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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?

#181

Post by 37ef_ced3 »

NN-512 (https://NN-512.com) generates stand-alone C code for AVX-512 neural nets

The idea was that user companies (or even the hardware companies: Intel, AMD) would pay me as a contractor to implement deconvolutions, transformers, etc., as extensions to the free/open core I released (which includes very sophisticated support for all forms of dense convolution, fully-connected layers, pooling, batch norm, activations, etc.)

The free/open core supplies all the basic operators, but many users would need extensions of the core to support their particular networks (or even just software to feed their parameters into the system and get results out) and hardware companies benefit from the software's existence because they sell chips and NN-512 makes the new vector units on their chips more useful

But it didn't work out that way. NN-512 did generate offers to work on other projects (a generous offer from Intel, for example) but nothing that extends NN-512

Why? There are numerous free end-to-end deep learning tools developed by large, company-sponsored teams (Nvidia, Facebook, Google, Intel, etc.) so a specialized tool that requires integration effort is unattractive. That's my guess. So beware, if you're working along similar lines

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

#182

Post by pul »

By far most of my side projects died before seeing the light of day. Either because I lost interest or I found another project that did what I aimed to do better than I imagined.

Only a couple went live but didn't get traction: - A site for ip geolocation lookup - A curated index of conference talks and meetups

Last year I decided that I'd do much more market research before writing any code, and that I'd see it through all the way. So I'm working on https://www.nslookup.io for about half a year now, which isn't profitable yet (€50 monthly cost). I'm still confident I can get it profitable. There's enough search traffic, other tools have horrible UX, and I've committed to spending time on it at least weekly next year.

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

#183

Post by tomcam »

Mc_Big_G wrote: post #162
tomcam wrote: post #45

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

I built a CL competitor with much better features than CL in 2008. I also failed but only spent my time and not much money.

That’s the way to go. My best to you, friend.

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

#184

Post by mrhackernews »

scyclow wrote: post #156

I made a face mask and t shirt website filled with items I designed. Let's just say that I haven't quite met my quarterly sales goals... https://ronamerch.co

with all due respect (and it's due - ecommerce is hard work), lose the animations...

As soon as I landed on your page, I wasn't thinking "I wanna buy t-shirts and masks!" I was thinking, "Boy, I've got motion sickness and I hope I don't puke."

Let me just say... I'm not a "motion sickness" type. But looking at your page still gave it to me.

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

#186

Post by godmode2019 »

iambateman wrote: post #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.

Thank you I have been looking for something like this. At one point I was going to build something like this using automated screenshots on a list if startups

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

#187

Post by ZguideZ »

mattmanser wrote: post #172
ZguideZ wrote: post #164

Recent startup failure was ZguideZ - an app that allowed locals to create their own digital tours, charge what they want, and then collect the majority of the profit on tours sold. It failed because it was a far bigger project than I was able to manage as a solo founder - though I tried. It was beyond my ability to code it and I didn't have funding to recruit quality developers. I hired a budget team and we cut corne…

Wow, sounds like a rollercoaster. You sure got some stories out of that one though! I like the concept a lot, shame you never got to find out if it would have worked.

Really powerful experience that I am grateful for (though I wish my hair would grow back - lol). At the moment working on a much more manageable project with a great team (Iwahai.com) and maybe in the future there will be an opportunity to revisit the ZguideZ concept. I still love the idea, but managing a worldwide network of independent guides is more than I want to take on at the moment.

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

#188

Post by seanwilson »

robbiejs wrote: post #173
seanwilson wrote: post #113

It wasn't a big serious project or anything, but for my first income generating project ever I made a small single player word game for Android that I should have tried to monetise more. Android had only been out for a couple of years at the time so it was easier to get noticed then. The game was free with an ad-banner during gameplay. I was making a decent amount in ad clicks and also had players emailing me for a p…

Fun game, even with trackpad I can do diagonal words. Nicely done.

Thanks, it's tricky to get the selection of diagonals working accurately like that. If you inspect the HTML, you can see each tile has an invisible 45 degree rotated clone on top of it that's used to detect when a tile is selected instead of the boundaries of the original tile.

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

#189

Post by asutekku »

mgreenleaf wrote: post #104

https://yakdocs.com , I built it, then realized I needed to learn more about marketing, so I've been working on that. Hoping to get better at the business side and find my niche audience and target.

The scrolling does not work on iOS. I need to completely stop the scrolling to keep moving downwards, making it really tedious to try to read the site.

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

#190

Post by NicoJuicy »

pul wrote: post #182

By far most of my side projects died before seeing the light of day. Either because I lost interest or I found another project that did what I aimed to do better than I imagined. Only a couple went live but didn't get traction: - A site for ip geolocation lookup - A curated index of conference talks and meetups Last year I decided that I'd do much more market research before writing any code, and that I'd see it thro…

https://www.nslookup.io/

Why not a droplet? I created something to lookup dns records within a project and it took me a couple of hours

An I missing something about the complexity of it?

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