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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

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Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

#81

Post by camgas »

nextaccountic wrote: post #8
camgas wrote: post #4

Running a service to manage remotely old phone-based intercoms (e.g DoorKing) without the need to change any hardware. We got some property managers in San Francisco and one locksmith reseller as customers. https://www.DropBy.io

That's a side project? The site looks very professional, congrats Anyway a bug report: https://dropby.io/privacy-policy/ is showing some CSS as text in the beginning and the end of the page

Thank you Will fix!

I’m still doing it on the side, but I did get some help from others over the years. Mainly some friends put some $ and got 2 other great partners helping me also on the side. One is in the property management business which is very helpful. He came first as a customer.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

#82

Post by camgas »

fanick wrote: post #15
camgas wrote: post #4

Running a service to manage remotely old phone-based intercoms (e.g DoorKing) without the need to change any hardware. We got some property managers in San Francisco and one locksmith reseller as customers. https://www.DropBy.io

Can you elaborate how there is no need for hardware changes? Are you connecting through the earpiece somehow? Some time ago I hacked our flat intercom. I needed to have a text message delivered when the intercom rang (we use it to open door to the building), I had to tap to it with an arduino.

Cool. Always great to hear what people tried to do with these intercoms. I played with Arduino myself a lot for similar reasons. Thanks for sharing.

It’s simple actually. We program all the units to call our cloud phone numbers. These numbers are shared among all US customers, so service is cheap to run. Also we got a patent in how we process these calls.

We then process, record, forward, these calls to their destinations. And also we send text message updates for certain events.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

#83

Post by camgas »

anonymous344 wrote: post #55
camgas wrote: post #4

Running a service to manage remotely old phone-based intercoms (e.g DoorKing) without the need to change any hardware. We got some property managers in San Francisco and one locksmith reseller as customers. https://www.DropBy.io

How does it work without internet? "zero hardware upgrades, or internet required." And for the tip, please make a better presentation video what the product and benefits are, with a voice over. You can get one from freelancer sites as low as 20$

Great suggestion about the video, thank you!

I described it above for previous comment but basically we program all the units to call our phone numbers. And then we process these calls in the cloud, record, forward, log, etc.. interface between intercom and us is phone line.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

#84

Post by camgas »

r0b05 wrote: post #43
camgas wrote: post #4

Running a service to manage remotely old phone-based intercoms (e.g DoorKing) without the need to change any hardware. We got some property managers in San Francisco and one locksmith reseller as customers. https://www.DropBy.io

Site looks very well done.

Thank you!

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

#85

Post by avinoth »

abass wrote: post #69
avinoth wrote: post #29

Running https://rosterbird.com on the side for 2 years now. It's oscillating between $800-$900 mrr for the past 3 months. I originally wanted it to be a passive income project but it has grown in scope before I even realized. Building and maintaining a B2B SaaS on the side is pretty draining. There's always more features, support requests, etc. Wouldn't recommend unless it takes off immediately or it is within a nice…

Well done on getting things to where you got them, it's tough to get anywhere around $1k/MRR! Some feedback: Your homepage is focused on all the features of what the software does. I'm super technical and someone that signs up for SaaS all the time (plus angel invests in B2B SaaS companies), and I can't quite understand what you're software really does based on the site copy. Speak more to the pain-points. I'm someon…

Thank you for the feedback, it is excellent. This homepage was done by me last month and you are correct. It speaks more of the offerings than exactly what it does or how it works. I'll get on it today.

As to what it does, It's basically a Rostering app for Slack teams to automate turn rotation and assign for who has to perform tasks when.

Users can setup their roster by selecting the interval (Daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly), notification time and select the squad members. RosterBird will automatically assign members per the configuration (factor in off days, absences, etc) and notify the assignee on their turn.

I'm working on additional features that allows the team members to book their convenient slots themselves instead of auto-assigning, that should give a different angle to the app and increase the potential usage, hopefully.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

#86

Post by avinoth »

em1sar wrote: post #71
avinoth wrote: post #29

Running https://rosterbird.com on the side for 2 years now. It's oscillating between $800-$900 mrr for the past 3 months. I originally wanted it to be a passive income project but it has grown in scope before I even realized. Building and maintaining a B2B SaaS on the side is pretty draining. There's always more features, support requests, etc. Wouldn't recommend unless it takes off immediately or it is within a nice…

I want to come up with such an idea and do the same but I always think "wow my idea is amazing" but then after a few days I realize that it's not really what the market needs. Do you have any tips on how to improve this ideation process?

