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Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

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71–80 of 133 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#71

Easy A - https://easy-a.net/ The website provides a semester simulator that can (accurately) predict student grades, workload, etc for a given course / semester. It also provides a breakdown of the grade distributions, work load (in hours), difficulty, etc. For every course, professor, and combination there, for universities on the site. Profitable is relative, I spent around 100 hours tossing the website together an…

How interesting. I taught a course on your site and the distribution mirrors my experience (as it should ). Congrats on releasing.

Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, turns out the average dev doesnt really know much about marketing. Some are even against learning it. I simply work with them to establish an online presence, a core brand (based on their skills and goals), a content strategy (what to write about in order to get the markets attention), visual branding (logo and website design), and time based plans to help them take action. Its like a sort of marketing makeover…

Cool. Thanks.

You are welcome. :)

Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#73
post #19

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 do you monetise?

Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#74

http://speedeoapp.com/ - Speed up almost any video on the web using a custom player. This was made to scratch my own itch of wanting to watch videos at faster speeds. At first I had ads, but that wasn't making much. When I made it not free, it started pulling in about $500 a month.

You should make an android version too!

Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#75

Depends what you mean by profitable. http://sites.creou.com It took about 4-6 weeks to build (fairly significant hours during that time). It currently only has 1 paying customer, but they pay about 10% more than it costs to host, so it technicaly makes profit month to month, but is unlikely to ever make back the costs I sunk into it. (Main problem is that although it was intended to be able to be used to build lots o…

I sell something similar but charge at least a hundred times more per project / site. You should really promote this as the "local" (country based) solution and raise prices. For £75 you will only get annoying cheapskates.

Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#76
I built https://boombox.io for fun back in late 2015. It's profitable in the sense that it makes more money than it costs, but not for the opportunity cost of my time (if I used those hours working for clients).

The alpha only took a few weeks, but making it production ready took much much longer. I did learn a lot building it, but for it to support me financially, I need to do a ton of sales & marketing.

Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide more information? How exactly do you help developers?

Well, turns out the average dev doesnt really know much about marketing. Some are even against learning it. I simply work with them to establish an online presence, a core brand (based on their skills and goals), a content strategy (what to write about in order to get the markets attention), visual branding (logo and website design), and time based plans to help them take action. Its like a sort of marketing makeover…

That last part got my attention! I'm currently studying internet marketing and there's so much stuff out there that makes me uneasy... have you found any resources for ethical marketing?

Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#79
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you find it hard to get users at the 50 USD level? Im about to launch a REST api monitoring service as a solo dev and wondering about pricing and user aquisition strategy. Thanks!

I think you should price your service based on your estimated cost +a percentage of profit rather than artificially setting a price.

This approach, while good for setting a lower bounds for what's sustainable, is rarely how you should first price things.

I run a small side business. My initial customers I priced like this. After the first year, I realized I was leaving a lot of money on the table - my business was niche and not commoditized, and my customers were willing to pay quite a lot more for the service.

I grandfathered in the first year customers and re-structured my pricing to be more "value based" - how much were my customers actually willing to pay for the service, i.e. how much was it worth to them.

It took a little while to figure out good price points, and there was a short period of time when I'm sure I lost some customers because prices were too high, but in general, my margins are significantly higher by charging customers based on their percieved value, as opposed to just covering my costs with a fixed margin. The customers don't even mind, because in their minds, the price is good value.

It's important to do this not just for its money-making potential - it creates a better impression of "value" for your product, and people value things that they pay more money for. Underpricing can cheapen people's perspective of your product, and de-value your time.

Minimum margins are for commodity businesses - where there are lots of competitors and customers can switch easily. For anything else, you can earn more money by considering "value pricing" based on talking to your customers and finding out their pricing tolerance.

Re: Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?

#80
post #24
post #19

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?

Well, for one, it's a very very common question here on HN, nad I can't think of a time I've seen the question asked that he hasn't helpfully responded pointing out his site, which has lots of answers to the exact question people keep asking.

It's really a win/win, and because he's sincerely answering the questions, it doesn't come across as awkward of misplaced self-promotion.

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