Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

Might not be the same thing, but I had/have built (a) project(s) that I began with the dreams of someday monetizing, but later realized, maybe I shouldn't, couldn't figure out how to charge for it, or didn't see a need of why anyone would pay to use it, and thus, ended up just keeping it as a "free platform".

I'm not upset about the decisions I've made for keeping my projects free, as if anything, they have taught me a lot, and I tend to use what I learned from them for future projects. In most cases, I end up turning on an Analytics feature and studying it, in order to understand the behavior of my users, and exactly what they are using it for and why, so that I can harness that into ideas for future projects.

Two projects like this were a blog I run called Confessions of the Professions ( http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com ). This website was created in order to solicit rants and raves from people about their jobs, careers, and their workplace. While I wouldn't call it a complete failure or complete success, as it has been monetized and makes money through ads, I would've loved to figured out a way to bring in revenue and make it a full time job.

The reason I say success and failure: It goes viral for days and weeks at a time, sometimes receiving over 10,000 visitors a day, while other days, it normally gets its average of about 1,000, though it could be worse. Sometimes, I cannot fully recognize the fact that I began with just Googlebot, my mom, and girlfriend as my visitors, and yet I continue to receive hundreds of emails a year with contributions and people thanking me. I even had a teacher from an elementary class full of students using some of the articles for their school project and thanked me so much for creating the website.

Confessions remains an ongoing project.. I'm always writing articles or receiving them from other people and getting them ready for the website, so I'd say I spent a good 2 years passionate about it and into it, hours and hours a day. I've since limited myself to no more than 1 hour per day on it. Occasionally 2 hours if writing an article.

For the other project, MyPost ( https://mypost.io ) is a web page creation platform that allows anyone to create a page with very little knowledge of HTML or CSS in seconds, or they can completely customize their page with HTML and CSS as they see fit. And there is soo much that people can do with it. I created it for a number of different reasons as well, including as an educational tool for people to learn what it was like to code. Social media has catered to the population so much that while everyone "can use social media and the Internet", far fewer can claim to hit the "View Source" button and actually understand all that makes a website what it is.

As for charging for this, I never could figure it out and hoped to one day just put ads on the website, but ended up scratching this idea, as the ads were just too annoying, even for me. I can tolerate some ad popups, but I created the platform to offer people an experience, not an annoyance. It is this project that taught me a lot about databases and a lot about what people want on the Internet, and that is: an easy way to gain exposure. I have plans for a another project that helps people to do that, similar to ProductHunt and Hacker News.

The time I spent on this was about 3 months initially and then another 2 months just making some changes, fixing things, creating samples, etc.

I would love to quit my day job and just work on side projects and monetize them.. as I'm sure many of us would, but I have yet to get to that point completely. I do have a few projects I built completely with monetization in mind, and while there is a free version of those products, I built them as a subscription-based platform. I also have a few other projects in mind that I have no intentions of charging for.... for some projects, it is more about gaining exposure and recognition for me.

I have a project which may never generate revenue, despite the fact I spent 2 months after hours working on it. I did a dumb thing and dove directly into the project without first finding a fit or customer base for it.

More or less, it's a scheduling application that allows a user to set when they're open and allow anyone to book that time for however much the original scheduler valued that slot of their schedule. It's a good base application, but without customers, it's wasted potential and engineering time. Guess I'll add a link: https://kronikl.io

There is an added benefit that I built up a lot of custom Vue components and flask modules which can be added to later projects (braintree painments, address inputs, settings pages, &c.), so I'm not considering it a complete loss.

I've decided to pivot most of my time to a more marketing based approach for the time being and, once customers role in, tailor the solution to their needs.

I spent a few thousand building a very detailed database of seed-funding entities that included all the staff and their backgrounds, detailed areas of interest and past investment, and more. I planned to turn it into an actually-useful seed funding search service. But I got distracted with another project needed to pay my bills. Time and persistence are the greatest obstacles to side projects IMO.

I built Thrail (https://thrail.io) 6 months ago wanting to solve my own difficulty to find and book quality outdoors activities in a certain area, especially when coming to a new place (tourism or recent relocation).

I think there are multiple reasons why it wasn't successful as I believed it might be, most importantly because I built something without first researching the market enough, and failure to do so got me building something which wasn't very helpful to people.

Another important issue was marketing. I'm developer myself, and even though I tried my best to get the word out there, the results weren't as good as I imagined they would be, on one side because I had no idea what I was doing, and on the other, because I didn't spend enough money on higher quality marketing.

I spent couple of months building it but I don't regret that time -- although this conclusion is probably specific to my personal situation at the time, where I had just closed the shop on my own development agency of 3+ years and wanted to get a break by working on something fun. Additionally, out of all the "weekend projects" I started over the years, this was the first one I actually "finished", and that means something to me, regardless of the outcome.

If I get into something similiar in the near future, I would definitely pay much more attention to the aspect of getting the feedback to build something people actually want to use. And marketing, definitely marketing.

It looks good, it's a great idea. I really think you have a bad name for it. It seems hard to spell, and the name seems more related to diary entries than billing time.

I think there's a lot of professional services that could use it, say photographers, psychologists, etc.

That said, I could see a service where experts (think node.js and others) could put a badge on their blog site and answer questions for an hour while getting paid for it. That would be something I might use if I can get an hour of an experts time (even if it cost me $50-$100) to get some information from an expert. So instead of me taking 8 hours to learn information, I can learn that info in 1 hour. It seems like a bargain.