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Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell
11–20 of 252 posts
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell
#12Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell
#13It makes money from domain name registrations it refers via affiliate links.
I've been playing with the idea of adding "pro" features for a couple of years now but I worry anything that detracts from its simplicity may hurt sales.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell
#14Modeler by trade, had to learn all the back and frontend stuff myself, been really fun so far.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell
#15Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell
#16I screen scrape camping reservations and send out notifications when a campsite becomes available. http://reserve.wanderinglabs.com/ Currently working on integrating the new CA reserve website. It is a shit show.
I can see this being a nice little side project. I work with a bunch of people that camp and in my province (Alberta) we have a rolling reserve window. People will book a campsite for a week prior to their intended trip just so they can get a spot. Provincial parks have since put an end to it by forcing someone to occupy the site within the first 24hrs or they cancel your entire reservation. It's cut throat here.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell
#17Currently it's making about $5,000 / month.
It's been a very interesting process dealing with building the app, marketing it, and dealing with support. The app is $19/mo for regular Shopify stores, and we have about 700+ total customers (only some are paying). We get A LOT of support requests for misc things and have been trying to build up a knowledge base of articles and help guides in our ZenDesk.
We have recently been running into an issue with file hosting storage fees (we allow people to upload files, no additional charge). We have a couple of Shopify stores that are costing us about $70/mo each in file hosting fees (we don't charge them extra).
I absolutely LOVE building apps for 3rd party providers. We don't really market the app, it's found organically in Shopify's app store. The first 8 months were filled with lots of little bugs needing fixing, but that has since slowed down as I've fixed things. At this point, it's a pretty stable application that doesn't require much maintenance, mostly just user support.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell
#18Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell
#19Within the next few months I'll be pivoting to The Nugget Startup Academy and will focus on training entrepreneurs instead of sending out ideas.