Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve? - laksmanv
======
hugs
5 years. (2011-2016) While working on my first startup (Sauce Labs), I made a
robot that plays Angry Birds as a side/art project in the autumn of 2011. The
serious part of the project is that you can use the robot for testing mobile
apps and devices. I started to sell the robots (still as a side project) on
Tindie when that first launched in the summer of 2012. I made a couple of
thousand dollars the first few years, but basically broke even profit-wise. I
got my first "big" enterprise order of robots in late 2014 and that made me
start wondering if I should ramp things up. I formally incorporated
([http://www.tapster.io](http://www.tapster.io)) in May 2015 and took some
seed funding (Indie.vc) to sell the robots full-time. Since incorporating,
it's now veeeery close (this summer) to ramen profitable while paying a few
salaries.

~~~
brianpgordon
It's interesting to me that your approach to automated testing includes a
real, physical device.

How well do you think your robot offering is positioned versus fast and free
virtual automated testing within an Android/iOS simulator? I assume there must
be some material advantage to testing on a real device, but I don't know a lot
about the domain. What happens if the layout of the app changes slightly- are
your testing programs purely based on physical coordinates?

~~~
hugs
Example #1: How do you automate a test for what happens to your streaming
music app when a phone call comes in? (This was a real scenario a client
couldn't figure out how to automate any other way.) Example #2: You're a car
company and have a mobile app that controls parking your car. You have a
business (and possibly legal) requirement to test the app with the same
unmodified hardware your users will use. (So you can't only use simulators.)
Example #3: You make wearables that measures steps taken. How do you test the
wearable to make sure it's logging steps properly? (You shake it with a
robot.)

Every company that makes a device (phone, car, wearable, anything with a touch
screen, etc) has a secret robot testing lab.

I didn't know all of these examples were real business problems (with the
associated big enterprise budgets) when I started the project. But after
enough of these conversations, I realized there's something there.

~~~
benliong78
At the Previous Company I was in (Bindo Labs) I was coding the NFC Payment
Integration with the Point of Sales System (POS). One of the requirements for
the integration was that every transaction has to happen less than 0.5 seconds
including the hardware card-reading part. So I ended up having to wave the
card around the reader all day testing it. I thought of building a automated
testing robot but tight deadline prevented me from diverging, and it didn't
end up happening.

I'd be curious to know how big a business it is for you now that it's 5 years
past. Sounds like a very interesting case-study.

~~~
hugs
We're now at about $150k in bookings halfway through the year. Last year was
$30k revenue for the entire year. I hope the numbers keep going up or this
will have to go back to side-project status!

~~~
coverband
In that case, my I humbly suggest turning the tapster.io landing page to a
more informative experience, rather than expecting visitors to click over to
the Tindie project site?

------
geerlingguy
I made Server Check.in 3.5 years ago (HN announcement thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901350)
), and it's been earning around $2k/year with almost no maintenance. Just a
few updates to the Drupal front-end/UI, and the Node.js backend every year
(maybe 20 hours total).

Costs are incredibly low, as I have ~15 low end box-type servers running as
check servers interacting with Drupal via a private API, and one DigitalOcean
droplet running prod, with a hot backup droplet. Everything was automated via
Ansible early on, and I don't have to touch anything except for
patching/updating from time to time.

I also have run Hosted Apache Solr for almost double the time, and it actually
earns a decent secondary income. Up to about 25 DigitalOcean droplets now,
also all managed via Ansible/Jenkins, and it has a few hundred clients (a
couple who have been stable clients for over 5 years, and a few very large
names that made me realize even a side project can be stable/good enough for
'big companies' to trust them).

I haven't advertised either except for mentions here and there and having them
in some of my social media profiles, but I've learned so much from running
both—and even turned some of that knowledge into a book that gives decent
passive income on top!

