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Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

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Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#51

I run HTTP Toolkit ( https://httptoolkit.com ) which passed $2k a couple of years back. No longer a side project, as it's made enough money for me to work on it full time for a fair while now, but it certainly started that way, and it's still a one-man show (plus many wonderful open-source contributors). I suspect that'll be a common theme in answers here though: if you have a side project making $2k a month, in most…

Interesting project. Will definitely check it out next time I have to analyze the traffic from my phone.

I was just about to ask how do you differentiate your product from mitmproxy but on a quick google search I found this thread from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29627819

Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The advantage of getting older is time is at warp speed so 2 years is nothing ha ha! To be honest: Realising that time is going by so fast really scared me this week. Being mid-30s I really need to get my shit together, soon... :-D

Spoiler: nobody ever gets their shit together

but try anyway

Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#55
I run small outsourced IT systems for SMBs. Web scrapers, reporting, stuff like that. Baisically private bespoke SaaS.

About $10k/mo gross revenue and takes a few hours of work a week (unless there’s a downtime event that needs fixing). A lot of upfront work to build some of these systems though.

Got to $2k/mo in the first month of doing this. I don’t recommend working (as a solo operator) with clients who have budgets less than $5-10k/mo. Too much overhead for too little return in that case.

In what little spare time I have left after my day job and looking after two small kids, I put more automation in place to improve reliability for my clients and reduce my own ops time requirement.

I get leads for this by referral from people I’ve done good work for in the past. But it’s the kind of thing you could bootstrap by direct outbound sales, publishing authority-building content to the right business audience, going to conferences/trade shows, or building a referral network from other service provides.

Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#56
I run two side projects atm but they are both becoming more and more the main job.

I am building a Zillow for Europe [1]. The real estate market in Europe is a big mess and for the past 10 years not much has happend so far in proptech because it was easy to rent/sell properties. Now things are changing and I see a lot more supply coming on the platform. So far rented out 40 apartments doing around 3k in profit a month. We focus primarily on overseas/expats right now

Another project I started with a good friend from Google is Webtastic AI [2] it's a lead gen platform that indexes large amounts of data and I am using simple ML models to clean it up and make sense out of it. It does around 1.9k a month now but we just launched 2 weeks ago so that looks promising. Thanks to google cloud we got 100k credits which makes it a bit more feasible because the startup costs are extremely high.

[1] https://homestra.com/ [2] https://webtastic.ai/

Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#57

I run HTTP Toolkit ( https://httptoolkit.com ) which passed $2k a couple of years back. No longer a side project, as it's made enough money for me to work on it full time for a fair while now, but it certainly started that way, and it's still a one-man show (plus many wonderful open-source contributors). I suspect that'll be a common theme in answers here though: if you have a side project making $2k a month, in most…

I absolutely love how easy it was to capture requests through ADB with your tool, only solution i could find which just worked out of the box.

Does it work for apps with pinned certs?

Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#58

If you have iOS/Android development experience, you can look at the Developer sector, which is relatively niche IMO. I've developed the iOS/iPadOS app, Proxyman for iOS [0], which gains steadily ~2k recurring revenue every month. Basically, it's an iOS app that helps you to capture and decrypt HTTP/HTTPS traffic on your phone. The app is needed if you need to inspect traffic from your app. Because it's an iOS app, pu…

I use proxyman a lot, you did an amazing job, it's a super slick and well working app

Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The advantage of getting older is time is at warp speed so 2 years is nothing ha ha! To be honest: Realising that time is going by so fast really scared me this week. Being mid-30s I really need to get my shit together, soon... :-D

Spoiler: nobody ever gets their shit together

Not sure that really helps. :-D

Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#60
I made Cleavr as a desktop app first and gave it away for free. I got lots of downloads as well as lots of support requests. To keep support tickets away I put a small price tag on it. People still kept downloading and reaching out for support (not necessarily bugs but eben if they have their app issues). I then decided to go the path of a cloud SAAS app. The desktop app didn't hit $2k mostly be ause the price tag was small and I just wanted to do good and give it away. Once I went cloud, it took only about 4 months to hit $2k per month.

[1] https://cleavr.io

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