

How Much I Money Made From Side Projects In 2008 - hbien
http://www.pseudocoder.com/archives/2009/01/04/how-much-money-i-made-from-side-projects-in-2008/

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chops
Everyone's gotta start somewhere, and eventually, maybe one of those projects
will take off and start generating a decent amount of profit.

A few years ago when I was a consultant, in my free time I worked on my World
of Warcraft guild's website and after a year and a half, I realized it was
better than the vast majority of other guild sites out there (imo), and
thought, maybe I could charge for this if i made it a service. So I spent 6
months rewriting my own guild's site to make it "general purpose" allowing
other guilds to create websites.

The thought was, "maybe I can score a few extra bucks on the side." I launched
in May of '06 and was profitable immediately, and by January '07, business was
so good that I dropped consulting altogether to focus on the guild hosting
site.

So keep plugging away. I probably had 5 or 6 projects (Frozen Custard Stand
CMS system anyone?) that I worked on "on the side" before this one actually
turned into a profitable venture.

~~~
palish
Wow. May I ask, how profitable was the WoW meta-guild site?

~~~
chops
I don't remember how profitable 2006 was (since the income was combined with
consulting at the end for taxes), but for 2007 and 2008, it was something like
$90k revenue each year. 2008 was on a course for a bigger year (March did
$14k) and then it seemed all WoW interest dropped considerably after July (if
you look at the alexa ratings for the main guild hosting services, they all
took the same dive). It's nothing massive or anything, but it's a reasonable
living for providing gaming service to folks who are pretty much just like me
:)

~~~
henning
July 2008 is right about the time Age of Conan launched. I wonder if that's
really what caused the drop?

~~~
thalur
Which immediately makes me wonder how easy it would be to scale chops' site to
service other MMOs. If you could get it to the point where you can release a
fully-featured guild website on the launch day of each new MMO you might just
be on to something :)

~~~
chops
I should have specified that it is actually multiplatform. The site currently
natively supports about 15 MMO games, and has an interface for customizing and
specifying your own game parameters (level cap, tradeskills, classes, races,
etc).

WoW is just the biggest player by far. Currently I host approximately 88% WoW
guilds. The other "bigger players" are EQ, EQ2, Warhammer, AOC, FFXI, and
LOTRO, with Warhammer being the biggest non-WoW game at 2%.

WoW just has so many more players.

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patio11
The great thing about side projects is that they only get better -- your code
stays written, your marketing snowball gets better, age and inlinks bring your
rankings higher, etc. (If your business plan does not have these features, for
example if you are planning to sell iPhone applications which have a shelf-
life of cut apples which have been soaked in agar[1], you may wish to
reconsider.)

2006: $1k of bingo cards

2007: $10k of bingo cards

2008: $21k of bingo cards

2009: ...

[1] Don't try this at home, kiddos.

~~~
staticshock
$21k in bingo? kudos.

------
inovica
We developed SourceGuardian.com as a side project from my main company
(Inovica.com) as we had a need for PHP encryption and were not prepared to pay
the thousands of dollars that one company was charging at the time. We
developed it for our own sites and then packaged it up to sell it to others.
We had some teething problems with the earlier versions, but we're still here
a number of years later. It's still a side project (and we have a few of
them!!) but it brings in revenues of around $70,000+ a year. There is a team
of three people though that worked on this side project and which share on
this.

We also run:

www.europeantenders.com - Around $20,000 a year

www.ukscrap.com. This did amazingly well when scrap values were high (we were
doing around $2000 a day) but they have become quite low at the moment so its
only just covering its costs.

Hope the above helps. Happy to provide more info or help to anyone who wants
it

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jbenz
Thanks so much for posting this. Very cool.

RSS Talker is sweet. Matt, if you're reading this, and if you don't mind, here
are a couple critiques:

The title of this page should really be the info in that bubble: "Track Amazon
Price Changes With an RSS Feed". This should be the biggest, boldest font on
the page.

I don't think the average web user is very familiar with the terms ASIN and
ISBN. It could be as simple as "Enter your email to track a specific product
on Amazon." The How It Works section can explain more.

Can you make it just an email service for people without RSS feeds?

This site has a ton of potential. It's a shame that Amazon's commission rate
is so low. It would be awesome to open it up to any web retailer that is
signed up through a service like Commission Junction. Some of them offer 15%
commission. I'm sure you've thought through all of this.

Good luck!

~~~
kirse
I use a similar site right now: <http://camelcamelcamel.com/>

I think their interface is a bit cleaner than RSSTalker and probably more
developed right now.

~~~
L1quid
Thanks, I have put quite a lot of work into it since January 2008. The site
has been very profitable since launching in April! Here's hoping that
continues in 2009...

Suggestions, feature requests, and bug reports are all welcome =)

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akshaye
Ask HN: What's better: Having multiple side projects; or devoting all time to
one single app? Which has better chance of bringing in more revenues?

~~~
brianr
I'm a fan of the "throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks"
approach. Build lots of different things until one starts to get traction, and
when one does, focus your attention on that.

~~~
rs
That's good for well sized projects for the time frame that you're willing to
commit to.

