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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?

#411

Post by chad_strategic »

notoriousarun wrote: post #3

Recent Failure -- I'm not getting customers. I love reading online content. It is tough to read quality long-form content online. So, I built https://pipecontent.com -- By Sharing your article collection(One-tab, Toby, Notion, Google-Docs, Twitter-Threads, Evernote, Dropbox, Website Link) -- Receive clutter free ready to print PDF OR A high quality printed magazine. Feedback appreciated.

I like this idea because it's hard to read quality long form content online. (like you said).

My side project in the past have always been good (sarcasm), but it's the marketing / advertising side that I always seem to fail at miserably. When that fails, then the project seems to dry up and I move on to the next half idea.

I don't know exactly how to market something like this, but I like the idea if that matters. Maybe something in the way of talking to a marketing person to find new avenues to drive traffic?

Your website loads fine in my mind, it might be slow but I didn't notice until someone said something. I was able to quickly see your value prop. Website speed can be fixed, the key is your product is interesting.

Best of luck!

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

#412

Post by johnx123-up »

rangelreale wrote: post #103

In 2006/2007 I built HTMLButcher, a C++ desktop application to slice PSD/image website designs made by designers to HTML. In these years sites where made with tables, so for slicing a design I had to cut the images and fit then into borderless HTML tables. I took 2 years to build it, and in this timeframe people started building sematic websites with CSS, and abandoning table-based designs. I managed to sell 100 copi…

Apart from the table based design, did you feel any competition from services like CSSilize? Was it difficult add support for the DIV based design?

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

#414

Post by Aeolun »

mariushn wrote: post #89

I built a hotel PMS system in 9 months without trying to sell it first to hoteliers (no industry experience, talked only to 1 hotel owner). Found out it's hard to sell it, even if almost/fully free. https://hoteliera.com/

It probably doesn’t pay to make it free, and especially to advertise it as such.

Price it as if the value is $200+/month and maybe people will feel it’s worth it.

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

#415

Post by [deleted] »

iandanforth wrote: post #278

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…

[deleted]

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

#416

Post by thom »

I made a baby names app in 2010-2011, mostly driven by my and my wife's inability to settle on a name for our first child. The system learned n-grams from names you liked, and other info like name origins etc. I tidied it all up into what I hoped was a tasteful Mac app, used some free Google Ad credit, and it was very satisfying to see that people used it, but it was never popular enough to pay its own way, despite briefly being the number one lifestyle app on the UK Mac App store.

I would have done better if I'd tweaked the algorithm more, done an iPhone version, or just taken it seriously, but it mostly came out of a personal need and in the absence of clear signs it was valuable it was easy to let go (especially when later sandboxing rules for Mac apps broke some fundamental stuff around persistent documents).

You can see some screenshots at:

https://twitter.com/lemonwatcher/status/1286082683412582403

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

#417

Post by ank-26 »

Two years ago we built this tool https://imagetranslate.com to translate and recreate images such as banners, advertisements, brochures etc.

It is being used by individuals as of now. (freelance translators, marketers, ecomm resellers) . But we wanted to integrate it with a bigger localisation tool as it would be of much more value for their day to day translation jobs. We couldn't close a deal there.

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

#418

Post by blackrock »

nerf0 wrote: post #366

I built a very simple website [0] for playing poker. The idea was that people can play poker in person without chips or a deck of cards. I had also planned for more features like hand history. But it didn't catch on and number of users is not growing. I've also learned that if your project has anything to do with the following topic, you can forget about online advertising: poker, blockchain, porn (probably). I did n…

> if your project has anything to do with the following topic, you can forget about online advertising: poker, blockchain, porn

Can you clarify this?

Does Google Ads forbid advertising on these products?

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

#419

Post by st1ck »

tHap1 wrote: post #178
j3th9n wrote: post #57

https://wifimask.com - WifiMask VPN. The little money that comes in is spent on server costs basically. I spent 3 years building it, spending too much time on trying to build "perfect" Apple apps, instead of quickly going online with an MVP and validate first. Besides that there are a lot of VPN's out there and competing with the "big boys" with big marketing budgets is hard, especially when they can provide things l…

The whole internet's full of VPN service but there's still a big market for it. There's a service I used a couple of years ago that allowed me to basically connect to the internet through this particular VPN without having any data plan. I don't know how they did it but it still seems weird that the service worked this way on the contrary to what I understand VPNs actually do or how they work. After a little bit of g…

I guess based on https://github.com/yarrick/iodine ? You could also run your own server.

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

#420

Post by michaelmu »

VintageLight wrote: post #245
ZguideZ wrote: post #164

Recent startup failure was ZguideZ - an app that allowed locals to create their own digital tours, charge what they want, and then collect the majority of the profit on tours sold. It failed because it was a far bigger project than I was able to manage as a solo founder - though I tried. It was beyond my ability to code it and I didn't have funding to recruit quality developers. I hired a budget team and we cut corne…

This idea seems really similar to Detour, created by Andrew Mason and later acquired by Bose: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/24/bose-acquires-andrew-mason...

I really liked Detour. Had some interesting walking tours of SF thanks to this app.
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