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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?

#311

Post by nailer »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #30

I developed a service that does SSL installation for you on Heroku: https://www.expeditedssl.com

Sounds like a great product! Some questions.

1. Your video mentions you 'buy the SSL certificate' for users. How does that work? Are you a CA or do you resell another CA?

2. Your video mentions latest security practices - are you selling EV certificates? Or just 'encryption to someone who owns this domain' certificates?

3. If you resell another CA, how can the identity verification process be 20 minutes?

Pardon all the questions, but I'm currently waiting on godaddy, who take 15 days, so I'm interested in this stuff.

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

#312

Post by frist45 »

gedrap wrote: post #76
frist45 wrote: post #47

I wrote a book called Build a Ruby Gem ( http://brandonhilkert.com/books/build-a-ruby-gem/ ). After release, it's required very little work and has totaled about $20k in 9 months since launch.

How did you market this book? Do you think having 1k twitter followers helped with sales?

Mostly in places I knew Rubyists hang out online. Message boards, link aggregators, etc. Twitter helped very little towards sales. Although I use Twitter here and there, focusing on capturing emails was more valuable.

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

#313

Post by baudehlo »

modoc wrote: post #70
GordonS wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As zrail mentioned below, it's not that much traffic from a load perspective. It's a Java app, so it uses some RAM, but honestly the hardest load to tune for was the inbound spam. I have a massively overspecced server that I use for this, and many other sites/projects - 24 GB RAM, dual X5670 CPUs, etc... Typically runs at a load average of only 0.5-0.6. Like I said, overspecced:)

You probably need a better mail server that can more easily handle that load. Check Haraka out (shameless plug, but it's designed for high loads and this kind of app).

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

#314

Post by johansch »

ClintFix wrote: post #71
johansch wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging from what I've been exposed to from HR departments, this is a seriously underdeveloped area... (I mean the content, not the selling of it.)

My specific content or the content that is normally available by other companies?

Sorry, I meant whatever I've been exposed to. Likely not that same as your content.

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

#315

Post by RealGeek »

stevenh wrote: post #288
discardorama wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If indeed the claim is true (I have not verified it), it is possible that the malware creators don't offer up these popups to Google's bots.

The directrev.com malware installation popups I provided screenshots of were triggered by this script embedded in savedeo's post-conversion page: http://cdn.directrev.com/js/gp.min.js?s=S0004793 Checking that script, we see a lot of "gunggo" references, which is the ad network doh admits to using. Gunggo apparently owns directrev.com, and both are considered pretty shady from what I can gather: https://nodpi.org/foru…

Alexa is highly inaccurate. My website (http://www.ranksignals.com) have Alexa rank 7,000 with 3,500 visits / day while my other websites with higher traffic have far lower Alexa rank.

My other websites have Alexa rank 23,000 with 15k to 20k visits/day and Alexa rank 250k and 5k visits/day.

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

#316

Post by zuck9 »

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…

Do you bother with a day job now?

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

#319

Post by mcphage »

tomrohlf wrote: post #271
mcphage wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind talking some about how you do it?

I'm happy to answer some questions... can you be a bit more specific?

Well, what kind of companies do you work with—a printer, and a distributor? Any others? How did you find the ones you work with—and how did you know that they were the right ones? What have you done for marketing—gone to trade shows, paid for advertising, giving samples to the right people, or what? How well is it doing? Have you sales been steady, increasing, or was there a big burst at the start, and a trickle since? Um... that's what I can think of off the top of my head.

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

#320

Post by wolframhempel »

endeavour wrote: post #261
wolframhempel wrote: post #88

I wrote a GPL licensed layout manager ( https://golden-layout.com/ ) that also comes with commercial licenses. It's been out for three months now and seems to appeal to financial institutions. Revenue is ok, especially since most sales are the more expensive (399 GBP) multi domain license, but a lot of the bigger customers don't want to just purchase it through the website, but rather enter into a more bespoke contra…

How did you go about marketing this? Did you have contacts at financial institutions or they just happened to stumble upon it?

Actually, all I did was post it on hackernews. This generated a lot of initial momentum, but page views are now slowly declining, so I guess I need to find new channels to promote it.
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