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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

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Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#481

Post by Soupy »

seanconaty wrote: post #332
Soupy wrote: post #117

I run https://pastmaps.com as a lil' solo bootstrapped labor of love. Think Google Maps, but for OLD maps. It has 185K+ fully georeferenced high-res maps covering all of America, as well as satellite, LiDAR, and 3D layers to enable exploration through space and time. History is cool yo. And apparently lucrative - it currently makes ~$5000/mo and is slowly but surely growing through word of mouth

I love this site. I love browsing David Rumsey's map collection and I know that they have a georeferenceing feature, but I haven't used it.

I also love David Rumsey's collection! Check out the rumsey map center at Stanford if you ever find yourself in the area, it's ridiculously cool

Pastmaps was really born out of my desire for more advanced features, layers, and tools on rumsey's site and I'm hoping I can eventually deliver on that vision (spoilers: I'm definitely not there yet)

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#482

Post by tobr »

kmoser wrote: post #409
nspeller wrote: post #116

I built an interactive Music Theory course 8 years ago over a winter break and it continues to bring in enough to pay my rent each month. I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives. It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos. I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that i…

I'm impressed! Every couple of years I come across a different music theory website and I try to follow along, but inevitably after a few sentences I'm completely lost and the rest becomes incomprehensible. I got really far along in yours, which was great, until I got to 6 (Keys): "When a song says that it is in the key of C Major or D Minor this is simply telling you which of the 12 notes are used in this song." You…

The sentence you quoted is a decent simplification but you probably shouldn’t take it too literally. It’s not really that the melody uses exactly seven notes. It is that these seven notes form the harmonic context that the chords and melody sits in. Normally that also means that the notes in question will be the most common ones in both chords and melody, but you can certainly use other notes as well.

A key is really an “I know it when I hear it” thing. The notes used are just one of many clues working together.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#483

Post by wtf242 »

vidyesh wrote: post #364
wtf242 wrote: post #354

The Greatest Books https://thegreatestbooks.org I created it in 2008 and have maintained and improved it over the years. I am trying to figure out how to monetize it more. I currently make around $2k a month. I just use adsense and have a paid membership feature through buymeacoffee. I get massive traffic and I'm pretty much the #1 result for anything related to best/greatest books. It's built with Rails and Postgres…

Can you go into more details, when was it built and how much time have you spent (approx) on creating the content? or is it all generated? And the traffic's gradual organic increase? Interesting to see Adsense revenue still being so high, I imagined this category being so competitive and diluted the CPM would be very low! I noticed your purchase modal only shows Amazon pricing, are you using their API to get prices o…

I built it in 2008, and have rewritten it twice now since them. I have spent quite a bit of time adding new lists. It's definitely a labor of love and I do spend quite a bit of time on it.

I do use Gen AI now to generate genres, descriptions, and to grab other data. Previously years ago i would just scrape it or manually set it.

Amazon has a nice product API with up to date prices.

I am working on bookshop.org integration. I used to also do barnes & noble. The problem is neither of them have APIs to programmatically search for books, so i have to do complicated scraping. example: https://github.com/ssherman/bookshop-search

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#484

Post by lifeisstillgood »

burningChrome wrote: post #472

My side project is managing several clients websites on a subscription based service. My buddy and I started a web design agency for small companies. It was just us two and we bootstrapped everything and were in the process of building several apps for the dozen or so architectural firms we were working with when he died suddenly of an aortic aneurism. It was such a shock to me and so I just shut the company down. Se…

Can you clarify what you mean by “leads” here - is this the sort of “we found fifty names and emails that might be interested”, or is it a landing page that collects a email and phone number for when someone enters them?

I am not trying to accuse you of something weird - it’s I hear a lot of lead generation as a basic business need and I never quite understood the real mechanisms - I only get the slightly passive landing site approach or cold calling

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#485

Post by apapli »

My wife built https://www.jummbo.ai but she doesn't have an HN account so I'll share for her.

Jummbo takes the "umm" out of prospecting in B2B sales.

It makes it really quick to find and prospect new customers, as it googles them, researches them, and writes custom emails and call scripts that are highly targeted to each of them.

The app is in the $hundreds per month, getting a lot of interest in a niche vertical which is quite promising so a lot of extra features will be added in the new year.

We're always up for feedback on how to make it better so if you set up a trial don't be shy with any suggestions you might have :)

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#487

Post by sofixa »

melvinmelih wrote: post #309
sofixa wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds cool, but why? Why would anyone generate a book ?

Think of it as deep diving into a topic that you want to know everything about. For example quantum computing, you can generate a book that goes in depth in yesterday’s quantum chip announcement ( https://instabooks.ai/products/df1ae367-e0c1-b749-9898-2744b... ). Or if you’re preparing for a job interview and need to brush up on your knowledge in that specific field ( https://instabooks.ai/products/041ced4c-efed-92e4…

Why wouldn't you buy a real book written by a real person who actually knows what they're talking about and is less likely to have hallucinated it all?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#488

Post by ronyfadel »

My 2 Mac Apps bring about $700/mo each:

Tubbie [1] is a simple and clean Mac YouTube downloader.

Mission Control Plus [2] fixes something stupidly simple: it adds closing, minimizing and quitting apps functionality to macOS' Mission Control.

[1] https://www.fadel.io/tubbie

[2] https://www.fadel.io/missioncontrolplus

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#489

Post by funny_name »

dietervds wrote: post #468

I write a newsletter on cybersecurity every week. Usually a summary of interesting articles and a list of known breaches and software issues. It's been going for seven years now I think? It makes about 25k in sponsorships each year, although it could be more if I actually got myself to sell a bit more. Either way, it's been a great way for me to keep learning. Nothing beats having to summarize a thing to thousands of…

Cool site. I'll probably check it out every now and then.

How do you source all of the articles? And have you done any marketing for it?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#490

Post by motyar »

Launched ZenMic: AI Podcast Generator few months ago. Crossed 400 free users so far.

Zero MRR but it makes money indirectly.

We still have to add pricing and paid plans but it attracted enough freelancing client who need related custom solution.

https://zenmic.com

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