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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?

#61

Post by icpmacdo »

niftylettuce wrote: post #37
bduerst wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hey I really like your approach of a lot of little project with a framework that suits a quick pace. I hope its okay to reach out to you through the email you provided in a different comment to correspond.

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

#62

Post by mavelikara »

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,…

Long time Selenium and Sauce Labs user here. Thanks for all the good work Jason!

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

#63

Post by aerovistae »

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)…

I don't know how you find the time/focus to become proficient as a full stack web developer with like 10 different frameworks AND iOS AND Android, that's not normal.

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

#64

Post by jasdeepsingh »

geerlingguy wrote: post #46
matt_wulfeck wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tr…

Very interesting case study! And kudos for being able to pull this off! Curious to learn about some $ numbers

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

#65

Post by niftylettuce »

icpmacdo wrote: post #61
niftylettuce wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hey I really like your approach of a lot of little project with a framework that suits a quick pace. I hope its okay to reach out to you through the email you provided in a different comment to correspond.

yeah it's definitely OK

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

#66

Post by [deleted] »

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)…

[deleted]

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

#67

Post by michaelbuckbee »

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 isn't meant to be snarky, but I seriously suspect that your business will really take off when the bot + ad click farming communities clue into what they could do with such a system.

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

#68

Post by msencenb »

If you define 'profitable' as $100 a month, that's where one of my iOS apps (http://postcardpanda.com) is at after 2+ years. I've only recently started putting actual time into it though.

If you want the full income report, here is May's: http://mattsencenbaugh.com/postcard-panda-may-2016-income-re...

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

#70

Post by Ramiuz »

daeken wrote: post #60

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…

Hey, maybe a little off-topic. This course seems very interesting (I'm currently studying https://secureyournodejs.com/?p=setup), is there a demo of a course or a sample to see the flow of the class?.
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