Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 219 posts

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#111

Post by fy20 »

jaclaz wrote: post #24
dewey wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you are saying and I felt the same way. I think as a tech person you always undervalue your products as you see it as “something I could build in a weekend”, which is very different to how other people see it. There’s many Twitter tools in the same price range and the feedback from people I got is that they are happy to pay that.

I don't know, I don't even have (never had) a Twitter account, so I completely fail to see any particular utility in the whole stuff (I mean Twitter), but since everyone went on the barricades against the 7.99, no wait 11 if via Apple ;), blue mark/whatever recent idea I figured that Twitter users were philosophically against a paid for subscription.

I actually ran a similar service maybe 10 years ago, as I wanted a way to find links I had tweeted. It just presented a web page of the links you have mentioned, it didn't send a newsletter.

Anyway my point is I also have a hard time (even now) believing people would pay for such a thing... Which is probably why none of my side projects have turned into a successful business ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#112

Post by _-----_ »

I was frustrated with the startup I was working with. The founders didn't agree with my focus/idea for their product, so I made it myself after work.

I have been working on the same product for over 7 years full-time. All of our income comes from it.

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#114

Post by 0x202020 »

Two different streams that have built up over time. I spend less than 10 hours combined weekly on them averaged over a month if i had to guess but both were independent full time jobs at one point

1) ($$m total, $$k/mo now) Server hosting! This started off as hosting game servers for friends in early high school. It expanded to friends of friends for awhile before I pivoted more towards crypto mining (yes I know, young kid with dubious ambitions). Lots of my first software experience was here. I wrote some software for switching the processes between mining/game hosting across the different boxes (raw processes on servers, the horror). Nowadays it’s winding down as just game hosting and some scientific computing rental to a few universities/their robotics clubs. It’s still slightly profitable but I have no interest in updating servers (CPUs from 2013-2015, GPUs mostly re-sold except for what a few people requested) and it runs everything via containers now.

2) ($$k/mo) Sports film review. I wrote the first version of this my first year of college which was a way to keep the stats book for basketball and football games and stitch the actions with the video footage. We had customers throughout ~20 states primarily high school but some colleges as well. In fact it still runs at a lot of them, but I’m not really connected with managing of it anymore. My co-founder still runs it and we rotate a few students from our alma-matter in as interns and occasionally juniors on it.

This became the basis for an esports version of the software that I created a few years ago. This time with CV to do all the gathering of stats and allowing for jumping around in videos and analyzing overall stats from the output. This started in Call of Duty for their then new professional league but expanded out to Halo, Rocket League and Valorant since. I still do some occasional retraining of the models but the product itself got acqui-hired by a larger company for which I still “consult”

EDIT: I’ve also had many more that cost me more money than they ever made, but I’m a big proponent of failing fast and iterating

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#115

Post by mateuszbuda »

emadda wrote: post #69
mateuszbuda wrote: post #41

A web scraping API: https://scrapingfish.com We started with a simple web scraping solution for real estate market that was up and running in just a couple of days. We used it to track prices of apartments in our area aggregated across multiple websites. Then, as we saw value in this, we expanded data scraping to other cities and types of properties and released the product to external users. We had a few paying cust…

This looks cool. When you say "4G proxies", are these devices that route their traffic over 4G connections via the mobile network? So you are using the IP ranges of telecommunications companies rather than clouds? Also, how do you protect against customers doing illegal things with the IP's that are assigned to your business?

On our blog, we give away how to create a home-scale version of our 4G proxy: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scrap...

We have some domains blacklisted and periodically monitor logs for websites which our customers scrape but so far not a single case of illegal scraping.

We've also decided to go with a small $2 purchase instead of free trial account with no credit card required. If someone contacts us with their use case and request for a free test account, we're happy to create one for them but it has to go through us. This way we're not a good choice for people willing to do illegal stuff with our API.

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#116

Post by batterylow »

It started as a solution for myself, i.e. a tool of convenience.

I made it available for free as an endpoint, and then it gained enough popularity to frequently hug my server into submission. After speaking with a few users, it turns out they were happy to pay for it. So I made it a SaaS!

I've enjoyed growing it over time, and seeing how others use it.

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#117

Post by incompleteCode »

alin23 wrote: post #102

How Lunar ( https://lunar.fyi/ ) became a necessity: New job, more stuff to do, so I got myself a 4K LG Monitor to extend my small Macbook screen. I had set up my home office right on an interior balcony where I had lots of natural light. That meant that the monitor brightness and contrast needed to be constantly adjusted to have the screen visible in sunlight and to not blind me when the clouds/night came. If you ev…

Did not expect to see Lunar here. Thanks for creating it! :)

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#119

Post by 88stacks »

nathanbarry wrote: post #110

I started ConvertKit (email marketing for creators) as a side hustle in 2013. In 2011 I had started blogging about my process for building iOS apps. In 2012 that turned into an email list on MailChimp and then a self-published book called The App Design Handbook (launched right here on HN). I thought that social networks like Twitter and Facebook would drive most of the sales, but it was actually the 800 person email…

Nice job! Thanks for sharing that inspirational post!

Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

#120

Post by david422 »

holgersindbaek wrote: post #106

I've created an online solitaire platform ( https://online-solitaire.com/ ) that's earning me $10k/m now. It started as a side-project 5 years ago, but I've recently gone full time on it. It actually started as a Mac app 10 years ago and I choose to create a solitaire game because I had made a string of side-project that I didn't earn any money on, so I wanted to see if I could find a project that would actually gene…

Nice, that's a smart approach.
Post reply on HN