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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?

#181

Post by ta17711771 »

awillen wrote: post #79
XIVMagnus wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's a Shopify site, so I'm just using their integration to print labels from whoever's cheapest - so far it's always been USPS. Honestly the shipping is something I need to figure out... I'm charging flat shipping per product right now until $50 because I don't want shipping costs to be too discouraging, but I am losing money shipping to the East Coast. For the most part my margins are pretty decent and at this poin…

Let me know if you're interested in having an East Coast facility!

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

#182

Post by sunsetSamurai »

FailMore wrote: post #34

The closest thing I've had to that is my side project Taaalk ( https://taaalk.co ) - it's a platform for online interviews. After the success of one of our interviews on HN [1], someone contacted me and suggest that I interview a highly successful value investor. We had a great 'Taaalk' [2] and he then put me in touch with an investing friend of his in London who runs a fund. We met for lunch and he taught me all abo…

care to share those tips about investing?

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

#183

Post by ta17711771 »

awillen wrote: post #136
em-bee wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

obligatory question: did you eat your own dogfood?

I have sprinkled some of the cheese powder I use in my mac and cheese, but that's about the closest I get :P. Luckily my dogs are happy to help out.

I commented elsewhere about an East Coast presence... your comment above has me thinking about CBD infusion options, too.

Something I'm very familiar with for treating older woofs in pain, and spazzy "I hate the vet" woofs, haha! Hope to hear from you.

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

#184

Post by stevekemp »

sareiodata wrote: post #62

I built https://markdownbin.com/ because a friend was complaining something like this doesn't exist. Nobody uses it and probably that's why it doesn't exist.

I created https://markdownshare.com/ for the same purpose; but due to abuse I've retired it.

Shame really, because I liked the service and it was quick/simple to build.

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

#185

Post by ta17711771 »

radihuq wrote: post #169
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

> is it a dick move to the website owner

FB gets more user engagement out of this, which is their goal. No harm, no foul.

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

#186

Post by ta17711771 »

wetmore wrote: post #114
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…

Sounds unethical

Why?

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

#187

Post by sunsetSamurai »

podbites wrote: post #125

I 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. https://www.podbites.fm

This is so cool, that guy basically has a developer(you) working for him, since he's' the only customer.

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

#188

Post by fxtentacle »

docuru wrote: post #110
fxtentacle wrote: post #31

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…

That’s quite interesting combination. How did you charge the marketing contractor? I wanted to reached out to marketing contractor but haven’t had much information Thank you!

The marketing contractor charged me. The way it worked was that if a new email or WhatsApp message or Instagram PM came in, he would get notified and work on it. And he measured the time for each task and then billed me for his time. Since it was usually only a few minutes for each work task, that only summed up to a few hundred $ per month.

As one example of the kind of tasks he handled:

Prospective customers could send in their measurements via WhatsApp and he would then look up into our internal measurement tables to determine which bikini size to order.

Or we would get collaboration invites from Instagram Influencers via PM or E-Mail. He would check their follower counts, bot ratio, etc. and then use an (internal secret) Google Docs to calculate the estimated value for us. He'd then use that to either decline or determine how generous our promotional gift would be.

Nowadays, the concept is called VA = Virtual Assistant, for example like what https://timesvr.com/ offers.

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

#189

Post by mNovak »

Anymore too busy for it, but in college my roommate and I had a side-hustle selling computer monitors on Amazon.

Basically there was a company that cleared out defunct call centers and such, who would call us up to offload monitors for $5 a piece. These would sell consistently on Amazon for $40. Not much effort involved, and made a few thousand that way to supply our other hobbies.

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

#190

Post by saxelsen »

badideaprojects wrote: post #18

https://sendnoodz.io | Spam your friends with MMS of noodles Strangely not because of the content, rather because there are lots of inconsistencies/imperfections in the design and it doesn't make enough to justify fixing them.

This is great! Definitely has the potential to go viral..! Kinda like the guy sending confetti as hate-gifts.
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