~~~
matt_wulfeck
I'm happy for your success, but I'm not sure I'd consider running a hosted
distributed database as a side project. You're on-call 100% of the time for a
single point of failure. Also, a bad/inexperienced tenant can serious
performance issues.

~~~
geerlingguy
I learned early on, it's all about proactive monitoring, 'self healing' (e.g.
restart on fail) services, and simplicity in everything.

I've been running between 300-500 Apache Solr search cores continuously for
almost 5 years, starting with 1.4, migrating up to now 4.10.4 (5 and 6 are in
the works), all with around 99.98% uptime (averaged on all the servers over
time).

I have detailed logs and per-search-core stat tracking (queries, index size,
query time) for the past 3 months and archives back further, and I have only
had to remove noisy neighbors a few times (and did so quickly, by first
isolating them on their own VM, then helping them move off to dedicated
resources if needed).

Also, I explicitly state I offer no SLA in the support docs—some people are
okay with that.

But yes, I'm always on call, technically. I've only had to fix 'emergency'
scenarios about 3 times in the past 5 years though. Even security updates are
automated via Ansible/Jenkins. I just need to log in and click a button and
things are updated, or a new server is built.

I highly recommend Google's new book on SREs; whether a one man shop or a
multi billion corp, the learnings are exactly the same!

~~~
wocg
_I 'm always on call, technically_

Do you have a partner who can do support when you need time away?

I run a small game website. A couple of years ago it experienced an outage
while I was away from home on a 2-day climbing trip. I didn't learn about it
until I checked email the first evening. It was a terrible feeling to realize
I'd been out having fun, and the site had been down for most of the day. I had
to drive home to get the site up again. It was miserable.

~~~
geerlingguy
All the primary automation and functionality can be controlled by my
smartphone; and if the worst comes to be, I can still login to all my servers
via Prompt. I've only had to do it once, but it's good to know if can control
all aspects of the system on any device, as long as I have my password manager
and the right SSH keys.

That goes along with the 'keep it simple' philosophy; since the service has a
very small public API and surface area, it's easy enough to diagnose issues
quickly with limited analysis of log data and simple monitoring.

But no, I don't have any partner actively, but I do have a
contingency/succession plan in case anything would happen to me (for the sake
of my customers).

------
altitudinous
I have several apps on the iOS app store. I make between $4000AUD - $9000AUD
per month.

I quit my job 3 years ago to do it, so I guess it isn't really a side project
any more. That said, it is a lonely way to make money and I am over it. My
career was computers, and I'm pleased I've done the apps, I can achieve
anything technical so it isn't a challenge any more and am looking at
something more physical, hands on.

When I quit my job I was making approx $3 a day from apps, I learned a lot.

The great thing is that I can quit and the apps keep making money. It is
trivial to keep them updated to the latest iOS version, design standard, or
advertising API - I've just put Firebase Analytics and the latest Admob API in
them all. Pleased with the iOS10 announcement today, it will not add burden to
my apps, nor are they sherlocked like my first app was. My most recent app
took me 10 days to make, it is fairly professional, I have one more I want to
make it will take a similar amount of time. Every time I get asked a support
question I answer it and also post the answer on a support website, this has
cut down support enquiries to one every week or two.

On to the next thing!

~~~
NKCSS
Care to post some links? Always nice to see some context.

~~~
altitudinous
Thanks for asking, but I'd like to retain my anonymity for now :) I also have
enough competitors at the moment!

------
matthewmueller
4 months.

I built a Slack bot called Standup Jack
([https://standupjack.com](https://standupjack.com)). It's a ton of work
upfront but if you launch early, keep an open dialog with your users, iterate
on their feedback and keep your costs low, it's a nice way to earn some side
income each month.

Udemy is a pretty easy way to start since they do the marketing for you (for a
pretty big cut).

~~~
travisby
How does Udemy market for you? All I knew was they were a course-learning
company.

Would love to hear!

~~~
matthewmueller
There are 3 ways for people to buy your course:

1) Direct marketing - Udemy drives a ton of traffic to their website, so
people just naturally see your course(s) and buy it.

2) Affiliate marketing - Udemy advertises your course(s) via things like
Google Adwords. You make a very measly cut on these sales.

3) Personal marketing - You can promote your course through your own channels
/ reputation. You make like 98% of the sale when people purchase it this way.

Without doing your own marketing, you can easily earn decent side income
though.

------
dalacv
I made a course on Udemy on how to make complete web applications without
writing code using APEX.

Link and free coupons:

[https://www.udemy.com/create-web-apps-with-
apex-5/?couponCod...](https://www.udemy.com/create-web-apps-with-
apex-5/?couponCode=FREE_FOR_HN)

Expenses:

$100 for a nice microphone (not necessary) but didn't want to record a bunch
and have it be garbage $100 for Screenflow (to do video editing). 20 hours
time (split across a couple of weekends

Profit:

I've made $1405 on it so far. It is almost completely passive income.

Proof:

[http://i.imgur.com/sexsrzK.png?1](http://i.imgur.com/sexsrzK.png?1)

If you know any of the topics in the Hot Topics list and can do desktop
recording, maybe you should think about teaching others and making some side
money while doing it. Best of all, the Udemy community is awesome. They are
very supportive of each other.

[https://teach.udemy.com/course-creation/hot-topic-
courses/](https://teach.udemy.com/course-creation/hot-topic-courses/)

~~~
golergka
How much time did it take you to create the course and how much to promote it?

