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Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

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Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#161

Post by illteratedang »

jepper wrote: post #20

Not really a startup in the sense of a VC backed multi million dollar company but three working friends and me have bootstrapped a fitness websites with science based health advice, mostly free, to basically the largest fitness related website in the Netherlands. Currently employing people, which i think still sounds insane for a hobby project. https://www.fit.nl . 700.000 pageviews a month. App, 2 books, system for…

I am moving from programming to medicine.

I am appaled that we can't ask a body to grow and the mechanism is not even fullly understood.

So, my reaearch includes making body grow organs, bones and other tissues just using an app.

Imagine growing from 5'10 to 6'5

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#162

Post by lgregg »

sneak wrote: post #16
ryandrake wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No employer I have ever worked for would even consider modifying this language in their agreement. They are going to have a standard boilerplate and if you try to negotiate or modify it they will tell you “sign it unmodified or GTFO.” Ask me how I know :-)

Counter anecdata: Many employers are happily willing to provide such carve-outs for ownership of side projects done at home on the employee’s own time and equipment.

This is interesting. Has this been your personal experience? If so, to what the extent?

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#163

Post by iends »

lee101 wrote: post #153

I built a high frequency cryptocurrency forecasting system https://bitbank.nz and few games in my spare time http://www.wordsmashing.com http://bigmultiplayerchess.com http://multiplicationmaster.com hasn't made that much money but allowed me to get paid more at work and tipped our income over the edge so we could get a mortgage on our first house which was nice :) great decision and learning experience building prod…

In big multiplayer chess the king/queens are mixed up.

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#164

Post by pier25 »

superhuzza wrote: post #109
_vuqm wrote: post #49

Might not be your typical answer, but I launched an ecommerce store that’s been profitable since the first month. At first I targeted solo devs without much digital design skills, but it turns out that blank sketchpads are very useful to designers and design agencies as well. It’s done well enough where I continue to run out of each batch of inventory and it’s turned a small profit as I continue to order large and la…

Wow, this is brilliant. So simple yet so useful. How do you plan to deal with competition? It seems like barriers to entry are low.

Linea App for iOS does this. If you have an iPad with an Apple Pencil it's awesome.

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#165

Post by dingdongdang »

https://adplexity.com/

Current revenue: 10,000,000 USD yearly

Cost: 100K USD yearly

Scrapes ads using python script and celery, lists the ads on a webapp for indexing/search and sells data to other advertisers.

Lemme know what can be done better.

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#166

Post by sincerely »

optymizer wrote: post #96
ryandrake wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No employer I have ever worked for would even consider modifying this language in their agreement. They are going to have a standard boilerplate and if you try to negotiate or modify it they will tell you “sign it unmodified or GTFO.” Ask me how I know :-)

I can confirm that. Two of the top 5 US tech companies told me to sign it as-is or GTFO.

Name and shame :)

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#167

Post by sincerely »

_vuqm wrote: post #49

Might not be your typical answer, but I launched an ecommerce store that’s been profitable since the first month. At first I targeted solo devs without much digital design skills, but it turns out that blank sketchpads are very useful to designers and design agencies as well. It’s done well enough where I continue to run out of each batch of inventory and it’s turned a small profit as I continue to order large and la…

Have you thought of making browser sketchpads with the orientation flipped so it's closer to the horizontal rectangles of most computer monitors?

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#168

Post by tasuki »

NullPrefix wrote: post #148
jepper wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I' m not in the US, so no crazy salaries on both sides. The average doctor probably makes more but the best programmer makes way more than the best doctor. However with long hours, night shifts, pressure etc you have to enjoy what you do or burn out early.

>However with long hours, night shifts, pressure etc you have to enjoy what you do or burn out early Is this about the doctor or the programmer?

Both, obviously.

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#169

Post by marmaduke »

bootloop wrote: post #114
polote wrote: post #67

That's what I do currently, I'm a full time product manager in a normal company, and I'm also working as a CTO at a startup, we are 3. Two people are working full time, and I only work part time (about 30h per week). I do that, because I like doing multilple things at the same time. But I think it is a very difficult life. I can do that because I have no social life and everything is optimized so that I can work all…

"Very tired all the time" - Where I come from (EU) this is the reason why it's not allowed to work two jobs (>40h) if the employer doesn't approve.

It’s not just a question of fatigue but also that for intellectually innovative work, it’s rare to get more out of 40+ hour weeks than 20-30.

At least this is the case with kids.

Re: Ask HN: Who here has built a profitable startup while keeping their day job?

#170

Post by xcubic »

SimianLogic2 wrote: post #129

I didn't build one from scratch, but I recently purchased https://introcave.com for low 6 figures. Though my background is more full stack, my current day job is mostly front end. Most of the product/ux/ui work is done before things hit my desk (agency work), so I really enjoy being able to run something on the side where I'm making those decisions. It's profitable month-to-month, but until it recoups the purchase pr…

May I ask how did you know the website was for sale?
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