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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

#151
post #6

I 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.

Interesting—we’re doing something similar with https://www.campnab.com Currently available in B.C., Ontario, and Washington State. Now adding national parks in Canada.

Looking good. Nice to see there is a small little market for this type of thing.

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

#152
post #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?

At this point, of the 300k, about 225k is from contributions (savings) and 75k is from gains. The bigger the account gets though, the bigger a percentage the gains will be as the account grows faster than my annual income does.

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

#153
post #63
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30, ~125k household income for two adults no kids, IT and teacher. Our income made it a little easier to get here but the $200k hole of combined student loans we started with (now fully paid off) probably counters that pretty evenly.

Is there more to the story? Started with -200k and now sit on +300k with a 125k salary? House? Came into a windfall of cash in addition to salary?

I'll be honest I'm glossing over some details about house refinancing and sales etc. About 40k of it was gains from a house. I'll give you that. About 75k of the 300k is investment gains. Income has remained pretty stable over that time (when I got a raise, my wife worked less or went back to school etc) and we started at that income level right out of college at 22 years old. So of the 500k, 115k is gains, so $375k is contributions/debt payment. In the 8 years since graduating that would be ~$45k/year. $125k-45k= $80k in taxes and spending per year for two people which isn't hard at all. Lived in DC for a year then moved to Denver.

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

#154
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.

You aren't investing it well then. This year S&P has gone up something like 20% (thank you, Donald). From 300k that would net you 60k which is 5K/mo. All you'd need to do is rebalance into VOO.

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

#155

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…

Wow good work! How much time do you spend on this a week?

Aside from building out new features, which I'm not in the middle of, I don't spend time on the app. My business partner handles support which is currently around 20-30 tickets per month. This is a side thing for us, we try to just let the app run without playing around with it too much.

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

#157

Working on https://apibot.co , a testing and monitoring tool for REST APIs. Many of our customers come from word of mouth plus talking to people. Its been very interesting to see the kind of tests that people built with our tool. We're still technically in BETA although sales are going slow but smoothly. Send me a message if you are interested (fernandohur at apibot.co).

FIY: I get an HTTPS certificate error on Chrome reply

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

#158

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…

Congrats. What is the tech stack for developing Shopify apps?

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

#159
We've started https://gdprapp.com - a piece of software for data protection officers / it auditors - to help with compliance and auditing process - it's focused at the moment on General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) but we will be integrating it with other security standards.

It was an internal project in the beginning and after some time and reworks we've decided to open it up to public.

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

#160

https://workroll.com - started in June, turns over $2k a month. Built whilst automating my own freelance sales work flow and figured others could make use of it too. It saves me about a week a month from doing my own lead generation. Been trying to get funding but had no luck. Too early. Also started a blog to help freelancers grow: https://medium.com/workroll

How did you find people who were looking to hire? I want to create something similar for a niche industry.

I monitor hundreds of job boards, social searches e.t.c.

More info here: https://medium.com/workroll/find-5-freelance-design-developm...

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