------
mhowland
3 Months.

I made [https://www.myothernumber.com](https://www.myothernumber.com) (online
temporary sms/mms/voice numbers) about a 1.5 years ago, was making ramen money
within 3 months.

Now tracking in the 5-figure/year range.

It's a very, very crowded market so primary cost is user acquisition, but then
again that's exactly why I built it, to better learn (consumer facing UA) and
have a platform to experiment with.

About to officially launch [http://artistic.af](http://artistic.af) (neural
artistic transfer meets instagram + canvas printing). I expect this one to
take a bit longer to scale, but it was just an excuse to learn DNNs.

~~~
lasfter
Just wanted to let you know that there is a typo on the first page of
artistic.af: "...a lot of historic genuius..."

Site looks great!

~~~
mhowland
Awesome, much appreciated!!

~~~
strm
And another one: ...and the inspriation of you...

------
simple1
I wrote an online multiplayer game called Aberoth:
[http://aberoth.com](http://aberoth.com). I released the first version to the
world in January 2010, but the game did not have many features initially, and
there was no way to buy anything. Toward the end of 2012 I felt good enough
about the product to start selling memberships.

I continued to work on the game on the side over the years, and I released the
game on Steam in July 2015:
[http://store.steampowered.com/app/354200/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/354200/).

It does not make near as much a normal software engineer's full time salary,
but it is profitable.

~~~
meir_yanovich
Hey looks good , mind telling us which server stack you are using and how much
money it cost ?

------
danschuller
I wrote a digital book, plus art, engine and example code about how to make a
JRPG style RPG. ([http://howtomakeanrpg.com/](http://howtomakeanrpg.com/) <\-
the current copy is pretty terrible!).

I'm still in pre-release but early-access has been available for mailing list
subscribers since January. Release should happen "soon".

Profit-wise: ~$500 a month (apart from the first month which was ~$5000). If I
include my own time, I've roughly covered my costs.

It's taken about 3 years (!) to write the book in my spare time, usually an
hour each morning. In a lot of ways it wasn't a great side project:

    
    
      - Hard to make
      - Small market
      - Complex
      

But it's the first commercial side project I've attempted and I've really
enjoyed the experience. Rather than jump straight on to a new project, I'll
probably spend time after release experimenting with marketing (google
adwords, content marketing etc).

(Previously I've written a programming book published via a traditional
publisher and my day job is as a game developer.)

------
niftylettuce
Here's a brief list!

* Wakeup.io - Simple Phone Wake-up Calls @ [https://wakeup.io](https://wakeup.io) and it is fully automated and runs itself with actually really good profits. It was built in 2-3 days.

* GetProve, Simple Phone Verification @ [https://getprove.com](https://getprove.com) and it is fully automated and runs itself with again, really good profits. It was built in a week or so.

* Teelaunch, Kickstarter/Indiegogo Fulfillment Service (exited/sold) [http://teelaunch.com](http://teelaunch.com) (the site is different now than it used to be here [https://web.archive.org/web/20140110204830/https://teelaunch...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140110204830/https://teelaunch.com/)). As you can see from Wayback Machine, the site was just a landing page when I had it... took me day to put it up!

* Standard Signature, Email Signature Automation for Gmail Business @ [https://standardsignature.com/](https://standardsignature.com/) (built in 48 hours)

* Glazed, a Rapid MVP boilerplate for NodeJS @ [http://glazed.io](http://glazed.io) (built in a week or so, but this was work/thoughts accumulated over like 5+ years of hacking - this landed me paying clients, so I still consider it a side project)

* Asynchrosend, a MailChimp competitor (site is down now, but I did have paying clients and successful startups like Notehall.com had used it), built in a week in college!

