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

Starting 1998, every couple of years I have taken up one or other side projects, which have all ended up not making a penny or even had much visits. My misadventures have been documented really well by the Waybackmachine in archive.org

Here is an example -- https://web.archive.org/web/20001017145942/http://www.nepaln...

This was a travel and hotel booking website we made using Perl starting 1998.

Then there was a Indic text editor tool, based on character map image exchange, that didn't go anywhere. As I was building the editor, so was Unicode becoming more common.

After that was rating system for anything using Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient. I specifically used it for hotels and universities.

Again Wayback machine reminds me that they existed -- https://web.archive.org/web/20130513055430/http://www.prjosh...

In between there were tools for early learners, used goods exchange and even a product demo system where people could give incremental feedback on specific aspects of the product.

After 22 years, I have realized that most projects failed because I was more into the programming aspect of them. Once the products were done programmatically upto a level in which I was satisfied I failed to follow through with marketing or even creating basic awareness.

With that discovered self-realization I started doing things low tech, meaning requiring very less programming work from the start of 2020. This included making videos on youtube and making what I call a Visual encyclopedia website, http://www.viewpedia.org

Now I realize that marketing or awareness creation part is equally hard. I have been trying to get my site ranked on Google and Bing for last few months and haven't gotten anywhere. Youtube videos, the highest count is 500 views.

I hope to document my projects in last 22 years and my current learnings for marketing in articles that I hope to post to HN later.

Store Locator as a SaaS. There are some successful products in this space, I just didn't execute on sales.

User created API consuming dashboards, I drove lots of traffic to it but it was a really niche product and I just don't think there was a path to revenue with such small numbers.

Static pagebuilder before Square and the like had that kind of thing dialed. Still proud of the technical achievement, had some users, but it never took off. I couldn't afford to market it.

A more traditional digital agency I started with some colleagues. It went well, and then it fell apart when one member grossly mismanaged the money and then took some big clients on his way out. I regret not sticking with it, but it was really demoralising that such bad behavior was rewarded and we were left with nothing. Many lessons learned though, I would never allow it to happen again.

Many other small projects that just waned or never got built to completion. I do all of this on my own and with my own money outside of any tech bubble, so it is pretty easy to get derailed. I have been at it for more than 10 years.

TLDR: Small wins over the course of months and months of trial and error.

I never considered myself a hardware integrator until I accidentally became one. Oops, e.g. fake it until you make it. Looking back at college, I received barely passing grades in my C and assembly coursework. Sure, I "understand" bitwise operations and bit shifting and LSB/MSB... but it still feels foreign to me, like every time I got something to work I celebrated that I made any progress at all. Me the imposter.

There were times in developing all these apps that I seriously thought, "well, I'm stuck, this is the end" and I just kept working a few hours at a time... If anything, troubleshooting and not getting fatally-frustrated is my super-power. These hard-won-solved-problems led me to build something "simple" for the user, which is its own very special reward (aka dev dopamine and serotonin).

I loved building these apps. I never thought I'd make any money. And my relative success with Label LIVE is just a rewarding icing on the cake of enjoying this kind of puzzle-solving. I mean, native Node modules, WASM... are their own special kinds of hell. The kind of hell you forget quickly and you have better written your future self decent documentation. Makes me nervous just thinking about finally adding Apple Silicon support. hands sweat

When Twitch Prime was originally released one of the major issues was reminding people that their token was available. I built primeminder as a tool to remind people to renew their Twitch Prime subscription via email notifications: https://github.com/gravyboat/primeminder, the plan was to eventually advertise in the body of the emails once the user base was large enough.

The second was a remote job board like weworkremotely called remote-first (https://github.com/gravyboat/remote-first). This was when weworkremotely was younger and I was pretty dissatisfied with the fact they didn't even support searching for jobs, it was just a messy list that was a pain to search so I thought I could do better to solve this.

Both projects failed.