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

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

#161

Post by grogenaut » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:32 PM UTC

awillen wrote: post #133

grogenaut wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Food dehydrators are a fun rabbit hole. Florists use them for wedding bouquets. You will also find a TON of info about scrappily acquiring them on prepper websites. I've seen several posts by Mormon families (food preservation and supply is encouraged by the religion), and a lot of the good ones get into taste, methods for preparing food, and doing it in bulk (which you'd care about). But the se sites will have a lar…

Yeah, one of the suppliers I've identified for freeze dried foods is one of those survivalist prepper type stores. I'm sure my use case is not what they're thinking about :)

What size are you looking at?

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

#162

Post by dheera » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

I made a web-based graphing calculator (http://fooplot.com) in 2007 that runs on ad revenue and is still delivering about 5X its hosting costs. It only makes enough profit for about a few dinners a month so nothing I can live off of but hey I'll take anything more than $0. It used to make an order of magnitude more back when I had 250K MAU and that was a meaningful addition to my meager PhD salary. But times have changed and (a) people started using mobile apps to graph functions and (b) AdSense somehow decreased the CPC I was getting and I then stopped putting effort into it.

You can put arbitrary equations into the URL, e.g.

http://fooplot.com/1+sin(x)/2

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

#163

Post by jsf01 » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

abc126589 wrote: post #30

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,…

Really great idea! Just a small note though your pricing page doesn’t work on a mobile device. It just renders a bunch of checkmarks without context

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

#164

Post by mavsman » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

Started making videos on YouTube of topics that I lookup over and over or that I would like to learn more. I prefer not to monetize my videos with YouTube ads but I've already been contracted by several major software companies to make videos for them.

Definitely not passive income but I enjoy it as a different work from normal programming where I can explore stuff I am interested or even just practice talking through interview questions out loud.

It's interesting to see which videos get traction. My most viewed video (https://youtu.be/8eyfmp7dtYk) is one that I just made on a whim, like many of my videos, and has a bad like/dislike ratio but I've gotten constructive feedback on it in case I decide to redo it.

I've learned a ton from having this channel and have made about $2k from contracting a handful of videos so far this year.

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

#165

Post by nickmancol » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

iddan wrote: post #42

I maintain Cayley, a knowledge graph database and built a web UI on top of it https://cayley.io

Really like the project. Thanks.

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

#166

Post by phreack » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:47 PM UTC

I had an affiliate marketing website when I was a kid, mostly for fun and learning with some friends, that made some money off backpack recommendations and Amazon links. We didn't feel too good about it after a while so we shut it down. I now hate SEO powered advice blogs.

More recently, I've started making adult videogames, one of which being an interactive fiction that had a lot of traction, but is now on hiatus due to Covid related reasons. One unintended effect of this, is that I learned personally how much both Apple and credit card providers have a chilling effect on freedom of nudity in entertainment - it's appalling.

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

#167

Post by petecooper » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:48 PM UTC

Scoundreller wrote: post #95

I made a grainy and poor-quality but useful video on how to fix a specific issue for Macs which didn’t have a video anywhere else. Spent 5 minutes to make the video and upload it. Was making $2-3/month, which is a great ROI for 5 minutes of work. All positive comments and upvotes because the video is useful. Then YouTube demonetized all small publishers because they can somehow block spam, but not identify “offensive…

I'll bite - can you post a link?

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

#168

Post by jfk13 » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:48 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #108

AznHisoka wrote: post #49

I made almost 6 figures a year on an affiliate website promoting natural health products, when they were extremely popular back in 2006. I would stay awake some nights and jot down every product mentioned in overnight infomercials (before I knew what TiVo was). then write a review on them the next day. Thousands of people would search for “X review” in the days after watching those infomercials and I would rank #1 be…

Where the reviews entirely fiction?

Naturally. You don't think they actually got hold of (and tried) the products in between seeing the infomercial on TV and posting the "review"?

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

#169

Post by radihuq » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

snird wrote: post #71

It's probably not what you meant, but I recently created a weekend project bot that scans facebook for apartments rental ads. Thanks to this bot, I landed an opportunity I wouldn't have catch otherwise, saving me 6,000$ a year. Assuming I will hold my new apartment for 3 years, this is a net savings of 18,000$. I haven't sold anything, but yet I created something that "generated money" for me. My code is open source…

This is great, congrats on the savings. Do you have any opinions on the ethics of web scraping? I have some projects I want to pursue that involve web scraping but I'm worried about

1) any illegal technicalities 2) is it a dick move to the website owner

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

#170

Post by pseudozach » Sat, Jun 06, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

I run a send free text app that lets users watch ads to send sms, I rarely need to update and provide customer support and it makes 60$/month from ads+iap. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pseudozach...

And then another app that converts play store balance to 1/2 bitcoin but I actually like to talk about this one, if I can find anyone interested https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pseudozach...