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

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861–866 of 866 posts

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

#861

For the past 2 and a half years I've been running a YouTube channel with semi-automated content. The content in question is threads on AskReddit. I know a lot of people look down on content like that (tbh myself included) but to be fair most content on YouTube is very low-effort. It's not getting close to the views it used to, but now it makes an average of about $1k/month. Our content is a lot higher quality than mo…

Can you comment on how your software works?

Sure thing. It has 2 parts, frontend (web gui in React) and backend (Nodejs + Puppeteer)

I have a web GUI for fetching thread comments from the Reddit API and where the user can quickly pick which comments should be filtered out. It also lets the user know if a comment is "bad" (violence etc.) from some automatic string matching so they can be filtered out or edited quickly.

Then on the backend I fill a HTML template with the comment data making it look pretty. Then I use Puppeteer to render and screenshot it into an image. Then I do a "segmented reveal", revealing one sentence at a time using HTML classes and CSS, depending on what part of the text is currently being read. It also scrolls down so the sentence currently being read is in the center of the screen, and does some other stuff like censor bad words using the CSS blur filter. Then I use ffmpeg with a bunch of complex_filter entries to add TTS audio to the screenshots, add transitions and stuff and concat it all together.

It's really not that complicated, but learning ffmpeg and making rendering reasonably quick and correct was a challenge.

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

#862
post #445

My side hustle[0] brings ~$600/month. Not a whole lot but it covers the costs and brings a decent profit. [0] https://pdf2qrcode.com .

Little late to this party but love the idea. One small piece of feedback: saying all PDFs are publicly available might scare people off. I'm assuming you're generating secure random links? I'd at least say it's only available to anyone with the link.

Thank you for the tip! Yes, the links are randomly generated and quite difficult to guess/bruteforce. I will update the wording accordingly.

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

#863
post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much time do you spend a month on marketing for placecard?

These days basically zero because most of my attention has moved on. I invested a ton in SEO and content early on though.

When you say invested, was this as in time (you wrote the content and worked on SEO yourself), or did you pay to outsource this? I'm struggling with this myself at the moment.

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

#865
post #13

I started AppMasker ( https://appmasker.com ) a few months ago. It’s basically a reverse-proxy as a service (using Caddy) and makes adding custom domains to your web app a breeze. Still working on my marketing pitch so feedback is welcome!

Honest question, is this that hard to do (without your service)? I don't think so.

Using Caddy it’s not too hard if you know what you’re doing. But if you have many nodes you’re deploying it’s starts to get more complicated. A lot of people don’t know what they’re doing, however.

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

#866
post #352

I’m working on a c2c marketplace for airsoft gear [1]. Users can buy and sell their airsoft replica’s, accessories and tools to/from other users by posting a listing to the site. We hope to accept payments through the platform using Stripe Connect soon. Currently averaging €600,- a month. [1] https://www.airsoftbazaar.com

Checked out your website and seems decent. How do you net €600 a month though? I see no ads or transaction fees?

Two things:

- We allow users to highlight their listings, which means the listing is shown on the homepage and at the top of the selected category

- we have a verification wizard that verifies the users telephone number and iban, which we charge for as well

We’ve almost finished a Stripe Connect integration, which allows users to pay for items through the platform itself (they now pay in person or by bank transfer). This will contain a processing fee.

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