Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

251–260 of 480 posts

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

#251

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.pseud…

> watch ads to send sms

hmm... interesting though, it does work haha

that's so interesting, I mean I remember when I didn't have a phone, not even a burner, sometimes you have to deal with those "get code texted" and use those online sites that allow free sms... interesting being able to make that stuff now vs. using them

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

#252
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool idea! I went ahead and bought a starter kit. I think you're on to something here.

Thanks so much!

I agree with cableshaft, it seems like a good idea. ~24 treats from the $9.99 mix container is also quite reasonable. The site is solid, loads fast. I like your box packaging, it's well done. Good luck with this venture.

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

#253
post #7
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who did you use for your packaging? What made you choose them?

I ran a 99Designs contest for a logo, and the winner of that also had some experience doing packaging design, so I used her: https://99designs.com/profiles/bettymar . I just thought she really captured the feel I was looking for - it's an upscale product, but it's for dogs so I still wanted it to feel fun.

Very cool! I really like seeing you respond to all the questions in the thread. It's giving me a really eye-opening view into the nuts and bolts of bootstrapping a physical product company. Thank you so much for going into detail!

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

#254

In this virus season alone I've made $8000 in sales. You'll find various subreddits where people are buying around 5-10spools a month. Imagine how much virgin plastic is being added like that to the environment. I've been creating filament and selling it: https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho... This activity also help recycle waste plastic. Production cost of filament is $7.5 per 5kg and filam…

Wow, great initiative. I think this is a perfect example of the market solving the problem fast. My main question is, how are you thinking about emissions and waste? Presumably, you've got to melt and extrude these things somewhere, and heating the plastic to its melting point to create decent sized quantities of this will result in harmful emissions of some kind. Do you have some sort of a scrubbing system? If so, how did you figure out what kind of system to set up and right size it for your production capacity?

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

#255
post #236
post #207

Algotrading options. Some initial investment is needed in order to open margin account, but otherwise it's basically passive income.

would you be willing to share the resources you used to get started with algotrading and understanding options?

There are books and courses on various strategies, but I didn't use any as it started as a hobby and trying out different approaches & finding "hacks" on my own was more fun (it turns out all of these "hacks" were known previously, who would have thought).

If you have purely technical questions, reddit has a few communities that can help and you can find more people on Discord.

Understanding stocks, options and all the financial stuff was the hardest part (for me as a non-fintech guy) as it's filled with their own lingo and large part of information available online is useless or even harmful (either coming from noobs/gamblers or "financial gurus willing to disclose their secrets for in a private webinar" or even legitimate traders that operate through textbook "cargo cult" rituals). Investopedia is a good start, but if your goal is to have profitable algorithm that does not require your attention, you will need to read and understand the rules and regulations that apply to your jurisdiction and exchanges you use. There are many somewhat obscure events that happen fairly rarely (during normal times - low volatility period, right now everything is accelerated 5x) so you might not hear about them at all until they affect you, but once they do occur you will either lose money or lose opportunity. I am going for sources (sec.gov, nasdaq.com, nyse.com - I trade US options exclusively), there might be some shortcuts (probably trainings), but I haven't tried any.

If you are just starting, try paper trading but also get a real account with real money as soon as you can (If you want to be above the average algotrader - start by collecting detailed data (per minute or so) and storing it for future use. Many brokers give you access to historical data but it is very basic and good quality historical data is very expensive. Use this dataset to backtest your algorithms, but try to make distinction between features that have real-world causes, the ones that are just product of chance and the ones that are caused by market makers or other traders. Most of the trades are happening fully automatically and everybody uses basically the same few sets of approaches, so you should be aware of them to either make or avoid losing money on those somewhat predictable components.

Oh, also make sure you understand the way your broker calculates all the fees and commissions as with algotrading that can make or break the whole profitability for you.

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi I am currently working on releasing the paid version of my app (online voice memo). I was wondering about any resources you have to learn about licensing and legal stuff, or any common caveats that you ran into.

It depends on your situation but if you are in the US I'd create an LLC and do business with that. It takes a few minutes if you use services that file for you. Second will be dealing with sales tax and it's a nightmare. If you sell to customers in Europe you need to pay VAT to different countries at different rates. Same goes for US states that tax very differently. We moved recently to paddle.com which acts as a re…

I second this. If you sell worldwide, there isn't any reason for you to handle the taxes and payment methods on your own. Actually, there's a whole bunch of companies that would do that for a relatively small cut (about 5% give or take). From the top of my head: 2Checkout, Bluesnap, DigitalRiver, FastSpring. I don't know much about Paddle, but they spammed me quite aggressively using the email from a leaked LinkedIn dump, so I'm not sure how much I would trust them.

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

#257
post #162

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 c…

Kind of curious how that works, the url does not match what you land on so I'm guessing something intercepts it but it outputs a unique url? It's not just urlencode anyway.

Are they precomputed to save resources or something? Pretty neat

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

#258
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

I think there was also case law about this recently[1] regarding LinkedIn, where if the content isn't behind a login wall, it can't legally be considered anything but public. The UGC aspect is an interesting angle I haven't thought of, but that's a fantastic point too. Would I be correct in saying that the same mechanism companies set up to evade responsibility for illegal UGC also sets it up to be legal to scrape? And if the user owns the material, what happens if you've already made money selling that data and they ask for their cut of the proceeds?

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

#259
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback! All the extra stuff on the B&C comes from the cheddar cheese powder - for the most part they're natural ingredients (excluding things like the yellow color, etc.), but you're right, it doesn't look great. Once we get low on my current supply of cheese powder, I'm going to look into getting a food dehydrator to make my own cheese powder.

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…

They're fun, but high-fat foods like dairy are mostly unsuitable for at home dehydration. Especially at a bulk level. I'm not an expert on nutrition labeling law but OP might have more luck listing "dehydrated cheddar cheese (ingredients, here)" with the ingredients in parenthesis. That signals to the consumer that even though there are a lot of big ingredients they are really just one thing.

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

#260
post #162

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 c…

Kind of curious how that works, the url does not match what you land on so I'm guessing something intercepts it but it outputs a unique url? It's not just urlencode anyway. Are they precomputed to save resources or something? Pretty neat

Oh it's just a base64-encoded JSON that contains other parameters like the view limits and such. You can base64 decode itself and see.
Post reply on HN