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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?

#201

Post by [deleted] »

jlokier wrote: post #200
4pkjai wrote: post #63

I make about $7000 a month with a web app that extracts transaction data from PDF bank statements. I built it because my bank only provides PDF statements and I wanted to analyse my spending over the last few years. I wrote some Kotlin code to work with the PDFs, found it incredibly difficult to implement so I figured other people would have this problem and turned it into a web app.

Wow, I've been doing this for nearly 10 years with multiple banks and auto-mergjng the output into my accounts, as well as to update memberships of an organisation using membership fee transactions from those files. It never occurred to me to think of offering it to others through a front end, or that there's a side income's worth of interest in that kind of bank PDF scraping. A fun thing I discovered doing this was…

[deleted]

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

#202

Post by simne »

Just do it.

This is most popular mistake of people, to think about business, or to discuss it, instead of do.

Because idea is nothing, but implementation is all. History know many fails with exceptionally good ideas, and much less number of successes, where idea was moderate, but with good implementation.

And "book" knowledge at beginning is Your enemy, because book written in past, but You will implement in future, when old knowledge could become obsolete. Later, You will find ways to use obsolete knowledge.

Best friend of business is real field business experience. Also good, to find right partner, who have business experience.

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

#203

Post by simne »

Overall, making business is simple, just make few things:

1. get some product (it is not really important, what is it, could be even garbage from attic, or old things);

2. make view, who could pay for it;

3. make simplest ad;

4. talk with people who react to Your ad, try to get more info and sell, don't forget to thank;

5. gather info, analyze info, and decide, what You could change to better and if this is interest and/or profitable enough to keep doing it;

6. return to step 1.

Additionally, You could read books, talk with other business owners, learn at courses, etc, but these all are secondary.

Primary for success is doing business , gather info, analyze info, and make decisions based on real life field info.

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

#204

Post by lcedp »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #151

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.

That's an interesting observation. Did it work for you?

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

#205

Post by 4pkjai »

existencebox wrote: post #141
4pkjai wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started off by buying Google Ads, but I lost money running them. Eventually I stopped running the ads and focused on writing blog posts. Also I think the domain sort of helps. I wrote a bit more about the start here: https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-02-25-zer...

Question for ya if you don't mind: I had to do some PDF scraping a while back as part of a side project collecting alternative social/economic datasources. Even within a single site, there were often errors at the fringes, especially if things like layout/styling changed, and my concern about giving bad data to users (or needing to constantly be checking data quality and adjusting custom parameters for each target si…

Oh yes I ran into this issue many many times. The way I dealt with it is a bit insane. I classify bank statements using images or text on the first page. Then I run custom code for that document type.

I also have a "pretty good" fallback algorithm if the statement cannot be classified.

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

#206

Post by 4pkjai »

jlokier wrote: post #200
4pkjai wrote: post #63

I make about $7000 a month with a web app that extracts transaction data from PDF bank statements. I built it because my bank only provides PDF statements and I wanted to analyse my spending over the last few years. I wrote some Kotlin code to work with the PDFs, found it incredibly difficult to implement so I figured other people would have this problem and turned it into a web app.

Wow, I've been doing this for nearly 10 years with multiple banks and auto-mergjng the output into my accounts, as well as to update memberships of an organisation using membership fee transactions from those files. It never occurred to me to think of offering it to others through a front end, or that there's a side income's worth of interest in that kind of bank PDF scraping. A fun thing I discovered doing this was…

Yeah I've seen some weird stuff from banks. Regions Bank seem to scramble their credit card statements so that text can't be copied.

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

#207

Post by 4pkjai »

drumdaze1 wrote: post #197
4pkjai wrote: post #63

I make about $7000 a month with a web app that extracts transaction data from PDF bank statements. I built it because my bank only provides PDF statements and I wanted to analyse my spending over the last few years. I wrote some Kotlin code to work with the PDFs, found it incredibly difficult to implement so I figured other people would have this problem and turned it into a web app.

Do you have a way of selling this as a service? PDF interpretation is notoriously difficult in a number of industries.

Not sure what you mean by as a service.

Currently it's a web app and I also provide a JSON API. Some details here: https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-07-13-jso...

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

#208

Post by 4pkjai »

shyn3 wrote: post #198
existencebox wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question for ya if you don't mind: I had to do some PDF scraping a while back as part of a side project collecting alternative social/economic datasources. Even within a single site, there were often errors at the fringes, especially if things like layout/styling changed, and my concern about giving bad data to users (or needing to constantly be checking data quality and adjusting custom parameters for each target si…

Usually banks have a template so the edge cases aren't so edgy. Had to do this with Canadian banks and each one had their own template, but once you parsed it, generally, it worked until they updated their template again.

True, Canadian banks are quite nice to work with. US, Indian and South African banks are hell!

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

#209

Post by p0d »

I solved a problem in my workplace. As in, people were bookings rooms using a book. So I made a booking system.

Have a think about problems people are solving with spreadsheets. This may give you some ideas.

Also consider integrations. For example, I have another product which exports timetable data from spreadsheets to Google Calendar. Why are people putting timetable data in spreadsheets? That's not the problem I am getting paid to solve :-)

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

#210

Post by egorfine »

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…

Awesome! I absolutely like the way videos move.

How did you market this app?

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