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Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

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Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#171

Post by asutekku »

abj wrote: post #142

Edit

Honestly, as a 3D modeler, what is your value proposition for me to have my assets on your platform? Why should I choose your platform over a platform where i get tens or hundreds of dollars for a single sale, compared to a Spotify model, where i might or might not get few dollars a month.

3D modeling is a labour intensive job and the market is way smaller than music or movies, meaning its way harder to get an audience large enough for this kind of service. Even with a audience large enough, could you guarantee I would receive as much as from other services?

Also, at $5 a month pricepoint you’re primarily going to attract below average modelers. Such a low pricepoint means the creator is not going to get much, considering the processing fees & comission and sharing the revenue with other creators.

However, as a consumer I like the idea. But as a creator I really don’t like it. If the subscription would be $50+, i would consider it.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#172

Post by mattmanser »

ZguideZ wrote: post #164

Recent startup failure was ZguideZ - an app that allowed locals to create their own digital tours, charge what they want, and then collect the majority of the profit on tours sold. It failed because it was a far bigger project than I was able to manage as a solo founder - though I tried. It was beyond my ability to code it and I didn't have funding to recruit quality developers. I hired a budget team and we cut corne…

Wow, sounds like a rollercoaster. You sure got some stories out of that one though!

I like the concept a lot, shame you never got to find out if it would have worked.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#173

Post by robbiejs »

seanwilson wrote: post #113

It wasn't a big serious project or anything, but for my first income generating project ever I made a small single player word game for Android that I should have tried to monetise more. Android had only been out for a couple of years at the time so it was easier to get noticed then. The game was free with an ad-banner during gameplay. I was making a decent amount in ad clicks and also had players emailing me for a p…

Fun game, even with trackpad I can do diagonal words. Nicely done.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#175

Post by alexh1 »

Portabella (https://portabella.io) is privacy friendly project management. Think Trello/Asana but end-to-end encrypted with no third party tracking.

Hasn't made any money yet but I think it's on the brink

I've also worked on Block Hooks (https://block-hooks.com) but that's very early days. I expect as the Celo ecosystem grows I'll get customers.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#176

Post by rrrrrraul »

j3th9n wrote: post #57

https://wifimask.com - WifiMask VPN. The little money that comes in is spent on server costs basically. I spent 3 years building it, spending too much time on trying to build "perfect" Apple apps, instead of quickly going online with an MVP and validate first. Besides that there are a lot of VPN's out there and competing with the "big boys" with big marketing budgets is hard, especially when they can provide things l…

Good on you for sticking with it. I too tried launching a similar service in this market, you’re right, the “big boys” marketing is everywhere and drowns out smaller service providers. Keep going, good luck.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#177

Post by rozenmd »

Oh I have so many that failed, but I don't think I'd be where I am today without them.

- BillDivider: a SaaS to help housemates divide bills and other expenses

It was my first side-project, I wrote it in Django with Bootstrap. It barely worked, and I gave up due to the cost of running it.

- Jobs? Ok!: a job board

This was probably the dumbest idea I had business-wise - I would scrape jobs from other sites, and ask people to pay to post their own jobs amongst the scraped jobs.

On the tech side of things, it was my first time using React and GraphQL, and I really enjoyed it. Oh and I used DynamoDB for highly relational data, which I wouldn't recommend.

- Appointment Scheduler: a SaaS kinda like Calendly

By this point I sort of had an idea of how to build, I started using infrastructure-as-code (terraform), and building new ideas was just a matter of having one, and copy pasting assets. Tried selling the idea to consultant friends of mine, but they were happy using Outlook.

- Room Booking Co: Same idea as Appointment Scheduler, but for meeting rooms

This one I basically built to test the Google Calendar API. Turns out it's extremely limiting for interfacing with public calendars.

- Online Or Not: a SaaS that performed contract testing on GraphQL endpoints, pivoted to an uptime monitor

I feel like this idea had legs, just launched too early: basically it would snapshot a "good" version of your GraphQL response, ping it every X hours, and alert when the response changed.

I actually took sales meetings on this one, built features that potential customers said were must haves before they could use it. Punchline: those "potential customers" ended up ghosting me.

All of those projects led me to where I am today: running https://PerfBeacon.com - (PerfBeacon helps you keep your app/site fast by automating Google Lighthouse checks), and https://MaxRozen.com - where I write weekly about React, and have started selling a book on useEffect.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#178

Post by tHap1 »

j3th9n wrote: post #57

https://wifimask.com - WifiMask VPN. The little money that comes in is spent on server costs basically. I spent 3 years building it, spending too much time on trying to build "perfect" Apple apps, instead of quickly going online with an MVP and validate first. Besides that there are a lot of VPN's out there and competing with the "big boys" with big marketing budgets is hard, especially when they can provide things l…

The whole internet's full of VPN service but there's still a big market for it. There's a service I used a couple of years ago that allowed me to basically connect to the internet through this particular VPN without having any data plan. I don't know how they did it but it still seems weird that the service worked this way on the contrary to what I understand VPNs actually do or how they work. After a little bit of googling, finally got the name it was called Your Freedom

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#179

Post by hitpointdrew »

scyclow wrote: post #156

I made a face mask and t shirt website filled with items I designed. Let's just say that I haven't quite met my quarterly sales goals... https://ronamerch.co

Having a site that is less busy might be helpful....all the motion on your site makes me want to click away immediately.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#180

Post by Jsharm »

I built an Alexa skill and put a lot of work to take it from hackathon project to polished product but even now it only gets 6-10 unique users a day. I keep chipping away on it but no idea how to market it further.

For the curious - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sharman-What-Animal-Am-I/dp/B081GV8...

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