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

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

#131

Post by pie6k »

I created https://screen.studio and it made 30k in first month after releasing it.

It allows you to create beautiful screen recordings in minutes.

Idea: my own pain both individually and when working with team. When you create any kind of app you often need some video of it, either for promo, landing, social media posts, tutorials, etc.

It was always taking way too long and was quickly getting outdated as app UI changes quickly.

Then I have seen stripe profile on Twitter and their promo videos and thought "how much of this video could be done automatically basing only on mouse movement and clicks info" and boom.

As a good entrepreneur I started by getting a domain of course. I got a really good one - screen.studio so I had to instantly start working on MVP

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

#133

Post by mateuszbuda »

is_true wrote: post #125
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…

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.

Interesting point. As far as I know, it's not that easy. We have a client who contacted the owners of the website he needs to scrape and offered to pay them for access to their data but they were not interested. I know that they are not their competitor and they're not doing anything that would harm their revenue in any way. I assume that they figured it was not worth the legal, organisational and other formal hassle to share their data.

Let's say that we want to pursue this idea anyway. We would have to reach our to every website owner that our clients scrape and figure out how to share the revenue. You cannot just transfer your money to another company. You need to sign a contract and in many cases have it approved by legal and compliance teams.

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

#134

Post by makeee »

I built something that I wanted and knew I would have paid for: https://divjoy.com ($5-10k/month)

If I was looking for a side hustle now I'd 100% be playing with GPT-3/ChatGPT and building small tools. There's a good chance your first few experiments won't catch on, but that you'll end up being in the right place at the right time, see an opportunity, and already have the code/knowledge to get an MVP out quickly.

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

#135

Post by ilyailford »

I run Maker Stations (https://makerstations.io) — the newsletter about workspace tours from creators and makers. Launched in 2021. We’re currently at about 12k monthly sessions and $200 MRR (not much, I know).

I love WFH and having my own private space where I can concentrate. Offices are fun in their way, but I always struggled to focus in a noisy, open environment.

Ironically, I’d normally listen to white noise while WFH, because I can control the volume!

That (and a famous virus thing that made us stuck at our homes) prompted me to look for some desk inspiration.

I had a blast browsing home office setups on Reddit, but... I always wanted to learn more about the makers behind them. Pictures weren't enough.

That’s how I came up with this idea.

Oh, and our design takes its inspiration from early 1990s computer magazines — with their adorable naivety, optimism, warmth, and energy.

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

#136

Post by is_true »

mateuszbuda wrote: post #133
is_true wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting point. As far as I know, it's not that easy. We have a client who contacted the owners of the website he needs to scrape and offered to pay them for access to their data but they were not interested. I know that they are not their competitor and they're not doing anything that would harm their revenue in any way. I assume that they figured it was not worth the legal, organisational and other formal hassle…

It's an interesting problem if you solve it you can probably avoid getting sued to bankruptcy

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

#137

Post by sramam »

koch wrote: post #11

From a 10 year old show hn post[0]. I wanted to make my own but ended up making a timeline maker and have kept working on it since (markwhen.com) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6833565

https://markwhen.com/ is really well done! Adding a link, to make it easier to find.

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

#138

Post by makeee »

pie6k wrote: post #131

I created https://screen.studio and it made 30k in first month after releasing it. It allows you to create beautiful screen recordings in minutes. Idea: my own pain both individually and when working with team. When you create any kind of app you often need some video of it, either for promo, landing, social media posts, tutorials, etc. It was always taking way too long and was quickly getting outdated as app UI chan…

Brilliant! I spent so long looking for a screen recording app that could simply follow the mouse and zoom automatically. Thought of building this myself. Good job executing on it so well. Will probably be a customer soon :)

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

#139

Post by tluyben2 »

jmduke wrote: post #6

I run Buttondown ( http://buttondown.email/ ) full-time now, but did so as a side project from 2017 to earlier this year. My strategy was fairly simple: I wanted to create a better version of a tool (in this case, Tinyletter) that: 1. I already used whose quality I thought was extremely poor, 2. I did not think the creators were incentivized to make improvements; 3. I could think of a sub-niche that I was well-equipp…

I discovered your service a few days ago; very well done!!!

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

#140

Post by mk89 »

nowherebeen wrote: post #126
mk89 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, but for some reason, maybe just "luck" (in the sense of "fortune"), I was always surrounded by people who google your idea and say "look at this, xyz is also doing it" which can be extremely demotivating.
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