Io be honest, i'm not much of an expert on this either. I've built several projects and have abandoned midway.

I put down all of my ideas with a title and 2 lines of description on evernote whenever it strikes (mostly when seeing a problem, there could be other solutions that exists for this problem at this point).

And whenever in an unrelated instance I encounter a variation of the problem again, which if I believe could've been solved by that idea that I had, I give it a serious thought into researching for solutions and if none exists, I get to build.

I wouldn't call this an ideal process, it just works for me. The bad side-effect I have come to realise from this process is, I build products for which there doesn't exist a solution, which means either the market isn't there or isn't big enough.

The previous project was the same situation (fileql.com, ended up selling it) and now RosterBird. They stay small for relatively long time as you also have to convince users that they have a problem in the first place.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

#87

Post by avinoth »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #59
avinoth wrote: post #29

Running https://rosterbird.com on the side for 2 years now. It's oscillating between $800-$900 mrr for the past 3 months. I originally wanted it to be a passive income project but it has grown in scope before I even realized. Building and maintaining a B2B SaaS on the side is pretty draining. There's always more features, support requests, etc. Wouldn't recommend unless it takes off immediately or it is within a nice…

I am not an expert by a long shot. My thoughts are the price is low. Maybe up the price and make $900 from fewer customers and therefore less support work.

I've just changed into the per-user pricing (From fixed rate) to give better flexibility for organizations of all sizes. Would look into the pricing again in 6 months based on how it performs for now.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

#88

Post by quickthrower2 »

avinoth wrote: post #87
quickthrower2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not an expert by a long shot. My thoughts are the price is low. Maybe up the price and make $900 from fewer customers and therefore less support work.

I've just changed into the per-user pricing (From fixed rate) to give better flexibility for organizations of all sizes. Would look into the pricing again in 6 months based on how it performs for now.

Nice. If you don't mind me asking, how do you get customers? Do they find you via the Slack store? Or do you go out selling this? Or do you get people find you via search? Or ads?

I am always tempted to make a slack app. Not this particular idea, likely something else.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

#89

Post by avinoth »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #88
avinoth wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just changed into the per-user pricing (From fixed rate) to give better flexibility for organizations of all sizes. Would look into the pricing again in 6 months based on how it performs for now.

Nice. If you don't mind me asking, how do you get customers? Do they find you via the Slack store? Or do you go out selling this? Or do you get people find you via search? Or ads? I am always tempted to make a slack app. Not this particular idea, likely something else.

I don't mind. It's mostly via Slack app directory, sometimes I get through my links. I specifically wanted to build an idea in a marketplace to solve the discovery problem (as I suck at outbound marketing or any marketing in general).

If you're looking to build in any marketplace, shopify is more strealimed as majority of the shopify's users spends on the apps (and the billing and stuff is integrated) compared to any other marketplace.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

#90

Post by mxstbr »

em1sar wrote: post #72
mxstbr wrote: post #34

I make https://bedrock.mxstbr.com , selling a full-stack Next.js & GraphQL boilerplate for building SaaS products, which comes with: * A complete TypeScript toolchain with end-to-end typesafety from the database to the client * User authentication * Subscription payments * Teams * Invitations It's also completely unstyled, which is somewhat unusual in this space. I've found that most of the time, people would just de…

Hi, big fan of Rebass, Theme UI..although sometimes Theme UI with Next.js doesn't work right out of the box, are you still the maintainer of these libraries? And how did you get the word out for your boilerplate product, just on Twitter? Do you have any tips on how to find a niche where a good, well maintained boilerplate is missing and how to make it profitable? Thanks

Thanks for the nice words! I stopped maintaining ThemeUI when I left Gatsby in 2021.

In terms of getting the word out, it's really all based on my personal audience. I haven't found a repeatable marketing channel outside of just… tweeting about it, which is also visible in declining sales as I saturate that channel.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

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