What about side projects that have no hope of ever making money but you'd love to talk about them?
Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
231–240 of 272 posts
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#232I made an app last year that lets the user track virtually anything. Most notably, it is possible to track prices from any website.
The app has made me a fair amount of money, but I don't really mention it to my friends or family. The thing is, I am Norwegian, and most people here use iPhones. Since the app is only available for Android, the conversation usually ends in an -oh, anyway.
The app (AnyTracker):https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shervinkou...
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#233I created a caption competition website seventeen years ago: https://www.caption.me/
Pulls funny photos from a Flickr group. People write funny captions and vote for their favourite. Some of today's active users have been on the site for more than a decade.
I used to pay the £50 monthly prize out of my own pocket, but some generous users offered to fund the prize themselves via a whip-round.
So the small amount of money from paid link advertising on my sites (approx £45/month) now covers the hosting. In my head, that means I can justify spending my free time modernising and grow the site. I'm slowly upgrading it from PHP to http4s+ReactJS
There are some fun tech things I enjoyed inventing on the site - real-time collaborative mind-mapping to help people think of caption ideas; bots that identify bad user behaviour and create forum topics to start a private discussion with the admin team; real-time updates using websockets; a system that automatically identifies the best voters and rewards them with a quota of "super-votes" they can use to vote more than once on the best captions.
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#234What about side projects that have no hope of ever making money but you'd love to talk about them?
https://goodnews4u.app
I intensionally keep it 100% free and no ads, because good news should not be for money and should be easily accessible.
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#235Well, I've spoken about this before, and on here no less, but only really in response to posts like this. I don't do any advertising or speak about mine except in interviews, since it's usually indicative of the kind of requirements they're looking for. I created a SaaS bootstrap for Javascript called Nodewood [1]. It actually started as just a template for me, because there's a lot of setup for each new JS web proje…
This is cool! Great to see you've had some success here!
I've built something similar for my favorite tech stack but haven't had any sales yet. I find it useful in my own projects and I've seen other similar projects make some money (like JumpStart Pro for Rails) so thinking it's something around my positioning / offerings rather than full lack of a need.
Some things I think you're doing really well:
* Great sales copy and documentation
* Great aesthetics -> adds to "trust"
* Message bot for feedback
Qs:
* Q1: Did you do any customer research to help determine what features to build?
* Q2: What did you find (if anything) is the biggest reason people choose to use boilerplate rather than rolling their own?
For those interested -> CloudSeeed - SaaS boilerplate for Sveltekit + .NET + Postgres - https://cloudseed.xyz/
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#236Not 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.
Handle?
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#237Three 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?
No, we’re tracking ball flight (in one of our future products).
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#238A couple of years ago I built a mobile reminder app that sends your reminders via text message. I haven’t done a good job marketing / promoting it. I’ve tried a couple of times in the past, but just have not cared enough to actually learn how to market it.
It really helps me in my everyday needs.
It currents helps about 4K+ users a month. Still blows my mind.
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#239Started https://mailsnag.com with a friend couple years ago. It is a test SMTP server (imagine chaos monkey for SMTP testing)
This is pretty awesome. I was looking for something like this in the last month! Thanks for sharing.
Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know how hard ET is and I really feel for you. My dad’s ET started getting worse at around 40 and when he reached 65 it got to the point where he couldn’t eat without much difficulty, couldn’t write a simple note, use his phone to text, and many things we take for granted and it stressed him out to the point where he started to isolate; he lost motivation completely. It broke my heart and in 2018 I decided to call…
Non-invasive wow! Could you provide more details on it?
I'm interested, too, but it might be a loose term - sometimes people say "non-invasive" to mean "minimally-invasive" or such. So something that involves opening the skull and placing electrodes on the surface of the brain can be considered "non-invasive" to the brain matter, and endoscopic endonasal surgery is much less invasive than going through the skull.
In fact, "non-invasive operation" is oxymoronic, because an operation or surgery is a medical treatment that is invasive.