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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?

#261

Post by anddt »

parrot987 wrote: post #244

I built prop_odds [1]. It's an API offering live (and historical) sports betting odds from different sites. I've been working on it for about 2 months. While not quite at 2k/month yet, it's nearly there and progressing in that direction. Revenue is coming from several customers who are using the data to build Discord bots that alert them (and their own paying users) about good odds, arbitrage opportunities, etc. [1]…

I guess you scrape odds from bookmakers' websites (I expecxt a fair bit of headless Selenium). Is there any legal implication of scraping data this way and reselling re-packaged as an API?

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

#262

Post by nghiatran_uit »

ffitch wrote: post #178
nghiatran_uit wrote: post #48

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…

Proxyman (desktop) is a terrifyingly polished app, kudos! Really curious, how does the revenue from macOS and iOS compare?

Thanks for the shoutout. I would not disclose the macOS revenue. We used to publish it as a #buildinpulic movement, but not anymore.

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

#263

Post by agotterer »

biztos wrote: post #228
agotterer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost per plate is negotiated with the restaurant ahead of time. We collect all of the money at time of RSVP which includes our margin. We then pay the restaurant and keep our fee.

How do you deal with drinks? As a customer I'd probably want to run a tab at the restaurant for whatever I drink (assuming they're alcohol-friendly) but as an organizer I'd probably want an upfront corkage fee I could take a reliable cut of.

Most meals include at least one alcoholic drink as well as soft drinks. Anything not included can be purchased a la carte and paid directly to the restaurant. A couple of dinners have been BYOB if the venue doesn't have a license and there's no fees for that.

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

#264

Post by cleverfoo »

GordonS wrote: post #221
cleverfoo wrote: post #105

I built Scanii [1], an unsafe/malware content detection API/SaaS, as a way to keep my coding skills sharp as I moved into engineering leadership roles. Over the years it has grown into a lovely $35k/month business while spending $0 in marketing thanks to our amazing customers. My advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: get it out there quick, listen to your customers and be ready to act on their feedback. Finding product/m…

Impressive! What do you think it is that you do that allows you to compete with VirusTotal, and even free tools like Jotti? Presumably you're now using commercial AV tools, rather than Clam? Did you have to get some kind of special license from them to use it like this?

> Impressive! What do you think it is that you do that allows you to compete with VirusTotal, and even free tools like Jotti?

Thanks and good question. We don't really compete with virus total since it's more of a research tool and, for a while, their terms explicitly prohibited commercial use (but I think that has changed). Jotti is a similar thing, more of a research tool than a high performance API you can use to build commercial products on.

> Presumably you're now using commercial AV tools, rather than Clam? Did you have to get some kind of special license from them to use it like this?

Yeah the product has expended a bunch over the years and we use multiple detection engines [2] to catch all kinds of unsafe content. But you are right, we do license a commercial AV engine to act as a backup to our own to ensure best possible detection rates. The licensing process warrants a blog post of its own since it's not what I would call easy.

[2] https://docs.scanii.com/article/149-how-do-the-different-det...

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

#265

Post by kouteiheika »

thangngoc89 wrote: post #198
kouteiheika wrote: post #20

I run a site for people learning Japanese ( https://jpdb.io ) as a side project. I'm currently at exactly ~$1996/month from Patreon donations. (It's not an aggressively monetized project.) I've been doing this for over 2 years now. You can take a look at my changelog to see most of the updates (at the beginning I did not maintain a changelog so it doesn't start exactly when I started the site): https://jpdb.io/change…

Do you have any plans providing a Mandarin version of this?

Maybe someday, but not at this point.

I'd love to support other languages too, but at this point it isn't very feasible. I'm just a single man, and this is just a side project, so I simply don't have the resources to even do everything that I want to do with Japanese (and there's still so much more I want to add/improve!), never mind branching out into other languages.

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

#266

Post by nghiatran_uit »

olabyne wrote: post #115
nghiatran_uit wrote: post #48

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…

Does it work with DNS-over-https queries from Apple ? I tried to grab the Airtag position from my Ipad with MITM Proxy running on a computer, but because it is DNS based some http packets from Apple wouldn't be visible

I've never tried it. Maybe you should give it a try. If it doesn't work, please create a ticket at https://github.com/ProxymanApp/Proxyman/issues

I'm happy to support you.

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

#267

Post by artosispylon »

agotterer wrote: post #21

A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business. So far we’ve hosted 12 din…

Where do you host it? At the restaurant itself or at your own venue?

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

#268

Post by pimterry »

ericb wrote: post #210
pimterry wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really! To be honest it's a bit of a hassle and I don't have good tooling or a proper setup. I write a little script, then just record myself manually clicking through it (which is boring, and takes a bunch of tries to do smoothly) and then load it into iMovie and trim it down and speed up any awkward slow bits. It's not a perfect solution at all, but it does the job and I only update it once a year or so. In a p…

So first off, your gif looks great! I like your sizing and resolution--that's one of the things I was worried about. Video recording is new to me, so I'd love to know what you record with and resolution settings to pick? I stumbled on this nice blog post on automating these recordings. Maybe a partial solution? https://martinheinz.dev/blog/94 I was thinking of doing a manual process like yours for a start rather than…

> I'd love to know what you record with and resolution settings to pick?

It's an _extremely_ simple setup. Actual recording is done with Mac's built-in screenshot tool: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208721. It's recorded at an arbitrary window size I eyeballed the first time, that now I probably have to stick to forever (because if they're all the same size, I can reuse parts to avoid re-recording unnecessarily).

All of this is suboptimal (using 1080p would have helped, for starters, since lots of tools work better with standard resolutions) but it doesn't really matter, it just annoys me mildly one day a year and that's it.

IMO: if you're at the start, unless you have a super unique situation, I wouldn't look at automating videos or perfecting the recording setup at all - just ship something barely acceptable and see if it works, and then focus on pain points that actually turn out to be blockers later. Getting a core product into real people's hands and getting real feedback ASAP is more valuable than tweaking the video resolution or anything similar!

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

#270

Post by lylejantzi3rd »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #206
darthcloud wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's really important to make it clear that the contribution is for what is currently there. I get often ask "Will $$$ make you work on that issues" and I always answer no. What will help fix that issue is my wife going shopping with the kids long enough for me to figure what is wrong. ;)

So the obvious answer is to take the $$$, give it to your wife, and ask her to take the kids shopping with her :-)

Creative workarounds like this is why I love hacker news. :)
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