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Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?

#41

Post by benliong78 »

hugs wrote: post #35
brianpgordon wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

At the Previous Company I was in (Bindo Labs) I was coding the NFC Payment Integration with the Point of Sales System (POS). One of the requirements for the integration was that every transaction has to happen less than 0.5 seconds including the hardware card-reading part. So I ended up having to wave the card around the reader all day testing it. I thought of building a automated testing robot but tight deadline prevented me from diverging, and it didn't end up happening.

I'd be curious to know how big a business it is for you now that it's 5 years past. Sounds like a very interesting case-study.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?

#43

Post by tempestn »

I created searchtempest.com as a hobby project in 2006, starting with zero web knowledge, although a bit of programming experience from electrical engineering. Within about a year and a half it was earning enough to pay my (very modest) rent. By 2009 I quit my day job to focus on it full time. Added autotempest.com around the same time and now have several employees working on the two. (The first hired around 2010 iirc.)

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?

#44

Post by matt_wulfeck »

geerlingguy wrote: post #40

I 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 o…

I'm happy for your success, but I'm not sure I'd consider running a hosted distributed database as a side project. You're on-call 100% of the time for a single point of failure. Also, a bad/inexperienced tenant can serious performance issues.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?

#45

Post by tmat »

hugs wrote: post #22

5 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,…

i just tried using sauce labs real device testing and I must say its pretty unusable for any real testing. Browserstack has this running pretty amazingly these days as I found out after saucelabs failed for me :(

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?

#46

Post by geerlingguy »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #44
geerlingguy wrote: post #40

I 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 o…

I'm happy for your success, but I'm not sure I'd consider running a hosted distributed database as a side project. You're on-call 100% of the time for a single point of failure. Also, a bad/inexperienced tenant can serious performance issues.

I learned early on, it's all about proactive monitoring, 'self healing' (e.g. restart on fail) services, and simplicity in everything.

I've been running between 300-500 Apache Solr search cores continuously for almost 5 years, starting with 1.4, migrating up to now 4.10.4 (5 and 6 are in the works), all with around 99.98% uptime (averaged on all the servers over time).

I have detailed logs and per-search-core stat tracking (queries, index size, query time) for the past 3 months and archives back further, and I have only had to remove noisy neighbors a few times (and did so quickly, by first isolating them on their own VM, then helping them move off to dedicated resources if needed).

Also, I explicitly state I offer no SLA in the support docs—some people are okay with that.

But yes, I'm always on call, technically. I've only had to fix 'emergency' scenarios about 3 times in the past 5 years though. Even security updates are automated via Ansible/Jenkins. I just need to log in and click a button and things are updated, or a new server is built.

I highly recommend Google's new book on SREs; whether a one man shop or a multi billion corp, the learnings are exactly the same!

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?

#47

Post by danschuller »

I wrote a digital book, plus art, engine and example code about how to make a JRPG style RPG. (http://howtomakeanrpg.com/ I'm still in pre-release but early-access has been available for mailing list subscribers since January. Release should happen "soon".

Profit-wise: ~$500 a month (apart from the first month which was ~$5000). If I include my own time, I've roughly covered my costs.

It's taken about 3 years (!) to write the book in my spare time, usually an hour each morning. In a lot of ways it wasn't a great side project:

  - Hard to make
  - Small market
  - Complex
But it's the first commercial side project I've attempted and I've really enjoyed the experience. Rather than jump straight on to a new project, I'll probably spend time after release experimenting with marketing (google adwords, content marketing etc).

(Previously I've written a programming book published via a traditional publisher and my day job is as a game developer.)

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?

#48

Post by ontoillogical »

niftylettuce wrote: post #2

Here'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)…

Can you explain the liquid chalk concept more? I use chalk to absorb and dry sweat on my hands, how does liquid do that? Does the alcohol evaporate super fast and leave the chalk to soak up my sweat?

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?

#49

Post by dtjohnnymonkey »

Textdropapp.com - web-based plain text editor for Dropbox. It started off as a scratch to my own itch, and I listed it in the Dropbox app directory. I started collecting feature requests and after a year or so I completely rewrote it as a paid app. The rewrite took 3-4 months of nights and weekends. I haven't touched it in 2.5 years but it still generates maybe $30-50 per month, net.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?

#50

Post by niftylettuce »

ontoillogical wrote: post #48
niftylettuce wrote: post #2

Here'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)…

Can you explain the liquid chalk concept more? I use chalk to absorb and dry sweat on my hands, how does liquid do that? Does the alcohol evaporate super fast and leave the chalk to soak up my sweat?

email me at niftylettuce@gmail.com, I deleted that from my comment here because I haven't really publicly released that project yet, but basically the gist is you put the liquid chalk on as a base layer, then use regular chalk. the marketing & sales is the true magic in a business like this. the liquid evaporates near instantly.
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