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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?

#281

Post by pengaru »

seanwilson wrote: post #269
pengaru wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Argh, I'll look into it because it shouldn't do that. It's using DOM + simple hardware accelerated animations intentionally (over something like canvas) and no polling to keep CPU usage down. Runs fine on Chrome on Mac.

Yeah well, in unaccelerated scenarios like mine that translates into software rendering on the CPU, which there seems to be a whole heck of a lot of happening despite nothing really changing on-screen.

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

#282

Post by Taig »

wcarss wrote: post #251
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 bac…

Thank you so much for your genuine interest and feedback, I really appreciate it. Getting external news/blog coverage is definitely something that is on my SEO to-do list, but I have other priorities at the moment as the competition is not getting traction despite numerous press releases and storybook SEO methods.

However, I have not yet thought about landlords, homeowners' associations and insurance models. But these are great ideas that I will start to explore now.

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

#283

Post by dudeinhawaii »

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/

One of the image links on your hiring page is broken.

https://imgz.org/i9xyk2H2.png

(or is that a joke I glazed over)

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

#284

Post by zamadatix »

lostmsu wrote: post #220

I made a tool called Diskache, which would combine an SSD with an HDD into a hybrid drive around 2015. You did not have to use the entire disk(s) for that. It worked on any two drives on Windows. But my marketing skills got me 0 customers beyond myself. The target audience was supposed to be gamers (back then typical SSD was 150GB and GTA V was 55GB alone). I even got greenlit on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/sha…

Also tail end of a niche but long flooded market. I wouldn't beat up your marketing skills too badly for it I the Steam page probably would have gotten a decent number of conversions if the demand had been there.

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

#285

Post by StavrosK »

dudeinhawaii wrote: post #283
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/

One of the image links on your hiring page is broken. https://imgz.org/i9xyk2H2.png (or is that a joke I glazed over)

Loads fine for me!

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

#286

Post by secfirstmd »

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…

Did you ever think of making a Dick Cheney Dildo™ to complement the set? :)

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

#287

Post by throwAway9234LL »

TACIXAT wrote: post #72
throwAway9234LL wrote: post #54

A long time ago a friend an I created a website to help people organize pool bets between them, for a sport event. We charged $1 / person in the pool. Made about $1,500 in total for the event. - I paid about $400 in ads to Google: they have a much better business model than us ;) - I competed against free offerings, and I still had clients, because I could afford ads, they could not. - It was a very strange, happy fe…

What did you use as a payment processor? Really hard to process cards for gambling.

Paypal. We were not doing gambling. Just charging $1 per person per pool for the service: registering the bets in time, give them points when they win, rankings, etc. We did not see any of the money of their possible side-bets.

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

#288

Post by bravura »

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…

Someone did this again in 2012, making 3D models based upon each of the Republican candidate polling numbers: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gop-butt-plugs-are-gallup-dat...

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

#289

Post by mguerville »

I and a few classmates in business school built a service to print people's top 5 instagram pics (top = #comments + #likes) every month and mail it to them as a nice physical keepsake. I was really flabbergasted that we couldn't get even 10 customers, we spend nearly $1,000 on ads before calling it quits (if we had had 10 customers we may have kept iterating but the setback was big enough to decide to just stop, and it only took a few weeks to build). Part of what was happening at the same time was the move towards stories, videos, and posts with multiples images, so it would have become way more complex than initially planned anyway and none of us were engineers. The year before that I "invented" a mouthwash that was all powder based so you could travel with it despite travel liquid restrictions, the kickstarter campaign raised a decent amount but about a 1/3 shy of what it would have cost to place the minimum order with the packaging company (the power would be in tea bags), so I also nixed that but that was a fun side project

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

#290

Post by kumarm »

kbelder wrote: post #275

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 al…

Why not call your app "Hexadoku - Hexdecimal Sudoku"?. There is no reason not do do the app just because someone grabbed the name.
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