I spent around 6 months of my spare time to build BonFive (https://bonfive.com). I built it because my wife and I noticed that content creators, especially streamers were having their content on a plethora of platforms and this was an attempt at having a centralized place for fans to discuss and share news and content of their favorite creators. I based our design around old Reddit as I felt it allowed for the most natural online interactions to take place. But with any online platform that expects to have user generate the content getting users in has been the hard part...
Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
131–140 of 600 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#132My German library app to track books borrowed from a library: http://www.videlibri.de/ It was doomed from the start, because basically no one goes to public libraries anymore. But you cannot go to a library without it. Like this week I saw a post of someone getting a 150€ late fee bill from the library while having no idea why, that would never happen with my app. That should have been well monetarizable, pay for my…
The current trend in libraries is to abolish fines and waive any past fines. It has been shown to increase usage of the libraries.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#133http://eruvstat.us - a website for Jewish communities to use to send notifications about the status of their eruv.
I have a couple cities using it for free at the moment, but would like to get more signed up to at least break even on hosting costs. It's a pretty niche service, and so far it seems like there isn't much interest...
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#134I made a flexible, light-weight, card-based drag-and-drop kanban-ish planning tool called StoryWall and posted the MVP on Hacker News literally the same week Trello was released.
Managed to take all the wind from my sails.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#135loooong list culminating in ratelimits.dev some holes in the ultra-niche cloud services tools market are holes for a reason
Poking around your site it seems like an excellent service. I'm curious if you could expand on why you think this is a failure and what challenges you experienced that make you think the major cloud providers deliberately leave this open.
thank you!
'failure' in that I don't know how to market it. In general I think businesses my size need a focused go-to-market strategy -- what is the profile of your first N customers, how do you get in front of them, what's the immediate 1-line value prop that makes your product worth $ + risk + integration effort.
I don't know the GTM for this one.
not saying aws is 'deliberately' leaving this open, more like most backends roll their own in this area because stack compatibility and low-latency are key.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#136I have built and continue to build extremely sophisticated LED lights. But there's no market for fancy anymore. I maybe made back my expenses, though I have a bunch of lights at home to show for it I guess.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#137I built a bitbucket cloud add-on that would compare your PR’s against others in the same repository, repositories or globally to see if they were smaller or larger than average. Would also display the number of files, lines changed and what languages.
Annoyingly there is no pay via atlassian for bitbucket cloud yet, and I was not prepared to do my own pay,ent which sort of negates the marketplace value.
It’s something I plan to launch when that is released eventually though.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#138My German library app to track books borrowed from a library: http://www.videlibri.de/ It was doomed from the start, because basically no one goes to public libraries anymore. But you cannot go to a library without it. Like this week I saw a post of someone getting a 150€ late fee bill from the library while having no idea why, that would never happen with my app. That should have been well monetarizable, pay for my…
> because basically no one goes to public libraries anymore Is this a German thing, an urban thing, or really a true statement universally? I ask because prior to covid lockdown, we made at least weekly trips to our public library and it always had a steady stream of patrons.
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Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#139Built a basic plug and play developer portal and API gateway at the beginning of the lockdown.
You can expose your APIs to third party developers by adding your endpoints, choosing the type of authentication and setting rate limits.
The app takes care of provisionimg API tokens and tracking requests. The documentation is auto generated from the swagger file.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#140My wife has a side project selling antique maps. I built her a shopify site about 1 year ago that costs €30 p/m but it's hardly generating any revenue. I spent maybe 10 hours on it and she has spent about € 2000 on inventory. https://utrechtaandemuur.nl
This is very niche. I question who would really want to buy antique maps, except as for wall art.
Can you venture into other things to sell on Shopify instead?