* I have a bunch, at least 20 more on my list TODO still, if you want to build one with me let me know! I really would love to find super talented people, or people that are motivated. It's really hard to find _good_ people if you know what I mean. I am not working on these right now though as I'm solely focused on one big project.

I have a bunch more projects I've built, that are also profitable that I can
share. Email me and I can share more!

 _Update #1_ \- I really wanted to mention the most important thing about
this. I read a Max Klein blog post that flipped the switch on me before to get
into this hack and ship fast mode; it was something like build small little
projects, but build a dozen of them. Once you build and release one quickly,
it's addictive. You soon start to release more and more, and you get so
creative and confident. You can literally build ANYTHING you want in a matter
of days if you truly focus and WANT to.

 _Update #2_ \- I added a few more side projects since this topic is fun!

~~~
ontoillogical
Can you explain the liquid chalk concept more? I use chalk to absorb and dry
sweat on my hands, how does liquid do that? Does the alcohol evaporate super
fast and leave the chalk to soak up my sweat?

~~~
joshvm
Lots of climbers use liquid chalk because it's less messy than using powdered
or bagged-chalk. It comes out as a thick milky goo which you rub on your
hands, the alcohol evaporates off and you're left with a coating of chalk.
I've had mixed experiences with it, it lasts longer, but that only seems to be
the case if your hands don't sweat. I gave up and went back to powder because
I need to reapply often.

------
rsoto
I've worked over a year on
[https://www.boxfactura.com/](https://www.boxfactura.com/) which is a special
email service for invoices in Mexico.

It has been profitable since January after quite some legwork, on the
technical side as well as the sales and persuation side.

~~~
emilioolivares
Hey man, I'm also from Mexico but currently live in NY. This is pretty
awesome. How did you manage to get traction with small businesses? Would love
to chat if you have time, my email is emilioolivares, I use Google email.

~~~
rsoto
Hey, Emilio!

Sure, I'll send you an email, however, I'd like to keep the answer to your
question on the public side, if you don't mind.

It has been quite a ride to get traction, mostly the first clients signed up
after talking to them about their issues with their invoices and expenses--
once they're interested, we begin the education process. The other sources are
a mix of everything. One of our services is a platform in which our client's
vendors can upload invoices so they can manage them. We get some information
on several businesses, both small and big so we can begin to offer our
solution. This particular product might be the best source for viral growth,
as one client can introduce 10 or 20 new users on our platform.

We also have a relatively successful side project on a related field [1],
which has several hundred hits daily. There's an ad there, there might be some
optimization on both the ad and the landing, but we're still trying to figure
that out. Finally, our focus has been towards explaining the product, as
there's nothing like it on the market (actually there are, but they're small
and having the same difficulties we have). Once they sign up, our onboarding
process is focused on one point: send your first invoice. As we saw many of
the new signups not completing this step (or the previous 2), we set up an
email communication strategy for each one of the steps, with our contact
information in each email. I've blogged a bit [2] about it.

Now that we're sure our product is helpful for the businesses, we just started
promoting heavily with a sales force.

I hope that answered your question!

1: [http://isrmatic.com/](http://isrmatic.com/)

2:
[http://www.therror.com/weblog/2016/mar/como_el_email_marketi...](http://www.therror.com/weblog/2016/mar/como_el_email_marketing_propulso_las_ventas_de_un_startup)

------
nevster
A year.

I was spending way too much time on eBay, so I wrote something for myself that
would scrape the web pages and use a kill list to filter out the junk. I
wanted a better UI to add words to the kill list and realised I could make
money via the eBay affiliate program.

So I took two months off between contracts and wrote the first version of
AuctionSieve - [http://auctionsieve.com](http://auctionsieve.com)

There was a D&D forum, the Acaeum where a bunch of people started using it and
giving feedback.

It was making me money from day 1 but it probably took about a year to repay
that 2 months of time investment.

It's now been 13 years(!) and it still makes me money - not enough to live off
(the payout calculations from eBay have changed several times) but a nice
chunk of change. And I only have to occasionally prod it. And add the
occasional new feature.

~~~
shaunpud
Are you still scraping or did you migrate to their API?

