Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 866 posts

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

#641

Post by billyhoffman »

happybuy wrote: post #16

I make a Safari ad blocker app for iOS and macOS - Magic Lasso Adblock - https://www.magiclasso.co/ It's free to use and download with an optional Pro subscription that includes additional features and makes > $500/month. Key things that have helped the revenue in 2021: - Released a major new version 3.0 which blocks all YouTube ads and has kicked along sales and improved the conversion rate considerably - Apple's sm…

Magic Lasso is what enabled me to finally stop using Chrome on my personal devices and just use Safari. I’ve been a happy (and paying) Magic Lasso user for over a year since I heard you advertise on some Mac podcasts.

Thank you for building this awesome product

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

#642

Post by vneur »

duck wrote: post #415
vneur wrote: post #22

I built a board game in 2021 that has been just breaking the cutoff for this post, all I do is mail out a few games a week as we get orders. We do all our own fulfillment to save money. Currently trying to design a real video game. I got lucky with the board game because it targeted a really niche audience (rock climbers) and so we weren't really competing with the full board game market, which is honestly super satu…

Looks like a fun game, I'll pass that on to some climber friends. Curious - where did you get the cards printed at? Working on a card game myself, but have been putting off researching that much after getting overwhelmed with options.

Depends on scale. For our initial play-testing I bought a bunch of plastic card sleeves and regular playing cards, and then printed out the 3"x5" game cards on my home printer. The playing cards are to make the card sleeves stiff and this way you can really quickly swap out your cards while play testing.

For prototyping the box and the demo copies we tried a few different print shops that operate in the US. The easiest by far is the game crafter, their website lets you upload and proof your cards through a web portal and I found that to be really good for not making mistakes. Unfortunately their quality is lower because the print runs are so small and the cost is pretty high.

If you get to large scale production (>500 copies) you can start getting things printed for reasonable cost. You can work with a chinese manufacturer directly (a bit risky for a first time project) or use one of the US intermediaries. Panda games is probably the best option there, but their minimum run is 2000.

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

#643

Post by lelandfe »

mongol wrote: post #446
crobertsbmw wrote: post #25

My little hardware book, Computer Engineering for Babies launched on Kickstarter a few months ago and blew my mind by raising almost $250k. It’s a simple book with buttons and LEDs to demonstrate different logic gates. I just shipped out the first batch of books a week ago and now waiting for the next batch of books. It’s gotten pretty demanding pretty quickly but I’m really excited about it. I’m hoping I can soon em…

Jeff Geerling tweeted something about that he got 1 million TikTok views from a video he spent two minutes to make. I think it featured this book.

Found it: https://www.tiktok.com/@geerlingguy/video/704386612371181086...

Now sitting at 3.7m views.

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

#644

Post by locallost »

timmaah wrote: post #181

My side project of screen scraping campground websites and alerting people of availabilities has taken off to the point of making more a month than the day job. https://wanderinglabs.com/

Congrats also at making it clear within seconds what it's all about. Too many products add flashy images and I have no idea what it's supposed to be.

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

#645

Post by hemmert »

Graffur wrote: post #598
hemmert wrote: post #401

Mine scaled to about $800/month this year (from $200/month in the previous years): Escape Team, a printable escape room https://www.escape-team.com All revenue is generated via in-app purchases, and it is about 60% iOS, 40% Android. People download and print a mission PDF with all the physical cut-fold-and-draw puzzles, then the app offers a $1.99 in-app purchase to unlock the audio narrative/gameplay for that missio…

Do you have a video of people playing this? (Quite common for board games). I can't understand how it is played.

Yes of course, here is a spoiler-free one:

https://youtu.be/_lDrUM8_hL0

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

#646

Post by eruci »

fm2606 wrote: post #587
eruci wrote: post #34

I built a free reverse geocoding api about 4 years ago ( https://api.3geonames.org ) Usage grew steadily sometimes crashing the server. So I loaded the software on GCP and AWS Marketplaces. Those needing a dedicated api launched their own servers for a fee. It has made an average pf $500 a month since I made those machine images available on https://3geonames.org/api about 2 years ago.

If it is free how are you making money? I didn't see any advertisement, i.e. Google Ads, etc.

I get a portion of the server fee on either AWS or GCP.

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

#647

Post by nitramm »

When I have realised how often I am searching for converting between timestamp and date I have created this website - https://timestamp.online/. It's earning around $100/month. The most interesting thing is how valuable are people from US - overall profit depends almost entirely on clicks from US.

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

#648

Post by _n7kw »

discordance wrote: post #293
_n7kw wrote: post #156

I earn more than $500 a month with [redacted], a phone contract comparison website for the UK market. [link redacted] Today, 90% of my time is spent on content marketing, followed by improvements to the website. Data is automatically pulled once a day. Parsing the data feeds can be frustrating, as there is no consistent format or documentation, therefore I need to code around many possible edge cases. I do all the we…

Useful! If you're able to share, I'm curious how you market this and get eyeballs on your site?

Write a lot of relevant, good quality content. It takes time and consistency before you can expect results.

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

#649

Post by yawaworht1978 »

madman2890 wrote: post #61

I bought a coffee farm in Colombia. Annualized it makes around $800 / month and growing. Should double to $1600 / month next year as we’ve doubled our production. It’s barely profitable, but is profitable nonetheless. The more we plant the more profitable it will get, and we’ll be planting 10,000 more trees soon!

How much did you pay for it and are there any corruption issues? How big is it and do you sell wholesale or own brand or both?

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

#650

Post by lewiscollard »

Nexxxeh wrote: post #363
AussieWog93 wrote: post #195

Open Source Hardware! Specifically a USB Oscilloscope: https://espotek.com/labrador Sell maybe $1k/mo of these through the website and another $3k through Amazon at a margin of around 50%. The biggest things that I see a lot of people get wrong in the hardware business is the importance of manufacturing and logistics. It doesn't matter that you're constantly producing new and improved revisions of your board if you'r…

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.

Yeah, I might have read the parent comment, thought "oh neat, good on ya", and not thought more of it if you hadn't pointed out that it's $29. Also it has open source software! Which runs on Linux! I had to order one just now for the funs and learnings.

Good job AussieWog93, and all the best to your business!

Post reply on HN