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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?

#201

Post by bko »

andreilys wrote: post #183
bko wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't address any of my points as to why they exist. You're just using charged language to describe people working in a system that is kind of shitty for event goers. They're providing a service for people like me that may not want to buy tickets a year ahead of time, but rather keep that optionality to go open closer to the date of the event even if it means a higher price

Reselling != scalping The system would work fine if there weren’t rent-seeking parasites who offer no service other than taking tickets off of the market that would go to regular people.

I told you the service that they offer, you're just choosing to ignore it. They buy and hold the tickets a year ahead of time and allow me to buy tickets to a concert or show up to the day the date of the show. If they misprice the tickets or get unlucky, they're stuck losing 100% of the amount they paid for it.

I wish artists sold tickets in batches starting a month or two out, but they don't. So this is the system we're stuck with.

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

#202

Post by conductr »

msoh wrote: post #99

I made Accelerator Keys, a little Mac app that gives people Alt key shortcuts in Office software on Macs. Most people have never encountered the problem, so it’s hard to talk about this in general company. But it’s solving a pain point for a few hundred finance/consulting folks with Macs, or tech startups buying Macs for their finance/strategy teams. Haven’t worked on this as much since kids came, but I’d love to fig…

If you wanted to start expanding features look at macabacus. It's a darling for finance folks on Windows but has no Mac support. The way it handles stored formats and keyboard access is a wonderful feature for productivity as is the formula auditing features.

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

#203

Post by throwaway561 »

j0hnyl wrote: post #188
throwaway561 wrote: post #182

Not sure if it fits here but I run an onlyfans account with my wife as a side project. We were already into taking arty/classy pictures and sharing them for fun, so we figured why not. I wrote a simple UI where she can drop an imgur link, select tags specific to the pic/vid, and then it generates a list of subreddits to post to and suggests a time and a title. I made another tool where you can drop in a bunch of pict…

you can try to sell your tooling to other onlyfans content creators.

I'm not sure about the legality of automating other peoples websites? I'd also need to add auth, payment processing, host it somewhere etc.

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

#204

Post by pillefitz »

rubyron wrote: post #170

Three years ago I started a side hustle in the golf industry to pay for my obsessive love for the game. Never really talked about it in my software circles (until now), but it’s probably time, as we’re doing mid 7-figures/yr, growing rapidly, and have three ft employees (sales and shipping). It’s become my ft gig as well and I couldn’t be happier. Currently I’m considering hiring another dev with a similar passion fo…

Very interesting! I once had the idea to build a training bot to suggest optimal swing direction and strength as well as feedback on how you did. Since you mentioned computer vision - is there some similarity to your product?

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

#205

Post by kevincox »

I built https://feedmail.org because I wasn't satisfied with the existing RSS-to-Email services available.

I figured I would really just be making it for myself but decided to make it a product and have made a few hundred dollars in the first months. It pays for the hosting costs and gives me some motivation to work on it. It's also been surprisingly stable and my monitoring is good, so if I am not actively working on it I can just walk away and forget.

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

#206

Post by onetime8192 »

Cd00d wrote: post #187
onetime8192 wrote: post #77

Neural net for soft porn (tasteful nudes). Android app, 5 years old: http://driftwheeler.com More than 860 users per day, on average. Continuously growing user base. Profit through Met-Art affiliation: https://partners.metartmoney.com

I have SO MANY questions? Where does your domain name come from? How do you get people to trust that install? What's keeping you out of an app store? How do you source update material? I expected to see pr0n related stuff in this thread, but your post struck me as super curious-inducing. Thanks.

Domain name comes from the 1993 album of this band:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haujobb

People trust the SexTechGuide assurance that the app is clean:

https://sextechguide.com/apps/android-apps/melondream-apk-re...

Also, it appeared in The Register and Wired, both big-name news sites:

https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/18/smutfinder_ai_is_now_...

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wired-awake-190516

Most app stores don't allow pornography.

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

#207

Post by jerome-jh »

sokoloff wrote: post #97
exceltrading wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Things like this put the "a 30% cut is outrageous!" into a different perspective for me.

It is still outrageous because those two big ones make a huge economy of scale. They did not develop a payment method for a single app but for millions.

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

#208

Post by adnanc »

I've been working on https://ayahbyayah.com an iOS app which I originally released in 2012 as a simple app for listening to the recitation of a single Ayat (verse) of the Qur'an.

It'll be the 10th year on the App Store in September, I need to spend more time on marketing instead of building.

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

#209

Post by cosmodisk »

dsiegel2275 wrote: post #20
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…

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.

This is an example of such software: https://www.xappex.com/

Basically allows to edit Salesforce data directly in excel. I bet they've got thousands of users.

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

#210

Post by gregsadetsky »

nso wrote: post #147
jmt_ wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would work visually but I think you'd run into a lot of edge cases where JS/CSS/the browser itself is expecting to hook into or access mouse APIs

Yeah, imagine fake mouse is clicking a Save-button, but real mouse is up in the corner clicking the browsers Close-button.

I agree, these questions are part of the work that would be required to take it from a prototype to something useable.

You could maybe add one big transparent layer on top of the page which would catch all "real" clicks and generate synthetic mouse events under the layer at the stabilized position.

Browsers aren't an "ideal" environment (versus an OS where you might be able to hook into the mouse position/display at a lower level), but at the same time, they are ubiquitious, cross-platform, etc.

Might be worth a shot to expand this more. It's on my long list of side projects -- I'd love to collab with someone on it!

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