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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?

#251

Post by wcarss »

Taig wrote: post #77

I recently launched a website that allows users to book a locksmith for emergency door openings ( https://slozzer.net/ ). The main goal is to ensure a safe and reliable process, because the locksmith industry has a terrible reputation for ripping off and exploiting customers (at least in Germany, for whose market the product is designed for). Unfortunately, only after several weeks of development I found out that it…

interesting service! Some unsolicited ideas: this sounds like the kind of thing you could take to blogs or newschannels to tell the kind of interesting story: "imagine getting locked out and then getting conned! locksmiths can be shady sometimes, but people really need them, so we make it safe."

I imagine you could find places that would do an interview of you or let you write a short guest blog post to get links back to your domain and drive up your domain's authority for the keywords, and also to directly drive traffic there. Locksmiths and landlords might also be good sources of traffic over time. Or a homeowner's association!

It also might be interesting to experiment with a kind of 'locksmith insurance' model, where you pay a small monthly fee for the peace of mind that a locksmith will be dispatched if you need it -- up to a limit of say 2/year or something. I can pretty honestly imagine paying for a service like that, at least during a normal year where I leave my house every day. Landlords or property management could also then 'sign up' with you on tenants' behalf, as a service available to their apartment, making their own lives easier too.

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

#253

Post by pengaru »

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…

Neat web version, but yikes did that thing light up my laptop's fans and make FF use nearly 100% of two 2.8ghz i7 cores here. Seems a bit ridiculous considering what's going on.

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

#254

Post by steviedotboston »

CallMeMarc wrote: post #249
steviedotboston wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep! As that video shows, eruvs are built with lots of poles and wires, which can come down due to construction or bad weather. It's important for observant jews to confirm that the eruv is "up" before they rely on it to carry on Shabbat

Very impressive actually, do you know if the poles and ropes are all on private property or is it allowed to have them on "public ground"? Judaism never fails to impress me since since I discovered the YouTube series from Peter Santenello about hasidic jews ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YTmrCLeidc&list=PLEyPgwIPkH... )

That's actually a very important part of eruv construction. In order to build an eruv, you need permission from the city government. Every 20 years or so, the Rabbi in charge of a city's eruv will meet with the mayor and have a ceremonial "rental" of the property encompassed by the eruv, and will pay the city a dollar.

Eruvs often make use of existing walls, utility poles and cables which are on public property, but if any extra poles or wires are needed they are paid for entirely from donations.

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

#255

Post by semireg »

troymc wrote: post #237
semireg wrote: post #125

I am fascinated by hardware with poor software support so I built two highly unsuccessful native mac apps: MASS and LabelScope to work with weight scales and label printers. You can read their defunct websites at https://semireg.com/mass/ and https://semireg.com/labelscope/ Both worked in novel ways. MASS “floated” the current weight above all apps and when double-clicked would insert the current weight at the focuse…

Could you say more about why you think the original mac apps "failed?" Small market? Lack of promotion? Cost too high? What?

Oh, definitely due to a small market WITHIN a small market. When users acquire speciality business hardware they don't reach for macOS. I'm trying to change that... one device at a time. MASS and LabelScope were mostly proof of concept. They failed in the sense that they were the cost of the education to do better. With Label LIVE (my newest app), I built an actual design app, targeting a much broader market (cross-platform to boot).

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

#256

Post by pengaru »

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

Your site looks like a satirical fake, nobody in their right mind is going to actually buy something through that.

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

#257

Post by cg94301 »

Built a SAAS app that automatically generates trading strategies from price/volume data. The strategies were optimized to achieve high Sharpe. However, it turns out that high Sharpe has little value in predicting out of sample performance. Stopped development short before trying to monetize. The app is still up at turboquant.com

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

#258

Post by petercooper »

pul wrote: post #196
NicoJuicy wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm using a droplet, but also pay for analytics (Plausible), Cloudflare Argo, ads (100 daily visitors for a euro daily). The complexity so far has mainly been polishing usability (autocomplete, responsive design, parsing DNS records, adding ip info, etc).

I'm intrigued where you've been advertising a tool like this in such an effective way(?) I don't have a DNS lookup tool so am not competing :-D

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

#259

Post by maest »

cg94301 wrote: post #257

Built a SAAS app that automatically generates trading strategies from price/volume data. The strategies were optimized to achieve high Sharpe. However, it turns out that high Sharpe has little value in predicting out of sample performance. Stopped development short before trying to monetize. The app is still up at turboquant.com

A historical good Sharpe is usually a prerequisite, but not a guarantee of having good live performance.

I'm sure you're aware of overfitting backtestes and it sounds like that's what you were doing.

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

#260

Post by 37ef_ced3 »

staunch wrote: post #195
37ef_ced3 wrote: post #181

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, activation…

I saw this in one of your other posts and it seems super interesting to me. 1. Improve the web site slightly (add a contact method and pricing info) and make it clear that it's a company offering an enterprise software tool. Programmers will be viewing the site, so it doesn't need much more than is there already. 2. Charge a flat $7,500/year for a commercial usage license and increase it as the functionality increase…

Thank you for this thoughtful reply!
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