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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?

#501

Post by mguerville »

conradfr wrote: post #495
Aeolun wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m currently subscribed to a service that allows me to select 8 pictures every month and have them printed and sent to me. They supply new albums at extra cost when the current one is full (have 3 so far, over about 1.5 years). Apparently there is a market for this kind of thing. Mine is targeted at young parents though, maybe that makes a difference?

My family uses famileo.com (Europe only I think) which is basically that, selecting recent photos and add texts to make "articles" and they send your "family newspaper" to your older relatives each month. My grand-parents love it, so yeah there's a market for this kind of things (at least as long as this generation lives).

We use famileo too, it's great. Our idea with that side hustle was total automation so people don't have to even choose the pictures, and perhaps that's where the product market fit was lacking. The hypothesis was that 1. most people think they'll choose pics but in reality they rarely do and rarely print any, and 2. in the "choose and print" market there was too much competition to begin with, from printing for pennies at walgreens or online via shutterfly, to recurring services like famileo

Here's the video I made, for what it's worth: https://youtu.be/93XUnsrG18g

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

#502

Post by rangelreale »

johnx123-up wrote: post #412
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?

I added and AP tablebless (absolute positioning) option, but this was only simulating tables with CSS. People stopped using large and sliced images with CSS, so it wasn't worth it.

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

#503

Post by rangelreale »

wolco2 wrote: post #384
gfxgirl wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little confused. That feature has been built into Photoshop since at least CS1 (2003), maybe earlier. https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/slicing-web-pages.ht...

That's where you start. But to make it responsive it takes more work. If I remember.. For a 9x9 basic table grid you would set the width 100% of the top and bottom image do the opposite for the sides and fix the corners. All of these tricks involved choosing designs that could work. It would have been a tool I would have liked.

Also webdesigners loved to change the layout mid-project and it was a big hassle to migrate the slicing from one PSD to another.

Not counting that some websites had dozens of PSD files, it was a pain.

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

#504

Post by wiradikusuma »

besulzbach wrote: post #497
wiradikusuma wrote: post #486

I made an Android app to keep track of my domain name collections -- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=id.every From the name (Every.ID), you can say that it aims to be the one app to keep track of everything you collect: domain names, postage stamps, games, etc. My end goal is to make it pluggable with API e.g. connect with your Steam account to auto-sync your game collection. Unfortunately, since I'm do…

How does domain collecting even work? Don't you have to continuously pay in order to renew your domain ownership? Even if it's $5/year per domain, surely at some point you have to stop collecting.

You're right that the cost will accumulate.

I'm not a professional domainer, but "a guy with lots of ideas and no time". Every once in a while I thought of some cool idea, struck a name and bought the .com "just in case I have time to develop it".

I initially used Google Sheet to keep track, but it doesn't remind me of renewals, and some info I want to be dynamically updated.

Oh, another thing I use Every.ID for: keeping track of software purchases, esp. LTDs (Life Time Deals --- SaaS but you only pay once). It's literally a category in the app.

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

#505

Post by BrianOnHN »

biztos wrote: post #370
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…

A zillion years ago I had a housemate who was a brilliant programmer and could smoke himself into the Zone like nobody's business, and one of his weird little side ventures was a Mac app to cut up Illustrator files and lay them out in HTML using tables, because that was the state of the art. As best I can recall, he wrote it in CodeWarrior over a couple weeks together with another guy who presumably knew Illustrator,…

> could smoke himself into the Zone like nobody's business

Can you elaborate on this?

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

#506

Post by semireg »

Aeolun wrote: post #430
semireg wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it’s ramen profitable, bootstrapped and growing. It’s just me at the moment and I’m still juggling full-time mobile app and IOT consulting. Since Label LIVE is a React app wrapped in Electron I’ve given a lot of thought to bringing it into a proper SaaS via browser but just don’t have the time.

Wouldn’t it be hsrd to get the browser app to play nice with printers?

