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

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241–250 of 480 posts

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

#241

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…

Kind of curious if you had problems with the triple a's in the name?

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

#242
post #239
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…

I had a look and this might be a completely ignorant suggestion (I don’t have a dog) but to me it was very surprising that dogs would like frozen food, so maybe you should explain that/why they do. Just seemed counterintuitive, I’ve never seen anybody give anything frozen to their dog.

Ice cream style treats (made for dogs, so not real ice cream) have become very popular with dog owners. You'll see them carried in all major grocery stores in the US now.

For example:

https://www.purina.com/frosty-paws

And:

http://dogstersicecream.com

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

#243

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…

Kind of curious if you had problems with the triple a's in the name?

Not really no. It's all goood :)

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

#244
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…

Just a suggestion... try Flutter. This way you at least get a cross platform app with (arguably) less work. Doubles your marketplace and reduces your risk on a single store blocking you. Also consider that what sells on iOS may sell even better on Android.

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

#245

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…

I was curious about this, I suppose if you're taking direct payments vs. say adsense, if you separate your name from the business. So if someone tried to track who ads belong to, wouldn't find the owner/operator of the site. Maybe that's just standard practice. I've been thinking about that myself eg. privately registering domains and somehow not having my name tied to ssl certs, etc...

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

#246
post #239
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…

I had a look and this might be a completely ignorant suggestion (I don’t have a dog) but to me it was very surprising that dogs would like frozen food, so maybe you should explain that/why they do. Just seemed counterintuitive, I’ve never seen anybody give anything frozen to their dog.

Anecdata: many dogs I know of really enjoy ice cubes. A meat flavored ice cube would probably make them quite excited.

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

#247
post #27

I built an Android app a few years back as a project to learn native Android coding, its been making around $300/month from sales/adsense. Its fun to read and reply to reviews every now and then. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lpellis.se...

Sounds like an Android app would be hard to maintain no? With regard to how many devices/os versions come out... not sure if you bother with that?

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

#248
I made Metaset (https://metaset.io) to quickly do visual analysis on data sets. Started from my own needs for a project that spit out large CSV files. Excel or Tableau were too cumbersome and I didn't bother doing pandas and matplotlib.

Later I found someone with a similar need but for Postgres databases. It's been pulling in a decent side income.

I am embarrassed by the amateur UI. There is so much I want to do around "smart" visualization, but haven't had time.

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

#249
My wife sells lasagna. It makes really good money, could potentially make more than a good job, but I'm not sure if we'd like to commit to that. Profit margins are pretty good, but it's still poor $ per effort. COVID makes it a bad time too.

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

#250

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 du…

> how much both Apple and credit card providers have a chilling effect on freedom of nudity in entertainment - it's appalling

As in good or bad? they're blocking/enabling?

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