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Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

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Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#11

https://99remotejobs.com a job board focused on remote jobs. I have promoted it on both LiHunt (software dev audience) and SaaSHub; however that didn’t help. Not a single sale :) As a result, I’ve decided to make it FREE and open source the code. Hopefully in a few months.

Remove the views unless you have thousands/hundreds of views. For me, the main thing is to get the traffic for job applications then work on the sales of the jobs. Just now it's a case of asking for $20 for 20 views of which 1 may apply. That seems like a hard sale to make.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#13

Recent Failure -- I'm not getting customers. I love reading online content. It is tough to read quality long-form content online. So, I built https://pipecontent.com -- By Sharing your article collection(One-tab, Toby, Notion, Google-Docs, Twitter-Threads, Evernote, Dropbox, Website Link) -- Receive clutter free ready to print PDF OR A high quality printed magazine. Feedback appreciated.

Looks cool but it took 6.5 sec on my pc to load the entire website and even more on mobile. And I have a pretty decent connection. Maybe that's where you lose some audience?

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#14

Recent Failure -- I'm not getting customers. I love reading online content. It is tough to read quality long-form content online. So, I built https://pipecontent.com -- By Sharing your article collection(One-tab, Toby, Notion, Google-Docs, Twitter-Threads, Evernote, Dropbox, Website Link) -- Receive clutter free ready to print PDF OR A high quality printed magazine. Feedback appreciated.

I don't mind the idea, but I think there's wayyy to much friction in getting content from the internet to paper. There's just not much value proposition from re-printing the content I can read online, quicker than I can get it in a magazine form.

The best use I can think for your service is for businesses who want to produce and send out magazines (maybe with content from their industry) in an automated way.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#15
https://www.musictaco.co.uk - Find the cheapest place to buy albums online (you can also track your favourite artists and it will email you when they have a new release)

To be fair, I built it primarily as a way to teach myself Rails, and in this regard it was a great success. But in the back of my mind I figured I might be able to make some affiliate revenue out of the traffic but it never took off.

It has failed so far because: it is a small niche (most people just use Spotify these days), I haven't marketed it very well and haven't found the niches where likeminded people hang out (building is definitely easier than marketing). I could definitely do more on the homepage to explain the features, particularly around tracking artists and being notified when they release new albums, but at the end of the day I just haven't been able to market it (nor did I spend a lot of time on this aspect of it). For a long time it only worked in the UK (an even smaller audience compared to the global market), although I did just roll out an update for it to work in the US, but have not done anything to advertise the fact.

Feedback welcome!

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#16
post #5

I have the opposite problem: I built https://imgz.org to not make money and it does. Not a lot, but not zero. I'll have to fix that. By the way, we're hiring: https://imgz.org/blog/2020/12/23/haha-suckers/

"... are ashamed of what Imgur has become?" I'm no expert but I think one could say you might get into trouble for defamation if you write something like that on your product page.

For asking people if they're ashamed? I doubt it, but I'm not an expert either.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#17
Webmix.io - a site to see many pages of the same type for web design.

For example, you could see many big SaaS login pages to get inspiration.

The issue is that categorizing sites is way more time consuming than I thought, and WordPress makes saving/using user “likes” really challenging.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#18
post #5

I have the opposite problem: I built https://imgz.org to not make money and it does. Not a lot, but not zero. I'll have to fix that. By the way, we're hiring: https://imgz.org/blog/2020/12/23/haha-suckers/

I have to admit, I much prefer this approach of "honest abuse" to most sites' business models.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#19

Webmix.io - a site to see many pages of the same type for web design. For example, you could see many big SaaS login pages to get inspiration. The issue is that categorizing sites is way more time consuming than I thought, and WordPress makes saving/using user “likes” really challenging.

This sounds like a project that would benefit from some kind of clustering algorithm using machine learning. Is that how you did it?

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#20
post #4

I built a Tinder-like matchmaking app where users log in with their Facebook account and the app then auto-matches users by their FB likes. I thought taking the hassle out of swiping could give my app an edge over Tinder. It was working fine for a week or so before Facebook caught up and revoked my API keys (effectively killing the app). They didn't give any reason besides some vague recommendation to review their Te…

Wow that really sucks! Sorry to hear that. I suppose you would've needed patents on the idea to stop them from stealing it.
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