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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?

#151

Post by arethuza »

leesalminen wrote: post #127

I spent all of 2014 building a SaaS for dog daycare/kennel owners. The MVP turned out beautiful. Went to a few trade shows towards the end of last year and people went crazy over the software. 0 outbound marketing yet, and already have 22 customers at $100/month. This year my goal is to scale up to 200 customers. It's a really weird market niche where no one has built software for in 10 years. Pretty neat.

Any specific reason for it being dog only - we put our cats in a cattery fairly often when we travel and I'd love to be able to use an online system to book things.

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

#152

Post by ndespres »

leesalminen wrote: post #127

I spent all of 2014 building a SaaS for dog daycare/kennel owners. The MVP turned out beautiful. Went to a few trade shows towards the end of last year and people went crazy over the software. 0 outbound marketing yet, and already have 22 customers at $100/month. This year my goal is to scale up to 200 customers. It's a really weird market niche where no one has built software for in 10 years. Pretty neat.

Can you share a link to your service? One of my new clients (I provide managed IT services) is in this exact market with 10 locations and more coming.

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

#154

Post by mafellows »

corobo wrote: post #110
mafellows wrote: post #61

Lead generation service for mobile developers: iOS Leads - http://iosleads.com & Android Leads - http://androidleads.net Have an assistant that helps curate freelance/contract positions from around the internet and through opportunities I hear about offline. I'm a mobile developer, so it's an effective side business to be working on. Many people have scored new clients and worked on interesting projects through the s…

Out of interest regarding the podcast advertising - how much does that sort of thing cost? Obviously there's going to be differences based on the podcast, listeners, etc but as an vague number were you looking at $hundreds, $thousands?

Per episode with the size audience mentioned, you're looking in the hundreds. Start out with one advertisement to test the waters. I ran one advertisement that had good results (5-10x return). Like an idiot, I assumed I milked the cow dry and should look for other podcasts or advertising mediums in general. That was dumb. I booked a couple of episodes again with Release Notes that produced the same ROI.

If you're having success with an advertisement, don't be afraid to double down and spend thousands. Ideally, you should get a bulk discount from the show.

I don't have conversion rates based on % listener or cost per listener. Would love to see podcast advertising evolve to this point in the future, but it certainly hasn't yet.

The folks at Baremetrics (https://baremetrics.io/) run an awesome service for monthly recurring Saas companies that use Stripe. If you know what your lifetime customer value is, you really have more faith in your advertising dollars.

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

#155

Post by tkiley »

"Profitable side-project" might be an unstable equilibrium. If you're doing something without scale, it will die when you lose interest. If you're doing something with scale, perhaps it should grow into a bootstrapped startup.

inquicker.com started as a hobby / learning opportunity (2005) and grew into a side project with about $20k/yr in recurring revenue from corporate customers (2008).

Eventually, it turned into a full-time job (early 2009) and I found a co-founder (late 2009). We hired our first four employees in 2010. In 2011 we signed our 100th customer and hit $1m in recurring revenue. In 2013 we hit $5m in recurring revenue.

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

#156

Post by leesalminen »

ndespres wrote: post #152
leesalminen wrote: post #127

I spent all of 2014 building a SaaS for dog daycare/kennel owners. The MVP turned out beautiful. Went to a few trade shows towards the end of last year and people went crazy over the software. 0 outbound marketing yet, and already have 22 customers at $100/month. This year my goal is to scale up to 200 customers. It's a really weird market niche where no one has built software for in 10 years. Pretty neat.

Can you share a link to your service? One of my new clients (I provide managed IT services) is in this exact market with 10 locations and more coming.

Cool!

URL is: gingrapp.com Company Phone: +1-877-324-7759

I'm Lee, few free to call anytime!

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

#157

Post by hpagey »

doh wrote: post #126
hpagey wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to extract audio out of a video file you generate?

Sure. For that reason I wrote other service, http://auderio.com ;)

ah i see. I was wondering if its possible to make a configurable autoupdating podcast channel based on these audio files.

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

#158

Post by doh »

stickperson wrote: post #142
doh wrote: post #102

A year ago I developed an universal video downloader site http://savedeo.com . I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but people liked the site and kept coming back. Year later the site generates around $30k a month and the operation costs are around $90 (close to nothing). The site is very lightweight as it doesn't really downloads anything. It just extracts direct links to the files. There are a great challeng…

Are there any legal implications associated with this site, as in is it legal to download videos from those sites?

Well, this is a kind of a gray zone. The data hosted on sites like Youtube don't belong to them but to the creators. The site itself doesn't download anything, in a way it simulates what your browsers does.

As a user, that's more complicated. In European Union it's legal. Everywhere else? Hard to say.

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

#159

Post by zeograd »

doh wrote: post #102

A year ago I developed an universal video downloader site http://savedeo.com . I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but people liked the site and kept coming back. Year later the site generates around $30k a month and the operation costs are around $90 (close to nothing). The site is very lightweight as it doesn't really downloads anything. It just extracts direct links to the files. There are a great challeng…

huge thanks for your story and the transparency of revenue.

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

#160

Post by doh »

hpagey wrote: post #157
doh wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. For that reason I wrote other service, http://auderio.com ;)

ah i see. I was wondering if its possible to make a configurable autoupdating podcast channel based on these audio files.

You can use the API from http://auderio.com and do whatever you want
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