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

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

#81

Post by culturestate »

xnorswap wrote: post #78
MattyMc wrote: 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…

So you're a ticket scalper? That's nothing something to be proud of. You say your friends detest resale sites but it sounds like you just became one yourself unless I'm misunderstanding what was happening here.

Scalpers don’t typically sell tickets for less than face value.

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

#82

Post by Jack000 »

newbie578 wrote: post #17

I 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?

For side projects intended to generate income, base it on market research.

- Ensure there's demand. Go on google and type in your problem or solution, are there a lot of results and ads? If yes, there is demand. If the top results are poorly made blogs with only adsense for monetization, there might be a problem. If there are literally no competitors, drop the idea immediately.

- No moat. For solos your priorities are inverted to VCs, pick a market that's easy to attack with lots of competitors where you can be the 50th. Ideally the market is somewhat niche, so it will be overlooked by larger companies.

- It's hard to compete with big companies as one person, but you can turn weakness into strength by offering a product that is simpler and easier to use (ie. fewer features) unbundle instead of bundle.

A great way to find these niches is through the "free tools" section of large websites. This means it's a niche they're using for lead gen and seo purposes. eg: https://www.shopify.com/tools https://www.wordstream.com/wordstream-graders https://www.hubspot.com/resources/tool

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

#83

Post by exceltrading »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #30
exceltrading wrote: post #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 competi…

So you're a SaaS basically?

Ha. And given how much of the world runs from excel sheets, I'm very surprised it's not a more popular business model.

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

#85

Post by exceltrading »

giarc wrote: post #48
dsiegel2275 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spreadsheet as a Subscription?

I've tried this with Google Sheets add-ons. It can be hard since there is no built in payment method so I end up using lots of API calls to Stripe to check for current subscription status. However, you have to get the user to subscribe on one site and install the add-on on another.

Yes, about half my code and effort is handling stuff that an "app store" usually would.

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

#86

Post by thefourthchime »

xnorswap wrote: post #78
MattyMc wrote: 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…

So you're a ticket scalper? That's nothing something to be proud of. You say your friends detest resale sites but it sounds like you just became one yourself unless I'm misunderstanding what was happening here.

Most tickets are "scalped" these days, either by credit card companies, the artist themselves, the venue, etc... A minority of tickets are sold through the normal retail channel these days.

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

#87

Post by healsdata »

fusspawn wrote: post #44

I funded life over the pandemic selling bots for MMO's. Made way more than I expected. Enough it became a full time job for a while. Died down a little after people started returning to work after Covid. But still makes a decent passive income.

Wow. This is something I'd love to hear/read more about. I always assumed the bar would be high in that area given the anti-cheat software in play.

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

#88

Post by michaelbuckbee »

I tried to launch a SaaS to do automated QA of email sends (check them for broken links before sending, mis-sized images, etc.) which was a big failure as the pain wasn't strong enough.

But to try and promote it I created a free automated email subject line checker which people loved -> https://sendcheckit.com

A couple years in and we've checked around 5 million subject lines for people.

There's an embed API that I originally let people use for free, but after it started being really abused I now charge a small annual fee for access. It's not enough for a full time income and I don't really talk about the site that much as it doesn't fit in the "portfolio" of my other professional interests which are mostly cybersecurity related.

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

#89

Post by kilroy123 »

petercooper wrote: post #5

Not exactly what you're looking for, but to help populate the thread, in the mid 00s I had a big chunk of accidental income that I didn't want to talk about at the time, but can now. I put Adsense on my blog early on and I'd make maybe $10-20 a day with no shenanigans. I wrote a post recommending a route planner I'd found (pre Google Maps). A month later my income jumped to $100-200 a day and it turned out to be due…

I follow you on twitter. It seems you've been super successful over the years with side gigs. You're an inspiration to me for when it comes to newsletters.
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