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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?

#531

Post by failedsides »

basicneo wrote: post #437
failedsides wrote: post #436

https://categorybooks.com/ I thought about aggregating books by prizes their authors had won, so you could browse books written by chemistry Nobel Prize winners or Fields Medal winners. I quickly gave up on the project, but I'm sure I poured hundreds of hours into it before that. I'm not too despondent about it anymore, and learned a lot (it's my first ever website, and only one so far!) - it was quite gruelling to m…

I like the idea, and your website looks great. What would you do differently if you had to redo it?

Thanks a ton!

I would get going with a more popular technology (I chose Svelte and Sapper). Like I mentioned, it's the first website I've ever built, so I ran into some problems that I'm sure would have been easier to deal with had there been a bigger community and more tutorials available. I was fixated on it being as fast as possible, which is perhaps quite ironic with the amount of images it's downloading - not lazily.

I have to admit now that I'm thinking about building a second project, that my technology stack will also be governed by what employers are looking for. I'm currently working in a non-tech industry, but I'm starting to think about trying to transition.

Another thing that came to mind was that I'd try to remove some of the monotonous tasks that made it such a grind, like manually compressing all of the images and trying to find the right size. That was a huge ordeal, and I would've been better off with implementing lazy loading and just running the images through some compression automatically or not compressing them at all. I really should have done that.

I'd also probably try to advertise it a bit more. This is the only time I've mentioned the project, and it's almost a year old. I was just hoping people would magically stumble into it.. I'm sure even a dollar or two from it would have given me the motivation to at least complete the parts I'd planned out for and actually found interesting myself.

Thanks again for the compliment and happy New Year's!

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

#532

Post by Volrath89 »

https://developerjobs.world

It's a job board site specifically thought for developers. All the jobs are scrapped from companies' carreer sites.

I stopped adding companies/countries because the visits to the site are underwhelming, not more than a couple per day. I unexpectedly got "many" visits from Nigeria even though there are no jobs from that country. Maybe I could try adding Nigerian jobs; if anyone has a github link with tech companies from Nigeria similar to the ones that exist for other countries I could scrape them

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

#533

Post by les_diabolique »

guidovranken wrote: post #446
les_diabolique wrote: post #118

I 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?

Are you interested in just the data? I no longer have the images, I had them hosted in S3 but I stopped paying for it so they are probably long gone.

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

#534

Post by ganashaw »

ProZsolt wrote: post #530
ganashaw wrote: post #62

I spent about 6 months building Itinee ( https://itinee.com ) which is a trip planning app focused on being budget conscious. I built it because my wife and I love to travel but my assortment of spreadsheets was a little intimidating to her. I wanted a platform that let us both participate in the planning process. Unfortunately, due to COVID, people aren't traveling so I haven't really put any money into marketing it…

I would be the target audience, but from the front page I don't see what value it brings over a spreadsheet. I won't register just to found out that. Does it automatically calculate travel costs?

Thanks for the feedback! In my view, these are some of the biggest advantages of Itinee over my previous spreadsheet planning:

- Visualize everything on a map. This is big for me just to help organize what days it makes the most sense to do things - Estimate travel costs (e.g. Ride sharing) based on distances between stops - Easily adjust number of attendees. Some costs are split regardless of how many people attend, like hotel rooms, while others are a fixed per person price, like event tickets - Ease of use for someone NOT familiar with spreadsheets. My wife couldn't replicate any of this in a spreadsheet, but she can use Itinee.

Some of the above may in fact, and probably is, possible with some fancy spreadsheet shenanigans, but the main point was to make the whole process more accessible.

I'd be really curious if the advantages I mentioned weren't apparent on the website or if they simply weren't, in your view, "enough" of an improvement over a spreadsheet to justify paying for it.

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

#535

Post by toss1 »

ganashaw wrote: post #310
toss1 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about something like a quasi-log scale, e.g.,: $19 for 6 weeks, $39 for 6 months, $79 for 12 months and $99 for three years?

