31–40 of 133 posts
Desktop utilities: http://www.rlvision.com I've been making freeware and shareware for a long time. Some are shareware and still make some (not much) money. Edit: You might be interested in this retrospective I wrote about my personal favorite utilities: http://www.rlvision.com/blog/16-years-with-flash-renamer-a-d...
https://info-beamer.com/ - Digital signage for the Raspberry Pi. Powered by Lua/OpenGl/OpenMax, so it doesn't depend on a sluggish browser. It started as a for-fun project for a hacker conference and since then I turned it into a profitable business.
How a Car Works: http://www.howacarworks.com Revenue from Adsense and iOS app salse. Profits around $2,000 per month. I'm now working on a video series about how cars work which I hope will be a good seller.
Free right now, but hopefully will make a decent amount after our beta.
Schedule email, text message and push-notification reminders.
I help developers market themselves effectively. Its not a huge product, but has a fair amount of demand. Feels good to help people move forward in their carreers. Even helped one land a job that got him a visa. Not crazy profitable, though. I charge less than $500 for something that can easily go for ten times more. But money is not everything and it brings me joy to see people move up in life. Currently only work with 2 people per month due tk time constraints. So it does less than $1k a month. Pays for hobbies.
Its a side project that was born out of people on twitter wanting to hire my shop (Yelluw) do it for them. But didnt make sense for them to hire a whole shop to do something so small.
I had been approached many times by tech publishers to write books from scratch, but I never found the process and economics attractive.
Then I spotted LeanPub--quite possibly on HN--and I thought, "Hmmm, there is nearly zero barrier to entry." They accepted Markdown, and I already had my entire blog in Markdown on GitHub.
So I published a collection of essays (https://leanpub.com/shippingsoftware), and launched it with a "Show HN" style post, making the book free. LeanPub allows people to pay more if they want, and an amazing number of people paid more, I made $2,000 in one day just from being on the front page of HN.
I've written a few other books since then, but I firmly believe that writing is a side project, not my profession, so I make a lot less than other authors who really put their backs into it.
But I'm happy, and my readers are happy, and I get a little money every month from people I like.
---
A few observations that may be valuable for other side-projects, whether media or software:
Some of my biggest wins were the books I didn't write. LeanPub has a feature where you can cobble together a book title and a cover image, and it creates a landing page that collects emails from interested readers.
Several times, I have created landing pages for books I was interested in writing and when I promoted the landing pages... Crickets. I didn't write those books.
Another thing that worked for me is that when I decided to write the original JavaScript Allongé (https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix), I was going to write my first long-form book from scratch. My previous books were collections of essays with additional linking and filler material.
I resolved to write a trial book first, so I wrote CoffeeScript Ristretto. I had a rough idea that the market for a CoffeeScript book was about 10% of the market for a JavaScript book, so I didn't have big expectations for revenue, but I figured I could gain experience writing the book and a lot of valuable feedback.
The secret was, when I then published JavaScript Allongé, it was basically the same book, just in JavaScript. The big differences had to do with the differences between CoffeeScript and javaScript, obviously, but most of the chapters were identical.
I found this process was a really big win, when JavaScript Allongé first hit, it was already refined by all the feedback I got from CoffeeScript Ristretto. If I was doing a software side project, I might take the same approach: Start in a smaller market where I can refine the software and business, then repurpose into the target market.
JM2C, YMMCV, &c.
IndieHackers.com will break $3-4k in monthly revenue this month or next, mostly from advertising. It costs me <$200/mo to run. It features all sorts of interviews with developers running profitable side projects themselves, so check it out if you're looking for ideas or inspiration!
How did you market this to get that many visitors?
Keygen provides a hosted SaaS product and app licensing API. Support for self-hosting Keygen is planned. Currently in closed beta, but have a few contracts lined up already so it should be profitable from day 1 after launch.
I have a couple other side projects that are barely profitable, but none of them seem to have the kind of market Keygen has.