Yes, it’s a big challenge. There are three solutions I see:

1) Rely on PDF and browser print APIs, which means you give up direct USB access and even some paper size API which is kind of a deal breaker for thermal printers.

2) Rely on a browser extension of some sort. This might work, and I haven’t researched this much, because I find it clunky and error prone, bad UX and at mercy of browsers.

3) Use the existing app as an “agent” that receives “print jobs” from the cloud. This would be similar to ShipStation Connect and Google Cloud Print. This has potential but would need all sorts of engineering and UX to become seamless.

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

#507

Post by inglor_cz »

killtimeatwork wrote: post #452
plumeria wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't one expect at least a job offer?

Maybe, but working hard for months/years a chance at a job offer doesn't sound that amazing anyway. BTW I worked in a startup once and a guy, who was developing opensource plugin for our product, applied for a job with us. The owner (a known blogger BTW) said "Why hire him if he's already working for us?"

"Why hire him if he's already working for us?"

Because you do not want him to abandon the project if it is useful to you?

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

#509

Post by ht_th »

randomsearch wrote: post #448
benibela wrote: post #58

My 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 :-)

In my locale, the public library has shrunk in size to about 40% of its size 20 years ago. And it now includes a coffee bar and lunch café. The current selection is mostly popular books. For all topics I know something about, the non-fiction books seems to cater to children, lay-people, and beginners.

The library has pivoted to social work, helping low-literate people, offering a safe space for teenagers to study, and a place for the elderly and 30+ women to meet. Those are all good reasons to exists, particularly because many of the visitors cannot go anywhere else, but I miss the library of my youth. I loved spending hours moving through the stacks, discovering all kinds of oddities and new things. But that seems passé. Even in the university library the amount of books has shrunk a lot and the depot with a lot of older stuff is now off-limits.

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

#510

Post by superice »

fapjacks wrote: post #433
superice wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve only taken a glance, but as a CS-teacher of 16 and 17 year olds, this looks great! I have no clue how to target high school teachers with ads, but if you can, this’d probably be a very interesting niche! (Although SQL isn’t fashionable enough these days I’m afraid, perhaps the same idea for blockchain will get all the hype :rollingeyes:)

Interesting, so which technologies do 16 and 17 year olds learn in HS CS courses?

That really depends on the high school in question, in NL the mandatory curriculum is laughably bad, mostly due to a lack of competent CS teachers. We teach JavaScript, basics of HTML and CSS, React & React Native, PHP (although I’m trying to get them to replace that with JS) , algorithmic complexity (to the level of handwavy big-O notation and some sorting algorithms), basics of UML, PostgreSQL, C in the context of Arduino, state machines, and for the advanced students I try to throw in a bit of TLA+ (mixed success there). We try and use a project based system where the students pick a project with an actual company and implement a proof of concept level solution. Last year that was a warehousing robot, this year a smart home solution to lower energy costs in social housing. Other non company related projects are a rubiks cube solving bot using LEGO Mindstorms along with a TLA+ proof it could actually achieve every position and would terminate (I did help out a bit on the TLA+ stuff ofcourse).

The trick is to never tell students how advanced the stuff they're doing is, get them excited and they'll go further than you can imagine.

But then again, I am also lucky enough to teach at a combined middle/high school that basically took the last 3 years of the curriculum (15-18yo) and shoved them into the first three (12-15yo) so I basically get free reign since they covered the final exam stuff in the first three years already. I don’t know of any other high school in the country that has this model and teaches at this level. In fact, that is the only reason I teach part-time at all: I wouldn't want to be an actual teacher, but they needed somebody with a deep enough technical knowledge, and had me in the picture both as an ex student (from before they introduced this CS-stuff though, I still deeply envy my own students) and as a 'client' of the students from my previous employer. Eventually I agreed to teach one day a week.

Generally you can expect basics of HTML, CSS, PHP, and if you’re lucky a bit of Arduino-C out of high schoolers, if they get CS at all (it’s very much optional for schools to provide a CS track in NL)

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