That could work! I'm curious what makes subscription models more attractive from your point of view. Is it just simpler to understand? It seems strictly less flexible than a pay-for-what you need model. I suppose in your example the advantage is that you can get a discount by paying for more up front which is a clear advantage for people who will take multiple trips in a year or are planning a trip far in advance.

I received a similar suggestion years ago from someone else, and it worked very well. It's effectively bigger discounts for longer & larger service plans up front. I found it effectively shifted the conversation from "How can I get a discount /beat you up on your price?" to "Ok, what is the right plan for our project"?

This is not quite like consulting/custom dev gigs, but has similar attributes. For purchases/subscriptions like yours, I've noticed that they often seem to create a tension between buying the two most likely to meet your needs - the longer higher-cost one is priced just low enough to be tempting. This probably indicates a lot of A/B testing of pricing, and decisions about whether you want to make it easier for your customers to decide, pointing customers to one plan or the other, what really drives higher purchasing levels and overall income.

Good luck!

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

#536

Post by elliottkember »

I built an LED framework for ESP32, and started building LED lamps that use it. I’ve sold more than I expected, but made less money than I’d hoped.

It’s taken years and countless hours of my time but it’s really fun and I’ve learned a lot.

The project is expanding into an IDE and online pattern gallery, and all sorts of fun additions. People are joining and making really impressive works with it. But it can be tough to keep the momentum going sometimes.

What has been nice is that even when I was the only person using it, the result was still something I could enjoy - there’s no network effect required to make something cool for my living room.

Turning a side project into a business is tough. I’ve been working with a factory to produce them in quantity. This has been a struggle. “Hardware is hard”, and manufacturers are not fun to work with, at least compared with software.

But at the end of the day the thing is in people’s houses and they like it.

Here’s the lamp I’ve been making: https://shop.soulmatelights.com/products/square and the IDE I’m building is at https://editor.soulmatelights.com/tutorial

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

#537

Post by bambataa »

andreygrehov wrote: post #521

https://www.bithub.com A cryptocurrency exchange, that I've been working on for several years now. It's up and running, allows you to swap 60+ currencies. So far, it has processed a grand total of 1 transaction. The transaction was made by... me. No idea what to do about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

After a quick look, I was going to comment that "how it works" doesn't really explain what's special about it and then I noticed the bit about scouring other platforms.

Maybe you could go heavy on that and present it as some kind of price optimiser rather than just another exchange?

My first thought was that it looks just like all the AMMs and so you're not really pushing what makes you different.

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

#538

Post by atylerrice »

I built Hatchedwith.com mostly because I wanted to mess around with language models. I can’t seem to find any customers even though I got two from a fake landing page but realistically it’s not the product I advertised in the beginning I’m going to lower the pricing to extremely cheap and call it done unless google starts picking up on the tens of thousands of pages.

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

#539

Post by michae2 »

tekdude wrote: post #119

Pulselyre: A touch-screen synthesizer app for live music production - https://www.pulselyre.com Spent a few years experimenting with touchscreen UI and audio synthesis in my free time on and off, and eventually settled on an engine and interface design. The idea is to create 'instruments' in the editor (2nd screenshot) by connecting basic modules to create and transform audio based on user X/Y touch coordinates. Then…

Thank you for the detailed comment. During quarantine I started working on a rudimentary sound engine, and this gives me a lot to think about. I really appreciate your analysis of the feedback you received.

Your demo video looks really great to me. Maybe it's not something serious music production people would use, but stick this on an iPad and I could see someone having a lot of fun with it, kind of like https://loopyapp.com/ or https://audiokitpro.com/synth/

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

#540

Post by silexia »

Tested recruits.com - skill test based recruiting many years before indeed launch their version of this.

Romylms.com - A learning management system/training website for companies to train their employees with courses and modules and quizzes and such.

I currently used both for my own company coalitiontechnologies.com. Neither has made money commercially on its own though although a few dedicated users love it.

I also launched a website where you could pay someone of any faith to pray for you for a dollar. That never took off either haha.

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