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Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
21–30 of 600 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#22Webmix.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?
I agree but no, it’s manual data entry at the moment.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#23I 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.
Haha, I'm tempted to throw money at it too.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#24I build in person services. I think online only will become counterculture. I’ve made a few thousand from everything I’ve tried. All construction.
>in person services
>All construction.
Slightly confused by that wording. Do you mean actual contruction as in build things with a hammer?
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#25I 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 thought that from what we have seen with all the image hosters coming and going every few years is that the financials don’t work out at some point and they are just losing money. Then they have to try to add ads, prevent hotlinking, add their own social network and handle abuse until people move on and the cycle continues.
What do you think you are going to do differently when you reach that point?
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#26I 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 thought that from what we have seen with all the image hosters coming and going every few years is that the financials don’t work out at some point and they are just losing money. Then they have to try to add ads, prevent hotlinking, add their own social network and handle abuse until people move on and the cycle continues. What do you think you are going to do differently when you reach that point?
Charge more until I'm making money, obviously.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#27https://letsfork.app
An app to simplify choosing a restaurant with friends/partner. I mostly created it to have something to do during lockdown, but it would have been fun if it took off.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#28Webmix.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?
It sounds like a project someone would use a clustering algorithm for, where a moderated user submission would be better.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#29I 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 guess it makes money because you shamelessly advertise in response to completely unrelated questions.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#30I began releasing my own Android apps in 2011, and the first several had little or no success.
One piece of knowledge I learned from someone is that advertising paid decently for apps with moderate success. Knowing this steered me in a good direction.
My first app with very small success handled Access databases locally on Android. As I had the first app which could do that, I released it in four days with very few features, but blurbs saying to contact me if they wanted more features. The lesson here is what people wanted. In my mind, I was thinking of how to handle tough technical challenges and new features with domain specific functionality. But what people want was simple. A recently opened files menu. To expand database browsing to database searching. To then expand searching to allow case insensitive searches. To again expand searching to allow wildcards. This was all fairly simple, the features I thought people wanted were much more complex. I would not have learned this lesson if the market had been more mature, if people had another option to use.
I did other niche apps without lessons learned other than that niche markets are small.
Then I had my success (for me a consistent $2000+ in revenue a month without much maintenance work needed on my end meant success). The difference between my success and the previous apps I did was I aimed for a broad mass market, not a niche one, and there were some significant competitors. This is a startup lesson that is heard often - don't aim for a niche market just to avoid competition. There were two main differentiators for me - my app was a book reader, but I did a lot of work to make sure it was easy to browse, search and download tens of thousands of Project Gutenberg books (which I hosted for speed). The other differentiator is I focused on EFIGS languages, not just English, so I was #1 result for libro and libros (books in Spanish) for a long time, and also did well in France, Germany, Italy etc. Project Gutenberg having done the legwork of a supply of many foreign language books helped.
So the main lesson was to aim for the mass market for the Android form factor, and try to find a way to differentiate from competition. People appreciated my niche Access database app, but it took some weeks for me to make $20 advertising revenue from it. Many more people wanted to read Alice in Wonderland and other books.