I did until it was shut down by a legal threat from a Fortune 100. It took about 1 year to go from 0 to profitable.
Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
31–40 of 208 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#32I wrote an online multiplayer game called Aberoth: http://aberoth.com. I released the first version to the world in January 2010, but the game did not have many features initially, and there was no way to buy anything. Toward the end of 2012 I felt good enough about the product to start selling memberships.
I continued to work on the game on the side over the years, and I released the game on Steam in July 2015: http://store.steampowered.com/app/354200/.
It does not make near as much a normal software engineer's full time salary, but it is profitable.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#33I built http://serpentinegame.com in 2008, an online multiplayer boggle game, and it makes a modest amount of money for me from ads and premium memberships. The only costs have been my time, a server on linode, and the domain name. I've had a couple other attempts but nothing has really taken off in the same way.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#34I've worked over a year on https://www.boxfactura.com/ which is a special email service for invoices in Mexico. It has been profitable since January after quite some legwork, on the technical side as well as the sales and persuation side.
Hey man, I'm also from Mexico but currently live in NY. This is pretty awesome. How did you manage to get traction with small businesses? Would love to chat if you have time, my email is emilioolivares, I use Google email.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#355 years. (2011-2016) While working on my first startup (Sauce Labs), I made a robot that plays Angry Birds as a side/art project in the autumn of 2011. The serious part of the project is that you can use the robot for testing mobile apps and devices. I started to sell the robots (still as a side project) on Tindie when that first launched in the summer of 2012. I made a couple of thousand dollars the first few years,…
It's interesting to me that your approach to automated testing includes a real, physical device. How well do you think your robot offering is positioned versus fast and free virtual automated testing within an Android/iOS simulator? I assume there must be some material advantage to testing on a real device, but I don't know a lot about the domain. What happens if the layout of the app changes slightly- are your testi…
Example #1: How do you automate a test for what happens to your streaming music app when a phone call comes in? (This was a real scenario a client couldn't figure out how to automate any other way.)
Example #2: You're a car company and have a mobile app that controls parking your car. You have a business (and possibly legal) requirement to test the app with the same unmodified hardware your users will use. (So you can't only use simulators.)
Example #3: You make wearables that measures steps taken. How do you test the wearable to make sure it's logging steps properly? (You shake it with a robot.)
Every company that makes a device (phone, car, wearable, anything with a touch screen, etc) has a secret robot testing lab.
I didn't know all of these examples were real business problems (with the associated big enterprise budgets) when I started the project. But after enough of these conversations, I realized there's something there.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just released Glazed, my latest boilerplate that I use for this stuff. You can find it here https://github.com/glazedio/glazed . However I have a HUGE absolutely STELLAR update coming probably in the next week for Glazed. I basically dog fed this on my own startup/project and have a ton of little but important updates to the project.
What's the benefits of using Nunjucks, in your opinion?
It's incredibly fast, I still may try using https://github.com/marko-js/marko on v2 though since it seems to be much faster. Haven't really tried their plugin/system yet. I came from using Jade for like five years straight and when performance time came around with it, it hurt. Nunjucks is really nice!
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just released Glazed, my latest boilerplate that I use for this stuff. You can find it here https://github.com/glazedio/glazed . However I have a HUGE absolutely STELLAR update coming probably in the next week for Glazed. I basically dog fed this on my own startup/project and have a ton of little but important updates to the project.
What's the benefits of using Nunjucks, in your opinion?
If I used a SPA framework on these projects they would take me 100x longer to build a MVP with. If the project is viable and gets traction, then you could consider rewriting with a SPA like React or something.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#38A year.
I was spending way too much time on eBay, so I wrote something for myself that would scrape the web pages and use a kill list to filter out the junk. I wanted a better UI to add words to the kill list and realised I could make money via the eBay affiliate program.
So I took two months off between contracts and wrote the first version of AuctionSieve - http://auctionsieve.com
There was a D&D forum, the Acaeum where a bunch of people started using it and giving feedback.
It was making me money from day 1 but it probably took about a year to repay that 2 months of time investment.
It's now been 13 years(!) and it still makes me money - not enough to live off (the payout calculations from eBay have changed several times) but a nice chunk of change. And I only have to occasionally prod it. And add the occasional new feature.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#39Here's a brief list! * Wakeup.io - Simple Phone Wake-up Calls @ https://wakeup.io and it is fully automated and runs itself with actually really good profits. It was built in 2-3 days. * GetProve, Simple Phone Verification @ https://getprove.com and it is fully automated and runs itself with again, really good profits. It was built in a week or so. * Teelaunch, Kickstarter/Indiegogo Fulfillment Service (exited/sold)…
i've been trying to come up w/ these really simple ideas like this which turn small profits. Death by a thousand paper cuts I guess. Having trouble coming up w/ one :(
just clone what someone else did and make it simpler to use and easier to understand, haha
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#40I made Server Check.in 3.5 years ago (HN announcement thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901350
), and it's been earning around $2k/year with almost no maintenance. Just a few updates to the Drupal front-end/UI, and the Node.js backend every year (maybe 20 hours total).
Costs are incredibly low, as I have ~15 low end box-type servers running as check servers interacting with Drupal via a private API, and one DigitalOcean droplet running prod, with a hot backup droplet. Everything was automated via Ansible early on, and I don't have to touch anything except for patching/updating from time to time.
I also have run Hosted Apache Solr for almost double the time, and it actually earns a decent secondary income. Up to about 25 DigitalOcean droplets now, also all managed via Ansible/Jenkins, and it has a few hundred clients (a couple who have been stable clients for over 5 years, and a few very large names that made me realize even a side project can be stable/good enough for 'big companies' to trust them).
I haven't advertised either except for mentions here and there and having them in some of my social media profiles, but I've learned so much from running both—and even turned some of that knowledge into a book that gives decent passive income on top!