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Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

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Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

#152
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mexicos overall internet presence is literally stuck in the early 2000s. Most business' official website are a Facebook page. In a country of 150M people and growing expat presence, there is a TON of opportunities for software businesses to enter the market. For example: Riviera Maya has no MLS style real estate tracker/listing platform. The entire real estate industry operates on word of mouth, WhatsApp and Facebook…

I keep running into this in the US in large cities. Really well regarded restaurants or music venues do everything through FB and insta. I don't have either of those apps, and I don't remember my passwords from a decade ago. Isn't there a service somewhere, where you give someone some pictures of your food, and restaurant, and you get a container and credentials for a webpage that handles reservations, takes pickup o…

Because Facebook is simple. Any one can update it, and it doesn't go down, and it doesn't cost anything.

I've many times seen web presences fail for small organizations, when the only person that understands the web set up leaves. With Facebook, that doesn't happen.

I'm sure there are services such as you describe, and probably many restaurants use them, and it's not obvious. But Facebook is the default.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

#153
Twitter Archive Eraser (https://delete.tweets.app) makes ~3K USD per month.

I don't do any active work on it any longer for the past 2 years or so, other than the small bug fixes/when Twitter changes the archive format. Bracing for a shutdown to the API soon anyway.

Past submissions on how it used to bring in $7k per month and a few technical details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439606 (June 2020), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29998723 (Jan 2022).

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

#154
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely my favorite fun fact. I'm grow up in the city but I spent a few summer days on a horse growing up. One of my earliest memories was horseback riding with my mom. I must have been no older than 18 months.

Note that you can also use the ranch business cards as 'get out of jail cards' to avoid social chatter when you need to change the subject: You note that the in-law starts taking the discussion towards some uncomfortable topic during thanksgiving dinner. You immediately use the card: "Say, have I given you my business card?" - and then you move on to talk about the ranch. Even if they interrupt you and try to get bac…

> get out of jail cards' to avoid social chatter

Great tip in general!

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

#155
post #7

I had 3 sources of side income last year. 1/ Started a niche dating app in 2017. Revenue ranges form 700-1,100/mo. Hosting is about $50/mo. 2/ Bought a house and rent our spare rooms for $3,100/mo. 3/ Contracting projects for a small dev shop earned $3-10k/mo (depending on how many hours I worked).

What is your niche dating app?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

#156

https://FreeSolitaire.win brings around $500/mo (advertising revenue). I started making this PWA in 2016 and I’ve been slowly adding to it over time. I intend it to stay minimal & lightweight. No framework, etc. Fun fact: because it is so lightweight, it was included in the Moya app ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nu.bi.moya ), a popular messaging app in South Africa that is “data-free” for users (it…

Cool that the ads are at the end of the game. Do you get people to donate as well? How did you start getting traffic to your game and how is it getting traffic nowadays? Apart from the South African app.

Yeah I don’t want the ads to be intrusive. I don’t get many donations, no. In my experience, people will donate for a tool deemed useful (for business, etc.) but not much to something recreative.

As for traffic: word of mouth, mainly. Posted it on Reddit back then, things like that. It grew organically from that. Also, although it’s far from being on top results on SERP (search engine result pages), some people do find it that way.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

#157
post #145

My tiny game has been bringing in at least $5k a month since I released on mobile, it's fully passive now. https://j4nw.com/pawnbarian I feel doubly blessed that it worked out with no ads or micropayment sinks of any sort, just a demo and a single $5 purchase.

What stack / engine did you use to develop it?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

#158
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends on how the work is produced for celebrities. If it’s a mass produced product and not one off artisan creations, OP might run into problems

They look to be making several of each person.

I imagine nobody is going to bother with them until it reaches a certain scale.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

#159
I'm making https://simplescraper.io - a no-code web scraping tool.

Saved up, quit my job and went all in...on a todo app. Needless to say that idea didn't go far, but it taught me how to code.

When I was close to broke I pivoted to this product and finally gained traction and now it's doing well enough to be my main source of income.

I'm kind of following the "1000 true fans" ethos that pops up here occasionally. There's a dedicated group of customers who benefit from the ease and speed of the tool and they're like my product team.

I check in with them often, make sure they're happy and build features for them. Turns out, what they value other people value too, and so the product slowly but surely grows.

Learning to code was definitely one of the best decisions I've made. Felt like gaining wings.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

#160

https://sre.rs - DevOps course (Udemy) for smaller teams and individuals

Nice and you have some interesting packages I have not touched. I just bought the course to help out :-) and lets see if I can run it on my Raspberry PI here cluster at home I recently built up.
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