Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 866 posts

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#581

Post by IAmGraydon »

hydershykh wrote: post #444

I have about 6 years of applied AI experience and I have been trying to work on something that can use that experience and be useful to others. Ended up building an analytics based platform that uses data analysis techniques to generate trade ideas for retail investors [0]. Started it as a hobby July 2019, but it ended up growing quite big. The plan was to generate about $1k/mo but we are generating about $120k/mo th…

Selling hope to the hopeless. Nice. If any of this worked, you would either use it yourself to make FAR more than $120k a month or sell it to a quant fund for an 8-figure payout.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#582

Post by grvdrm »

deanmoriarty wrote: post #550
Rastonbury wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if its realistic calculus to think you'll be easily able to make $1m passive income side project. Would you trade $1m a year for $100k passive?

It’s clearly tough to say without having a real opportunity in front of me, but if the passive income was diversified enough and with minimal time investment, I would most definitely trade my 60h/week job for a side project bringing a fraction of my current income (the exact fraction would be on a case by case). I think I personally am at the point where time is a scarcer resource than money. Getting a lower paid job…

You’re doing well so I don’t think you are doing it wrong. But given that base, could you build a side project dedicating just a couple of hours per week to the effort? If/when it turns into a product, great. If not, you’ve not used up all of your free time making something. I’m obviously oversimplifying but curious if you think 2-3 hours of side-work per week is still a non-starter?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#583

Post by kiru_io »

chadash wrote: post #574

I help elementary schools place students into classes. classplacer.com. This involves some clever algorithmic work and turns out to be a very interesting mathematical problem. I only work with two schools since I don’t have time to expand this and I’m right around that $500/month amount but it’s more like $6k-ish per summer. It still requires some active attention on my part but maybe 10 hours of work per summer sinc…

Hi there, This is great! How did you find your clients?

I am working on a dictation tool (https://flashdictation.com), but don't know what is the best strategy to reach teachers.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#585

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #486
blunte wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It adds more complexity to relationships, but it can also keep families/friends closer because they have more shared goals. There are some cultures where family businesses, where most members of the family work and participate, are the norm. Quite a huge population of people operate that way.

I would be interested to hear other founders' first-hand experience with this. In my experience, hiring my younger cousin for occasional work during school/uni breaks has been great, but involving close friends looking for work has been disastrous 3 out of 3 times.

My parents worked with my grand parents before taking over the business and I have occasionally worked with them through the years. You don’t really hire family members. They join you in the family business. It’s a different dynamic but I t doesn’t really cause issue because the family business has always been a part of our family life. The frontier between personal life and work is very blurry but that’s nothing unusual for SME owners.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#586

Post by seaphaw »

deanmoriarty wrote: post #511

After reading all this, I admit I feel kind of silly for working so hard (50-60h a week on average) to earn my Silicon Valley FAANG comp. I am wondering how much survivorship bias is at play here, some ideas look relatively simple compared to the amount they bring in. Or maybe one really has to take the leap of faith and trust that there is demand for virtually anything? Maybe it’s not so simple, my partner opened a…

I’m in a similar situation as a backend tech lead at a FAANG-like company but I also have a side project web app that generates about $500/month from ad revenue. I find that I learn a lot from the side project that helps me at my day job like front end development, ux, listening to user feedback, deployment all the way out to end users, and programming in other backend languages I wouldn’t have an excuse to play with at work.

Also the higher up I move on the engineering ladder at a bigger tech company, the more valuable it is to spend time doing things that aren’t coding. The side project lets me scratch my coding itch while doing the more valuable stuff all day.

Edit: typo

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#587

Post by fm2606 »

eruci wrote: post #34

I built a free reverse geocoding api about 4 years ago ( https://api.3geonames.org ) Usage grew steadily sometimes crashing the server. So I loaded the software on GCP and AWS Marketplaces. Those needing a dedicated api launched their own servers for a fee. It has made an average pf $500 a month since I made those machine images available on https://3geonames.org/api about 2 years ago.

If it is free how are you making money? I didn't see any advertisement, i.e. Google Ads, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#588

Post by parmezan »

czue wrote: post #289

I have two! An app for making wedding place cards that does about $1000/mo https://www.placecard.me/ A boilerplate for making SaaS apps with Python/Django that does $5k/month (highly variable) https://www.saaspegasus.com/ I also have a third that does around $150/mo. It's an app that adds analytics to GroupMe which is a WhatsApp alternative. https://chatstats.co/ I keep complete revenue and effort data here if you're…

Impressive dude.

Also from a security perspective don't forget to update those very out of date nginx webservers :)

My tool detects version 1.10.3 which was released on 31 Jan 2017

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#589

Post by crobertsbmw »

ijustwanttovote wrote: post #184
crobertsbmw wrote: post #25

My little hardware book, Computer Engineering for Babies launched on Kickstarter a few months ago and blew my mind by raising almost $250k. It’s a simple book with buttons and LEDs to demonstrate different logic gates. I just shipped out the first batch of books a week ago and now waiting for the next batch of books. It’s gotten pretty demanding pretty quickly but I’m really excited about it. I’m hoping I can soon em…

I've seen your product on TikTok. Very cool.

Yeah, a few people posted videos and at least one of them got a lot of attention.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#590

Post by doovd »

hydershykh wrote: post #444

I have about 6 years of applied AI experience and I have been trying to work on something that can use that experience and be useful to others. Ended up building an analytics based platform that uses data analysis techniques to generate trade ideas for retail investors [0]. Started it as a hobby July 2019, but it ended up growing quite big. The plan was to generate about $1k/mo but we are generating about $120k/mo th…

How do you answer the following inevitable questions?

If you have good trade ideas/signals, then why do you not use them yourself? I assume you do not use them yourself because it' does not make sense to share your edge (if you have one). If you do not have an edge, how can you be offering "trade ideas"?

Post reply on HN