~~~
nevster
Still scraping. If you use their API, you need to submit your app for
evaluation and there are a bunch of restrictions and other things you need to
comply with. I'd need to do a whole lot of work and remove some of the
features. The level of effort has never felt worth it. It means there are
occasional breakages every 6 months or so but it's usually the work of half an
hour to fix it and push out an update. My users very quickly tell me if it's
broken. ;)

~~~
laaph
Can I ask you what you are using to scrape with? I am finding that Amazon's
anti-bot strategies change every so often, so unless I use phantom.js or
Selenium, I have to change odd things like headers and various things every so
often.

I finally reworked my code to just download the html files using phantom.js
and parse it with perl so that I can run this on a headless server, and this
method hasn't broken lately. I find trying to use phantom.js is kind of crazy
(mainly I have a hard time with the documentation) and javascript is not my
native language. I was using curl, LWP, and wget in the past.

~~~
nevster
I'm not using any libraries. All hand coded to just get the bits it needs in
the html using lots of indexOf.

With regards to the anti-bot problem, this isn't running on any server, it's
running on the user's computer. The number of requests they make per second
doesn't seem to trigger any anti-bot measures. I'm just using plain Java
URLConnections.

------
ZenSwordArts
About 9 months ago i created [https://namesmith.io](https://namesmith.io) , a
business and domain name generator. I practically did nothing to boost the
search engine ranking but the volume of visitors is growing (very slowly).

So far the site can barely cover my vserver cost but that's ok since I can use
the server for more than just namesmith. Most of the time some few dollar
amounts tickle in but I had some sales of premium domains which gave > 50$
each.

I still plan to add some more features, such as URL shortening, but at the
time it is not worth it.

~~~
myth_drannon
That's very nice tool! You can add accounts so a user can persist the starred
ones.

~~~
ZenSwordArts
Thanks! I considered accounts in the beginning but didn't go through with it
because most users don't want to create yet another account.

Also the favorites should persist via cookies at least for some time.

------
daeken
A day. Okay, it isn't quite that simple. My sideproject is Breaker 101, an
online class for web security.
([https://breaker101.com](https://breaker101.com))

I launched on HN and sold out (75 seats or so, $1500 each IIRC) that same day.
I had designed the syllabus over the previous couple days, but there was no
product -- because I honestly thought that only a few people would buy it, and
I'd just have to refund them.

I built the class over the next few months and that went really well (not
perfectly, but definitely well), but subsequent runs never got anywhere near
the same success in terms of sales -- just couldn't get it in front of enough
people.

I recently relaunched it at $150 in more of a self-driven form. It's
profitable by all means, but it needs marketing behind it. I've been thinking
a lot about selling it to someone that can give it the love it needs, but I'm
still on the fence there.

~~~
Ramiuz
Hey, maybe a little off-topic. This course seems very interesting (I'm
currently studying
[https://secureyournodejs.com/?p=setup](https://secureyournodejs.com/?p=setup)),
is there a demo of a course or a sample to see the flow of the class?.

------
msencenb
If you define 'profitable' as $100 a month, that's where one of my iOS apps
([http://postcardpanda.com](http://postcardpanda.com)) is at after 2+ years.
I've only recently started putting actual time into it though.

If you want the full income report, here is May's:
[http://mattsencenbaugh.com/postcard-panda-may-2016-income-
re...](http://mattsencenbaugh.com/postcard-panda-may-2016-income-report/)

------
hoodoof
I know this goes against accepted wisdom and I cannot yet prove that it works,
but I no longer believe I am capable of the "build something small, fast and
succeed". Niftylettuce in this thread has shown it an be done, but I have not
succeeded in doing so.

I am now working on big, highly functional, fully working on launch utilities
for DevOps people. Hopefully this will result in building something people
want.

It seems the startup world is made up primarily of people pumping out easy to
build shit.

~~~
niftylettuce
I don't consider these really startups haha. No way. I think you have not
succeeded YET because you need to find something fun to work on that you want
to build for yourself.

I honestly built the wake-up call service for MYSELF and nobody else. I
couldn't wake up for classes in college even with an alarm clock (didn't sleep
much since I was hacking all the time). I thought having someone call me made
the world of difference in signaling my brain to move. So I built the wakeup
thing for myself, then maybe a year or two later I added international support
after I realized people were paying like $2 a week with it. People actually
paid for it? That blew my mind.

The other services and things I built were again just because I wanted them
for myself. Just have fun with it. True, these are easy to build projects, but
the real skill comes in when you can pump one out in a day!

