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Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

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Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#101

Post by LittlePeter »

nojito wrote: post #79
LittlePeter wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am aware of maybe 3 or 4 prediction markets. Can you provide some names? Are you betting or cleaning data and reselling it or displaying it and earning income via ads?

I'm on Predictit, Poly, and Kalshi and use the data for betting.

Thanks! To contribute at least something to this thread, here are couple more prediction markets where you may or may not bet for real money:

- https://manifold.markets - https://www.unitarity.com/app - https://futuur.com - https://predict.hypermind.com/hypermind/app.html - https://www.metaculus.com - https://polymarket.com

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#102

Post by DanHulton »

Well, I've spoken about this before, and on here no less, but only really in response to posts like this. I don't do any advertising or speak about mine except in interviews, since it's usually indicative of the kind of requirements they're looking for.

I created a SaaS bootstrap for Javascript called Nodewood [1]. It actually started as just a template for me, because there's a lot of setup for each new JS web project that I kept skipping to get to the "fun" stuff, like I'd just hard-coded the user as ID #1 instead of writing user registration/login code. Since then, it's grown to also have form validation, a starter UI, teams support, subscription support with Stripe, an admin panel, a CLI tool, and I'm currently adding a deploy option via Pulumi [2].

I've sold a few licenses, but also it offers me a platform to "scratch my own itches", which then become available to the people who bought a license.

[1] - Nodewood: https://nodewood.com [2] - Pulumi: https://www.pulumi.com/

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#103

Post by rozgo »

gottebp wrote: post #29

After my grandfather got Parkinson’s disease circa 2005, I developed hand tremor cancelling software for the mouse [1]. It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer. It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough. I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It fe…

You should consider surrounding yourself with people that can tell the story. It's common to not be able or willing to tell your own story. Others can carry or lift this weight for you, and take it where it needs to go.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#104

Post by macinjosh »

xnorswap wrote: post #78
MattyMc wrote: post #14

I staked $15k, bought season tickets for my favourite baseball team, wrote an electron app to auto-price and market those tickets under face value. We ended up going to 6-7 games for free, sat in MUCH better seats than we ever could have afforded to, and had access to playoff tickets at face value. Further, my friends had access to great seats at reasonable prices and I avoided having to buy from resale sites (who I…

So you're a ticket scalper? That's nothing something to be proud of. You say your friends detest resale sites but it sounds like you just became one yourself unless I'm misunderstanding what was happening here.

IMO "scalping" is OK and is just selling for what the market will bear. There is demand for something with limited supply (aka scarcity) so prices will go up. I also don't buy that it is unfair to the artist because if their tickets are being "scalped" they could just as easily add more dates to each venue to provide more supply to the market. Some artists do this but many just want to breeze through town in one show.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#105

Post by DeathArrow »

Got a few hundreds euros by building a poker helping app using neural networks. Since I love poker and I wanted to sharpen my skills in ML.

It involved me working all weekends and 4 to five hours after work, and also spending nights playing poker in Poker Stars.

Basically, if I wouldn't have built the app and just played poker without using the app suggestions I would have made more money.

I am still convinced that given some hundred man year of work and a lot of money to buy GPUs, I can make some millions with it. Not sure those millions would be worth. :)

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#106

Post by xnorswap »

culturestate wrote: post #81
xnorswap wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're a ticket scalper? That's nothing something to be proud of. You say your friends detest resale sites but it sounds like you just became one yourself unless I'm misunderstanding what was happening here.

Scalpers don’t typically sell tickets for less than face value.

Nor is OP if you take their 20% discount into account.

Scalping tickets designed to be heavily discounted for fans, then re-selling them to anyone for profit is scummy even if the price still comes under the non-fan price.

At best you're just denying other fans the chance to get discounts for your own profit.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#107

Post by eliya_confiant »

perlin wrote: post #94

I run the infrastructure (k8s+helm on GCP) for a PoS validator of a top 50 crypto project. My client is a big whale who bonded ~$15.6M at the projects all-time high. It’s about 1-2 hours of work per month and my 10% cut of the rewards nets me anywhere from $4k-$40k/mo. depending on the price. Given the fact that crypto is in the gutter now I haven’t been selling any to USD, but it’s a nice way to stack an asset with…

Is it POKT?

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#108

Post by MrLeap »

I've been working on a 3d first person creative writing RPG where you're a Tentacle Monster with a magic mechanical typewriter. You learn ritual magic based on what you write and it can export .txt files. It even has printer "support". It's called Tentacle Typer.

My goal is to make people more prolific and creative writers.

It's not released yet, but I've gotten enough wish lists that I'm confident I will make some money when I do. It's also led to some freelance/consulting work that's kept me afloat while I shamble forth.

https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1469737611824713739 A little discouraged by some gambits that didn't yield results I wanted has me not talking about it as much as I was last year. Ah well I bet the hype energy will come back. There's a lot cool here.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#109

Post by xnorswap »

macinjosh wrote: post #104
xnorswap wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're a ticket scalper? That's nothing something to be proud of. You say your friends detest resale sites but it sounds like you just became one yourself unless I'm misunderstanding what was happening here.

IMO "scalping" is OK and is just selling for what the market will bear. There is demand for something with limited supply (aka scarcity) so prices will go up. I also don't buy that it is unfair to the artist because if their tickets are being "scalped" they could just as easily add more dates to each venue to provide more supply to the market. Some artists do this but many just want to breeze through town in one show…

If tickets were sold for "market price" then the vast majority of people would be priced out of many events because the wealthy are so much wealthier than the average person that they'd simply monopolise a whole lot of entertainment.

Not entirely unlike what has happened to the housing market in cities like London or Vancouver.

If you're okay with huge swathes of the population going without whole sectors of entertainment because "it's a free market" then you're entitled to that opinion. That isn't a society I value.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#110

Post by rahimnathwani »

ryannevius wrote: post #12

Over a weekend during the height of the pandemic, I made a digital school material website that has a "donate" button on it. Totally unexpectedly, it was making $1k/mo via donations. The original hope was to just pay for the hosting costs.

Cool. What's the URL?
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