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

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121–130 of 219 posts

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

#121

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…

TIL you can make 10k a month on a solitaire app.

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

#122
I originally started putting ads on my blog after people started being an asshole about my articles on Hacker News, originally scoped to only readers from Hacker News. That combined with Patreon pays for all my hosting costs (even the CDN on fly.io and my random AWS infrastructure) and all the video games I play (about $280 US per month of income). It's gotten to the point where it's a tax burden, but I think it's worth it. I've never had a side project make an actual profit before and I'm excited to keep writing as a way to hone my skills and get experience with even more fun technology.

My recent post on embedding Rust into Go programs with WebAssembly (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33713717) made me about $20 of ad impressions on the day of its release, pretty impressive given how many of you people must run ad blockers!

It'd be cool to make my blog generate more income and eventually take over as my full time job, but I'm pretty happy with the fact that it's a side project that I can peck at when I want to. A lot of energy that would be spent doing various random Discord/IRC bots that go nowhere ends up being thrust into the blog instead. I also love being able to integrate various cursed things (like a Dhall script that takes my salary history data to spit out LaTeX for my resume: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/dhall/latex/resume.dhal...) and then write up how I did it and why. It makes coming up with ideas for the blog a lot easier!

I have plans to make a "Why I think WASI is cool" style post with interactive terminals that run WebAssembly programs in the browser, but I'm still trying to figure out how to graft xterm.js into my custom build setup with Deno. I have an untested but should theoretically work implementation here though in case anyone has any tips: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/src/frontend/wasiterm.t...

Filing my taxes is a huge pain now lol.

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

#123

I'm running DeltaRay / MesoSim, the advanced option backtesting service: https://portal.deltaray.io My decade long journey of trading: Beginning of my career at IBM I was doing processor and system simulations (Cell, PowerPC). We developed a simulation method there, which was published as: "Mesoscale Performance Simulations of MultiCore Processor Systems" Meanwhile in an other dimension my uncle tried his luck with t…

If it works, why not just use it yourself to earn $$$$ selling options?

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

#124

Can I just offer an alternative? What if we all pushed back and didn't accept low wages? It's been going on for far too long and just accepting it and starting side hustles is very defeatist.

In order to not accept terms of an agreement, you need a reasonable alternative. Being able to start your own business that makes money is a good alternative.

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

#125

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…

Have you ever thought about sharing revenue with the owner of the sites?

I asked on the guys that runs scrapping bee but he just ignored me.

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

#126
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more people have these ideas than they realize, but it’s the failure to act that holds them back. Just because there are competitors doesn’t mean there’s no room for you. Don’t look for reasons not to give it a shot. Don’t tell anyone about it. There’s a lot of psychology trickery going on when you share your idea with people. Either they shit on the idea and you lose incentive to work on it, or the praise yo…

Yes, I would like to stress out that it's VERY likely that there are competitors. I believe nearly everything has been already created, and the idea of finding a niche market doesn't necessarily mean to innovate and do something nobody ever ever did, but it's more about offering another perspective of it -> simplification? Modern UI? Same business problem but different solution? We're almost 8 billion people. If even…

Even Amazon had competitors when it started. Although it was the first online bookstore, they were competing with physical bookstores. Same for Google, Netflix, and Facebook.

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

#127

I currently make 100% of my family's income from side projects that expanded into full time gigs. A lot of people will answer "solve a real-world problem and alleviate your customers' pain points", but I've seen so many people interpret this in the most bizarre ways possible, go down ridiculously dumb paths and fall flat on their arse. To be brutally honest, if you're asking how to find a product idea on HN, I don't…

I think more people have these ideas than they realize, but it’s the failure to act that holds them back. Just because there are competitors doesn’t mean there’s no room for you. Don’t look for reasons not to give it a shot. Don’t tell anyone about it. There’s a lot of psychology trickery going on when you share your idea with people. Either they shit on the idea and you lose incentive to work on it, or the praise yo…

If you don't tell anyone about your idea, how will you get customers?

Tell everyone about your idea. But you have to silo people's feedback. Do they have enough knowledge to actually tell you if the idea is good or bad? Are they a potential customer? If they are a potential customer and they like it, are they willing to pay for it? If they are a potential customer and don't like it, why not? What would need to change about it for them to pay for it?

Build stuff for the people who will pay you for it and then you'll have a side hustle.

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

#128

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…

Can you clarify how it makes 10k/mo? I don't see anywhere on the site where a person could donate/buy something, and I don't see ads. Your download also seems free. How does it actually generate any cash for you?

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

#129

I'm running DeltaRay / MesoSim, the advanced option backtesting service: https://portal.deltaray.io My decade long journey of trading: Beginning of my career at IBM I was doing processor and system simulations (Cell, PowerPC). We developed a simulation method there, which was published as: "Mesoscale Performance Simulations of MultiCore Processor Systems" Meanwhile in an other dimension my uncle tried his luck with t…

If it works, why not just use it yourself to earn $$$$ selling options?

This is just a backtesting tool enables users to experminet with various strategies. I'm using it actively so do others (retail and small hedge-funds).

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

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more people have these ideas than they realize, but it’s the failure to act that holds them back. Just because there are competitors doesn’t mean there’s no room for you. Don’t look for reasons not to give it a shot. Don’t tell anyone about it. There’s a lot of psychology trickery going on when you share your idea with people. Either they shit on the idea and you lose incentive to work on it, or the praise yo…

I can’t agree more with the tip to never tell anyone your plans. That dopamine rush you get by discussing ideas with others quite literally is enough to never actually start anything.

Some bars and restaurants make most of their income off such conversations
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