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

All of my side projects failed, I developed 3 apps, out of those one was not meant to earn anything, but it's success was to get users. My best app got around 100 users for couple of days, none of them used it more than 5 days straight.

First App was a birthday calendar (Back in 2012-13), where I pulled Contact book, Google Plus and Facebook and at one time also had a section of born today. But it had bugs, it took too much time to solve. When I fixed things, Google Plus was shutting down, and FB APIs also got more restricted. I dropped working on that project.

Second App was a utility around a service called PushBullet: Still active and one of the must have utility back in the day, I developed an open-source utility around that app. I couldn't market it properly, (Didn't know real possibility of Product hunt or Hacker news back then). Then PushBullet went behind paywall and I stopped using it entirely. Also lost interest working on that project.

Third App was another utility managing (and intelligently deleting) files in Android Phones: Current Files App (Started as Files GO) didn't exist then. I worked on this longer than any other project. Even tried to do marketting, at it's peak (when I posted about the app on reddit) it had ~100 users a day, then daily job got on the way and I couldn't work on the app. Then Google Happened, their restrictive play store policy meant I have to chose between other aspect of life and this project. I dropped working on this....

Not counting many ideas that didn't go beyond failed or unconvincing POCs. I have stopped developing apps entirely since couple of years. Got some backend certificates, and now in a free time I indulge in Chess, Reading and writing blog post (80% in native language on non tech stuff and 20% on tech stuff).

Edit: Started working on a POC of a service I had in my mind since long. Let's see what happens.

We had a bunch of good ideas the world didn’t care about. For example, actual user IDs and a feedback system. We launched it as an add-on for radio station websites and learned that they were an endless source of feature requests, which we foolishly granted. Finally, it didn’t scale well because a lot of behind the scenes content moderation was necessary.

Mostly I blame myself for not validating the idea properly. If “The Mom Test” book had been around at that time I could have saved that money and a lot of strain on my marriage. I feel strongly that it is by far the most important business book to be published in the last three or four decades.

Hyades (https://hyades.info/)

I wanted a not-too-intrusive Github notification system that would give me a broad overview of what happened in my starred repos (i.e. repos for which I'm only a consumer), as some kind of ‶real-time″ changelog. Indeed, I star quite a lot of e.g. emacs packages and other small utilities, which don't have a strict release schedule/changelog cycle, so it's easy to miss a new feature.

So I developed a service that would send me a weekly newsletter of ‶what happened″ (issues, releases), and I decided to make it public, as I assumed I was most probably not the only person with such a need. I never planned on making actual money out of it, but I thought it could recoup hosting costs, which it didn't.

But on the other hand, I learned quite a bit while doing it, so it's probably still a net win.

https://wifimask.com - WifiMask VPN. The little money that comes in is spent on server costs basically. I spent 3 years building it, spending too much time on trying to build "perfect" Apple apps, instead of quickly going online with an MVP and validate first. Besides that there are a lot of VPN's out there and competing with the "big boys" with big marketing budgets is hard, especially when they can provide things like Netflix US streaming. I can keep it online forever this way, it's "bootstrapped", so no screaming investors who want to see money, but I stopped working on an Android and Windows app, I see it as a lost case and these days I'm focused on my webhosting: joostwebhost.nl and secret future projects. ;-) (And I'm available as a freelancer) I learned a lot from it though, more then I ever learned at an employer. I'm pretty sure I can apply the knowledge to a future successful project.

It set off the flamewar detector. That's the "software that demotes overheated discussions" mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. I've turned off the penalty now. We review all the posts that get it, because sometimes legit discussions get hit—but it can take us a while.

Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? They ask you to email hn@ycombinator.com instead of posting like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25581828 was particularly excessive because it adds noise to the story feed—and doing this doesn't work anyhow. I only knew about your question because another user decided to help you out and emailed us.