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

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

#251

Post by sgt » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

reuven wrote: 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)…

Are you still writing for Linux Journal etc? I remember your articles from back in 98, 99, 00.

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

#252

Post by eloisant » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

mappum wrote: post #208

An Android app I made in a few hours makes $500/m from ads, and has 1M+ downloads on Google Play. It claims to be a radar detector for your phone, but that's not even possible (it's actually just completely random). The description says that it is for novelty purposes, but the reviews show people believe it works and it has a placebo effect. Most reviews say things like "I drove past a police station and it went off!…

It's actually totally possible with crowdsourcing, and a lot of applications actually work, like Waze.

So people believing it works are not stupid, they can legitimately believe you're pulling that from a common database with an app that lets user signal radar or police cars.

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

#253

Post by robinhood » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 5:05 PM UTC

I've created five years ago http://www.totalwireframe.com, based on a hunch that it would interest people. It's a site where I sell libraries for an obscure/niche market.

The first year, I sold for $0 of librairies. In 2014, I've made ~$45,000 and it's 100% passive income. I'm not proud to say that I've worked a total of 30 hours on the site last year (it sounds as if I'm lazy, and I'm not). Moreover, I've never spent a single dollar on marketing, no matter its form.

It works so well that I've taken the decision to leave my daily job to work on the site full time. I (perhaps naively) think that if I make that much money while doing practically nothing, I can surely make a ton more by actually working on it every day for a year. On Feb 1st, I'm making the jump.

It has been tough to get there though. The first year has been a disaster. I nearly abandoned the site. Then, one day, I started to gain traction. To this day, I have no idea why. Then, months after months, the sales went up. It took me weeks and weeks of work to create the libraries I'm selling today. I also did a lot of variations, based on the feedback I received from my customers. My customers are the best, I think. They like what I do, they give me a lot of feedback. In the course of my business, I also did stupid things I regret immensely, like copy a competitor (but honestly it was not intentional), and I'm really, really not proud of this.

Sales have reached a peak of $7500 for the month of May 2014.

The site is based on http://jekyllrb.com/ and is hosted on https://www.webfaction.com/, on a 9$ per month plan. As the site is static, I just need Nginx. That's it. GetDPD allows me to collect payments with both Paypal and Stripe.

To let people pay and downlaod, I use http://getdpd.com/. They are fantastic. I've tried a lot of other options and even though GetDPD looks terrible, it's a great product, well worth the tiny monthly cost.

I hope my story will let people know that it's totally feasible to do a great business as a side project. I honestly wonder EVERY.SINGLE.DAY how come it worked for me, but well,... it worked :-)

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

#254

Post by mappum » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 5:07 PM UTC

eloisant wrote: post #252

mappum wrote: post #208

An Android app I made in a few hours makes $500/m from ads, and has 1M+ downloads on Google Play. It claims to be a radar detector for your phone, but that's not even possible (it's actually just completely random). The description says that it is for novelty purposes, but the reviews show people believe it works and it has a placebo effect. Most reviews say things like "I drove past a police station and it went off!…

It's actually totally possible with crowdsourcing, and a lot of applications actually work, like Waze. So people believing it works are not stupid, they can legitimately believe you're pulling that from a common database with an app that lets user signal radar or police cars.

The description clearly says "Your phone is able to detect strong radio signals, just like the ones directed at your car by police when measuring your speed.", and the reviews show people expect it to work by radar detection, not crowdsourcing. Many comments are police officers that tested it with their radar guns (and they of course realize it is fake).

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

#255

Post by brianpetro_ » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 5:08 PM UTC

sfteus wrote: post #124

brianpetro_ wrote: post #26

Create a Job Board, use the latest social routes to drive traffic and build a list. The amount you make from the Job Board post is heavily dependent on the amount social followers (drives traffic and makes purchasing more appealing). https://www.angularjobs.com started making ~$1000/month in revenue with a highly targeted social reach of ~10k followers. Technical co-founder type? Take what you know about programming…

If you don't mind me asking, do you populate the initial listings on the job board by your self (by finding job listings and posting them), or leave it empty upon launch and just offer a period of free listing to get started?

I was populating the board with jobs for companies I scored recruiting contracts with.

These contracts made building the JobPosts and driving traffic worth my time(contract = collect a sizable a fee when someone you refer to a position gets hired).

JobPosts drive the organic traffic to JobBoards, so make sure you take SEO into consideration when posting.

I also started with a much lower rate to post on the JobBoard, never free, but as low as $29 at one point. As the traffic grew, so did the price. Now a JobPost costs $349.

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

#256

Post by brokentone » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 5:09 PM UTC

stevenh wrote: post #204

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…

You're pushing malware via popups. To convert one video, I was subjected to each of these popups three times: http://i.imgur.com/qqK77qp.png http://i.imgur.com/eCAtjOi.png You're probably paid per install, unless the distribution model for malware has significantly changed in the past six years. Assuming $2 per install, that would mean you're infecting 15,000 machines per month. At bare minimum, this malware you dist…

Strong words, but I don't disagree. I left a previous job in large part due to the shady advertising companies we were directly connected with, and which I had to integrate. It's really tricky, because the business people on the advertiser's side have all these justifications for why it's a valid model, and the business people on our side had a bigger check than any legitimate provider would give them (same argument the owner of this site is making).

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

#257

Post by patrickk » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 5:09 PM UTC

adzeds wrote: post #249

patrickk wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice job! You're probably aware of this site https://betegy.com/ maybe you can get some ideas from them (not affiliated). You should discuss your site at /r/soccerbetting my email is in my profile if you want to discuss further.

Yeah, I am away of the Betegy site. They offer a paid service. That is not something I am looking to do, I would prefer to hand out all my tips for free. I have on two occasions run my predictions vs theirs and have beaten them on both occasions which is good. I may set up a tracker between both algorithms over a longer timescale to see which is more accurate.

Do you track your results? That would be a good thing to have on the site for marketing purposes. Also, ever consider writing a betfair bot to automatically bet on your tips through their API? How do you decide on bankroll in your tips? (this is an area that interests me)

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

#258

Post by brandon272 » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 5:09 PM UTC

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…

It seems like there are hundreds (or thousands) of other sites that do the same thing. What do you feel separates yours from the others?

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

#259

Post by RealGeek » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 5:10 PM UTC

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…

How many visitors do you get on the website?

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

#260

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 5:10 PM UTC

tessierashpool wrote: post #31

MichaelCrawford wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have two close friends who are professional filmmakers, Sari Gennis and Ted Arabian. Sari was the animation director for Ferngully, her sister was my boss' girlfriend back in the day. I met Ted in high school, when he and I both played Roman Soldiers in Jesus Christ Superstar. However I plan to make most of the video myself, but then to have Ted edit it. Real Soon Now I'm going to make a storyboard from digital sti…

Consider that a homeless fellow here in Portland, not long ago said to me "Some of they people I find sleeping on the street, they tell me they used to make six figures". I find lots of software engineers eating at soup kitchens and sleeping in homeless shelters. wait a minute, what?

Not surprised. I remember having a conversation with a homeless panhandling ex-software engineer in front of the NYC Tower Records store (original one on 4th & B'way) almost 30 years ago. He claimed to make over $500/day panhandling and, from his style, I believed it.

Yes. He really either used to be a programmer or was faking it extremely well!