I play in an indie rock band ( http://www.goodkidofficial.com ). We make ~$1000 a month from Spotify, shows and merch sales.
What are the ratios of these three sources?
Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?
51–60 of 133 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?
#52https://freeyourmusic.com Moving music between different streaming services. Eg. Spotify to Apple Music. Profits from it have let me invested and co-founded another startup I am building that is 100x more complicated: https://ahoy.io It's nice because I do not have to worry about salary, as I can live comfortably from the revenue from STAMP.
Definitely going to use freeyourmusic the next time I need to switch. The last time I was in this situation I found a sketchy python script that transferred only bits of my library.
Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?
#53StatusGator: https://statusgator.com Monitors status pages of cloud services with optional notifications and creates a unified status page of your service dependencies. I wrote a blog post recently about how profitable (barely) it is: https://blog.statusgator.com/anatomy-of-a-profitable-side-pr...
I just posted a thread asking about design considerations for something like this. There are a lot of monitoring sites but they are typically for internal consumption.
I am really interested in real-time, or timely monitoring of external services. I'll check the service out, but curious if any of it is open source, and hos you verify a site is up/down?
Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?
#54ContentGems at http://contentgems.com . CG automatically powers social media, websites and customer newsletters with engaging curated content. It's a serious, profitable side project and we're approaching our fifth year.
Congrats on this, nicely done. By coincidence, also exactly what I was looking for: will be signing up for a paid account shortly.
If you don't mind sharing, what's your MRR?
Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?
#55IndieHackers.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?
I actually launched my side project on indiehackers - http://www.oppsdaily.com - a newsletter filled with software opportunities. I posted some of the traffic stats here http://www.oppsdaily.com/blog
Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?
#56My books on LeanPub: https://leanpub.com/u/raganwald 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 ( ht…
p.s. Here's another thing that might be interesting for people with side projects:
I just checked my royalties. When I wrote CoffeeScript Ristretto, I estimated that the market for JavaScript Allongé would be 10x as large.
Obviously the market for JavaScript was more than 10x as large, but there are way more JS books, and my particular style of writing seemed like it would fit the kind of early adopter who would use CoffeeScript in those days.
Looking at my royalties today, I see that all editions of JavaScript Allongé have generated approximately 6x as much in royalties as CoffeeScript Ristretto.
You could take the line that I should have sold way more JavaScript Allongé. Or, you could take the line that CoffeeScript Ristretto outsold my estimate.
For various reasons, I take the latter view: You can be surprisingly successful in a smaller market, with fewer competitors, that has a very "opinionated" or "early adopter" culture, compared to a mass market with many competitors and a wide variety of sub-cultures.
Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?
#57My books on LeanPub: https://leanpub.com/u/raganwald 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 ( ht…
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
> I had been approached many times by tech publishers to write books from scratch, but I never found the process and economics attractive.
You might want to consider writing the book on leanpub, and then talking to a traditional publisher to adopt the book. At least that's my plan for https://leanpub.com/perl6 (a publisher has approached me, though it's currently in a too early stage, so we've deferred further discussions until version 1 of the manuscript is ready).
> 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.
I believe you need to create a book on leanpub for that, which now costs USD$99. Not terribly much, but a certain threshold that prevents me from just throwing out ideas like this.
Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?
#58https://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.
I sell something similar for brick & mortar shops. Sells itself and has option to provide add-ons such as maintenance and graphic design (for ads). Mind if we exchange numbera through email? Im looking to adjust pricing but have nothing to compare to.
Sure. Feel free to contact me. Either through the email in my hn profile or on https://info-beamer.com/contact
Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I sell something similar for brick & mortar shops. Sells itself and has option to provide add-ons such as maintenance and graphic design (for ads). Mind if we exchange numbera through email? Im looking to adjust pricing but have nothing to compare to.
Sure. Feel free to contact me. Either through the email in my hn profile or on https://info-beamer.com/contact
Thank you, I will. :)
Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?
#60My books on LeanPub: https://leanpub.com/u/raganwald 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 ( ht…
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. > I had been approached many times by tech publishers to write books from scratch, but I never found the process and economics attractive. You might want to consider writing the book on leanpub, and then talking to a traditional publisher to adopt the book. At least that's my plan for https://leanpub.com/perl6 (a publisher has approached me, though it's currently in a too early stage…
> I believe you need to create a book on leanpub for that, which now costs USD$99
Yes, that is a new "feature." However, IIRC, once you reach a certain threshold of royalties, the $99 is waived. So,if I were starting today, I still wouldn't pay it because my very first book would get me over the threshold.
Now I had the benefit of having written a blog, so I had material and an audience. But these are important things to have even if you don't pay $99 to publish a book.
If you want to write a book, or start a software side-project, it is enormously helpful to "prime the pump" by building your brand a little. Speak at conferences, write a blog, be a thoughtful contributor on social media sites where your eventual customers go for help.
If you do those things, you needn't worry about the $99 for your first book, or whatever fee some captive app market charges you, &c.
Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, but online reputations can be built over time by plugging away, a little like gold-mining in MMORPGs...