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

461–470 of 547 posts

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

#461

Post by leesalminen »

sloppiiiii wrote: post #450
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 - how did you determine pricing for a niche?

In my niche, there are 2 legit SaaS providers.

-One charges $85/month, has decent support but a disliked and old product.

-The other charges $60/month, has poor support and a very slow product (~30 sec. page load time)

I knew that I had a superior product (months of real-world testing) and that our business wanted to make support a priority.

In the end, we priced at $100/mo or $1000/yr. It's higher than everyone else which implies a better product (kinda). I haven't run into sticker shock yet for anyone with an existing business.

We're planning on raising the price >20% for new customers within 6 months.

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

#462

Post by leesalminen »

nhayden wrote: post #415
leesalminen wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! We offer the fastest, most intuitive SaaS platform for Dog Daycares with world class support. Currently there are 2 direct competitors, one has a slow product with poor support and the other has a decade old product that's inexplicably convoluted. I wouldn't consider anyone else on the market a true competitor (and our customers agree). A couple of our favorite features are photo/video report cards over SMS,…

Do you have plans to try to scale nationally? How many doggy daycares exist in the US? Do you think this type of software would extend into similar markets well? Maybe vets, or actual child daycare?

We're currently in 14 states and Ontario. I have lofty international dreams, though :).

According to IBIS, there are ~11,000 dog kennels and daycares in the US alone. Self-performed research indicates ~12,000 similar facilities in Canada/UK/Australia.

I've looked into the veterinary world and beta tested our product at one practice. Turns out, there's tons of stuff vets need to keep track of that kennels don't. The basic premise is similar, though. We might fork the codebase one day.

Child daycares is a tough market. There are actually good products out there with medium-level investors. To be honest, I haven't spent much time looking into the market.

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

#463

Post by moveelo »

Mine was not over $1,000/mo but I'm working to get it there.

http://undupe.com was something I spun up one day, it gained a little interest and now it runs around $400+ a month(with under 10 users). Not very much, but a nice start.

I'm working on moving this one up a notch past $1,000/mo while adding other small products to my portfolio.

$1k/mo is still a milestone I've been working on reaching. Up until now, I've been an active contract developer.

Still have lots of product tests running and seeing what will be next. Eventually, this will turn into a nice portfolio of digital assets and income.

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

#464

Post by kyllo »

rab_oof wrote: post #426
tomrohlf wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its difficult to completely automate the supply chain as incoming FBA shipments expire 30 days after they are created. If you're shipping heavy freight from China this is cost prohibitive. I currently "touch" my inventory one time in-between the source and FBA. I'm working on streamlining that part though.

Be sure that your mfgr isn't running off extra for AliBaba, free markets or other channels. Contract mfgrs are notorious about ripping off IP and product.

How is it possible to be sure of that, though? If they're a contract mfg then by definition they've already signed a contract that says they can't do that, so if they do it, they've broken the contract.

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

#465

Post by mlwarren »

nitinsingla0999 wrote: post #438
mlwarren wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you pulling the watch pictures from Amazon manually? Or have you automated it to some extent?

No pulling from Amazon manually. I'm doing lot of research manually and trying to find very best watches. Not sure if this can be automated but great point!!

There is an Amazon API for that, but since you're trying to curate for only the best watches, manual work best.

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

#466

Post by bbcbasic »

leesalminen wrote: post #458
bbcbasic wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Lee. I have questions if you don't mind. Did you get all customers from trade shows or did you also use other methods? Did you cold call? With the trade show did you just go and talk to people, or did you have a stall set up?

Howdy! To date I've done 0 outbound sales/marketing. Just face-to-face interactions with folks at trade shows and our referral program. About 30% of our customers are referrals. It's possible my co-founder are just so likable that our customers rave about us on private Facebook groups with their peers (our target demographic). In this little niche, just being new and "not those guys" goes a long way. Add in a smile a…

G'day! (From Australia!)

That is very cool, thanks for the information and being so open about your business. With so many good stories on HN I am considering writing a short book of interviews of people who have set up businesses of the bootstrap/lifestyle genre. Would you be interesting in being a case study?

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

#467

Post by MichaelCrawford »

MichaelCrawford wrote: post #378
ef4 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why did you downvote this?

It really is the case that I can't get cash out of PayPal, but PayPal does permit me to use it for online payments. A few days ago I bought a pizza with a eGift card that I bought from Newegg.

What I'd really like to do is to buy coffee and food at cafes. Starbucks once did a promotion where one could buy a prepaid card with PayPal, that they don't do that anymore. I've never heard of anyone else doing that.

If I could use my PayPal to buy coffee, or find some other ways to spend it at brick-and-mortars, there are all kinds of ways I could earn money online, then get paid via PayPal.

I use PayPal to pay for my phone. That and the pizza are all that I've been able to find that I either want or need, that I can use PayPal for.

Using it to buy coffee would enable me to work more productively. I do a lot better working at a cafe, out among the public, than at home by myself. It's not coffee that makes me productive; I buy the coffee to pay for my cable, power socket and wifi.

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

#468

Post by MichaelCrawford »

leesalminen wrote: post #394
MichaelCrawford wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's interesting. Every single one of my customers has a terrible website. Every. Single. One. We're looking to expand into a subscription service that provides a CMS w/ dog-centric themes to our customers. Shoot me an email, we should talk. Email address on my profile.

Start with a dedicated dog-centric CMS.

Now make a dedicated cat-centric one.

Surely they will have some common elements between them. Find a way to make a pet-centric CMS.

Eventually you will have a flexibly configurable CMS that you could sell to many local businesses.

But you are better off writing a couple of hardwired, dedicated CMSs, then to try writing that flexible one from the very start.

My very first shot at Warp Life for iOS, a Conway's Game of life implementation, had a frame rate of about two per second. Now it's about 8,000 per second.

Now that I've gotten it up to 8,000 per second, I'm getting some real insight as to how to optimize it.

There are other reasons one would want a Life App than because it's fast. MY Life App is for those who care about the speed; not everyone does.

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

#469

Post by richardbrevig »

modoc wrote: post #32

10MinuteMail - http://10minutemail.com Temporary email. Got lucky with traffic, and run two Google Adsense ads.

May seem like a basic question, but I'm curious what different use cases your users us your service for. The obvious to me would be to sign up for a service that requires an email and use the fake one. What else is it used for?

Thanks.

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

#470

Post by karolist »

hpeikemo wrote: post #383

I created an iOS app http://ideon.co/theconverted/ as a side project. I've had hopes to be able to survive entirely on revenue from my own projects instead of relying on client work. I'm very far from that goal at this point, but the extra income is nice.

Looks awesome, do you mind expanding a bit on how the GUI/animations were built?
Post reply on HN