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Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

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11–20 of 272 posts

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#12
Over a weekend during the height of the pandemic, I made a digital school material website that has a "donate" button on it. Totally unexpectedly, it was making $1k/mo via donations. The original hope was to just pay for the hosting costs.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#13
I sell an excel add-in that integrates with some popular trading software. It makes life easier for traders. It has a couple thousand users paying around $10 a month. That's about as specific as I want to get.

It required a little domain specific knowledge to create, and a recognized name among trading forums to initially market. Otherwise it's super simple and I'm continually surprised that there are no real competitors.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#14
I staked $15k, bought season tickets for my favourite baseball team, wrote an electron app to auto-price and market those tickets under face value.

We ended up going to 6-7 games for free, sat in MUCH better seats than we ever could have afforded to, and had access to playoff tickets at face value. Further, my friends had access to great seats at reasonable prices and I avoided having to buy from resale sites (who I detest). 90% of the process was automated.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#15

I had site similar to this that generated 600-700$ USD per month as passive income. https://randomcountrygenerator.com/ I didn't touched it, sometimes for many months in a row.

How does this make money? I don't see any ads.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#16
I got my BlueRetro [1] project which is a universal BT controller adapter for retro console.

I'm making a pretty bad job monetizing this TBH. I originally wanted to sell the HW myself but turn out that with real job + young family with the little energy and time left I can't do more than "here's the code".

Turn out a few makers pick it up and are nice enough to give me a cut on their sales. Adding user donation I maybe made 2K out of it this year, not much but better than nothing I guess.

I wrote a retrospective about the last three year working in this if you like more detail [2]

[1] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro

[2] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro/discussions/289

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#18
post #14

I staked $15k, bought season tickets for my favourite baseball team, wrote an electron app to auto-price and market those tickets under face value. We ended up going to 6-7 games for free, sat in MUCH better seats than we ever could have afforded to, and had access to playoff tickets at face value. Further, my friends had access to great seats at reasonable prices and I avoided having to buy from resale sites (who I…

> wrote an electron app to auto-price and market those tickets under face value

Could you elaborate on this a little? I think I can imagine, but am curious to hear a bit more about how this worked!

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#19
post #14

I staked $15k, bought season tickets for my favourite baseball team, wrote an electron app to auto-price and market those tickets under face value. We ended up going to 6-7 games for free, sat in MUCH better seats than we ever could have afforded to, and had access to playoff tickets at face value. Further, my friends had access to great seats at reasonable prices and I avoided having to buy from resale sites (who I…

This sounds more like an algorithm to maximize your benefit from the $15k you spent.

As opposed to a "money making business".

(Still very cool though).

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#20

I sell an excel add-in that integrates with some popular trading software. It makes life easier for traders. It has a couple thousand users paying around $10 a month. That's about as specific as I want to get. It required a little domain specific knowledge to create, and a recognized name among trading forums to initially market. Otherwise it's super simple and I'm continually surprised that there are no real competi…

That is the exact niche type of side project that I dream about. Though, with "a couple thousand users paying around $10 a month" that is hardly a side project anymore, given the annual revenue north of $200K.
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