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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?

#341

Post by s279 »

rusticpenn wrote: post #238
mrhackernews wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You weren't kidding. I underestimated the effect the site would have on me.

You weren’t kidding that they weren’t kidding, I almost vomited.

Some less harsh criticism:

- zigzag circle looks like a visual field migraine before the spinning, cut both replace the logo with something slightly more unique.

- moving text is distracting.

- objects moving left to right and right to left (if you’re dead set on having moving things pick one direction).

- what’s the difference between this and redbubble/zazzle etc?

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

#342

Post by sugarkjube »

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…

Rumour is due to covid a babyboom is coming, so soon there will be a lot of potential for your app.

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

#343

Post by malloreon »

I have a side project that didn't make money, then did, and now effectively does not.

I write novels: I've published 10 so far. I didn't make any money for a while, but all in all I've sold about 80,000 copies. I haven't published anything new since 2018 and my sales have since dried up completely.

Fiction is a product market fit game first: if you don't write what people want to read, they won't read it. After that, it is a quantity game. New books come out every day, if you don't keep releasing more stories, people will forget you.

getting back to writing is one of my 2021 goals.

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

#344

Post by chris_f »

chaostheory wrote: post #90

If I remember it correctly, I initially wanted to build a LinkedIn alternative; but then it morphed into a IMDB alternative to give credit to where it's due https://theymadethat.com Besides answering who built what https://theymadethat.com/things/k4z/iphone and who worked together and what makes up what https://theymadethat.com/projects/7da659d8-629f-5c10-9160-7a... You can also use it to figure where something was u…

This is cool. Are all of the entries manually added, or are you also pulling in information from outside structured sources like Wikipedia?

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

#345

Post by shakezula »

ZguideZ wrote: post #151

Just prior to smartphones, I founded a startup called Puhrump that allowed people to call into a call center and have the operators google anything for them. It was a way to solve bar bets and find things out before the internet was in everyone's pocket. Unfortunately, the internet appeared in everyone's pockets before we had completed our seed round of funding. Great idea but a couple of years too late.

Reminds me of Cha Cha. And wow it’s been a long time since I thought about Cha Cha.

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

#346

Post by AdamGibbins »

ganashaw wrote: post #330
AdamGibbins wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To save your changes, purchase a trip slot for as low as $10 Yet the price directly to the right of that says "Trip Slot $5".

Thanks for the catch! I updated the language to "...purchase a trip slot and editing access for as low as $10" Your comment makes me wonder if it would be clearer to present things as "Trip slot + first month of editing access = $10" and "Each additional month of editing access = $5" or similar.

Ah, I see, that makes more sense. I had not realised that a "trip slot" was a read only thing although on reflection that's pretty obvious. I thought the monthly price was unlimited slots...but that makes no sense given it's the same price.

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

#347

Post by WoodenChair »

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…

I was thinking about building the same kind of native Mac app as MASS and I never heard of it... my bad. Did you have prior USB programming experience? How did you learn to interface with the scales? Did you reverse engineer them? What’s the best way to learn to do this sort of USB programming on the Mac? Thanks in advance for your answers.

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

#348

Post by sib301 »

mguerville wrote: post #298
seppin wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What did you sell it for if you don’t mind my asking?

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

#350

Post by chaostheory »

chris_f wrote: post #344
chaostheory wrote: post #90

If I remember it correctly, I initially wanted to build a LinkedIn alternative; but then it morphed into a IMDB alternative to give credit to where it's due https://theymadethat.com Besides answering who built what https://theymadethat.com/things/k4z/iphone and who worked together and what makes up what https://theymadethat.com/projects/7da659d8-629f-5c10-9160-7a... You can also use it to figure where something was u…

This is cool. Are all of the entries manually added, or are you also pulling in information from outside structured sources like Wikipedia?

Thanks. Data was manually added to dogfood the UX. It's improved a little from that.

Programmatically importing data is actually my next "big" goal. It'll be hard to maintain quality though when I start on this route.

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