3 years. Took 6 months of earning 100 a month and then in my 7th month it did 20kgbp. It currently does about 100k per year
Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
131–140 of 208 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#132About 9 months ago i created https://namesmith.io , a business and domain name generator. I practically did nothing to boost the search engine ranking but the volume of visitors is growing (very slowly). So far the site can barely cover my vserver cost but that's ok since I can use the server for more than just namesmith. Most of the time some few dollar amounts tickle in but I had some sales of premium domains which…
That's very nice tool! You can add accounts so a user can persist the starred ones.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#133About 9 months ago i created https://namesmith.io , a business and domain name generator. I practically did nothing to boost the search engine ranking but the volume of visitors is growing (very slowly). So far the site can barely cover my vserver cost but that's ok since I can use the server for more than just namesmith. Most of the time some few dollar amounts tickle in but I had some sales of premium domains which…
That's very nice tool! You can add accounts so a user can persist the starred ones.
Thanks! I considered accounts in the beginning but didn't go through with it because most users don't want to create yet another account.
Also the favorites should persist via cookies at least for some time.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#134Earlier 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…
I'm always on call, technically
Do you have a partner who can do support when you need time away?
I run a small game website. A couple of years ago it experienced an outage while I was away from home on a 2-day climbing trip. I didn't learn about it until I checked email the first evening. It was a terrible feeling to realize I'd been out having fun, and the site had been down for most of the day. I had to drive home to get the site up again. It was miserable.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#135I'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.
Hey Jeff,
We have not considered it, since our main market is Mexico, because of how taxes and invoices work here. Also, we don't issue invoices—we just receive them. But sure, we'll look into your suggestion!
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#136I 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, b…
Is the money from advertising on the website or the newsletter, or the cost for people to get the newsletter?
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, though I'm really just trying to focus on ONE project now as opposed to running ~30 side projects. An immense amount of time... Email me if you want to chat more! Let people tell you you're crazy if and when you say you're going to build this this this and that. Then go and build it. You will awe them.
I want to put together a timeline like @yegg had once, not sure where it went since his blog switched to Medium. But I've been working on side projects since I was at least 16, I have tried to build competitors to services like MailChimp, Facebook, etc. It's a ton of failure honestly, but it has been a fun ride. My biggest failure is due to lack of focus on ONE project, which I have changed recently and built the hab…
As long as you're learning, failure is good. Better off work than on. Are you really going to fire yourself? :-)
I appreciate your sharing the story.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#138Not currently. Lack of ideas/inspiration/perspiration.
It'd be nice to have a few on the side making enough to support hobbies though.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#139I 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, b…
Is the money from advertising on the website or the newsletter, or the cost for people to get the newsletter?
99% of the money comes from the newsletter sponsorships. Newsletter sponsorships generally can earn wayyyy more than website ads. Incase you're interested in more details, the newsletter has ~10,000 subscribers (~50% daily, ~50% weekly) and the site gets about 30k uniques a month.
Re: Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the money from advertising on the website or the newsletter, or the cost for people to get the newsletter?
99% of the money comes from the newsletter sponsorships. Newsletter sponsorships generally can earn wayyyy more than website ads. Incase you're interested in more details, the newsletter has ~10,000 subscribers (~50% daily, ~50% weekly) and the site gets about 30k uniques a month.
Also if anyone is wondering why the costs are so high, the main expenses are CloudFront (huge HUGE gifs) and Mailchimp. I'm sure I could reduce the costs to $50-100ish a month, but laziness.