I own a swimming pool and do most of my own maintenance and water chemistry. I created https://poolforthought.com as a place to organize my knowledge. I later realized other people want the same info, and now 7 years later it's made about $20k USD. Ads and affiliate links drive site revenue. I have about 12k email signups of people who want a pool maintenance ebook I'm creating (for a price). I should finish that thing. It's money just sitting there waiting for me to capture.
Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
121–130 of 480 posts
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#122I work ~4 hours a week making aircraft add-ons for X-Plane, releasing one product every 3 months, net profit ~$5k a month total.
It's fairly simple: 1) Commission Russian 3D artist to make model of aircraft -$1000 2) Commission Audio Engineer to do sound - $500 3) Tweak model to work well with simulator + animation - 12 hours 4) Paint model in Substance - 12 hours 5) Set up flight model in X-Plane's "Plane Maker" - 8 hours 6) Coding - 12 hours 7) Misc loose ends & testing - 12 hours
I don't talk about it because I don't want too much competition figuring out what an easy way this is to make money.
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#123I 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…
Very cool.
My dog loves the frozen bones with marrow, which I dub frobos.
I’m sure he would love these!
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#124I made a tool to detect which user account can be safely remove from PagerDuty. It also provide simple weekly report emails.
I got a few subscribers by doing nothing else that putting it on the PagerDuty marketplace.
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#125I made a voicemail service for podcasters using WebRTC. It's a widget you add to your website. I spent about 3 weeks building it. So far I have 1 active user paying around $13 a month. Its been great, my user has been telling me how to build the product he wants.
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#126In this virus season alone I've made $8000 in sales. You'll find various subreddits where people are buying around 5-10spools a month. Imagine how much virgin plastic is being added like that to the environment. I've been creating filament and selling it: https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho... This activity also help recycle waste plastic. Production cost of filament is $7.5 per 5kg and filam…
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#127I wanted to learn iOS dev, so made the simplest game I could think of: a card game where you just draw a random card and win if it's between two values. Then I made another app that just transliterates your name into Japanese characters and displays that. That one made $33 / year. Together they almost covered the Apple Developer fee :-) Things continued like this for years, until one day Apple started getting harsher…
Stories like this have me convinced that choosing to do serious business with a company like Apple or Google, has a strong chance of ending up in losing time and money. Maybe you'll get a few users, maybe not. Maybe they'll remove your entire catalog of apps, maybe not.
At least my domain registrar and hosting provider probably won't remove my website.
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#128I have a creative writing site that lets authors write branching fiction novels together. It's stupid fun, we have Discord/Zoom writing events Sunday nights where we try to write chapters together (usually around 500 words) and read them to each other. It existed years ago and made some advertising money, and then I shut it down because of spam problems (since solved). I brought it back to live because of COVID. I'm…
Is it a branching tree or a dag? I was just thinking it might be a fun challenge to combine branches occasionally.
As in: now he's a dead firemoose.
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#129I work ~4 hours a week making aircraft add-ons for X-Plane, releasing one product every 3 months, net profit ~$5k a month total. It's fairly simple: 1) Commission Russian 3D artist to make model of aircraft -$1000 2) Commission Audio Engineer to do sound - $500 3) Tweak model to work well with simulator + animation - 12 hours 4) Paint model in Substance - 12 hours 5) Set up flight model in X-Plane's "Plane Maker" - 8…
So cool. How do you even think of an idea like this?
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#130My 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,…
I really like the UI - is this an Electron app, or what is the stack you use?