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

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

#371

Post by fxtentacle » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 6:19 AM UTC

docuru wrote: post #320

fxtentacle wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for your detailed answer! That really helped me learn about it. All the best with your side business (and all)!

Glad to help :)

I got started with my endeavors from people explaining things to me on programming IRC channels, so despite its bad reputation, advice from random strangers on the internet can be good advice.

As for this particular project, I stopped it when I ran out of bikinis and couldn't buy more at the same conditions anymore. At the same time, competition from China was also arriving in the form of dropshipping. I could have switched suppliers to reduce my purchase costs and remain competitive, but selling a high volume of cheap products is a lot more work than selling a low volume of high priced items.

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

#372

Post by aj3 » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 6:30 AM UTC

z023bs wrote: post #318

aj3 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

thanks so much for the detailed reply! I was mainly looking for reputable sources of information to learn from, there are so many BS opinionated websites and Youtube gurus trying to sell courses that it is very hard to find a quality source of information. I watched a bunch of Khan Academy videos but they weren't super comprehensive so I was looking to get more in depth. what is your opinion on technical analysis and…

There are some patterns that are fairly reliable such as volatility around earnings. But that's sort of obvious and only works because everybody knows about & expects it to work. What's called TI on YouTube is different kind of price forecasting altogether. In my opinion there are only three ways to predict price movement on that scale:

  1. by having insider knowledge
  2. by market manipulation
  3. by getting lucky

Obviously, I haven't taken any classes or worked for the Wall Street so might be missing some hidden knowledge, do your own research. My strategies mostly assume random outcomes and work on a scale that does not require TI, but I also attempt to detect dangerous stocks, market makers' sentiment and market manipulation (btw, cryptocurrencies are great for studying mm).

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

#373

Post by aj3 » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 6:30 AM UTC

marcins wrote: post #359

aj3 wrote: post #207

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

Without going into any more detail than you’re comfortable sharing, I’m just curious as to what kind of percentage return are you seeing from this?

It beats SPY, but I'm not leaving my job.

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

#374

Post by aj3 » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 6:38 AM UTC

organicfigs wrote: post #328

aj3 wrote: post #207

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

I wanted to add a response here for every aspirational algotrader: you can lose a lot of money very quickly. I hobbied in algotrading through my twenties, learned a lot more than I expected too, worked out the math, and made $600 in a matter of 15 minutes on my first day before losing $1000 the same day. That's when I decided to pull the plug. I already knew that it would be more profitable finding contracting gigs t…

That's right, I don't advise anyone to invest more than what you're comfortable losing: besides making dumb decisions even such things as an innocuous gap in your test coverage can lead to losing everything you have in a zap. In my opinion there's also no need for margin account right away. Focus on paper trading and only invest a few hundred bucks in real account just to get the feeling of it and to realize what are the little things that paper trading misses.

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

#375

Post by asdff » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 7:10 AM UTC

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)

typical at college campuses in the us

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

#376

Post by audiometry » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 7:13 AM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #370

M5x7wI3CmbEem10 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how did you find a manufacturer and the right number of SKUs?

I paid an Italian guy experienced in the fashion industry. He organized all of the bikinis for one upfront purchase price, which also included service fees for him. But that was a pity later on when I ran out of bikinis and didn't manage to hire him again.

This guy sounds like the key angle on your business. How did you find him in the first place?

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

#377

Post by winrid » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 7:31 AM UTC

zatel wrote: post #271

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

FastComments is really cool looking and so simple (it reminds me of brutalist web design). Could you explain a little on how you do limiting of page loads? I've been trying to add this kind of functionality to my own projects but can't think of a way to track it without storing in a db which seems like a bottleneck process if every page load is a write

Store an object representing the namespace (customer+month) and use whatever your DB's increment operator is to increment the count for that month. Keep a map, or use an LRU cache, to check the DB periodically to see who has gone past their limit. You can also fire off this write to the DB asynchronously since you don't care that much if it fails and you don't want to create back pressure in your application.

For example an object like {tenant, month, year, count}. Then you can reuse this for reporting etc which is what I do. We also track other metrics per customer + month like commenter sign ups, votes, etc.

Also - I'm open to new opportunities right now if anyone's interested in hiring me. :)

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

#378

Post by mattkevan » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 7:33 AM UTC

abetusk wrote: post #355

mattkevan wrote: post #77

I sell prints of public domain artwork on Etsy [0]. I’ve automated the print production and fulfillment, so all I need to do is set up the artwork and maintain the product listings. It consistently brings in around £100-300 per month and if I put any time at all into marketing it could probably do a lot better. I also maintain a directory of UX tools, resources and information [1]. It currently doesn’t bring in anyth…

I've often thought about doing this or something similar. Can I ask, how long have you been at it? How did you pick your initial round of public domain pictures? What was your growth curve like? And did you automate the print/production initially or do it only after you'd been around for a while? If you don't mind me asking, what print/production company are you using, how did you find them and why did you settle on…

I’ve been doing it for around 4 years now. Growth has been slow initially because you need a lot of listings to be noticed - the bigger sellers all have over 1000.

I knew I wanted to do something with public domain art prints, so I researched other sellers to find the types of things that were popular. Lots of places like the Library of Congress, NYPL and the Rijksmuseum have open access policies, so I regularly hunt through their collections to find interesting stuff. The problem is always finding something in the public domain that’s also very high resolution.

For a long time I produced the pieces myself as buying top quality paper and a decent printer worked out cheaper than using a print company - and I quite enjoyed it. However I’ve decided now that the convenience is worth the extra cost.

I’ve also automated creating listing images by using Cloudinary and a few shell scripts. This has been a massive time-saver.

As for print companies, it’s a balance between cost, quality and price. The big ones like Printful or Gooten are cheaper and do everything from t-shirts to phone cases, but have a limited range of paper and sizes. Specialist fine art places have a huge range of paper and produce better prints but are much more expensive.

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

#379

Post by winrid » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 7:35 AM UTC

baseballMan wrote: post #346

zatel wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FastComments is really cool looking and so simple (it reminds me of brutalist web design). Could you explain a little on how you do limiting of page loads? I've been trying to add this kind of functionality to my own projects but can't think of a way to track it without storing in a db which seems like a bottleneck process if every page load is a write

I'm guessing they're using watch.ly. I've never heard of the service but it's on the header of the fastcomments blog. Watch.ly mentions a service that will "add realtime hit counters to my products."

Watch.ly is like mixpanel + instabot. I just haven't polished it enough to market it...

FastComments doesn't depend on Watch.ly - it's just there for some UI stuff. Also, Watch.ly sends me a daily email saying what pages (or app screens on native apps) were visited most, for how long, etc, so we can see daily if all the sudden people stop spending time on an important page.

It also gives me a realtime traffic graph. I can see people going from one page, to another, and where they drop off.

Like four months of work there...

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

#380

Post by snird » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 7:37 AM UTC

bradlys wrote: post #327

snird wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a landlord though, what’s the reason to use Facebook then? Is there no alternative like craigslist in Israel? I’ve only seen posts of apartments for rent in Facebook groups that are aimed at college students. (In the US) Otherwise, Craigslist is basically king.

Young people use facebook to find apartments.

So if your apartments target young couples or room mates, facebook is your place. For families we have craiglist-like solutions.