* I mean pump one out in the sense that you build it, both front-end and back-end, and then release it on the internet. A lot of these projects I didn't do any fancy deployment stuff with, I popped open `screen -DR`, did a GitHub deploy key to the server, cloned repo, installed deps, and ran `node app`.

------
tylerdavis
[https://www.soundviz.com](https://www.soundviz.com)

Two and a half years ago I started working on the idea. It took me about a
year to get the initial offering done and launched. The first calendar year in
business was technically profitable. We ended up reinvesting the profits into
new computers as well as paying all of the operational expenses upfront for
the following year.

This year, it's tracking at roughly 5x of last year's revenue and we've also
improved our margins by about 2x.

All said and done, we both put about an hour a day into it, five days a week,
and one full weekend day a month.

~~~
kejaed
This is really cool. Got a share to my friends out there. If you don't mind me
asking, what kind of printing service do you hook into?

------
khuknows
I started a Product Hunt style newsletter that curates the best UI designs
every day ([http://uimovement.com](http://uimovement.com)).

It was profitable from sponsorships about 6 months after launch (slightly over
$1,000 a month in revenue, costs $300ish a month). I spend about 10 minutes a
day on it. I need to spend more time marketing it and updating some of the
tech - but I'm too lazy.

Also, I'm not sure the 6 months to profit counts, because I worked on 3-4
similar side-projects before launching it for about a year before.

~~~
cerbasict12
Is the money from advertising on the website or the newsletter, or the cost
for people to get the newsletter?

~~~
khuknows
99% of the money comes from the newsletter sponsorships. Newsletter
sponsorships generally can earn wayyyy more than website ads. Incase you're
interested in more details, the newsletter has ~10,000 subscribers (~50%
daily, ~50% weekly) and the site gets about 30k uniques a month.

~~~
khuknows
Also if anyone is wondering why the costs are so high, the main expenses are
CloudFront (huge HUGE gifs) and Mailchimp. I'm sure I could reduce the costs
to $50-100ish a month, but laziness.

~~~
cerbasict12
Great work! I was wondering if you earn more by charing a buck for the daily
post. I wonder how it would work?

------
parterburn
I built a journal-over-email app that has been a profitable side business
since day one. Defining "profitable" is necessary, I think - in this case it's
covering it's own costs + more. This isn't my full-time gig, so I'm not
counting any sort of hourly rate for my own time. The MVP is something I built
over a long weekend, and I occasionally work on it while my wife and I watch
TV/movies (so the time investment hasn't been too drastic, and the alternative
is $0/hr).

The app is called Dabble Me ([https://dabble.me](https://dabble.me)) and you
can read about the inspiration and costs to run here:
[https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/increase-your-
happ...](https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/increase-your-happiness-
with-daily-journaling-8109b0700506#.bbzx2grd9)

Today (18mos since launch) it's generating around $500/mo in passive income. I
played around with a few different pricing models. The first was a "donate
whatever you can" for a few pro options (did not generate what I expected),
the next was a pretty lenient freemium model (lacked the upgrades), and what
seems to be working best is a very stringent freemium model.

A big part of Dabble Me and my passion for the project arises from this being
a "scratch your own itch" build. I want this service to exist more than anyone
else...so I built it and charged others to use it. That seems to be a theme
that has a higher success rate than others.

------
AtticusTheGreat
I built [http://serpentinegame.com](http://serpentinegame.com) in 2008, an
online multiplayer boggle game, and it makes a modest amount of money for me
from ads and premium memberships. The only costs have been my time, a server
on linode, and the domain name. I've had a couple other attempts but nothing
has really taken off in the same way.

------
drwl
This isn't me. I found this on reddit and it's a pretty good AMA about
Gleam.io.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/3hpt9z/iama_c...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/3hpt9z/iama_cofounder_of_gleamio_this_was_our_7th/)

------
skraelingjar
I open sourced all of my (two) side projects. Has anyone turned their open
source project into something profitable?

------
sparkling
YouTube video tutorials on niche tech topics. Upfront investments: $50 for a
decent microphone.

Spent about 40 hours creating and editing the videos. They have been online
now for nearly 11 months and i have a total of ~300k views. That made me
nearly $400 from video ads.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
I don't know anything about YouTube ads, but I figured it would be more $ for
that many views.

(Not trying to be insulting, so I hope I don't come off that way.)

