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Ask HN: What revenue generating side projects do full-time employees here have?

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11–20 of 121 posts

Re: Ask HN: What revenue generating side projects do full-time employees here have?

#11

New account because I don't want my employers knowing. My sideproject on iOS and Android generates 1.1M a year. About 90-100k a month. I'm still employed because the app runs on its own, very low maintenance, so might as well get a salary doing something else and learn new things

can you share your app?

Re: Ask HN: What revenue generating side projects do full-time employees here have?

#12
I built a drop-ship site, it started as a way to play with some ideas I had at work. As a platform, I think it can scale pretty well... it has a super flexible EDI system allowing me to automate suppliers, inventory system, custom website, order management system, advertising feeds etc. It's built to handle thousands of suppliers, products, and orders, and has all the bells and whistles.

But I only really make enough to afford enough beer to wash away my regrets of spending so much time building this thing.

Re: Ask HN: What revenue generating side projects do full-time employees here have?

#13
I don't have a project but I have always been wondering if there is some open-source style software (with a license that allows this of course) that would let me customize the software and sell it to other businesses and get small recurring income as a SaaS product (like $70 a month). Think small restaurant inventory management, pricing, CRM, software for real estate brokers to manage clients, dentist online appointment tracker etc. etc.

Thoughts ?

Re: Ask HN: What revenue generating side projects do full-time employees here have?

#14
post #8

A buddy and I started https://goatattack.com last year. It doesn't generate a ton of revenue but we enjoy it and people seem to like it. It runs itself at this point.

Any plan to support international numbers? That would be nice.

Re: Ask HN: What revenue generating side projects do full-time employees here have?

#16

New account because I don't want my employers knowing. My sideproject on iOS and Android generates 1.1M a year. About 90-100k a month. I'm still employed because the app runs on its own, very low maintenance, so might as well get a salary doing something else and learn new things

My question is how do you still have employers when you're making 1.1M a year. Jeez.

Re: Ask HN: What revenue generating side projects do full-time employees here have?

#17
I run this website: http://step2scheduling.com It is solving the problem of scheduling step 2 CS exam for medical students. It uses selenium to refresh and check for schedule openings and automatically book tests for students. I coded it up for my G/F some time ago when she needed to schedule a test and couldn't find an opening. Now I'm making $500/month for doing next to nothing.

Re: Ask HN: What revenue generating side projects do full-time employees here have?

#19
post #14
post #8

A buddy and I started https://goatattack.com last year. It doesn't generate a ton of revenue but we enjoy it and people seem to like it. It runs itself at this point.

Any plan to support international numbers? That would be nice.

As soon as Twilio supports it. Right now it looks like they've added Canada so I need to add that to the website. https://www.twilio.com/help/faq/sms/can-i-send-or-receive-mm...

Re: Ask HN: What revenue generating side projects do full-time employees here have?

#20
About six years ago I pretty-much single handedly wrote the entire backend for http://www.ComedyCalls.com and other sites like http://www.WakeUpDialer.com, http://www.CallMyLostPhone.com, http://www.BirthdayDialer.com, and others - see the links in the footer. The PSTN system is all in-house (and we pay a LOT less per-call than what Twilio, for example, charges).

I have a 25% stake in the company - but I don't get much money myself, less than $1000/mo on average. This is because of our thin margins, and because my other business partners own the other 75% (50% is owned by the founder who created the sites back in 2008 using cheap outsourced labour that I was brought in to rewrite) and the other 25% is owned by another person for historical reasons. Furthermore because none of us spend much time on it anymore - or get much money from it - we're all very hesitant to spend money on marketing or advertising (we got marketing quotes starting at $5000/mo - and my co-owners are unconvinced that advertising would help at all), hence the impasse.

We do plan to create some new additional sites and services that have higher margins, including launching a "Twilio-lite"-like API which would offer much less functionality (as our backend is not as sophisticated as theirs) but would also cost less per-call. But that, too, would require marketing to get the word out.

If anyone here is a VC or is otherwise interested in investing for marketing, or is a marketing expert yourself, or interested in using our system - we'd be happy to talk a deal.

We did sell one of our older sites to a web publishing company a few years ago that went for almost a six-figure value - but unfortunately for me, that was after I wrote the entire stack, but before I was granted part-ownership (so I was just paid for my time: 3 hours to set a clone of the system up on the buyer's infrastructure).

One of my "rivals" - the creator of WakeUp.io posted his site to last month's "Show HN" thread, now it's my turn :)

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