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Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

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Re: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

#91
I made https://QuickMail.io for lead generation (making +$5,000/month)

This is the quick (1 min video) version of how I did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0y28HmcqUo&feature=youtu.be

This is the longer version: http://blog.quickmail.io/category/journey-to-1k-paying-custo...

Re: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

#93

I wrote an Android app based on a blog post of mine which got popular: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jasmcole.w... http://jasmcole.com/2014/08/25/helmhurts/ It reached the reddit front page for a day, and earned £3,000 during that day. Since then, it's averaged ~£150 per month, with only small input from me (minor updates)

I saw your write-up on this before; very cool work. Could you talk a little about the programming side of things and what you had to do to go from your initial mock-up (what did you use for that?) to the Android app, and how that process went? I saw that you'd written it was your first time with Android/Java.

Re: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

#95

I wrote a puzzle app for iOS - https://itunes.apple.com/app/id906543727 It's free to download and try it out, but then I charge for additional puzzles. I was keen to give a complete version of the app for free (without ads) so that people understand clearly what I'm offering. This strategy seems to be working with good and returning custom. Not $1k yet but some reason for optimism ;)

What's the current situation with In-App Purchases and patent issues? I'd like to do fund a smaller project of my own but I'm put off by the problems other developers have had in the past.

Re: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

#96
post #68
post #34

I wrote a book and video series on Sublime Text - https://SublimeTextBook.com It's done about 80k in sales in 3 months - I'm in the process of writing a blog post about how I did it, what worked and what didn't. It's not inexpensive, but it pays for itself quickly so people are fine with spending the $45 on the book + videos. Feel free to ask questions here so I have content for the post.

How did you get into writing? I tried to write blogs and had to write papers for university, but I always struggle. I have the feeling that some people can produce much text from nothing, where I put my ideas into a few sentences...

I too, am laconic.

Re: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

#97
http://bestattendance.com. Built it over a summer back when I was a high school teacher and had summers off. Not sure I would have been able to do it without a nice 3 month block of time. Doing side projects on weekends and evenings only is pretty tough.

Re: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

#98
post #74

Something to think about: Based on the answers here and in the related Reddit thread it seems that information products (e-books, targeted blog posts, link collections) still generate better revenue (either sales or ad revenue) than pure software products as side projects.

A lot more people who write books talk about their experience than those who run a niche profitable SaaS app for obvious reasons (competitive advantage). In my experience, it's much easier to have a stable recurring revenue from a SaaS app than a book. Books go out of date much faster.

On the other hand, a book can't go bankrupt/get shut down/go out of service after you've bought it and invested time into. In that sense, it's a safer purchase.

Re: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

#99

Small niches are cool, but you probably can't live from ads. Choose a lame subject with lots of users and make a clean and easy to use website. I have a small directory website. It's pretty boring stuff, but it is a good source of almost passive income. Never published it. I just created the website and sent the sitemap to Google Webmasters. It's 8 months old and I have 400k pageviews/month. I have lots of projects i…

With 400k page views what does your Adsense look like?

Re: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

#100
post #58
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, that is a lot! What sort of hardware do you need for that kind of load?

That's approximately 2 hits per second. If you're serving static content (or heavily cached) you could handle that with a Raspberry PI. Heck you could probably do it with an arduino. Edit: this depends heavily on your traffic pattern, of course. Super bursty traffic from Reddit, TechCrunch, etc is going to swamp your IO, but CPU will never dominate the equation.

Depends on your users I think. If 50% of that traffic is during a 10 hour window of time each day, that could be around 70 views per second. And pulling email for an account could be more costly than a static page view. Then if he's getting that many views, he could be processing tens or hundreds of emails a day per account more or less.... Could get expensive.
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