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

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71–80 of 818 posts

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

#71
I built a web app that extracts data from documents, like PDFs, Word, etc. I've seen people say "GPT wrapper", but it consistently outperforms similar tools in the space. My main customer is a private equity fund that randomly reached out. I didn't know much at all about fintech, but it works and gets the job done.

I don't have a proper marketing site yet since I've been focused on building the app, but it's coming soon (hopefully...)

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

#72
post #56

I'm making a little by sharing all my nonfiction book summaries/notes on https://littlerbooks.com .

Thank you for sharing, that is a neat side project and was actually just looking for something like this. Can you share how your summarisation process works and if you use any specific tools or approaches to generate them?

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

#74

My SaaS Cronitor.io started here in 2014 as a side project. Left my job at Zillow 4 years ago and we are still going strong. Here’s my reply from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15150205

oh hey, love cronitor! it is a killer tool for my personal and work stuff both!

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

#75
I sell custom jewelry on Etsy and my Shopify website (lulimjewelry.com). I have a background in 3d printing and through that I realized that the sweet spot for 3d printed products is something that is small, high value, and custom. The jewelry industry fits this perfectly, and has already seen a large uptake in 3d printer adoption.

I built a pipeline using fabric.js, flask, and blender that lets me take my customer's customizations (fingerprints, signatures, other engravings) and place them on a ring. I ultimately generate a STL file that I send over to my casting house in LA. They 3d print the STL in wax, and then cast that wax mould with precious metals using the traditional casting process.

It's a fun side business as I get to tinker with new technologies (recently working on integrating a LLM into the ring design process). I have decent profits (enough to pay my mom and sister to help with customer support and shipping), so the workload I take on myself is relatively small.

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

#76
post #16

I made SmoothTrack, a no-equipment head tracking app for iOS and Android which lets you control the game camera in sim games (like MSFS 2024 for example) with your head - basically like TrackIR, just without any equipment and for $15 instead of $150. I originally made the app just for myself to save myself the money of buying a TrackIR system, but then /r/flightsim begged me to release it as a full app. Last month, I…

How does this work without a virtual headset (don't you just end up looking off-screen)? Are you moving your head far less than the camera moves on the screen?

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

#77
post #61

Just launched Story Treasure a way to create illustrated children's books, motivated by the fact that I'm a portuguese dad raising two bilingual girls in Germany... very hard to find portuguese books around here! https://www.storytreasure.ai/

German speaker in Portugal. :-)

That's awesome. Just did one.

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

#78

I built a web app that extracts data from documents, like PDFs, Word, etc. I've seen people say "GPT wrapper", but it consistently outperforms similar tools in the space. My main customer is a private equity fund that randomly reached out. I didn't know much at all about fintech, but it works and gets the job done. I don't have a proper marketing site yet since I've been focused on building the app, but it's coming s…

How do you reduce errors or hallucinations? I recently uploaded a very clear PDF to meta.ai and asked it a few, very simple questions. It completely made up quotes, including page numbers, section numbers etc.

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

#79

I made PortDroid, an Android Port Scanner and networking toolkit back in 2014 because I was learning programming and was curious to what was possible. I mainly wrote it for myself and I've done no marketing so have been quite surprised how popular it has become (~800k downloads). It's been a consistent passion project for me now over the years and I love getting feedback and suggestions from people using it. It'll ne…

Wow... happy to see portdroid :) Had used your app for debugging an android app that I built some 6-7 years ago

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

#80
I built the frontend for https://rigged.ai

We do statistical processing and breakdown of options sweep data, and generate realtime alerts that people can use to copy trade big Wall Street traders. We also have a strategy playground you can use to test different strategies that could be used for a trading bot.

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