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Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

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61–70 of 272 posts

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#61
I built MoneyHabitsHQ.com for simplified personal finance.

The hardest thing about it is that talking about budgeting is really personal. People are more than willing to talk about their process but things get awkward when it gets specific.

I can’t screenshare with someone to onboard them because that would involve seeing every bank account they have. Im curious if anyone has thoughts on how to solve that problem?

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#62
post #55

Circa 2006-07, I made around $4k by selling Adsense coupons. I saw people selling these on SEO forums and thought that there must be a way to get them. A little googling and I found a way to get these $50, $75, $100 adsense vouchers. These would sell sell for anywhere between $5-$20. It literally was free money till it lasted.

People still do this with AWS or even DigitalOcean.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#63

I built https://joyful.gifts a couple of years ago. Nice lunch money and was a good technical challenge. I did it to be able to call myself a full-stack software dev. Basically, get over my imposter syndrome.

Nice, interesting idea, how do you handle gift choices? Is there an option to screen the gifts beforehand?

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#64

I built MoneyHabitsHQ.com for simplified personal finance. The hardest thing about it is that talking about budgeting is really personal. People are more than willing to talk about their process but things get awkward when it gets specific. I can’t screenshare with someone to onboard them because that would involve seeing every bank account they have. Im curious if anyone has thoughts on how to solve that problem?

could you create dummy accounts with fake amounts, and onboard them through your screen?

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#65
post #29

After my grandfather got Parkinson’s disease circa 2005, I developed hand tremor cancelling software for the mouse [1]. It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer. It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough. I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It fe…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#66
post #63

I built https://joyful.gifts a couple of years ago. Nice lunch money and was a good technical challenge. I did it to be able to call myself a full-stack software dev. Basically, get over my imposter syndrome.

Nice, interesting idea, how do you handle gift choices? Is there an option to screen the gifts beforehand?

Yea - the customers get an email with the choice 15 days in advance. They don't get a list to pick from. Just one where they say yay/nay - if nay, then a new item gets pick and new email is generated.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#67

I built MoneyHabitsHQ.com for simplified personal finance. The hardest thing about it is that talking about budgeting is really personal. People are more than willing to talk about their process but things get awkward when it gets specific. I can’t screenshare with someone to onboard them because that would involve seeing every bank account they have. Im curious if anyone has thoughts on how to solve that problem?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#68
post #29

After my grandfather got Parkinson’s disease circa 2005, I developed hand tremor cancelling software for the mouse [1]. It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer. It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough. I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It fe…

Out of curiosity, did you consider creating a browser extension version of your software? As a developer of a dictation extension for Chrome [0] I see that it gets a lot of use for accessibility purposes. I once experimented with a tremor-compensating extension and some css that hid the “natural” cursor and overlaid a cursor image instead whose position I controlled (using a basic rolling window average to make it st…

Can you hook the mouse in a browser extension?

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#69
post #29

After my grandfather got Parkinson’s disease circa 2005, I developed hand tremor cancelling software for the mouse [1]. It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer. It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough. I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It fe…

I'm a software developer by trade. I've had essential tremor all my life. Virtually all doctors say, "well, at least it's a benign condition." Right. And it's affected my life in countless ways, none of them good. It's gotten slowly worse over the years. It's not debilitating, but it's frustrating, and it rules out some activities completely. As I type this I randomly touch the touch pad or an unwanted key, and random things happen. :-)

Your software looks amazing for me! Your web site describes my situation exactly. It looks like it's Windows only? Any plans for a Mac version?

Edit: I accidentally posted a truncated version of this earlier (I deleted it), exactly because of my tremor!

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