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

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151–160 of 480 posts

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

#151

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. Th…

I guess I am dumb, but I can't understand how to use the tools :( Maybe an instructions page will help

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

#153
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…

thanks mate, my two dogs will love this. my dog just got spayed, and isn't taking to her treats. i think this would really make her happy.

I really hope it does!

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

#154
post #73

I 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…

Out of curiosity, did you make those apps paid or chose to show ads within app UI?

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

#155
post #118

I built a Chrome extension that checks websites for SEO, speed and security best practices: https://www.checkbot.io/ Most of the growth has been organic but I post it in forums when it seems relevant. I haven't had much luck with ads but writing articles has been worthwhile.

There was one guy refer about your checkbot somewhere on this thread and I installed. Will start using it very soon :)

Thanks! Let me know if you've got any questions or you need tips on how to fix any of the problems it finds.

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

#156
post #151

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. Th…

I guess I am dumb, but I can't understand how to use the tools :( Maybe an instructions page will help

The point is that these tools are not standalone. They're meant as an instruction aid for teachers and learning tools for students in the Montessori environment. These people will know immediately how to use them.

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

#157
I started many unsuccessful side projects, making me almost no or no money at all. The latest one (WunderFlix) is different though. It starts making a modest amount of money. But since I never made any money with the other projects I still don't like to talk about it.

But, now that you've asked... I always wanted to have an app that can help me creating short films of my kids with my iPhone. I searched the App Store and found many, but they were all so complicated to use. I wanted simplicity. After all, I have kids, and thus no time to fiddle around with a complicated and long process to create the films. Since I could not find the app I was looking for, I decided to create it myself :-)

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wunderflix/id1484705777

[2] https://www.wunderflix.com

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

#158

It’s very small at the moment, but I built a simple way to stand up a landing page, collect payment, and send out a link. Primarily have yoga instructors using this as a better way to collect payment for Zoom classes compared to collecting payment on Venmo or using another tool they’re not comfortable with such as Gumroad. Only charging .6% on top of Stripe’s fees and no monthly. Only making a little money at the mom…

Why is it better than gumroad?

Yogis and fitness instructors I've spoken to see Gumroad as being too "techie" and the few that have tried it felt it was more geared towards selling online assets, rather than live classes.

For now it's very basic, but I'm working on a few features that are specifically geared to helping live class creators sell more easily, primarily calendar integration, support for multiple classes being sold, and support for monthly subscriptions to all classes from an instructor.

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

#159
Built a Slack bot to get notified whenever someone schedules or cancels a Calendly event.

Received lots of feedback initially, and the project is roughly feature complete.

Should invest in marketing but haven't been doing that at all ...Does that qualify as not talking about it? :)

https://calenduck.co/

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

#160
I always make side projects to learn new things and they periodically make me a small amount of money.

From most recent to oldest:

Https://brand-kit.net

Have not made money yet but just launched last month. Basically it is starter business branding at a very affordable price wrapped into a service.

Https://scrape.email

Launched at the beginning of the year and making around 100/month now. I used common crawl to index emails across the web monthly making it easy to find all emails for a given website.

Https://appdoctor.io

My most ambitious project from 2 years ago. Appdoctor is an app monitoring platform with automated tests, status page and a bunch of extra stuff..makes around 150/m now.

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