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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?

#411

Post by bemmu »

strogonoff wrote: post #403
bemmu wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both were paid. Also forgot to mention (implied though), but the card game one made $60/year.

Props to you. Recently I was looking for something to measure my cruise speed on a bicycle, and a single developer appears to dominate App Store search results with a dozen or more nearly identical speedometer apps—all free and packed with ads. When I think that Apple would allow that, but not an honest paid app that transliterates a name into another language, I start questioning whether I should get into that ecosy…

It's been a long time, so seems I got the reason a bit wrong when I looked into it properly now. It seems I could have avoided it by improving any small bit:

"We noticed that your app has not been updated in a significant amount of time... To keep your app on the App Store, submit an updated version for review and make sure it follows the latest App Review Guidelines. If you are unable to submit an update within 30 days, your app will be removed from the App Store until you submit an update and it is approved."

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

#412

Post by wastedhours »

fufmaya wrote: post #340
andreasduess wrote: post #97

I started up a botanical brewery. We make non alcoholic drinks from medicinal mushrooms and we’re about three weeks away from launching our chaga based drink. We were supposed to launch in March, but COVID threw a spanner into the works. You can check it here: https://borealbrewing.ca Putting out a real product has been an insane amount of work, from getting the brand designed to finding somebody to actually help wit…

First off, it looks like you've really worked hard at this, and it looks really interesting. It's something that I would try if I saw it in a store. I would expect to find it at any of the health food stores locally. I mean the following constructively: Why the focus on ditching alcohol? It's a big turn-off and I'm not even a regular drinker. Seems like the wrong messaging immediately. Sell your product on its own me…

Non and low alcohol is a massively growing market - it's not about judgement, but about creating an adult drink that doesn't have alcohol. Whether that's for people on medication, designated drivers, recovers, or those who just want something else.

It's very common to market these sorts of drinks as non/low alcohol as that's part of the appeal.

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

#413

Post by lpellis »

jcun4128 wrote: post #247
lpellis wrote: 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?

I've only had to update it two times to fix bugs with android upgrades,so all in all not too bad. Google did once randomly pulled my app without warning (just an email after they pulled it) for violating some terms, without stating what terms. I couldnt get any useful feedback, eventually I just bumped the version number and rewrote the description, that got met back on the store. But it did make me very weary of building anything their platform.

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

#414

Post by econcon »

dh-g wrote: post #398
mrfusion wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow awesome idea. How many rolls do you produce a day? How about recycling plastic waste ground on the beach?

Recycling plastic is hard because it will be degraded to various levels, will be of different plastic types, will be dirty, will have custom additives, etc. If you are interested in plastic recycling: https://preciousplastic.com/

We need more research into it I guess also see: https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/greek-researchers-determ...

Here they report improved ABS properties on recycling

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

#415

Post by jvilalta »

shireboy wrote: post #141

I built https://rootshirechess.glitch.me/ for my kids to play chess with cousins and grandparents during the epidemic. I put “buy me a coffee” on and posted a couple places about it. Made ~24$ on it ;)

Nice to see this available for chess. I built something just like this but for rummikub. Same basic idea... jitsi conference embedded in a web page.

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

#416

Post by giarc »

mattkevan wrote: post #378
abetusk wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does etsy have add-ons/integrations like Shopify does? For example on Shopify you can integration with printful and the orders automatically get set to printful for fulfillment.

Edit Never mind, I see your response to another question.

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

#417

Post by docuru »

fxtentacle wrote: post #371
docuru wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh well, since it was your side-project so I guess letting it go wasn't hard. But you got the core idea of selling online :)

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

#418

Post by cableshaft »

bemmu wrote: 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…

> While my game has no other players, and the "money" you win doesn't save anywhere or get you anything, it was still gambly enough that I could no longer have it in the store as an individual developer.

Uh oh. I am developing a single player game that's somewhat similar to yours and was planning to release it on iOS. It doesn't involve money, just points, but it is push your luck. Do you know what I should be looking for to see Apple's new guidelines for this?

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

#419

Post by t0mislav »

akudha wrote: post #401
t0mislav wrote: post #205

Yes, I have. 3000€ since the ads are there. Also from 6, 7 years ago, I was learning to code. https://random.country/

I wonder if it is possible to make a site like this today and monetize it with Adsense. Doesn't Adsense reject thin content sites?

Well I tried with similar site year ago and Google rejected it. So I think answer is probably not possible.

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

#420

Post by t0mislav »

mkl wrote: post #304
t0mislav wrote: post #205

Yes, I have. 3000€ since the ads are there. Also from 6, 7 years ago, I was learning to code. https://random.country/

I do this kind of browsing on Wikipedia, but totally random is kind of fun. I spotted a character encoding error, visible on Bangladesh, I think UTF-8 may be being interpreted as Latin-1? "Chicken’s Neck"

Thanks, will check it.
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