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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?

#271

Post by qdot76367 »

ZguideZ wrote: post #144

In 2004 my brother and I developed a buttplug shaped like George W. Bush - we called it the Bushplug. Manufacturing was more expensive than we had expected but we sold about 100 of them - presumably as novelty gifts. Our price point was too high for a novelty gift and the nose was a little too pointy to be an enjoyable sex toy. We made our money back and had some fun with being featured on BoingBoing and Fleshbot. So…

As the other HN Buttplug Poster who is also having problems making money with their product, I salute you.

(And yeah this is why I stay in software, manufacturing even on non-tech toys is still $$$$)

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

#272

Post by purplecats »

A service that swipes on dating profiles for you by leveraging AIs and your specific granular preferences.

I’ve made some but not sure how to go about marketing it, especially in foreign markets.

I’d post a link here but idk if it could lead to a c&d although it’s not much different than those dumb autoswipers.

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

#273

Post by TheDong »

jpulec wrote: post #69

I launched mergecaravan.com to deal with a problem I've encountered at a few jobs in the past. Mostly, I built it initially to scratch my own itch, and to go back to doing more django dev. Basically, you can add a label to a PR in github and it will then queue it up to be merged once all the required checks pass, and it keeps queued PRs "up-to-date". It's made a little money, but not much. Github recently rolled out…

That sounds almost exactly like bors-ng: https://github.com/bors-ng/bors-ng#a-merge-bot-for-github-pu...

There was also homu, which predated bors and also did more or less the exact same thing.

Does your thing have any features that differentiate it from what bors does?

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

#274

Post by kawera »

manuelisimo wrote: post #174
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

Maybe try fewer animations

Or zero animations, even better.

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

#275

Post by kbelder »

I self-published (through Amazon) a book of hexadecimal sudoku puzzles. I think I coined the term 'hexadoku'... there are other similar books now, but I think I was the first. It's made me maybe $100 a year for many years. I did have the forethought to label it 'volume 1', but haven't followed up on that.

I just realized a week ago that I should have made an app out of it. I checked and somebody's grabbed the name already.

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

#276

Post by arnaudsm »

Built a modern comparison engine for tech products (https://picked.arnaud.at)

Feedback and conversion were amazing but SEO was lacking since Google hates search engines. I needed written content (or advertising) to compete with classical review websites.

Bittersweet, but I learned a lot and it got me my first job in the bay so I don't regret it!

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

#278

Post by iandanforth »

I tried to launch a Kickstarter for a project called CoinCard. Basically it's a leather, credit card sized holder for coins where each coin slips into a perfectly sized slot for that coin. I still use one the prototypes in my wallet today. I learned a ton about leather and manufacturing, a bit about videography, and what it takes to launch a kickstarter (much more than you think). Ultimately not enough people wanted one, though a few begged me to make them one at any price.

I still think a large manufacturer of wallets could easily popularize this as a standard wallet insert, but so few leather manufacturers are in the US anymore I couldn't even contact them to give away the idea.

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

#279

Post by giovannibonetti »

mpermar wrote: post #270

An app for finding the best hotels for traveling with kids. It was basically crawling the booking.com API and then applying an algorithm to figure out if a property was suitable for families with children or not. It would do the usual. Parse descriptions and try to find keywords there, parse and count the number of comments mentioning family-related topics, up-score hotels with certain facilities and then push the im…

You can share it here! You have our attention :)
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