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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?

#381

Post by trapexit »

rlyshw wrote: post #124
trapexit wrote: post #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 budge…

I’ve thought about doing this, but a few reservations came up when I considered getting started with a family friend. I just pictured a contracted ”IT MANAGER” getting rabbit holed into some time-sink extreme; 1. Dedicated operational IT admin: Dealing with repetitive tasks+requests, like managing customer’s Microsoft environment and on-site infrastructure.. Owning physical and AD infra doesn’t sound like a part-time…

I don’t take on huge IT projects anymore, or ones that have potential to require lots of changes over time.

Used to do this as an agency principal and it involved a lot of time spent managing clients and projects and subcontractors. Drove myself crazy and took a couple years off after nearly burning out.

I look for projects where the software solves a single targeted business problem and can quickly get to “done”. Then the client is happy to pay for ongoing maintenance/ops, so any additional effort I put into the software is around reducing my ongoing workload.

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

#382

Post by rawoke083600 »

I have two: (it's 50% just ship something, 50% luck) but in my humble opinion few ppl are lucky enough to make it big with their first 5 or 10 projects. Just figure out how can you ship many things per year !

[0] fibretiger.co.za - Price comparison for fibre internet services in South Africa. It's an extremely fragmented market, we have about 10 fibre networks (10 that matters) and twice as many ISPs

[1] littlebigstats.com - Corrective Maintenance and Planned Maintenance for Restaurants or anything with assets and 10+ branches (KFC Kenya) is one our clients. You will be surprised how many org are trying todo PPM and CM with a whatsapp group and spreadsheet. We even implemented a version (you have to squint a little) of SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) methods so you just have to define the "rules and boundaries" for a good and efficient maintenance process. Example: any new tickets logged by branches should be assigned within 1 hour. Or no more than 20% of your corrective maintenance tickets can have a "AWAITING PARTS" status. etc.

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

#384

Post by atari800 »

I created a SaaS CRM/DMS for manufactured housing retailers ("mobile home" dealerships.) Monthly gross is about $4,000. Expenses other than my own time are $400 per month for the server. So about $3,600 a month net.

The MH industry contracted drastically after the 2008/2009 financial crisis, and the handful of dealership software companies still in the industry went under. So I basically have the market to myself right now. The total market is not very big, though - maybe 1,500 independent manufactured housing "street dealerships" in the USA at this point.

I have 15-ish paying customers right now. I'd love to be able to spend all my time on growing the business, but I've been too afraid to quit the other freelance dev work I do. Also, I unwisely took on a big contract that I haven't been able to finish in a timely manner, which is dragging me down. I wish I'd spent that time growing the MH SaaS instead.

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

#385

Post by yurishimo »

kouteiheika wrote: post #344
spacemannoslen wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share with us the main differentiator your product has over some behemoth like Google translate? I'm personally an occasional tourist to Japan only and wish I could find a course in "tourist essentials" or "Tourist fluent" Japanese

> Can you share with us the main differentiator your product has over some behemoth like Google translate? You might as well ask how a screwdriver is different from an apple. (: Google Translate, is, well, a translator. You give it text, and it translates it. That's it. My site's for people who want to actually learn Japanese to fluency, with a particular focus on media-based immersion. For example, is there a Japane…

This is wild for a side project?!?! I wish you had something like this for Dutch. I recently moved from America and something like this would be phenomenal. I can see why you have so many patron donations!

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

#386

Post by steve_adams_86 »

rubymamis wrote: post #126
havblue wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your opinions about QT? Do you use the open source version or the paid version? (I like it myself but mostly because I like their wysiwyg and the debugger support is intuitive relative to other ides)

Overall, I love Qt. I started studying QML 2 weeks ago to implement a Kanban view based on the underlined Markdown styled todo items in the text editor, and it's been really great so far. Property bindings, signals & slots, integration with C++, it all makes so much sense, much more than other declarative languages/frameworks (looking at you, React) imo. Qt has been around for years, the documentation is extensive an…

I was able to build things with Qt and Qt3D I wasn't sure would even be possible before starting (a very narrow-scoped robotics automation planner/simulator). It was remarkably easy to get moving with.

Ironically the first version was mocked in Unity, thinking the tooling and ecosystem would make the MVP easy to build. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't particularly easy either. The end result was extremely heavyweight and gave terrible performance. Qt on the other hand yielded fairly snappy and lightweight results, and the development experience wasn't bad at all.

I wonder why more people don't use it, but then, that's my only exposure. Maybe it's not so great for other things, and I suppose there's the whole matter of having to pay for certain tooling and support. Us developers are sometimes super-hesitant to pay for the tools we use, haha.

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

#387

Post by p3rls »

3dfan wrote: post #276
p3rls wrote: post #274

I built https://kpopping.com , a platform for international fans of Korean music. It's been six grueling years (what they say about b2c is completely true) but these days we bounce around from $3k-5k in monthly revenue. I estimate we have another two-three years before we are finished... +_+

Via ads?

Yep. We also have a subscription available https://kpopping.com/subscription/plus

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

#388

Post by klaaz0r »

mft_ wrote: post #348
klaaz0r wrote: post #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 mont…

> I am building a Zillow for Europe [1] As a European, I (at least) don't understand what this means - and therefore don't understand your offering, your USP? What does/will Homestra offer, and how will it be different from e.g. Immobilienscout?

Good question, it's for expats/digital nomads/overseas buyers. Europe is very segmented and every country has it's own real estate classified sites, these are great for internal market but lack a lot of the features to help a foreign buyer. If you are a German looking for something within Germany changes are you will not use the site for a long time (lets hope in 10 years it's a different story!)

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

#389

Post by lavrton »

I am building Polotno SDK (https://polotno.com/). It a mix of SaaS and paid javascript library and react components. It is a design editor that you can integrate into your web app. From the first paying customer it took around 1 year to get 2000 MRR. And I spent around 9 months on making first version before the first paying customer.

It took me a very long time to find the idea of SDK. Previously I was thinking only about B2C cases. B2C market is already VERY crowded with Canva and million of its competitors. But B2B market was almost empty when I started.

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

#390

Post by tultra »

klaaz0r wrote: post #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 mont…

That's super interesting! I actually started developing 'Zillow for Brazil' a couple of years ago for the same reason (Brazil realstate websites are a total mess - there's no option to show locations on a map!), but dropped the project due to lack of knowledge (I was just starting my journey in computer science) and also because I thought that tackling such a project would require a gargantuan amount of work (external integrations, indexing addresses, and so on). Besides, I had doubts whether I would be able to make a net profit from the website considering that GoogleMaps API is quite expensive for Brazil standards. Congrats!
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