One of the biggest mistakes people make when thinking about making money with a side project is to think it has to be a revolutionary, game changing product to make money. Most people cannot fathom how much money is being spent online every minute (it's about $10.4M per minute just on ecommerce alone). You barely have to dip your pinky finger into that stream to make a living.
Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
151–160 of 219 posts
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#152I 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 It was always taking way too long and was quickly getting outdated as app UI chan…
This looks great. I'm currently working on some screencasts on technical topics. Is this suited for something like that? These are videos of 30-60 minutes length, a lot of time spent in terminal, editor, web pages. Or is this really meant more for product glamour shot type videos?
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#153YC has an excellent video on this that's out just recently (from SUS 2022): How to get and evaluate startup ideas[0] There are a lot of different ways to think about this -- but generally what seems to be the pattern is: - Get in a problem-finding mindset (generate value by solving problems). Problems are absolutely everywhere in society - Qualifying problems is more important than having them (is this a problem peop…
> https://unvalidatedideas.com/archive I like how you commercialize it. Those ads are so relevant I went through some posts just for them and found 2 podcasts I think I'll enjoy.
Thanks so much, this really makes my day!
You’re gonna love the ads in the next one — it’s one of the more relevant ones.
Also seeing that you liked the recommendation I’m going to start erring on putting more in there for podcasts and other resources, thanks for noting this
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#154No post body was provided.
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
This whole comment comes across as "you either got it, or you don't. it's something you're born with." Not sure if that was your intent but I just want to make it crystal clear that that's completely untrue. Building good businesses and identifying profitable ideas is a skill that can be learned. > Good business ideas jump out at you screaming Explaining this would be a good place to start. We shouldn't conflate our…
Honestly, with all skills there are people who naturally "get it" and those that naturally don't. Doesn't matter if it's programming, sports or entrepreneurship. The reason I left a discouraging comment is that, unlike the other examples, people in certain communities (including here!) have a weird tendency where they feel they must become a successful entrepreneur or they've failed in life. This is especially bad be…
Yes, this is true. Also, one hell of a lot of luck is needed. I know this goes against most peoples' grain, but it is true. For example, Bill Gates agreed with it. He said that his high-end schools had computers or computer time available for him. He was able to get together with other computer buffs. This would not have happened if he was in a school where this didn't exist, or he went to a school in South side of Chicago in the baddest part of town.
His father was a name partner in a law firm, so Gates got all his legal advice for free, probably including leasing his software rather than selling it, which had huge ramifications.
His mother was on the board of directors of United Way with IBM's CEO, and she hooked up Bill Gates with the CEO and Bill Gate's software was on IBM's PC.
IBM tried to get a PC operating system and went to Gary Kildall to get his version of DR-DOS, but there were disagreements and IBM said no. So they went to Microsoft, who went out and purchased an operating system for $25,000 as I remember ($93,502.72 in today's dollars) from another company and named it MS-DOS and they were able to strike a deal with IBM.
Gates probably had this 3 or 4 year window that he hit perfectly for having his software be able to become the top company. A few years later and it would be too late.
There is a lot of luck involved.
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#156This memory goes back almost thirty years. In 1993, most products still shipped on floppy disks, and costs were increasing as products grew in size. Shrinking a popular product by even one disk could save over a million dollars. Publishers were using data compression but the tools were of the same class that were intended for regular users. That is, compression and decompression required roughly similar compute resources. I noted a few things:
1. Software products would be compressed just once but decompressed millions of times.
2. It should be possible to create an asymmetric codec that expended tremendous resources on compression but still kept decompression light.
3. Publishers didn't care how much compute compression would require as long as it was still tractable and would save them money. If they had to buy an expensive computer and let it run overnight it would be fine.
I didn't know anything about compression at the time but the premise seemed strong. I took unpaid time off to tackle this problem and in a few months (after a lot of trial-and-error learning) I began to have a workable product.
Borland, Novell, and Microsoft (for the .CAB files) were the first licensees. The compressor was called Quantum and was typically 20-30% better than PkZip. My sales technique was to take a product, recompress it with Quantum, and show the company how much money they could save. (As I recall, I was able to demonstrate reducing Windows for Workgroups by two disks.)
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#157Can 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.
You’ll never out-wage bringing value to the market in terms of making money. I have no idea how side-hustles are “defeatist”, when almost no one has the privilege of just “not accepting” to make money in lieu of some wishful thinking to somehow strong-arm companies into giving more money to people.
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#158https://changedetection.io - identified a niche where there was only closed source solutions that were _extremely_ expensive for what it is, and all other opensource products seemed very 'under-cooked' and talked more about the technology (language, web framework etc) they used rather than the problem they solved. All other opensource solutions were also too hard to install and lacked features. Added many features th…
Nicely done. This is a commonly needed utility, obviously most relevantly in spaces where the purveyors of data aren't in the business of nor are they interested in making the data available or easily consumable. When I worked at a hedge fund doing research on various sectors, we had tons of data points we needed to monitor. Some of them were only available on government agency or company websites. Being able to detect when something changed, and quickly, was obviously really important for us. Anyways, good job commercializing this and doing it in a way that will feel palatable to customers.
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#159I'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…
Pleasant to see a fast website, that sadly does not happen a lot nowadays!
Re: Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?
#160I'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…
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