Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

111–120 of 208 posts

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

#111
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to let you know that there is a typo on the first page of artistic.af: "...a lot of historic genuius..." Site looks great!

Awesome, much appreciated!!

And another one: ...and the inspriation of you...

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

#113

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)…

super inspiring. Thanks for sharing man.

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

#114
I started a Product Hunt style newsletter that curates the best UI designs every day (http://uimovement.com).

It was profitable from sponsorships about 6 months after launch (slightly over $1,000 a month in revenue, costs $300ish a month). I spend about 10 minutes a day on it. I need to spend more time marketing it and updating some of the tech - but I'm too lazy.

Also, I'm not sure the 6 months to profit counts, because I worked on 3-4 similar side-projects before launching it for about a year before.

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

#115

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).

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!

I really appreciate the kind words and thanks for spreading Jack!

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

#116

https://www.docsapp.io/ I built DocsApp in 1 year and now is ramen profitable. Tech stack: * Play Framework (Scala) * PostgreSQL (RDS) * S3 * Docker (cloud.docker.com) * Scaleway * HAProxy

May I ask which S3 plugin do you use ? Haven't found anything useful for Play!.

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

#117
post #38

A year. I was spending way too much time on eBay, so I wrote something for myself that would scrape the web pages and use a kill list to filter out the junk. I wanted a better UI to add words to the kill list and realised I could make money via the eBay affiliate program. So I took two months off between contracts and wrote the first version of AuctionSieve - http://auctionsieve.com There was a D&D forum, the Acaeum…

Are you still scraping or did you migrate to their API?

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

#118

https://www.docsapp.io/ I built DocsApp in 1 year and now is ramen profitable. Tech stack: * Play Framework (Scala) * PostgreSQL (RDS) * S3 * Docker (cloud.docker.com) * Scaleway * HAProxy

May I ask which S3 plugin do you use ? Haven't found anything useful for Play!.

Use AWS Java SDK since my S3 usage just simple upload file.

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

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask which S3 plugin do you use ? Haven't found anything useful for Play!.

Use AWS Java SDK since my S3 usage just simple upload file.

Alright cool, why did you decide to go with Scala instead of Java ?

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

#120
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,…

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…

I've been involved in automated testing with a robot for point-of-sale systems. The pinpads are secure devices, so there's no way of injecting commands, and there's no adequate bug-compatible simulator. It's cute watching it carefully insert a card, type in the PIN, remove the card, etc.
Post reply on HN