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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?

#101

Post by dlkinney »

mariushn wrote: post #89

I built a hotel PMS system in 9 months without trying to sell it first to hoteliers (no industry experience, talked only to 1 hotel owner). Found out it's hard to sell it, even if almost/fully free. https://hoteliera.com/

Might want to retool it for self-storage businesses. There are a ton of independent self-storage locations (at least in the US) and they predominantly use hotelier software/SAAS. But what makes yours different is that it's modern and looks good. This is a HUGE plus for client-facing services, especially bill paying.

Yes, they're cheapskates. And there's a ton of them, so initial sell is high touch. But there's been a lot of modernization among them, yet their client-facing web presence really isn't being served. So once you've got them, I'd expect to be able to hold on to them--low-touch--for a very, very long time.

Just an idea...

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

#102

Post by jedgardyson »

Been working on https://tryquilt.com, a production service that creates a 1hr polished video interview about a loved ones' life, for about a year now. We did user research, figured out ops and how to tell the stories in a way that folks end up happy with-- with small launches on a few subreddits and a few partnership attempts. Total cost has been in the low $1,000s (mostly test production folks and interviewers + software) with no returns yet. Big sink timewise, on and off between breaks for the day-job. Might use a full CMS (probs Wordpress) from the get-go and maybe something like Webflow or Shopify for faster market testing next time. Also a lot to be done to make the production process leaner (it's been good learning tho!).

Will probably push more, just after the holiday window, then expand to an adjacent market where there are more clear triggers for purchase.

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

#103

Post by rangelreale »

In 2006/2007 I built HTMLButcher, a C++ desktop application to slice PSD/image website designs made by designers to HTML. In these years sites where made with tables, so for slicing a design I had to cut the images and fit then into borderless HTML tables. I took 2 years to build it, and in this timeframe people started building sematic websites with CSS, and abandoning table-based designs. I managed to sell 100 copies, for some reason 90% to India. After some years without selling nothing, I open sourced it: https://github.com/RangelReale/htmlbutcher. The good thing is that I REALLY learned C++ with this project, and this knowledge was the basis for my current company where I made a digitalsignage application in C++ that runs in some of the largest DOOH places in Brazil, in Windows, Linux and MAC (targets of HTMLButcher). So in the end it was a good investment!

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

#105

Post by rangelreale »

rangelreale wrote: post #103

In 2006/2007 I built HTMLButcher, a C++ desktop application to slice PSD/image website designs made by designers to HTML. In these years sites where made with tables, so for slicing a design I had to cut the images and fit then into borderless HTML tables. I took 2 years to build it, and in this timeframe people started building sematic websites with CSS, and abandoning table-based designs. I managed to sell 100 copi…

Also take a look at the marvelous table-based design of the app website: http://rangelreale.github.io/htmlbutcher/index.html

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

#106

Post by sontek »

microLED5nano wrote: post #56

Read 25 years computer news, summarized OLED touchscreens since 2018. Amazon "Google Phone News September 2020 micro LED TV, 5 nano meter chips" published after edited (by price, some alphabetical) chapters like cheap, solid state battery. I paid for a little advertising but those already in industry more interested than business people. LibreOffice needs Android update.

markov chain?

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

#107

Post by dejv »

I must have finished like 15 projects that was meant to be generating money and was technically capable to do that.

Biggest failure was SAAS for organizing wineries and generating reports for carious government bodies. There are various old software from 90s that do that or you can use paper books (depending on country you are not allowed to use excel).

I've spent around 3 years of fulltime work but it turned out farmers do not care about software. They might use some old desktop software or just hope that inspection is not going to come. Software is still up and running and there are some paying customers, but it just doesn't make sense to spend much time working against the wind. Also my addressable market is not big enough to support additional development.

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

#108

Post by bobkrusty »

miniyarov wrote: post #34

I built a VPN application for iOS and Android (still working on it) that uses user's DigitalOcean, AWS, or GCP to log in via OAuth2 or API token and create a VPN server so that only the user can connect and use. However, I still can think of any monetization except Ads (which I don't think will help because the VPN server also include ad-blocker). The only monetization might be donation. But if anyone has any idea I…

I use free vpn app with ads on my android.

Why they can

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

#109

Post by bobkrusty »

dewey wrote: post #25
StavrosK wrote: 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 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?

Not to mention ppl use adblockers Nowadays

Hahaha

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

#110

Post by tomcam »

bobkrusty wrote: post #95
tomcam wrote: post #45

I spent $1.4 million of my own money attempting to dethrone Craigslist in 2007. Didn't work.

Omg , Sorry to hear. that Life is a beach. Full of surprises. This's one of great life lesson I ever read May force with you

You’re very kind, thank you. That’s business! The upside would have been high, so I accepted the risk. Still alive, still have most of my health and family. I’m a fortunate man.
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