A few years ago, I made a website aimed at cataloging all the toilets in the world. The idea was to show that a big portion of the world population still has no access to proper toilets. It was a website with a map of toilets, where you could click on the location and see the toilets there. It worked for a year but did not generate much attention sadly.
Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
291–300 of 600 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting concept, although the pricing structure seems at odds with budgeting. I would say 6-month or 12-month subscription blocks make more sense to allow for planning and budgeting.
Thanks for the feedback! Pricing is not my forte. My thought process was basically this: - In general, people are probably only planning a single trip at a time (an exception might be if travel agents were to be interested) - Based on that assumption, it came down to what resolution of access people would want. With the current model, 6 months of editing access comes down to $35. I could, equivalently, just charge $3…
How about something like a quasi-log scale, e.g.,:
$19 for 6 weeks,
$39 for 6 months,
$79 for 12 months and
$99 for three years?
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#293A 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…
Why didn't it make sense to continue after the event ended? Most sports events happen on a recurring basis. I wonder if this idea got legs if you would get in trouble with regulators of some kind..
I think we were on the right side of the law since we sere not taking any side of the bets. Just charging for the service. The pool participants probably were having their own bets between each other, but we would not take any cut of those.
We stopped because there was a lot of competition, we saw a short term gap in soccer in the US market. But fairly quickly we would have been crushed. Spending a lot of time on something that would not have brought in much money was not that interesting, since it was not fun enough beyond the novelty of the experience.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#294I 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…
curious, have you had any successes ? (respectfully)
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#295I’m still trying to be a small market gardener/farmer.
I’ve accepted that I’ll never reach my goal of financial independence.
But I do believe I can supplement my diet enough to make it a zero-cost hobby. And that’s alright with me.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#296I 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…
Someone else may have nabbed the app name, but "Original Hexadoku" by kbelder, author of Hexadecimal Sudoku Puzzles, is surely a selling point in the (admittedly presumably small) market space. Go for it :)
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about a tool that generates C (or Java or X) code from TensorFlow or PyTorch models? That way you can train a model offline, and then export it to your preferred language for serving/production. For bonus points, figure out how to get the generated code to use the GPU properly.
Addressing your last sentence, I am actually a GPU programmer by trade. GPUs are my specialty, and much of my professional work has been in Nvidia's CUDA But AVX-512 is a real step forward, if you look at the price/performance ratio for real-world workloads. So AVX-512 is the focus of NN-512 GPU cloud compute is almost unbelievably expensive. Even Linode charges $1000 per month, or $1.50 per hour (look at the GPU pla…
I've been interested in your project. I don't think you're realizing the potential of the parent's suggestion.
You motivate the work through bottom-up construction, but I don't think you have a clear explanation for who the users are. They must be:
1) Sure they are only going to use models that are supported by NN-512. This is a big jump for me and many people who want to do transformers, LSTMs, etc. and not just what NN-512 costs. 2) They have to be price sensitive. But if you want larger companies, they will rarely just have one use-case that NN-512 supports; they will probably have a ton of use-cases that NN-512 supports. 3) They want to target AVX-512. If they are a medium or larger company they probably want to have tooling around this, to support model development and later deployment.
Those are my thoughts in general.
I currently need to be able to target and deploy on PC and Mac CPUs from the past 10 years. (I know, this is specific.)
I think parent is saying that individual devs are more likely to try NN-512 if they don't have to learn a new API, since most of them want to have the flexibility to fool around before committing to a new tech or bringing it in-house.
I guess my suggestion is really try to specifically define who the user is for NN-512 and what NN problems they are trying to solve, and let that shape the roadmap.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#298I 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…
curious, have you had any successes ? (respectfully)
I have, I built a subscription coloring book business when they became a huge fad. It was profitable (between $500 and $1,000 a month in net profit) and I sold it after 10 months when I needed to relocate outside of the country for work so the burden of managing it would no longer be worth it.
I also joined somebody else's side hustle in the employee engagement space (tips for managers and a simple tool to keep track of staff info like birthdays, favorite food, etc.) that was acquired by a larger but still very small company in that space. Both "exits" were not in the low 5 digits so nothing notable but a nice feeling
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#299A timer that's like a pomodoro timer but different. Wrote it for the iPad because I was interested in multi-touch gestures. Wrote a prototype in Java that works on the desktop which I use every day. I've just never gotten around to completing and publishing the iPad app. We're talking iOS 4 when I started...
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#300I’m still trying to be a small market gardener/farmer. I’ve accepted that I’ll never reach my goal of financial independence. But I do believe I can supplement my diet enough to make it a zero-cost hobby. And that’s alright with me.
You can also have lots of fun with growth experiment, finding good light, nutrients mixes for better yield/flavor. Blog it and tell us!