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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?

#191

Post by ta17711771 »

winrid wrote: post #107

I don't talk about my side projects at work hours, even if someone asks. However, I built Pixmap for Android to learn Android dev. It makes a couple dollars a month... :) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.winricklab... I built FastComments as a tool for myself, but it's starting to gather bigger and bigger customers. https://FastComments.com

Dogfooding watch.ly as well. Very nice!

Consider some sort of tag for that, by the way, even if small.

I'm looking into one, and I had to dig into the source to find out which one you were using!

...and even then, I had to dig back in to find the URL, because your search ranking is nonexistent from my perspective.

Your services are inspiring as hell, from a minimalism/productivity perspective!

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

#192

Post by IshKebab »

sunsetSamurai wrote: post #182
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?

I wouldn't listen to the advice of anyone that thought they could make 50% return in a year just based on "nothing magical, just solid and practical value investing advice".

They're either too naive to realise it was luck, or trying to scam you.

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

#193

Post by xkozn »

https://timeshift.xkozn.co/

This allows you change the start time of a Strava (Garmin, etc.) activity. Useful for WFH situations where you really just want a nice midday run or bike, but don't want to deal with the potential judgement from coworkers who follow you. Might be overthinking things, but oh well :)

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

#194

Post by awillen »

ta17711771 wrote: post #179
awillen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the safety side, I've had crude analysis done (which is the standard nutritional testing for pet food in the US and was $250 per flavor), and I've consulted with a couple of vets to make sure the product is safe. On the legal side, I've got business insurance, which thankfully isn't that expensive. I've been holding off on forming an LLC since that's gonna run me about a grand here in CA including the cost of sett…

Why not incorporate somewhere that's not CA?

That's a good question... the last couple of LLCs that I've formed have been for businesses that are clearly operating in CA (one was for real estate here and the other for a local service company) and thus require the LLC there. Since I'm selling to the whole US here, maybe it is a better option... I will look into it.

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

#195

Post by awillen »

grogenaut wrote: post #161
awillen wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

At the moment I'm buying #10 cans (which are like 3 quarts I believe), though obviously I'll try to scale that up if sales merit it.

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

#196

Post by tunesmith »

sfink wrote: post #128
tunesmith wrote: post #113

I 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.

Absolutely. I discourage cyclic, but dag is ok. It can be hard to write a downstream chapter (and keep the plot consistent) when there are two upstream paths, so we don't do it a lot, but we have a few examples. I think in our current story of about 110 chapters, we have three crosslinks, and two of them have a major impact on the story. I wrote a pretty snazzy react/cytoscape thing to visualize and explore the maps.

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

#197

Post by awillen »

ta17711771 wrote: post #181
awillen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I appreciate the offer, but I think I am quite a ways away from that at this point :)

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

#198

Post by awillen »

ta17711771 wrote: post #183
awillen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just don't feel like I'm nearly educated enough on CBD in dogs to start using that as an ingredient. I know it's become very common very quickly, but I'd have to read all the research before I could consider it.

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

#199

Post by andreasduess »

jordiee wrote: post #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…

That’s really interesting. We do something similar for clients that don’t have access to the budget needed to hire the agency proper. If I may make one comment, I thought there were too many colour choices. I work with designers everyday and even I got confused.

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

#200

Post by zerr »

Stevvo wrote: post #122

I 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…

It's not a zero-sum game, and it doesn't easy at all :)
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