got my attention! I'm currently studying internet marketing and there's so much stuff out there that makes me uneasy... have you found any resources for ethical marketing?

Marketing yourself as a developer can just be blogging, creating videos/sreencaptures of you explaining some thing etc. You don't have to sell anything, just convince people that you're worth employing. Just the other day my boss discussed some hiring decisions with me, and he said "the guy is too expensive. If he had a blog or an active github profile, I could justify 10% more" (above what we'd usually pay for the p…

Yes, with those simple things you can manage to develop a nice online persona. Where I help people is more in how they are going to implement those ideas. Blogging is not as simple as it sounds and some people need some help to get started. They also need to write with an end goal in sight. I tell people to blog as if you were to publish a book from your posts after 6 months. People also tend to need help in structuring content. I help them learn how to write technical content that does not end up reading like furniture instructions.

Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#95

Post by simon_weber »

gediminas_ wrote: post #89
simon_weber wrote: post #64

I started two projects last year and now make ~$100/month in profit. Costs are almost nothing. https://autoplaylists.simon.codes : iTunes-style smart playlists for Google Music. https://gchat.simon.codes : autoreplies for Google Chat/Hangouts. Particularly useful for people with multiple accounts that forward email. https://simon.codes/2017/01/09/side-project-income-2016-0-to... has more details on why I chose these…

How do you combat code stealing and submitting an extension as their own if that has happened before?

To be honest, I just don't worry about it. I haven't had any problems yet!

In the case I run into problems, I'd consider changing the license.

Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#96

Post by accordionclown »

jshawl wrote: post #8

https://updog.co host a website from your Dropbox or google drive account. Add password protection, render markdown, and more to come!

i had a glitch when i tried it (it was my mistake) and they helped me sort it out. very worthwhile and friendly.

Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#97

Post by colinbartlett »

vonklaus wrote: post #53
colinbartlett wrote: post #13

StatusGator: https://statusgator.com Monitors status pages of cloud services with optional notifications and creates a unified status page of your service dependencies. I wrote a blog post recently about how profitable (barely) it is: https://blog.statusgator.com/anatomy-of-a-profitable-side-pr...

I just posted a thread asking about design considerations for something like this. There are a lot of monitoring sites but they are typically for internal consumption. I am really interested in real-time, or timely monitoring of external services. I'll check the service out, but curious if any of it is open source, and hos you verify a site is up/down?

It's not open source, but that's something I've considered.

And StatusGator doesn't verify that a service is up or down, it just reports what a service reports. Most status pages have several components which are either up, down, or warn, and StatusGator aggregates that same data from all the various sources. If any component is down, that service is listed as down, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#98

Post by jazoom »

I've spent a couple of years making https://pricehipster.com

It's a very fast product search engine and price comparison website. Search speeds won't be great outside Australia (Australian stores).

I am currently making preparations to expand to other countries later this year.

It has only become (slightly) profitable just recently.

Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#99

Post by angry-hacker »

rlv-dan wrote: post #16

Desktop utilities: http://www.rlvision.com I've been making freeware and shareware for a long time. Some are shareware and still make some (not much) money. Edit: You might be interested in this retrospective I wrote about my personal favorite utilities: http://www.rlvision.com/blog/16-years-with-flash-renamer-a-d...

Thank you for the tool. Remember using it on Windows when I was young.

Is it still possible to make money with shareware?

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