Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

thanks

Trichromy reminds me of Prokudin-Gorsky's color photographs from the 19th century. Except of course he tried to get rid of the effect. Clever!

I write documentation for a living (a different, non-tech kind). The best resources in my opinion are the writing guides of various governments. Gov.uk leads the way, but the Australian government puts out great guides too.

Steve Krug's "Don't make me think" is old but still applies to the modern web.

I made dividend tracking website. I am a backend engineer, so the UI is simple bootstrap and I focus on having data I find valuable. I've been working on it since I finished University, so it's like 7 years, and current MRR at $740 isn't great, but at least I don't have to pay for hosting (and financial data sources are expensive). I believe that spare money should be invested in stocks, so I like that I work on something I use, and will be using in the following decades. The website is DIGRIN.com (DIvidend GRowth INvesting), good value for free users as well IMHO.

I'm making a physical product with my wife: an illustrated narrative puzzle magazine. It's similar to escape games, but it's more story driven and easy to do in short sessions and at your own pace. It started with my wife making the first magazine pretty much by herself. Since then we've made more magazines together and the business is slowly growing.

We're selling them mainly on our custom lightweight online store. It's done with minimal JS and Node as backend, Stripe as payment provider. We have a Meta pixel to help us track our advertising conversion, but we've disabled cookies, they just felt somehow dirty... It's nice to have power over these things when running your own business. As a next step for the website I'm thinking of including a templating language in the workflow, now I'm still doing edits with search and replace, sometimes missing things... but I do enjoy the simplicity.

The actual business has two main challenges: First is discoverability. It's a pretty unique product, an adventure escape game in a magazine. It doesn't sell well in physical game shops since it doesn't look like a game. We sell well in conventions where we get to explain what the product is, but we also want some weekends for ourselves! Meta ads for our online shop are working surprisingly well though.

The second and bigger challenge is shipping. Our flat is filled with boxes, and the time I spend sorting magazines, enveloping them, printing address labels, carrying them to the post office... it's really not worth my hourly rate as an engineer (Nor my wife's, but I do it since my schedule is more flexible, and I've automated some parts of the process with a string of incredibly user hostile shell scripts). And the shipping costs are downputting to many, we're quite cornered here in Finland. We are slowly gaining some distribution partners in Europe, but we should also be looking into better shipping options, like perhaps some kind of shipping warehouse exist? Our volume is slowly getting big enough so that it might be feasible. I've only done some cursory googling on this but don't exactly know what I'm even looking for, and there's only so many hours in a day.

A lot of work, small margins (ads+printing+misc takes a big slice), but around $500 profit per month. Feels absolutely fantastic to have an actual concrete business we own!

https://cluehound.com