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

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171–180 of 547 posts

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

#171

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.

Awesome question! The software has completely customizable "reservation types" and "breeds", which allows for all kinds of animals. We actually don't say the word "dog" once in the app.

Not only can you manage your reservations online, we also feature photo/video report cards over SMS :). That's my personal favorite feature...love getting a video of my 2 dogs wrestling at daycare.

We have a pretty generous referral program, get in touch if you have a business you'd like to refer.

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

#172
post #69

I made http://bankofamericaroutingnumber.com It took less than a day and makes about $150/month. Not quite the 1k but not bad for minimal work.

Hm, how do you get visitors? You don't show up on the first page of Google results for 'bank of america routing number' for me. (I guess you show up second if I add certain state names.)

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

#173

I sell 6 and 12 month leadership development programs to companies. I make 50% of the sale. At $50/mo per employee on the program, I make an extra $1000/mo at 40 employees. http://LIFELeadershipCorporate.com

Do you intend for the text to blink on your site? Because it blinks for me. Latest Safari. I recorded what it looked like. You can see it here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/i9jpjzm7035bhg2/blinking.mov?dl=0

Interesting. It is not supposed to do that. I will look into it. Thank you for bringing it to my attention!

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

#174
post #166
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…

is most of the income from the nfsw section?

Actually, the NSFW section is only 0.65% of the site traffic. I think the most income comes from some casinos or this type of ads.

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

#176
post #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.

Thanks! And sure, I wrote the initial simulation code in Matlab, which is very simple, just adding 2D arrays which Matlab is fairly quick at.

I then saw the traction the blog post was getting, so wanted to capitalise on that quickly. I had an Android phone, so for simplicity (and ease of monetisation) decided to write an app for that. From zero knowledge of Java it took probably 30 hours over a weekend to get the app out, then perhaps another 10 hours over the next week on a few updates and bug fixes.

Getting the app up and running was relatively simple, most of the time was spent looking up API functions in Google's SDK documentation (and SO!). The only complication was making sure the CPU-intensive parts ran in a separate thread to avoid locking up the UI, and dealing with different device display sizes and resolutions. Everything else (dealing with input, generating images etc.) wasn't particularly difficult, but did take time to implement.

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

#177
post #170
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually spent a decent amount of time preventing people from promoting their videos on the homepage. The traffic dropped a bit afterwards but I like to have a real data there, just for the curiosity.

Fair enough, I was more thinking similar to how Google searches do it, a sort of yellow-backed "Promoted" link as an alternate/additional source of income than artificially bumping something to the top through fake downloads

Well, the top videos get barely over couple of 1k views so I don't know how valuable it is.

I am extremely strict with what I count as a hit (I have a whole GEOip & browser combination) so if two people come from the same country with the same browser, it's only one hit, ever.

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

#179
post #165
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.

You used to (still do?) spam this heavily on the programming subreddit. It annoys me to see that it's selling rather well, yet you apparently can't be bothered to buy an ad. Please see: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_what_constitutes_spam.3...

I just looked at my submission history and I've only submitted it to /r/programming once - so that isn't spam.

And yes - I've bought all the reddit ads I can get my hands on - they are in pretty limited quantity.

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

#180
post #57

I wrote an ebook ("Practice Makes Python", http://lerner.co.il/practice-makes-python ) for people who have learned Python basics, but want to gain fluency. I'm working on videos for a higher-tier offering, and then will start to market it more seriously. I only launched the book about 1.5 months ago, and I'm at about $1500 in revenue. I'm definitely hoping to see greater income with the higher tiers (including video)…

How have you marketed this so far?
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