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

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301–310 of 600 posts

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

#301
My friend and I built a marketing company for fitness.

We haven't yet made any income from it, and covid hit us pretty hard because of our customer base. However we're using the end of 2020 to build momentum on a few social media platforms in order to start gaining traction.

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

#302

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

with all due respect (and it's due - ecommerce is hard work), lose the animations... As soon as I landed on your page, I wasn't thinking "I wanna buy t-shirts and masks!" I was thinking, "Boy, I've got motion sickness and I hope I don't puke." Let me just say... I'm not a "motion sickness" type. But looking at your page still gave it to me.

Wow, I clicked because of your comment and I concur, you're not being dramatic, it's pretty overwhelming animation

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

#303
I probably have about 20 domains registered that I've never done anything with. Eg wherewasthistaken.com - the idea being you have a photo, eg from your parents, and you don't know where the photo was taken. So you post it on the website and people can comment if they recognise where it was taken.

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

#304
post #223

A card game to introduce SQL and Data Science - rowsandtables.com It's a physical game requiring at least 2 people so it's a tough sell this year. Still managed to sell about 100 copies though.

Awesome. Love the idea, I've built a card game to teach innovation (www.intrapreneurs-game.com) so I appreciate the effort that goes into designing a game, I'm currently trying to get my game developed as an app because I'm doing some remote workshops in 2021 and want to use it, thanks for sharing

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

#305

My wife has a side project selling antique maps. I built her a shopify site about 1 year ago that costs €30 p/m but it's hardly generating any revenue. I spent maybe 10 hours on it and she has spent about € 2000 on inventory. https://utrechtaandemuur.nl

Wondering: why did you choose to focus on one city?

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

#306

In 2004 my brother and I developed a buttplug shaped like George W. Bush - we called it the Bushplug. Manufacturing was more expensive than we had expected but we sold about 100 of them - presumably as novelty gifts. Our price point was too high for a novelty gift and the nose was a little too pointy to be an enjoyable sex toy. We made our money back and had some fun with being featured on BoingBoing and Fleshbot. So…

Is this it?

https://www.shapeways.com/product/9X5DEFHAE/george-w-bush-pl...

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

#307

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

with all due respect (and it's due - ecommerce is hard work), lose the animations... As soon as I landed on your page, I wasn't thinking "I wanna buy t-shirts and masks!" I was thinking, "Boy, I've got motion sickness and I hope I don't puke." Let me just say... I'm not a "motion sickness" type. But looking at your page still gave it to me.

Oh wow. Okay. Yes, ditch the animations. I genuinely cannot stand to use the site :(

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

#308
post #55

Hyades ( https://hyades.info/ ) I wanted a not-too-intrusive Github notification system that would give me a broad overview of what happened in my starred repos ( i.e. repos for which I'm only a consumer), as some kind of ‶real-time″ changelog. Indeed, I star quite a lot of e.g. emacs packages and other small utilities, which don't have a strict release schedule/changelog cycle, so it's easy to miss a new feature. So…

Not a bad idea. Congrats!

I was thinking of building something like this but rather for people I follow on GitHub: their contributions, comments, PRs and so on. A kind of a way to learn from one’s GH peers.

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

#309
post #69

I launched mergecaravan.com to deal with a problem I've encountered at a few jobs in the past. Mostly, I built it initially to scratch my own itch, and to go back to doing more django dev. Basically, you can add a label to a PR in github and it will then queue it up to be merged once all the required checks pass, and it keeps queued PRs "up-to-date". It's made a little money, but not much. Github recently rolled out…

That sounds almost exactly like bors-ng: https://github.com/bors-ng/bors-ng#a-merge-bot-for-github-pu... There was also homu, which predated bors and also did more or less the exact same thing. Does your thing have any features that differentiate it from what bors does?

You don't have to host it yourself ;)

Beyond that, there are a couple of things that I don't believe bors has.

A big one that I built for myself was the idea of supporting "working hours", i.e. only merge code during this timeframe.

For example, one company I worked for had some pretty flaky tests. Unfortunately, what would happen is we would have several PRs get reviewed and then use a tool like bors to enqueue them. Inevitably, some queued PR would have a failed check for this flaky test.

Fast forward to the weekend and a completely different developer would merge a hotfix into master. Unfortunately, a side effect would be that a tool like bors would try to merge the head commit into the PR with the flaky test, and now it passes! So it gets deployed at a random unexpected time, which isn't what we wanted.

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

#310
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback! Pricing is not my forte. My thought process was basically this: - In general, people are probably only planning a single trip at a time (an exception might be if travel agents were to be interested) - Based on that assumption, it came down to what resolution of access people would want. With the current model, 6 months of editing access comes down to $35. I could, equivalently, just charge $3…

How about something like a quasi-log scale, e.g.,: $19 for 6 weeks, $39 for 6 months, $79 for 12 months and $99 for three years?

That could work! I'm curious what makes subscription models more attractive from your point of view. Is it just simpler to understand? It seems strictly less flexible than a pay-for-what you need model. I suppose in your example the advantage is that you can get a discount by paying for more up front which is a clear advantage for people who will take multiple trips in a year or are planning a trip far in advance.
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