I created a web app that extracts transaction data from PDF bank statements. I talk about it with friends, but often a lot of people think I'm running some sort of data hoarding scam.
So do you make money off of it?
Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
31–40 of 272 posts
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#32This little thing is still doing nice lunch money (for 10+ years!) mainly on adsense, to my unending surprise.
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#33I 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!
For sure.
Generally, the electron app would pull face value prices and availability from [baseballteam].com, current resale prices from hubstub.com (Next, I had collected a list of email addresses from friends and a few posts on Facebook and Craigslist. The app had a button create/update a Google sheet with games/prices, pull in the emails, and batch email people (in groups of <50) the information along with the games. The manual part was marking the games as sold in the sheet, tracking etransfers and sending tickets, but it was little work.
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#34I got a question for everyone reading. How to even decide what side project to work on? Should I keep all ideas in a spreadsheet and then choose one, or make a grading system for ideas?
One aspect that I see recurring in successful side-project stories is that someone pairs their development skills with some domain-specific knowledge. So you could do an inventory of what domain-specific knowledge you do have, and think about projects that would leverage that.
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#35I 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…
So you're a SaaS basically?
Spreadsheet as a Subscription?
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#36Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#37After my grandfather got Parkinson’s disease circa 2005, I developed hand tremor cancelling software for the mouse [1]. It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer. It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough. I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It fe…
This is awesome!
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#38People make money on side projects?! Not me...
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#39I got a question for everyone reading. How to even decide what side project to work on? Should I keep all ideas in a spreadsheet and then choose one, or make a grading system for ideas?
I’ve put together lists of ideas before, here’s a few ways I’ve done it:
1. Any idea that comes in your head, jot down in a card or list. This is just to get in the habit.
You may sometimes write a full page about the idea, sometimes it’s a sentence.
2. Quick triage, is this for “fame” (it’s just a small, time bound, scoped, fun project with no explicit objective or plan to earn money), or “fortune” (you’d only want it to be a business, prepared for months and years of work), both are fine
3. For “fame” tasks, pick ones that scratch an itch where you want to learn something or solve a problem (simple website, VS Code plug-in, OSS repo on GitHub, a tool/script you wrote and use locally you want to offer to others as a website, etc) something that’s time bound and has a very simple and complete scope.
4. For “fortune” tasks, decide which ones you feel are interesting, you have knowledge about the problem personally, you see revenue generation possibility, you can do it on your own or with minimal resources to start, you know it’s going to take years, but you’ve got something encouraging/progress to show yourself within 1-2 months
That’s how I think about ideas lately.
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#40I got a question for everyone reading. How to even decide what side project to work on? Should I keep all ideas in a spreadsheet and then choose one, or make a grading system for ideas?
One aspect that I see recurring in successful side-project stories is that someone pairs their development skills with some domain-specific knowledge. So you could do an inventory of what domain-specific knowledge you do have, and think about projects that would leverage that.
'airs their development skills with some domain-specific knowledge' - and a route to monetise it.