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

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

#571

Post by Guest19023892 » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 11:31 PM UTC

elliottkember wrote: post #536

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…

The light looks great in the video and the price seems reasonable.

You should really add more photos and videos though. Or include a YouTube video showing how to setup the light and use the app. I wouldn't mind spending $150 on a light, but I definitely wouldn't buy one based on the two sentence description and the short video you have on the product page. I'm left wondering...

1. Is the app required for setup or can I just plug it in?

2. Do I need the app to change modes, or are there any buttons on on the light? Does it even have an on/off button or does it need to be unplugged or turned off with the app?

3. Does it stand by itself? How thick is it? Can I hang or lean it on the wall? Or is it thick in the middle and I need to hide it in a corner like in your video?

4. The front looks clean and simple, but what does the side and back even look like?

5. Can I have it display a solid white light if I'm reading and don't want all the changing colors? (I'm assuming the answer is "Yes" now that I viewed the editor tutorial)

6. How bright is it? Like a typical monitor?

I can't find answers to these questions, any contact information to get those answers, or any photos of the light. I can't possibly buy it. On a side note...

1. The editor looks really cool. I'm surprised this isn't showcased on the site anywhere, or any examples from the gallery. Once I viewed the editor and some examples, I realized what is actually possible.

2. It looks like your site is unfinished. One of the slides on your homepage says, "Introduce customers to your shop with lifestyle imagery and product photography." I was thinking about that for a while, wondering how this light with only 196 LEDs could display product photography in shop windows. After scratching my head I realized this must be some default Shopify slide, and not something you wrote.

Random marketing strategy...

YouTube/Twitch streamers are obsessed with colorful background lighting. They also love customizing their stream. Get this in the hands of some famous streamers and show them how they can play animations or pixelated versions of their stream logos. They'll get lots of viewers asking where the light is from and how they can buy one. Or, setup a referral program so streamers mention it during their stream or in their descriptions.

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

#572

Post by ganashaw » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 1:27 AM UTC

ProZsolt wrote: post #569

ganashaw wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Estimate travel costs weren't apparent from the front page, there is no mention of it and the example plan (picture) only use walking. I just found the Chicago itinerary in the blog post. It should be accessible from the front page. I don't see enough value added over spreadsheets / custom Google maps to worth the money, but I'm pretty happy with our current system.

This is great feedback! I definitely think it's a harder sell for someone who already has a system that works for them.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond. Happy new year!

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

#573

Post by templarchamp » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 2:33 AM UTC

koellewe wrote: post #4

I built a Tinder-like matchmaking app where users log in with their Facebook account and the app then auto-matches users by their FB likes. I thought taking the hassle out of swiping could give my app an edge over Tinder. It was working fine for a week or so before Facebook caught up and revoked my API keys (effectively killing the app). They didn't give any reason besides some vague recommendation to review their Te…

If you had patent, you could go after FB and have some out of court settlement.

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

#574

Post by harshadbarge » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 2:47 AM UTC

WIP.. So its not 'failed' yet nor plan to.. Learnt coding because I had free time (COVID) and wanted to involve son into STEP aspects of coding. Then, I saw machine learning as a motivation for side hustle; learnt some of the better libraries out there and applied in the area of sports predictions. Saw incredible success and planned on pivoting to sports betting and now we have a steady consumption of our algorithim output. So, we are currently 'sharing' our success with others but plan to monetize it later. Figuring that part out.

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

#575

Post by Jugurtha » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 2:57 AM UTC

harshadbarge wrote: post #574

WIP.. So its not 'failed' yet nor plan to.. Learnt coding because I had free time (COVID) and wanted to involve son into STEP aspects of coding. Then, I saw machine learning as a motivation for side hustle; learnt some of the better libraries out there and applied in the area of sports predictions. Saw incredible success and planned on pivoting to sports betting and now we have a steady consumption of our algorithim…

Nice! Do you mind elaborating more on how you went about training your models, where do you generate the outputs (web page? spreadsheet?), and the difficulties you encountered or the tedious/repetitive parts?