However, from my experience in the past, I actually tried that on a number of
BIG projects - knowing only a couple of things:

1\. The ideas were big - thinking about 50k LOC at minimum.

2\. I had too much ego to let them go

Bad, bad mistake. Bad rs.

I scaled back to just working on 1 big project, and maybe toying with 2-3
smaller projects, and it has worked out better.

But the essence of your advice is right - work on a number of projects, and
focus on one that works.

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palehose
I seriously don't see the point of advertising how much money I'm making off a
given site. If someone else knows that putting together a site like RSSTalker
will eventually bring in thousands of dollars annually with a minimum amount
of maintenance, doesn't that increase the chance that my site is going to get
cloned by someone else?

If I were to visit RSSTalker and not know whether or not the site was
profitable, I would be less likely to take the time to consider cloning the
site.

~~~
mattcurry
Honestly the reason I wrote the post wasn't to advertise the sites or brag
about the money (which isn't all that much to brag about anyway).

I originally started the blog with the goal of focusing on these type of side
projects, whether they are mine or not. Check out the original mission
statement:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20070224000551/www.pseudocoder.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070224000551/www.pseudocoder.com/about)

I'd since gotten away from that, but it's something that still interests me. I
posted this because I wanted to be transparent with my sites and hoped it
would inspire others to do the same.

As for people copying the sites...go nuts. Enjoy the long nights and dashed
dreams...I know I did.

~~~
rymngh
This is Hacker News, you are free to do that. It inspires us actually.

This is why I go back to Hacker News everytime. I list the reasons again: 1)
Because bunch of smart guys hang over here. 2) There's just so much to learn
especially on starting a startup, this is one topic that I love because it
teaches us something. 3) Because of PG.

And I think this topic teaches everyone of us something worth posting here in
HN.

------
joshwa
I can't for the life of me figure out what planbookedu.com does, even after
watching the screencast.

It's a calendar? With only all-day events allowed? And with TinyMCE?

What am I missing?

~~~
gcheong
I had the same reaction. I think if he just spent some time in creating a
clear message and then putting that message on the front page he might see an
increase in users. If you think about the average user they need to have the
selling point made a clear as possible, more so if we're talking about the
average teacher ;^).

~~~
mattcurry
Thanks for the criticism...copywriting isn't my strong suit. In my defense I
think the site makes sense if you're a teacher. At least that's what my wife
(the teacher) tells me :)

~~~
rymngh
Your wife has some associated bias. I totally agree with them, you can
increase your revenue like 5 times if you just made that clearer.

But I guess you have some point since I'm guessing that the Edu website gets
noticed not because of Web search but word of mouth of teachers. And probably
the teachers who spread this website to other teachers have well explained the
product's features enough already.

But If you just upgrade the clarity of your site. The web searcher won't get
trouble and know your site's purpose immediately.

------
jreposa
I'm a bit behind Matt in sales, but I just launched a site the other day that
does something quite similar to RSStalker, but specific to best selling books:
<http://yowzas.com>

Best selling book lists are everywhere, but this one is near real-time due to
AWS. I find myself browsing the site daily reading book reviews. I have
category specific ones like <http://business.yowzas.com> and just like
RSStalker, I have RSS feeds for each major category of best selling book
lists.

~~~
L1quid
Nice site! I dig the simplicity and usefulness of the design.

~~~
jreposa
thanks! i really got sick of trying to find books on amazon. i essentially
removed everything that i didn't care about... so, really i made it in part
because i had an itch to scratch.

\- list of best sellers \- most helpful reviews \- books i also might like

------
paulgb
RSStalker is a great idea. Glad it's worked out well for him.

------
jwesley
"All I did for marketing in 2008 was email existing users"

Seriously? That does not make any sense. Why not try a paid search campaign?
Or networking with teachers via twitter? What is the purpose of building a
business and then not doing anything to market it?

~~~
mattcurry
Frankly the old version of the site sucked. I finally got around to launching
the new version this past summer. I was hesitant to push it considering I had
no real QA other then myself. It would have sucked to spent a ton of
time/money to market it and then find a huge bug that drove all those users
away.

Now that it's half way through the school year and there haven't been any
issues I'm more confident. But it doesn't make sense to market it now, since
teachers are already in their routine for the year. Next August I plan on
making a bigger push.

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fuzzmeister
later.rsstalker.com looks very useful, I will definitely use it. Great
alternative to tossing everything into my bookmarks.

~~~
mattcurry
Thanks fuzzmeister. Let me know if you hit any issues. I coded and launched it
in a weekend, so it may have some bugs. So far it's worked well for me though.

~~~
MaysonL
I clicked the bookmarklet a little before 3 PST for the Language Log page you
should see in your db: it showed up on the webpage, but never made it to the
feed (according to Google Reader).

~~~
mattcurry
The feeds are cached, so items may not appear right away. Plus there is an
additional lag depending on how often Google pings the feed.

Anyway, I checked out your case and I see the link in your feed now. I plan on
dropping the cache time once I get off the shared hosting.

~~~
MaysonL
Great - got it now.

