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Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell

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Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell

#71

https://onlyusedtesla.com/ $150/day around that! A used tesla marketplace.

Home page of your site appears to currently say it's free [1] - how're you making $150 a day?

[1] "FREE DURING BETA: Our site is always free for buyers, but right now it’s free for sellers too."

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell

#72
post #62

I launched an app for Shopify about a year ago called Custom Fields: https://customfields.bonify.io Currently 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 b…

Very nice! Spread out over many customers that sounds like a pretty stable revenue stream. Curious though how much support do you provide for $19/mo? Do you get a lot of support requests / emails? At that price point one customer interaction is more than most tech workers rate for the time spent interacting with it.

We probably get like 20-30 support tickets per month now (we used to get about 50 per month). It can be a drain as neither I, nor my business partner really want to deal with it. We haven't hired anyone to deal with it yet... The issues we get requests on now are more like really technical issues that take a while to debug and write up the solution.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell

#73
post #51

I launched an app for Shopify about a year ago called Custom Fields: https://customfields.bonify.io Currently 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 b…

I really like what you've done. > We don't really market the app Well, what you did _is_ marketing (via integration), it's a great strategy when done well and looks like you did an awesome job. I've heard it said that marketing is basically doing anything that exposes your product to more people.

Yea, that's why I love 3rd party integrations.. Just need 10 more of them and be raking in $50k/month would be nice :)

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell

#74

My domain name and social media handle search tool has been humming along nicely for 5+ years now and produces a modest amount of profit each month. https://namevine.com/ It 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.

Just a note on twitter - it looks like there is a false positive for the availability of 'wood'

There isn't an (obvious) account with that name, but twitter doesn't let me register it. I don't know if it is a blocked keyword or private or what.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell

#75
Making ~$500/month from a combination of things:

https://blog.matthewrathbone.com - Articles about Hadoop, Hive, and Spark with Amazon book and Coursera course affiliate links

https://www.99inbound.com - Forms and form-endpoints for close.io, add a form to your website and have entries sync to Close.io as new leads. Made this as a side-project when I needed this functionality and didn't want to pay out the nose for Zapier.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.matthewrat... - Android app to check-in to foursquare/swarm in one click. Used to be more popular when checking in was more of a thing. Revenue comes from an in-app upgrade that adds minimal features, so is more of a 'thank you' upgrade. Built in a weekend.

And of course, investments in index funds like VTI and BND.

When I launched Simple Check-in upgrade payments it did about $400/day for a week which was very exciting.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell

#76
I made ~$4000 last month by arbitraging crypto currencies on 3 markets.

I use a bot to do the work for me, but I monitor it very closely and I spend a lot of optimizing the old code. I don't have much money on the exchanges because I don't trust them but I could make much more if I wanted to risk more.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell

#77
https://swizec.com/reactd3js

Classic content with attached sales funnel play. The aim is to help people become better engineers. Been hammering away at the React visualizations niche for a bit over two years now and it’s time to make something new.

Product sales make around $20k/year and are slowly trending up, and I’m experimenting with coaching which makes around $1k/month but is hard to scale due to time/focus.

Also doing some influencer marketing type deal with https://school.shoutem.com makes about $1.5k/month and I build React Native apps for them and write about it.

All in all, going to come up to around $50k in sidehustle this year. Been 2x-ing YoY steadily for the past 3 years since I got serious about it.

I write posts about all this stuff on my blog if you’re interested —> swizec.com/blog

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell

#78

I launched an app for Shopify about a year ago called Custom Fields: https://customfields.bonify.io Currently 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 b…

Well done! A few years ago I assumed it was way too late to get into selling Shopify apps. I am glad to have been proved wrong, and you have me re-evaluating some newer marketplaces I presume to be mature.

Shopify seems to be booming.. I hope they do, I have some stock in them, and of course, the app. I may end up doing more apps in the future, but their app store is just going to get more flooded, more competition, etc. Sooner the better, gotta get your foot in the door.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell

#79
post #12

I've cut my expenses and invested the extra in index funds. Currently at a nest egg of around $300k which spews off dividends of around $500/month and is currently appreciating a bit faster than that.

Did you get to that size of nest egg through investing?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell

#80
UI design newsletter (https://uimovement.com/) - still making over $500 a month on average from sponsorships and Carbon ads on the site.

Going steady for a couple of years now - but requires very little time from me.

Shameless plug: Currently working on a service (https://letterfuel.com/) that makes building daily/weekly newsletters like UI Movement super-easy.

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