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Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

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Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#61
post #2

I really don't like talking about my side projects, so I guess they all qualify, but I'm particularly excited about one at the moment. Right now I'm working on a dog treat business - I make a treat mix that you add water to and freeze for a meat-based frozen treat. I feel really good about the product and the packaging design (and this is the first time I've ever worked on any kind of a physical product, so it's real…

Sincere question—how do you handle legal, especially with consumables?

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#63
I don't typically talk about my side projects, but I made a simple Montessori materials website for use while teachers/students have been stuck at home the past few months: https://montessori.tools

It has grown organically to 1,000 visits per day and ~$1,000/month. I have a couple of additional materials in the pipeline. Of course, I've already seen everything from the site shamelessly copied and posted elsewhere. That's fine; I never built it for the money (I built it for my wife, who is a teacher).

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#64

I used to sell extra naughty bikinis online, in addition to being a consultant for distributed real-time machine learning. People had a hard time combining the image of a nerd in the basement with that of a flashy sales guy surrounded by models. So I usually didn't mention the bikinis to allow me to charge full nerd pricing for my coding. This site project brought in roughly €500 monthly with almost no work, because…

How did you find your marketing contractor? What were they doing?

I met the marketing guy through a business brunch that the DC (a club for online marketers) was organizing every 2 weeks in Saigon back in 2015.

What he did was mostly to reply to whatsapp messages and to grant free bikinis to Instagram influencers.

One particularly good angle was yoga teachers. They'd usually be doing retreats at exotic locations and posting inspirational photos multiple times per day. Plus the yoga teachers that are popular on Instagram tend to be extremely attractive girls doing slightly suggestive poses. So that was a great fit for my bikinis.

And you'd be surprised how cheap Instagram influencers are. There's so many people who want to be famous that it's 100% a buyer's market.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#65
post #52

I started a podcast to talk with folks about their tech stack choices. It's at https://runninginproduction.com/ . Since October 2019 it's made $200 in the form of 1 episode having a sponsor. As a side topic, I would be very happy to have anyone on who wants to talk about their tech stack for their side projects.

I like the clean buttons for all the podcast platforms but I must admit I searched through your website for like 5 minutes before I saw them because I searched for the logos of the platforms.

Subscribed in pocket casts and will tune in later!

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#66
post #2

I really don't like talking about my side projects, so I guess they all qualify, but I'm particularly excited about one at the moment. Right now I'm working on a dog treat business - I make a treat mix that you add water to and freeze for a meat-based frozen treat. I feel really good about the product and the packaging design (and this is the first time I've ever worked on any kind of a physical product, so it's real…

What service are you using for shipping? If you don't mind answering what are the costs of offering free shipping?

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#67

My app Twitter Archive Eraser ( https://martani.github.io/Twitter-Archive-Eraser ) used to be free, then I added a donation button and people, while barely donated, used to say that this is something they would have paid for! I worked on a paid tier (learnt a tremendous amount about actually selling an app, integration with payment processors, licensing, more legal stuff than I wanted to etc.) Almost from the get go,…

Hi I am currently working on releasing the paid version of my app (online voice memo). I was wondering about any resources you have to learn about licensing and legal stuff, or any common caveats that you ran into.

It depends on your situation but if you are in the US I'd create an LLC and do business with that. It takes a few minutes if you use services that file for you.

Second will be dealing with sales tax and it's a nightmare. If you sell to customers in Europe you need to pay VAT to different countries at different rates. Same goes for US states that tax very differently. We moved recently to paddle.com which acts as a reseller and so they take care of all sales tax collection and remittance (they are the one selling the app after all). We moved away from PayPal and so far it's been very smooth.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#68
Partner and I built a service to do sales attribution and commissions, ingesting data from Shopify / WooCommerce / etc. Works great for any sort of sales organization w hierarchy, but we’ve had success with network marketing / direct sales.

Spending nights and weekends, we scaled enough that we banked about $67k on the side in the first 8 months and then took used that as seed to go full time. 3 years later we’re still at it with a decent team and a ton of fun and cool tech

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#69

My app Twitter Archive Eraser ( https://martani.github.io/Twitter-Archive-Eraser ) used to be free, then I added a donation button and people, while barely donated, used to say that this is something they would have paid for! I worked on a paid tier (learnt a tremendous amount about actually selling an app, integration with payment processors, licensing, more legal stuff than I wanted to etc.) Almost from the get go,…

How did you find your early users?

The app was developed for use for myself. Then I put it online for other to use for free. The advantage (and probably missing part in the original description) is that the app was free for +5 years before I added a paid tier. So we already had a decent user base.
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