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

#576

Post by templarchamp » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 3:20 AM UTC

patbwill wrote: post #570

Late 2019, I launched https://stocks2.com , a financial site that posts a daily updated report for all NASDAQ/NYSE stocks. It started well, increasingly growing audience and Adsense revenues until Google's May 2020 core update. Since then, the site started sliding in the SERPs and finally it now disappeared from Google. Honestly, I still don't understand why Google has penalized the site so much. Any feedback will be…

Searching for a symbol is not pulling any data. There is no audit info on the page like contact, address, team etc How many page views do you have?

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

#577

Post by templarchamp » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 4:21 AM UTC

bengtan wrote: post #564

Hi, I wrote (and am still writing) Gig'o'Books ( http://www.gigobooks.com ) -- Accounting for gigs and side income. I'm the first user (ie. dogfooding). Thing is ... I'm sure there's a lot of people with gigs who would find it useful but for some reason, I'm having trouble finding them.

If you have this for US, I would have tried. My business is currently passive but I still pay a lot to accountant to run a payroll once per year.

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

#578

Post by harshadbarge » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:33 AM UTC

Jugurtha wrote: post #575

harshadbarge wrote: post #574

WIP.. So its not 'failed' yet nor plan to.. Learnt coding because I had free time (COVID) and wanted to involve son into STEP aspects of coding. Then, I saw machine learning as a motivation for side hustle; learnt some of the better libraries out there and applied in the area of sports predictions. Saw incredible success and planned on pivoting to sports betting and now we have a steady consumption of our algorithim…

Nice! Do you mind elaborating more on how you went about training your models, where do you generate the outputs (web page? spreadsheet?), and the difficulties you encountered or the tedious/repetitive parts?

I downloaded and have curated historical sports data from various sources and figured out the 'simplest' parameters which work.. which at the moment is just the defaults. Model training is not much to be honest. I have a fairly fast processor so it takes about 10 minutes to run every iteration. It has evolved from predicting just one dimension/feature but now, it predicts all of the variables it can train on (all training features) Earlier, I used to manually input every predictor and then run the algorithim but now, I have figured out the copy-paste method which essentially cuts the pre-processing from around 2 hours to 10 minutes now. It gets a bit hectic giver the current nature of sports happening every day and increasing frequency of cycles. That part can be optimised via web scraping but not a priority at the moment but is a priority nevertheless. Outputs are generated into a spreadsheet at the moment but would publish them onto an online platform later once I figure out the 'monetizing' and user-prompted running of the algorithim part.

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

#579

Post by wartijn_ » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 9:28 AM UTC

seanwilson wrote: post #473

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, personally, I would pay for no ads and maybe brief definitions of the words that I have just crossed out, but I would be turned off by microtransactions like boosts, extra life's or skins.

Cool, thanks! Yep, I hate soulless plays like "buy gems to play more", "wait until tomorrow to get more gems to play", "invite your friends to get more gems" etc. Word definitions would be awesome. Are there any good free sources for this? That also have offensive words flagged? I'm not sure how to do a free version of the game that isn't so good that nobody upgrades though to be honest. With the competition on mobil…

en.wiktionary.org might be good for this. It’s free and marks some words as vulgar.

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

#580

Post by Flimm » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 10:06 AM UTC

sugarkjube wrote: post #342

mpermar wrote: post #270

An app for finding the best hotels for traveling with kids. It was basically crawling the booking.com API and then applying an algorithm to figure out if a property was suitable for families with children or not. It would do the usual. Parse descriptions and try to find keywords there, parse and count the number of comments mentioning family-related topics, up-score hotels with certain facilities and then push the im…

Rumour is due to covid a babyboom is coming, so soon there will be a lot of potential for your app.

There might be a baby boom after Covid-19, but right now, we are expecting a baby bust. Economic uncertainty is leading people to delay having children, at least in certain countries.