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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#181

Post by davidwhooper »

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.

Hi Lee,

Do you mind me asking what the development process was like behind this? You have a landing page and a great idea for a product in a good space. Specifically, did you develop the application yourself? If so, what language did you use and what were some challenges you came across? I am looking to start developing some SaaS product and have a few basic ideas, but don't exactly know where to start.

Thanks in advance.

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

#182

Post by TheBiv »

gedrap wrote: post #82

There was a number of similar active threads over the years, some great ideas in them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7094402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8246255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4639271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5903868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387789

Thank you

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

#183

Post by zrail »

aakilfernandes wrote: post #169
zrail wrote: post #8

I wrote a book[1] a year and a half ago that just recently crossed $42k in total revenue. These days it consistently earns $1.5k/mo without much further input from me, other than tweaks to the landing page copy and updates once in awhile when Stripe or Rails changes significantly. [1]: https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com Edit: If you'd like to read a preview, you can do so here: https://www.masteringmodernpayment…

I was thinking about doing something similar. Do you recommend using your own domain name (like nathan barry) or having a custom domain?

If you have a domain name already, use it. I launched with just a page on my blog and later moved it over to a separate domain. I don't think it matters in the long run, and in the short run you get a boost from your personal domain that people already know.

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

#184

Post by redfalcon6 »

doh wrote: post #125
eob wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty awesome. I just tried it out to see how you make money and noticed that you have both banner ads and also open popup-tabs. Are you comfortable sharing how much of the revenue is from the banners versus the popups? Are those the only two streams?

There are no banners only pop-up ads. There are two different providers, one generating around 1/3 the other the rest. I get probably one inquiry a week to test new ad system, which I mostly do. This way I went up from 6-7k a month to beyond 30k.

Awesome! Any recommendations on what pop-up / interstitial providers to use? I have a small site which has free, useful file downloads, and these could work well on that as an additional revenue stream. I have Adsense on there now but it is only pumping out $200-300/Month off of 10K+ visitors.

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

#185

Post by corobo »

mafellows wrote: post #154
corobo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

Awesome stuff thank you - I'm currently creating a podcast hosting service, advertising on podcasts themselves seems an obvious choice to look into. I aim to have something that allows podcasters and advertisers to easily interact - that bit about ROI for advertisers has given me a bit of inspiration! :)

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

#190

Post by joesavage »

Around two years ago now I created a League of Legends champion information/countering website: https://www.championcounter.com/

Growth was slow but steady, and the site now receives ~1.4M pageviews per month. The money to keep things up and running comes through banner ads - it's not a huge amount (have only started hitting just about $1000/mo in recent months, and don't know how long that'll last for), but it's still a nice revenue stream to have.

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