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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?

#391

Post by ZguideZ »

ketamine__ wrote: post #306
ZguideZ wrote: post #144

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...

Lol! Those look a lot like ours did but we didn't have color - it really makes the difference.

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

#392

Post by ZguideZ »

wolco2 wrote: post #381
THE_PUN_STOPS wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right idea, wrong time. My friend owns a sex shop in Provincetown, MA and has sold tens of thousands of Trump-plugs over the past 4 years.

location, location, location

lofl!!!!

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

#393

Post by ZguideZ »

secfirstmd wrote: post #286
ZguideZ wrote: post #144

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…

Did you ever think of making a Dick Cheney Dildo™ to complement the set? :)

If we had that, we 'wood' have certainly succeeded! Hey...that makes me realize the Cheney Dick could be made out of wood so the splinters would stay with you forever.

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

#394

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

sizzle wrote: post #321
qdot76367 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the other HN Buttplug Poster who is also having problems making money with their product, I salute you. (And yeah this is why I stay in software, manufacturing even on non-tech toys is still $$$$)

What niche does your butt plug serve?

Thank you for this.

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

#395

Post by issa »

nevster wrote: post #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.

I think this is a great idea. Did you ever do anything with it?

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

#396

Post by gremlinsinc »

miniyarov wrote: post #34

I built a VPN application for iOS and Android (still working on it) that uses user's DigitalOcean, AWS, or GCP to log in via OAuth2 or API token and create a VPN server so that only the user can connect and use. However, I still can think of any monetization except Ads (which I don't think will help because the VPN server also include ad-blocker). The only monetization might be donation. But if anyone has any idea I…

Make a free/pro version. Free version only works w/ a lock-screen interstitial ad enabled, and the VPN disconnects every 30 minutes until you re-enable it.

Pro version is like $1.99/month subscription.

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

#397

Post by fwipsy »

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…

It's a really fun game. I was a little frustrated by some words which didn't seem to be recognized - I think 'rome' and 'zen' were two, whereas much more obscure words were accepted.

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

#398

Post by futhey »

rangelreale wrote: post #103

In 2006/2007 I built HTMLButcher, a C++ desktop application to slice PSD/image website designs made by designers to HTML. In these years sites where made with tables, so for slicing a design I had to cut the images and fit then into borderless HTML tables. I took 2 years to build it, and in this timeframe people started building sematic websites with CSS, and abandoning table-based designs. I managed to sell 100 copi…

I would have used this in ~2005. Seems like you were just slightly late to market. CS2's built in tool to slice PSD -> HTML kind of sucked and required a lot of post-processing work.

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

#399

Post by 37ef_ced3 »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #385
37ef_ced3 wrote: post #181

NN-512 ( https://NN-512.com ) generates stand-alone C code for AVX-512 neural nets The idea was that user companies (or even the hardware companies: Intel, AMD) would pay me as a contractor to implement deconvolutions, transformers, etc., as extensions to the free/open core I released (which includes very sophisticated support for all forms of dense convolution, fully-connected layers, pooling, batch norm, activation…

Your project is seriously cool, I'm sorry it didn't work out for you.

Thanks dude

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

#400

Post by stanislavb »

t3rabytes wrote: post #160
stanislavb wrote: post #8

https://99remotejobs.com a job board focused on remote jobs. I have promoted it on both LiHunt (software dev audience) and SaaSHub; however that didn’t help. Not a single sale :) As a result, I’ve decided to make it FREE and open source the code. Hopefully in a few months.

https://weworkremotely.com/ is a pretty big remote job board that is likely siphoning away most traffic

yeah, I think you need to be a recognizable brand and have tons of traffic to be able to make real money out of it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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