Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 547 posts

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

#371

Post by mandeepj »

lefonty wrote: post #292
megaframe wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started with the open NLP packages, but I rewrote pretty much everything, including my own ML algos. Typically based on the open source one. I kept running into scaling and use case performance issues. On some occasions things I did turned out to be solutions I'd find buried in the language of some google paper, which is mildly frustrating. Forex is a tricky space, volatility and fees can really funk you up. I do a…

I am curious where do you get your data feed for trading. Do you pay for the data or are you using a free api? The main i reason i choose forex was due to ease of API use for data and trading. Also follow up question, what sort of inputs are you using for training. Are you using mainly sentiment and price history or mostly technical indicators?

I got stock data from Yahoo to generate these reports. It is extremely fast and reliable

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

#372

Post by nailer »

nailer wrote: post #311
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 t…

Ah I just watched your video and I see you resell rapidssl. But the video also showed the certificate being generated on your server, rather than making a CSR on the desktop. Wouldn't you then know the private key?

Again, sorry for all the questions and thanks for answering!

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

#374

Post by gedrap »

tkiley wrote: post #155

"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…

We need more stories like this! It's not all about crazy growth over a year or two after founding like in the most front page stories.

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

#375

Post by MichaelCrawford »

apetresc wrote: post #51
MichaelCrawford wrote: post #2

It's been a few years, but at one time I averaged $3,500.00 per month, with two months at $5,000.00, from two AdSense units on just one single, quite lengthy but well-researched and well-written essay on legal music downloading. I am, today, skeptical that it's worth anyone's while to try to make money from ads published alongside one's articles. At one time that was widely accepted as the very best way to make money…

> Just a couple days ago, I read that three times as much money is raised from crowdfunding than from VC. Citation required. That doesn't sound possible.

I found the cite in an article by a VC, linked from HN.

I'll post it for you but not just now as it will take me a while to dig up my bookmark, also I need to get some sleep.

I'm skeptical too, but that's what the VC did claim.

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

#376

Post by MichaelCrawford »

ef4 wrote: post #247
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.

This pattern works all over the place . Get to know any kind of small business owner and you'll see they need good software that doesn't exist. Partly that's because they can be cheap and hard to market to at scale, which discourages deeper-pocketed software companies from going after them. But if you're solo and just interested in a lifestyle business with recurring revenue, it's a very reliable path.

A close friend of mine earns a lot of coin by pointing out to medical marijuana dispensaries that they have terrible websites. They are happy to pay him for redesigns.

I've been thinking of doing something like that, but my aim would be to find websites that I regard as sucking particularly hard.

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

#377

Post by ClintFix »

johansch wrote: post #314
ClintFix wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh ok. What were some of the best ones that you encountered? What do you think were some of the biggest shortcomings in the ones that you saw?

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

#378

Post by MichaelCrawford »

ef4 wrote: post #247
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.

This pattern works all over the place . Get to know any kind of small business owner and you'll see they need good software that doesn't exist. Partly that's because they can be cheap and hard to market to at scale, which discourages deeper-pocketed software companies from going after them. But if you're solo and just interested in a lifestyle business with recurring revenue, it's a very reliable path.

It would be quite helpful to me were you to enable me to purchase things from brick-and-mortar shops with paypal.

I can order domino's pizza with paypal but it is a PITA.

PayPal is completely convinced that I am laundering money in support of terrorism, however they are cool with my ordering pepperoni with olives.

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

#379

Post by doh »

zuck9 wrote: post #316
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?

I actually do. My main thing is http://pexe.so

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

#380

Post by gedrap »

adzeds wrote: post #83
gedrap wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you share more, what information on betting? I was looking into this area.

I have developed an algorithm that has a strong strike rate for picking outcomes of matches. My app/website simply provides this information to users for free. One of the good things about affiliate relationships in the betting niche is that they offer lifetime earnings if you go down that route. They also offer fairly strong CPAs if you negotiate with the brands you drive a lot of traffic to. I am now branching out…

Oh, so your revenue comes from affiliates? I thought that you have a monthly subscription fee :)
Post reply on HN