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Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

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Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#21

Post by agotterer »

A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.

So far we’ve hosted 12 dinners over the past year. Growing from out first meal with 13 friends to as many as 80 guests for this months meal. Our mailing list has over 400 people on it and we’ve sold out every event since our 4th. Sometimes we end up hosting multiple nights.

It’s not a very scalable business as it exists today. For now is just a passion project that makes a few bucks, allows us meet interesting people, and provides the opportunity to discover new foods and restaurants.

Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#22

Post by iambateman »

Depending on your goals, have you considered freelancing?

If your purpose is cash flow, freelancing can quickly generate $2000++ with much less risk than starting a SaaS.

That’s not to say starting a SaaS is a bad idea…but if pure short-term cash production is your goal, I’d consider finding clients who trust you to pay you hourly on the side.

FWIW, I’ve started 2 SaaS companies with a collective revenue of $0, and my side freelancing currently makes more than $2k/mo.

Lastly…it’s very possible that you have lots of other goals other than cash, and if so, good luck with your SaaS! I started MoneyHabitsHQ.com and it was one of the most fun learning activities of my career, despite not producing revenue.

Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#23

Post by kouteiheika »

mateuszbuda wrote: post #10

For https://scrapingfish.com/ it took us about 5-6 months from idea to $2k/month. It’s still not our main source of income. It was fun to build especially that it involved working with hardware.

Just curious, so how exactly do you source your IPs? I clicked on the "How IPs for web scraping are sourced" page expecting an answer on how you do it, but it doesn't actually tell me that; it just tells me how they're not sourced. You said that "it involved working with hardware", so did you source your own mobile SIM cards in various countries, hook up your own phones to that and use those as proxies?

Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#25

Post by StephenSmith »

agotterer wrote: post #21

A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business. So far we’ve hosted 12 din…

Very cool! Any advice for someone who would want to replicate this endeavor?

Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#26

Post by capableweb »

hugoroussel wrote: post #19

GPT Gmail and GPT Workspace, using GPT in the google docs, slides, sheets and auto responder for Gmail. https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/gpt_for_gma... https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/gpt_for_doc... https://gpt.space The best part is not even about the money but about having a lot of users, democratising GPT and saving a lot of human hours everyday!

When did you launch? Seems like very good revenue if you launched recently and already reached 2000/month considering the low price and high cost of the OpenAI API.

Edit: Your T&C says it was written in 2019, you can't possibly been running the project since then right? https://gpt.space/terms-of-service

Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#27

Post by sph »

$0 still, and haven't launched.

But since I literally just deployed my new landing page for the Early Access, and looking to launch by the end of the month, I figure I might talk about it.

I'm working on Bernard (https://bernard.app), a link checker service for website owners. Since the job market is tight, I figured I might go all in into what I hope will become a profitable, lean, one-person business.

Hoping to reach ramen profitability within the next 12 months.

Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#28

Post by martin_a »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #5
jmduke wrote: post #2

I run Buttondown (buttondown.email) full-time now, but until this past year it was a side project for me alongside my day job as an IC (later EM). It took...around two and a half years, I think, to hit $2k/mo MRR. It was definitely not the stereotypical "launch → iterate a bit → boom, PMF" story that you often hear, which was fine because it was 'just' a side project and I didn't have to worry about running out of mo…

I never hear that story. But I hear the 2 year one alot. The advantage of getting older is time is at warp speed so 2 years is nothing ha ha!

> The advantage of getting older is time is at warp speed so 2 years is nothing ha ha!

To be honest: Realising that time is going by so fast really scared me this week. Being mid-30s I really need to get my shit together, soon... :-D

Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#29

Post by rubymamis »

DaanDL wrote: post #11
rubymamis wrote: post #4

I'm the founder of the open-source and cross-platform note-taking app https://www.get-notes.com (written in Qt C++). I earn about $2000 a month from ads on the landing page (organic SEO), but very soon plan to add a subscription for pro features (while people could still compile it from source and get the full experience without paying, if they wish). I started the project 8 years ago to create a slick looking note-t…

Wuut.. Never heard of this! It looks very slick, I searched and searched for a nice note taking app on Linux and eventually landed with NoteKit, but this looks better.

Thanks! Even more awesome features and improvements are coming soon (:

We're on Github here btw: https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes

Re: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

#30

Post by hackathonguy »

We currently make about $3K per month with https://www.hiyodel.com - ChatGPT-powered copywriting for Shopify stores. The Shopify ecosystem is a toughie and it's been a difficult road so far, but it's great having the "passive" income!
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