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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?

#81

Post by mhowland »

3 Months.

I made https://www.myothernumber.com (online temporary sms/mms/voice numbers) about a 1.5 years ago, was making ramen money within 3 months.

Now tracking in the 5-figure/year range.

It's a very, very crowded market so primary cost is user acquisition, but then again that's exactly why I built it, to better learn (consumer facing UA) and have a platform to experiment with.

About to officially launch http://artistic.af (neural artistic transfer meets instagram + canvas printing). I expect this one to take a bit longer to scale, but it was just an excuse to learn DNNs.

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

#82

Post by geerlingguy »

wtracy wrote: post #72
geerlingguy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's the one!

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

#83

Post by brezelgoring »

cookiecaper wrote: post #31

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.

Could you go deeper into this? The fact that you got bullied by a F100 company means you had the potential to go big, what was your project about?

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

#84

Post by mburst »

I've been working on https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teamtol.li... for the past 2 years. About 2 years ago Valve released an API to get data for Dota and other games in their portfolio. It was a good excuse for me to learn Android development which is something I had wanted to do for awhile. About a year in to the project I added some ads which in turn made the app almost instantly profitable. I built the API to be super performant from the start and the whole thing runs on the equivalent of a micro-instance despite needing to serve up a few hundred thousand requests per day.

My main goal with the project right now isn't to generate profit though. If you were to account for the cost of my time I'm sure the project would be deeply in debt. I just enjoy working on it and it gives me a good excuse to travel to different Dota events throughout the world and meet awesome people.

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

#86

Post by niftylettuce »

aerovistae wrote: post #63
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.

Haha you're telling me!!!!

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

#88

Post by jeffonhn »

rsoto wrote: post #4

I'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 Rsoto,

I'd recommend an English version of your website. There are companies in the US which have to issue Factura's and I have found it hard to find websites discussing Factura's and offering Factura solutions in English.

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

#89

Post by matheweis »

I build iConvert Icons [see http://iconverticons.com/online/] six years ago without any intention of making money off of it.

Unfortunately about three years into it, it became a full sink (negative time + negative money). I was actually going to sell it off for a couple of grand about that point, at which my wife encouraged me to have a go at making something out of it.

It was profitable within a month, and has been ever since. Not enough to pay [my] bills, but it pays for itself and enough left over for some other hobbies.

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

#90

Post by shireboy »

I wrote https://leanpub.com/trellodojo in about 4 months to start, and periodically spend several hours a month updating it. It earns ~100 to ~300 a month. I do have some ideas for software and other digital content that I can't seem to get traction on. Reading the rest of this is motivating though. Keep up the good work everybody!
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