Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 480 posts

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

#211

Post by wusatiuk »

awillen wrote: post #9
Coxa wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any experience with the marketing part? I am kinda in the same situation but have no clue how marketing works and was wondering if you could share any insights.

I started my career doing some marketing and then moved to product management, all in tech at small startups. Even as a PM, because I joined companies of Google Ads are pretty straightforward, so at this point I'm just running a couple and watching conversion rates - you basically just need to look at how much you're spending vs. how much revenue they're bringing in to figure out if they're worth it. IG advertising i…

If you need any help in terms of seo / ppc / social ads you can ping anytime, if you are intersted in some kind of joint-venture or something.

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

#212

Post by wusatiuk »

Coxa wrote: post #3
awillen wrote: 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…

Do you have any experience with the marketing part? I am kinda in the same situation but have no clue how marketing works and was wondering if you could share any insights.

If you could share your product/url, you might get some marketing ideas from HN community.

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

#213

Post by snird »

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

I was a CTO of a company that did scraping to gather data and sell the analysis. We did this for sellers on Amazon.

In short about legality - it depends on the country. But most will define user content as owned by the user, not the platform, therefore legal to scrape and use, as the user intents for the data to be public.

But sites will fight you on this. Amazon specifically give up a really good fight.

Ofcourse, this talks about user content in an "open" platform. If the content is owned by a business that has no intentions for it to be open for everyone in every medium, its probably illegal.

In regard to being a dick move, it depends. If someone posted an ad in facebook, he intended for it to be seen. He doesn't care how. I just tunnel it to myself in easier way for me to consume.

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

#214

Post by jedberg »

seanwilson wrote: post #89
cdiamand wrote: post #33

I've probably been promoting it too much lately, especially on here. I'll pass on this one, but just wanted to say thank you to everyone who shares a project. It really does help others to see what is possible. Sidequestion: Does anyone have any recommendations on simple guides to SEO? I'm realizing the power of search traffic to bring in visitors to sideprojects.

> Sidequestion: Does anyone have any recommendations on simple guides to SEO? I run a Chrome extension that will crawl your site and give on-page/technical SEO suggestions: https://www.checkbot.io/ . The SEO best practices it checks for are explained + justified in a simple fashion here: https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/ I know a lot of developers are skeptical about SEO advice (e.g. keyword density stuff, experimen…

> Most on-page SEO best practices align with what would benefit a regular user also.

Because good SEO is indistinguishable from good UX. :)

The best SEO advice you can give someone is "make the page easy for a blind person to read".

Just doing that one thing will get you about 99% of the way there.

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

#215

Post by Implicated »

Generally when I want to learn something new I'll build a new side project (or re-build an existing one) to support the learning process. This time I wanted to include my partner in the project so I built something that would require some manual moderation of content.

I built a 'hookup' website and have monetized it with a single affiliate offer/link.

It's made a few thousand in the last 18 months or so, with almost no promotion (posted something about it on reddit once).

Like someone else in this post commented, the way that the 'adult' industry is pushed out of the banking/credit card world makes it pretty tough to monetize sites of this nature.

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

#216

Post by moeamaya »

unstatusthequo wrote: post #203
awillen wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lawyer here. Not yours. But consider Delaware or really any state. You do not need to form it in CA just because that’s where you are. Just get a registered agent and pick a state that doesn’t have oppressive LLC fees...

We've gone over this with our lawyers many times, but if you do the majority of your business operations in CA and have an LLC in any state you'll be subject to $800/year minimum franchise tax in CA still.

https://www.lobbplewe.com/blog/2019/09/rules-for-out-of-stat...

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

#217

Post by snird »

HaloZero wrote: post #104
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…

Interesting. I've never heard of apartment posts in facebook groups but I'm in the bay area. Do other people here in the US have this experience as well? I was thinking it'd be Facebook marketplace, craigslist, and apartment sites (like apartments.com)

I can say that people in Israel prefer facebook groups for many reasons:

1. It allows for "team search". My friends knew I'm looking, so they tagged me in relevant posts they saw. Can't do it anywhere else (including marketplace by facebook themselves)

2. It allows for group communication with the publisher of the post. One asks - everybody sees.

3. It gives a sense of power to those who seek to rent. Many posts with high prices have comments like "You are crazy", "You are a pig", "whoever pays this much is as sucker". It almost warms the heart, we fight the greedy landlords. It almost make it fun, like a witch hunt.

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

#218

Post by winrid »

ta17711771 wrote: post #191
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!

Thank you!! If you wanna try out watch.ly I can set you up. You can build the chat bot using a UI now. And yes - I didn't really market watch.ly yet even though I paid thousands for that domain. I switched to FastComments as a fun tool and then people started paying for it... :)

I love to build fast software! It's so hard to get that to be a high priority in a day job at most companies (in my experience).

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

#219

Post by philsnow »

unstatusthequo wrote: post #203
awillen wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lawyer here. Not yours. But consider Delaware or really any state. You do not need to form it in CA just because that’s where you are. Just get a registered agent and pick a state that doesn’t have oppressive LLC fees...

CA levies a (not insignificant) fee even for Delaware LLCs that operate in California.

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

#220

Post by robomartin »

Won't be a customer for this product...we have three German Shepherds..too much work...and they will swallow them up in a microsecond.

I will, however, give you an idea for another product. Don't know if it has an audience, but it is along the lines of what you are doing.

When large dogs are small you can buy pre-made treats and they'll spend a good amount of time working on them. Past a certain age/size they'll instantly crack them into pieces and it's the end of the story.

It would be interesting to have healthy protein-based edible treats of different sizes (2 to 12 inches?) that are hard or resilient enough to keep a dog busy for a while while they grind away while providing nutritional treat.

One of the options for dogs like ours seems to be to buy cooked bones like this one:

https://www.petco.com/shop/en/petcostore/product/good-lovin-...

They will work on something like this for days. The problem is that they are not really nutritious and they will eventually fracture them and they will splinter. The dogs won't get hurt but it's always of concern having bone fragments on the floor. Also, I don't think you necessarily need something that will last weeks. If it's good for a day or a few days (depending on cost) it's probably OK.

There's are other options in the market:

https://www.petco.com/shop/en/petcostore/product/dog/dog-tre...

Read the ingredients and think about whether or not dogs evolved to eat this stuff. I don't think so. They can get sick and have intestinal problems from these kinds of treats.

Also, read some of the comments on that particular product for a view into what I am generally talking about.

Good luck.

Post reply on HN