Man i always post such questions but never get responses at all. Sigh.
Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
71–80 of 208 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#72Earlier 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…
Would that be this book? https://landing.google.com/sre/book.html
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#735 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 remember when it started selling in tindie. It was really interesting but I wrongly thought that no one would use that. Im glad I was wrong. It definitely opens yo my eyes for opportunities. Best of luck!
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#74I'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.
Hey, Emilio!
Sure, I'll send you an email, however, I'd like to keep the answer to your question on the public side, if you don't mind.
It has been quite a ride to get traction, mostly the first clients signed up after talking to them about their issues with their invoices and expenses--once they're interested, we begin the education process. The other sources are a mix of everything. One of our services is a platform in which our client's vendors can upload invoices so they can manage them. We get some information on several businesses, both small and big so we can begin to offer our solution. This particular product might be the best source for viral growth, as one client can introduce 10 or 20 new users on our platform.
We also have a relatively successful side project on a related field [1], which has several hundred hits daily. There's an ad there, there might be some optimization on both the ad and the landing, but we're still trying to figure that out. Finally, our focus has been towards explaining the product, as there's nothing like it on the market (actually there are, but they're small and having the same difficulties we have). Once they sign up, our onboarding process is focused on one point: send your first invoice. As we saw many of the new signups not completing this step (or the previous 2), we set up an email communication strategy for each one of the steps, with our contact information in each email. I've blogged a bit [2] about it.
Now that we're sure our product is helpful for the businesses, we just started promoting heavily with a sales force.
I hope that answered your question!
2: http://www.therror.com/weblog/2016/mar/como_el_email_marketi...
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#754 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).
A fantastic tool built around a great idea. When people ask me the timeless question of "why Slack", I actually point to Standup Jack as an example of how a simple and useful integration can save time and increase transparency through Slack's API. I actually had no idea it was a one-man show until just now. Seriously awesome execution!
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#76A 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…
If you want to pursue the marketing support angle, drop me a note. I have something that might help. :)
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#775 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 the first time I wished a company had a giant "jumbotron" video on their marketing page. You sell robots, add a video!
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#785 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 remember when it started selling in tindie. It was really interesting but I wrongly thought that no one would use that. Im glad I was wrong. It definitely opens yo my eyes for opportunities. Best of luck!
I was just as surprised as you are. :)
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#795 years of bootstrapping a nutrition & fitness tracking web/mobile app for me.
After the first few months it was only making enough income to cover basic hosting costs and not much else, so I ended up getting a job (well, co-founded a different startup with good funding). In the next two years, I was just doing the bare minimum to keep it running, and it grew 80% each year. Start of year 3, other startup failed and I had spare time to invest in the site and it was making maybe 8000/month in revenues, and the decent yearly growth has continued so that now in year 5 I can comfortably live on the business, and have a few employees / contractors to help with support and development.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#805 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 the first time I wished a company had a giant "jumbotron" video on their marketing page. You sell robots, add a video!
Yeah, the website needs some love. I didn't even have a separate website for the project until this year.