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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?

#261

Post by Kaos-Industries »

rgriggs wrote: post #246

I built PDFEncrypt ( https://pdfencrypt.net ) a couple years ago based on a very simple need from a client: to encrypt PDF files via a native Windows app, for free, without needing to upload files to a sketchy website or buy expensive software. I have been amazed at the number of visitors (4000/mo), emails, downloads, and donations the project has received. I released it as open source software, and I'm now working o…

Do you make use of native PDF encryption features or something entirely separate?

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

#262

Post by Kaos-Industries »

textmessager12 wrote: post #238

A 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. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/text-me-that/id1329223000

You say you haven't done much marketing, but the Play Store assets are pretty well polished. Did you use those yourself or hire someone for them?

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

#263

Post by mendicott »

mbostleman wrote: post #178

Around 2006 - 2008 I was playing around with SecondLife and found the only thing that interested me there was coding objects with their LSL scripting language. I happened to fall in with a content creator (eg. a really good artist that could create cool looking things from the in world primitive object tools) that sold "campers" which were objects on which you could basically park your avatar in some kind of pose and…

FYI, I've cross-posted this to the Virtual Beings Facebook group, with backlink.

=> https://www.facebook.com/groups/virtualbeings/posts/14218620...

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

#264

Post by rgriggs »

Kaos-Industries wrote: post #261
rgriggs wrote: post #246

I built PDFEncrypt ( https://pdfencrypt.net ) a couple years ago based on a very simple need from a client: to encrypt PDF files via a native Windows app, for free, without needing to upload files to a sketchy website or buy expensive software. I have been amazed at the number of visitors (4000/mo), emails, downloads, and donations the project has received. I released it as open source software, and I'm now working o…

Do you make use of native PDF encryption features or something entirely separate?

Native PDF encryption. That way they can be opened by any PDF viewer.

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

#265

Post by dev_at »

Kaos-Industries wrote: post #257
dev_at wrote: 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?

I don't think so. The user can test the app for free as much as he/she wants. The user only has to pay if he/she wants to track from more than one website at a time. Also, all Google Play purchases are refundable within 48 hours (everyone might not be aware of this though).

The bad reviews usually come when people try to track from websites that are JavaScript heavy, where the app does not work so well. Maybe I should have been more precise; it works on most websites, not all.

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

#266

Post by sarora27 »

wnolens wrote: post #244
sarora27 wrote: post #154

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...

Love the name. Don't see any examples of what it looks like though.

Thanks for the compliment! The best example we usually share is our help center: https://help.kbee.app

Every article in our help center is a Google Doc in a folder within our Google Drive. We simply pointed Kbee to this folder and it rendered all of the content in a standalone, external wiki that our users can access.

Would love to get your feedback on it if you get a chance to check it out :)

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

#267

Post by sarora27 »

Kaos-Industries wrote: post #254
sarora27 wrote: post #154

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?

We started off by launching Kbee in 100s of different internet directories, communities, and subreddits (i found a list of "places to post your startup that listed all of these places). Our first set of users actually came from r/mysideproject.

From there, we tried our hand at a few failed experiments (Lifetime deal platforms...Avoid like the plague) and ultimately settled on optimizing for SEO as we realized most of our paying subscribers are finding us organically on Google. Decision makers for Kbee tend to range from single-person teams to government organizations so we think optimizing for SEO is the best way for us to continue attracting the right type of customer for Kbee.

Happy to share the list I mentioned above if you're interested!

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

#268

Post by throwaway238367 »

Jack000 wrote: post #82
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 ar…

> If there are literally no competitors, drop the idea immediately.

Just wanted to note that I make >50k/month, and this is the opposite of the approach that I've taken for about half my projects. I look for niches that I think will grow a lot, but which have no competition at the moment because the niche is so small. I build the site, SEO-optimise it, and then just leave it. I do this for lots of little niches that I think will grow, and about 1 in 5 take off. Some of my biggest sites didn't take off for years.

> No moat.

For my strategy building a moat is critical because I have way too many projects to keep on top of them and fight off competition that have a 1% better feature-set. The product should ideally get more useful "automatically" as it grows (e.g. user-contributed content, or something like that).

---

My general advice: Learn basics of SEO, look around at what people want, build niche tools/things to help them get what they want. Keep repeating that and you'll eventually hit upon an idea that gets really big. Keep it simple (and cheap!) - a bunch of my projects that serve thousands of users per day run on Glitch and Replit (yes, really). Try to stick to project ideas that don't require much ongoing maintenance. There are likely many other good strategies - this is just my approach.

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

#269

Post by xcubic »

justinlloyd wrote: post #214

Many moons ago, I built: A neural network that would recommend buy & sell signals on various stocks in a hand-picked index, that had an invite only daily newsletter called "Justin's Junkmail." I made some good money from putting one ad that I hand selected into each newsletter, at the footer. The entire thing ran almost on auto-pilot, other than me fussing over the wording of the auto-generated recommendations and wh…

So your neural nets were "simple ones" no deep learning or such shaninagans?

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

#270

Post by majani »

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.

I think what's more outrageous is that more devs don't find it worth to do a website yourself and get a 10x cost reduction on transaction fees
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