Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 208 posts

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

#51

Post by hugs »

benliong78 wrote: post #41
hugs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pre…

We're now at about $150k in bookings halfway through the year. Last year was $30k revenue for the entire year. I hope the numbers keep going up or this will have to go back to side-project status!

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

#52

Post by RhodesianHunter »

tempestn wrote: post #43

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 ii…

Did all of the "No affiliation with craigslist." warnings come after some legal action?

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

#53

Post by hugs »

tmat wrote: post #45
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 :(

Sorry to hear that. I'm sure, though, that the Sauce folks would want to hear more detail about the issues you saw.

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

#54

Post by aerovistae »

dtjohnnymonkey wrote: post #49

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.

Oh man, I would love to have this functionality. Unfortunately I value the security of the contents of my Dropbox too much to open it to 3rd party services. Frustrating. Great idea making this.

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

#55

Post by matthewmueller »

4 months.

I built a Slack bot called Standup Jack (https://standupjack.com). It's a ton of work upfront but if you launch early, keep an open dialog with your users, iterate on their feedback and keep your costs low, it's a nice way to earn some side income each month.

Udemy is a pretty easy way to start since they do the marketing for you (for a pretty big cut).

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

#57

Post by dalacv »

I made a course on Udemy on how to make complete web applications without writing code using APEX.

Link and free coupons:

https://www.udemy.com/create-web-apps-with-apex-5/?couponCod...

Expenses:

$100 for a nice microphone (not necessary) but didn't want to record a bunch and have it be garbage $100 for Screenflow (to do video editing). 20 hours time (split across a couple of weekends

Profit:

I've made $1405 on it so far. It is almost completely passive income.

Proof:

http://i.imgur.com/sexsrzK.png?1

If you know any of the topics in the Hot Topics list and can do desktop recording, maybe you should think about teaching others and making some side money while doing it. Best of all, the Udemy community is awesome. They are very supportive of each other.

https://teach.udemy.com/course-creation/hot-topic-courses/

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

#58

Post by usloth_wandows »

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,…

That's hilarious! I totally expected some sort of automated testing suite for emulators/simulators, not a physical robot with a stylus! Awesome work!

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

#59

Post by King-Aaron »

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,…

This is extremely cool, I need one of these little guys on my desk already!

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

#60

Post by daeken »

A day. Okay, it isn't quite that simple. My sideproject is Breaker 101, an online class for web security. (https://breaker101.com)

I launched on HN and sold out (75 seats or so, $1500 each IIRC) that same day. I had designed the syllabus over the previous couple days, but there was no product -- because I honestly thought that only a few people would buy it, and I'd just have to refund them.

I built the class over the next few months and that went really well (not perfectly, but definitely well), but subsequent runs never got anywhere near the same success in terms of sales -- just couldn't get it in front of enough people.

I recently relaunched it at $150 in more of a self-driven form. It's profitable by all means, but it needs marketing behind it. I've been thinking a lot about selling it to someone that can give it the love it needs, but I'm still on the fence there.

Post reply on HN