Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

news.ycombinator.com

121–130 of 156 posts

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#121
post #120
post #102

Down For Everyone Or Just Me https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ Makes ~$1,000 a month gross, lot less after AWS costs. I've had it for a long time, but haven't done much with it because of my primary business. After I sold that I spent the last year playing with some ideas and testing. I am working to get a new design up and just partnered with a friend to redo the arch and let him see what ideas he has to better m…

I use Down For Everyone Or Just Me a lot, it is a great little purposeful site :)

Thanks, we are trying to clean it up a bit now, both in look and simplicity as it has just been the same for a long time. The other owner is working on moving it to AWS and lambda stuff :). I bet he will publish something about it too.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#122
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the source of the income ? I mean what is the business model.

affiliate/ads. Nothing too fancy yet, we are starting to look at what else we could do.

We do a lot of stuff looking at what is being requested and serving hosting ads based on that, nothing has clicked yet.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! Given the uncertainty in options markets and a rather tough job of following trades of others ... are you able to keep users going? Also, your pricing seems quite steep ... just curious how many active users you have and revenue / month? (a single user on your monthly package gets you too $500! :))

The pricing is steep because I believe in my system. I don't believe there is an uncertainty if you have an edge. My system was designed with an edge in mind and was able to make profits in 2016 February and 2018 January while everyone was running away. Generally, if you start with a $30K account, the trial alone should pay out a years of subscription. The subscriptions are growing, also I think I will raise it to $1…

Can you please explain a bit about how you get this edge?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#124
https://netho.me/ - website traffic estimator. Now there are tons of sites like this, but when i started it the niche was not so crowded. I made this website while learning basic programming (php, html, css, js). It makes a bit under $500/month from ads. For now the main feature is to estimate website traffic, but pretty often it is not very accurate. Last feature i plugged is voting that allows tagging sites as legit or scam. Another one - showing free domain name alternatives. The system is buggy and from time to time i'm still fixing bugs and js\css issues when i have time. i've learned a lot building this thing.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pricing is steep because I believe in my system. I don't believe there is an uncertainty if you have an edge. My system was designed with an edge in mind and was able to make profits in 2016 February and 2018 January while everyone was running away. Generally, if you start with a $30K account, the trial alone should pay out a years of subscription. The subscriptions are growing, also I think I will raise it to $1…

Can you please explain a bit about how you get this edge?

We built a proprietary system which listens to the market using technical analysis, fundamentals, and news gathering. It looks for stocks which are trading with a higher than usual volume pattern, or fast price movement depending on our scanning. Also, eliminates a lot of stocks which don't fit the system requirements, in order to increase the rate of return using rules that we have been adding. Does that make sense?

There are lots of ways to beat the market, many people are doing it, you can look in /r/algotrading on reddit as there some good discussions there if you are interested in getting started. The easy part is the implementing the strategy, the hard part is coming up with one. You can look into the Wheel Strategy as well if you own stocks.

You can look at our Discord, it's open until Wednesday. There are a few historical entries/plans/exits [1].

[1] https://discord.gg/n3dqVk4

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#126
post #58
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to see a counter-example to the otherwise ever-present HN credo of "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything". On one hand you have execution that can get you an advantage of a difficult-to-reproduce technology stack for solving a problem, but on the other hand, information that other players might not have discovered (yet) also can get you an advantage in the market. Although I find the latter to be…

I basically have a shitty Rails app that solves a particular problem for a completely non tech industry (there are millions of such problems). It’s easy for me to find the people who need it. But if I ever had to compete with high quality software my app would probably die.

Sounds like you should find someone to write you better software.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#127
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideas are not worth much. Only execution matters.

I love this terrible sentence. But no (unfortunately). The idea is everything. A great idea and terrible team usually succeeds. An amazing team and terrible idea almost always fails. VCs can only control the team. That is why they push this idea really hard.

I disagree with everything you wrote. There are tens of thousands of businesses that are successful with boring ideas. There are tens of thousands of great ideas with terrible teams that are long dead. Your statement is a combo of survivor bias and hubris. Case and point: the biggest industries for millionaires in the US are real estate and dry cleaners. Boring ideas executed well make boatloads. Stop worshipping TechCrunch and start doing the work.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#128

I’m a full time developer but own a gym. By accident! I went to take over a building as office space that was a liquidated gym. Signed the lease and the day before we moved in the owner called and said we can’t remove the equipment as it was all put in before the stairs. I asked a lot of questions about why the gym didn’t work, had already seen the equipment in there and did some negotiating on purchasing the kit, kn…

Thank you so much for your sharing. I am curious that how much money you invested to set up the automation and how to prevent non-members getting in.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#129
Bit on the weirder submissions for YC but our family genome sequencing facility is generating more than $500/mo on the side.

Currently growing at over 100% YOY (somewhere around 26% QOQ), closed out our last month at over $23k, and on pace to do somewhere between $350-400k. This is not an easy side project and there's been an insane amount of learnings on both the wet lab and informatics side. We've had some set backs but it's worth it when we get to hear what sort of life changing (literally) work we get to contribute.

https://thesequencingcenter.com/

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell

#130

https://servicehq.ca Built this over about 2-3 months with the help from a Beta customer satisfying their requirements slowly, but still ensuring that the platform is generic and modular enough. It’s now averaging about $1000/month with 2 customers. I’m now planning to slowly rebuild the mobile app (need to improve UX and add offline functionality). Once ready, I can start selling to more customers, Also thinking of…

$1000/month with 2 customers (for a SaaS) is impressive. Any tips for other SaaS-devtrepeneurs to achieve the same, without needing 100 customers per $1000?
Post reply on HN