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

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251–260 of 272 posts

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

#251
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. How do you "track" pages? Do you open a browser and extract the response? Thanks.

Hi, the parsing is done with Jsoup. So it parses the Html content of the website, without opening a browser. Also it has a neat feature that lets you select the number you want to track by simply highlighting it.

The tracking by just selecting is magic for me. Congrats

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

#252
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, the parsing is done with Jsoup. So it parses the Html content of the website, without opening a browser. Also it has a neat feature that lets you select the number you want to track by simply highlighting it.

The tracking by just selecting is magic for me. Congrats

Thanks!

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

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's just arbitrage. scalping tickets isn't morally distinct from any other form of "buy low, sell high."

I see your point. I'm not sure you're objectively wrong. But it feels wrong. :) Where there is sufficient demand for things to sell out to people who want the product, but are unable to get it because someone has used a bot to scoop them up at superhuman speeds... that doesn't feel exactly like the moral equivalent of other forms of arbitrage. _Especially_ when the sellers themselves would prefer that not happen. The…

I can see where you're coming from, but I have pretty bad news, which is that the last line just doesn't match reality, at least not in the United States. It might make sense in theory, but it just isn't true:

> Market makers provide value; scalpers rent seek.

In the United States, event tickets are functionally a monopoly. In practice, Ticketmaster/Live Nation is a rent-seeking market maker which crushes small events and blocks value from being created.

Here's a deep dive on that, just under 20 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Y7uqqEFnY

This doesn't mean that scalpers can't also be rent-seekers, but given that scalpers are highly competitive and Ticketmaster is a monopoly, I think the scalpers aren't in a position to seek rent.

This part has a similar flaw:

> someone has used a bot to scoop them up at superhuman speeds... that doesn't feel exactly like the moral equivalent of other forms of arbitrage.

High-speed trading is all about bots and arbitrage. This isn't the first time those two things have been combined. There are corners of New York where they're practically synonymous.

This one has factual issues also:

> The bands want the tickets to go to the fans at no higher than the price the venue sets.

It's only true of _some_ bands. There's evidence (in that deep dive video) that Justin Bieber has probably scalped tickets to his own shows, at scale.

I'm not saying that if Justin Bieber does it, it automatically can't be scummy. That seems like a very very hard argument to make. I'm a musician and I would not want to have that kind of relationship with my fans (if I had any, beyond a few repeat listeners on Spotify).

I'm just saying, there's a lot in this comment which makes intuitive sense but doesn't actually line up with the reality of the situation.

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

#254

Two years ago, my cofounder and I built and launched a tool that turns Google Drive folders into a wiki ( https://kbee.app ). It's making about $1.5K/month and growing organically on it's own...

I'm really curious how you go about getting users for something that's this niche - specifically, people who need to build a knowledge base for their company and already have something like it in Google Drive - but you obviously are doing so pretty well. Could you share how you did that?

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

#255
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must run earlyscores.com! That site was a life saver for me. Sadly anything aimed towards tech savvy high schoolers is probably going to be pretty difficult to monetize.

Not too difficult! Monetized with ads, the project was making a significant profit (>$15k per year; all of it came in on one day) - the difficult part was trying to do anything else with all of those users.

Is that with AdSense or another ad network?

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

#256

I have a web app that caters to the adult live video chatting industry. It makes about 4 or 5k a month completely passively. Unfortunately I’m too embarrassed to talk about it with anyone.

Would you mind telling us what it does and how you discovered the need for it?

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

#257
post #232

I 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://p…

Judging from many of your most recent reviews which claim that the product is buggy to the point of not working as describe, do you think it's possible a lot of that revenue might be due to the fact you're making it from in-app purchases which (at least, from the perspective of the user) appear to be non-refundable?

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

#258

I did a deep dive into history of Social Security Numbers (SSN) in the united states from available information and wrote a poorly executed static site generated from the information with google adds. Does a few hundred USD a month. http://numchk.com/

I can't see any ads, so how are you making money from this? If it's from selling the data, what kind of use cases do your customers find for it?

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

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

What do you currently track? What was the product that you made the money on?

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

#260
post #47

I make a very sizeable side income on prediction markets. Basically, through scraping, collecting, and cleaning an obscene amount of data.

Huh. I recently realized I might like cleaning and transforming data (and staring at the inputs and outputs and intermediary results of the pipeline to see the peculiarities of the data and what can be improved.) I didn't realize this was an activity that could make money, especially on its own.

What exactly is cleaning and transforming data?
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