I tried scavenging expensive brands of clothes from Goodwill to sell to a consignment shop. I wasted bus fare, only sold one pair of jeans, and ended up with a bag full of clothes that didn’t fit. 2/10 don’t recommend.
Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
441–450 of 600 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#442My wife has a side project selling antique maps. I built her a shopify site about 1 year ago that costs €30 p/m but it's hardly generating any revenue. I spent maybe 10 hours on it and she has spent about € 2000 on inventory. https://utrechtaandemuur.nl
This looks good! There are some minor UX tweaks that you should do for a better starting point to the site. I'm assuming: 1. The initial site hasn't changed since launch. 2. If it has, then its been due to intuition vs data. From my quick glance, this has potential and she should be able to sell her entire inventory €2000. It would be good to know what the digital marketing strategy has been to build awareness and dr…
Nuce business. I didn't see an English version of the site.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#443During the previous crypto craze a few years ago I built a .net service that continuously scanned 100s of sites for crypto news for specific keywords (configuration of sites and keywords stored in xml files) and texted me alerts when keywords hit, in an attempt to apply an event-based investment strategy to the crypto space. Given the immaturity of the market, small events often led to irrational spikes, and I made s…
You do realize that the bull run is back again? Might be a good idea to look into this again.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#444I made a face mask and t shirt website filled with items I designed. Let's just say that I haven't quite met my quarterly sales goals... https://ronamerch.co
I love your webpage design,
but i dislike your products design.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm using a droplet, but also pay for analytics (Plausible), Cloudflare Argo, ads (100 daily visitors for a euro daily). The complexity so far has mainly been polishing usability (autocomplete, responsive design, parsing DNS records, adding ip info, etc).
I'm intrigued where you've been advertising a tool like this in such an effective way(?) I don't have a DNS lookup tool so am not competing :-D
That's why ;) No one is advertising a DSN lookup tool, so CPC on Google search is 1 cent. I've set the limit on 1 euro per day, but I could probably buy more traffic if I wanted.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#446I created a vinyl auction aggregator from eBay called collectorsfrenzy.com in 2008 which I ran till 2018. At the time, there was another website Popsike (still running today) that accomplished the same task, but they only updated the listings pulled from eBay every few months whereas my service pulled the listings as soon as they completed. My failure was that I ran everything from my cable modem and off of my own ha…
Will you sell me your database?
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#447I'm pretty sure I made the first website that sold bitcoins directly to users. It was called "btcnow" and it launched in maybe June or July of 2011. I pretty much glued a google checkout widget to a Bitcoin dispenser, but people loved it. You could use your normal google account to buy coins, and three seconds later they were in your wallet. I was selling maybe a hundred or so bitcoins a day for a couple years, but t…
I hope you kept a few of those coins for yourself and are rich now!
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#448My German library app to track books borrowed from a library: http://www.videlibri.de/ It was doomed from the start, because basically no one goes to public libraries anymore. But you cannot go to a library without it. Like this week I saw a post of someone getting a 150€ late fee bill from the library while having no idea why, that would never happen with my app. That should have been well monetarizable, pay for my…
> basically no one goes to public libraries anymore.
I do. This surprises me.
I always think a weekly trip to the library is good for the soul, just to be reminded of all the knowledge that's out there waiting to be discovered. Good reminder to watch less Netflix :-)
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#449Recent 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…
I think this was a great idea btw, sorry that it didn't work out. Before covid I always used to try and find audio walking tours for cities, and alternative ones to the normally rather dry official ones for museums, but there really isn't much out there.
Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you mind elaborating on that; besides running out of money, what were the things that went wrong? Or the things that didn't happen when needed to?
We had a bunch of good ideas the world didn’t care about. For example, actual user IDs and a feedback system. We launched it as an add-on for radio station websites and learned that they were an endless source of feature requests, which we foolishly granted. Finally, it didn’t scale well because a lot of behind the scenes content moderation was necessary. Mostly I blame myself for not validating the idea properly. If…
Hard agree on the Mom test. Sorry you spent all that cash, hope that you got something out of it.