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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

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Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#391
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there. Been in hosting since 1999. I've worked at two of the companies on your first page and know people at/from several others on your first page. In fact I was at one of them until this month. Hello from the other side!

hey, where did you go now? Care to offer any opinion about reviews in the space?

I'm at a MWP provider that shares something in common with SpaceX ;-)

My only misgiving is that twitter itself is extremely negative, and that the signal to noise ratio (no pun intended) is fairly bad. I've been on the front lines of answering twitter during outages, and I'm scarred for life. It's been 6 years since I was at ASO and I just now can stomach visiting twitter without having a PTSD like response. So gathering review and comments from there is gonna be a hard one for me to swallow. I do like the fairness of the concept, but in practice I think the source (twitter) itself is flawed in this regard. I've seen people paying <$10/mo go to absolute war against a host on Twitter because the host wouldn't fix their hacked site. So... I'm biased against it lol.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#392

I built an in-browser 3D world for life coaches so they can create better experiences for their communities. Audio & video chat in a game-like world, where exploration and socializing is for health, happiness, and personal growth. We're averaging about $400/mo right now through customizing worlds and building features as requested. https://www.relm.us

You guys are using y.js to implement the world right? Are CRDTs commonly used in the video games space? And if you don’t mind explaining, why did you go with y.js over Automerge?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This literally made me say "WTF?!" when I went to the page. I think you're burying the lede here. It's only $29 inc worldwide shipping ! WTAF, that's awesome. I'll be ordering one as soon as Christmas is out of the way. Any plans to add an EU or UK distribution point? I'm prepared to wait the 2-3 weeks for free UK shipping tbh, but if you're adding more local distribution early next year I'd hold on.

>It's only $29 inc worldwide shipping Oh yeah, thanks for pointing that out. The one time I'm not in a shilly mood (Christmas and all) and the post actually gets interaction. Murphy's Law! >Any plans to add an EU or UK distribution point? Sorta kinda maybe. I did have one, but a whole lot of VAT compliance bullshit caught up with me. In most countries, GST/VAT is handled automatically by large eCommerce platforms (if…

> Now that Brexit has happened and the UK's laws have changed to something sane

Interesting perspective - in the main everything around international trade got a whole lot more complicated for us here in the UK since leaving the EU.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#394

I made Nodewood ( https://nodewood.com/ ), a SaaS starter kit/boilerplate. An unlimited-app license is around $500, so a single sale a month puts me into this territory. It could probably be higher, if I were any better and/or more persistent about marketing, but right now I'm focusing on the last two releases I have scheduled on the roadmap before releasing "1.0" (easy scripting and an easy deploy system), then I'll…

Cool! What is the tech stack behind it if you don’t me asking?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#396

I helped my wife (a primary school teacher) start a social emotional development book & activity subscription service. https://mybookbag.com.au/ It's slowly growing, but to be honest the pricing needs to be increased. Profit margins are paper thin (ha!). Still though, it's been fun putting together the website, integrating Stripe etc. Biggest issue is book publishers. Wow their ordering systems are archaic! We can't…

Nice idea! If I was in AU I'd subscribe for my kid.

Do you think you'd have the same issues in the US or Europe, is it just local distributors don't have that much stock?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#397

I helped my wife (a primary school teacher) start a social emotional development book & activity subscription service. https://mybookbag.com.au/ It's slowly growing, but to be honest the pricing needs to be increased. Profit margins are paper thin (ha!). Still though, it's been fun putting together the website, integrating Stripe etc. Biggest issue is book publishers. Wow their ordering systems are archaic! We can't…

>It's slowly growing, but to be honest the pricing needs to be increased. Profit margins are paper thin (ha!).

Looking at your site, the first thing I noticed is that you use AusPost (I'm assuming you'd be paying MyPost Business rates).

Especially for larger packages within the same city, Sendle generally has better rates and turnaround times.

Have you looked into alternative logistics options?

>>We can't deliver different books to different subscribers because she'd then need to produce additional activities & resources for each of the books.

Is there a reason you can't ship new customers books (and resources) from your existing back catalogue? This could solve the inventory problem too.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#398
I built a new Pinboard.in client for iOS and macOS called Pins (Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25881622)

If it were back in the old days, I would've charged for it upfront for $5 or so. Instead I decided to make it free to try with an in-app purchase to remove all limitations. Targetting a niche customer base that have already paid at least $22/year for a Pinboard.in subscription and are likely to be disappointed by the current offerings meant I was able to go for a more sensible price. Right now the full unlock costs $15 and includes 3 platforms (iOS, iPadOS, and macOS) with family sharing enabled.

I was able to recruit 100+ beta testers and added some much needed features before launch. Since then it has been a steady pace of one update every month or two which adds either new features, UX improvements, or bug fixes.

The app is highly rated (4.8/5 overall rating) and has a good number of loyal customers who follow me on Twitter (@GetPinsApp).

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#399
https://stockevents.app

~5000$/mo

An investment tracking app with a unique view of things (events).

Started just before corona, since I needed something like this myself. Turns out a lot of people were searching for something like that. The fact that many other investment tracking apps are either ad ridden, slow or have a bad ux helped as well.

Technical:

- App flutter

- Backend go

- Database postgres

- Hosted Kubernetes on GCP

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's only $29 inc worldwide shipping Oh yeah, thanks for pointing that out. The one time I'm not in a shilly mood (Christmas and all) and the post actually gets interaction. Murphy's Law! >Any plans to add an EU or UK distribution point? Sorta kinda maybe. I did have one, but a whole lot of VAT compliance bullshit caught up with me. In most countries, GST/VAT is handled automatically by large eCommerce platforms (if…

> Now that Brexit has happened and the UK's laws have changed to something sane Interesting perspective - in the main everything around international trade got a whole lot more complicated for us here in the UK since leaving the EU.

Oh, I'm not commenting on the overall effect. From what I understand, international trade absolutely did get more complicated.

On the other hand, though, it gives the UK a bit more freedom to set its own laws and make its own agreements.

VAT laws that are actually designed to collect VAT, for example, plus we finally have a UK-AU FTA!

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