~~~
Namrog84
Between $1-$4 per 1k view is quite typical.

I think certain demographics will influence it (depending upon how much they
click links and I'd imagine tech people are less inclined to click on links
and more likely to adblock)

------
adzeds
1 year.

Built up a hobby site slowly over the past two years, at the end of the first
year it was making £7,700 a month..

It is still active and earning around £2-3k per month with only about 1 hours
work a week.

Currently looking to sell it on as I have just started on a new project.

~~~
martin_a
What do you mean by "hobby site"? A site covering a specific hobby or
something else? Can you tell more about how you earn money (memberships,
advertisements, something else)?

~~~
devopsproject
Things that people do outside of work like mountain biking, yoga, paintball,
cooking, whatever. There is lots of opportunity for ad revenue and affiliate
links

~~~
adzeds
Yeah. You can get affiliate links for pretty much everything these days.

~~~
adzeds
I have also just started work on this project:
[http://cupomterra.com.br/](http://cupomterra.com.br/)

------
splatsearch
3 years. Took 6 months of earning 100 a month and then in my 7th month it did
20kgbp. It currently does about 100k per year

~~~
penetrarthur
Go on...

------
cookiecaper
I did until it was shut down by a legal threat from a Fortune 100. It took
about 1 year to go from 0 to profitable.

~~~
earlyriser
Could you explain more about this?

------
NKCSS
I created a WPA(2) password lookup web-based service in April of 2008:

[https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/Thomson-
SpeedTouch](https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/Thomson-SpeedTouch)

I just added ads and it's made 50-300 a month (had ~1000 unique visitors a day
for the last 8 years).

Added
[https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/UPC](https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/UPC)
last year for a different brand model

And

[https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/DownloadFundaImages](https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/DownloadFundaImages)
for the Dutch real-estate market

And a few years ago, I reverse enginered the encryption of the Wordz game and
post the new game 20-30 seconds before the new roud starts, and more:
[https://www.nickkusters.com/nl/Diensten/WoordJacht/](https://www.nickkusters.com/nl/Diensten/WoordJacht/)

This combined is my hobby/fun website. It used to cost €300 a month in server
fees; it's now down to €80. Over the lifetime of the site, I probably broke
even :) But it's still used daily, generating ad revenue, and if I had put in
time to cut down cost, I could have made some money.

~~~
UVB-76
Those ads (in the first link) are almost certainly a breach of the AdSense
placement policies.

~~~
NKCSS
Not sure I agree; the button in question is 240px high in size to make sure
it's a huge click target; the ads are adjacent, true, but I tried to make all
actions huge to make sure it's usable without fat-fingering it.

------
dtjohnnymonkey
Textdropapp.com - web-based plain text editor for Dropbox. It started off as a
scratch to my own itch, and I listed it in the Dropbox app directory. I
started collecting feature requests and after a year or so I completely
rewrote it as a paid app. The rewrite took 3-4 months of nights and weekends.
I haven't touched it in 2.5 years but it still generates maybe $30-50 per
month, net.

~~~
aerovistae
Oh man, I would love to have this functionality. Unfortunately I value the
security of the contents of my Dropbox too much to open it to 3rd party
services. Frustrating. Great idea making this.

------
mburst
I've been working on
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teamtol.li...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teamtol.livedota)
for the past 2 years. About 2 years ago Valve released an API to get data for
Dota and other games in their portfolio. It was a good excuse for me to learn
Android development which is something I had wanted to do for awhile. About a
year in to the project I added some ads which in turn made the app almost
instantly profitable. I built the API to be super performant from the start
and the whole thing runs on the equivalent of a micro-instance despite needing
to serve up a few hundred thousand requests per day.

My main goal with the project right now isn't to generate profit though. If
you were to account for the cost of my time I'm sure the project would be
deeply in debt. I just enjoy working on it and it gives me a good excuse to
travel to different Dota events throughout the world and meet awesome people.

~~~
poushkar
What are the figures you earn a month if not a secret? I am also a dota player
and have a tool in mind (not competitive to yours) I want to build and wonder
how profitable is the niche.

------
someotheridiot
[https://rebrickable.com](https://rebrickable.com) \- A LEGO database that
shows you which sets you can build from your existing collection, also
includes thousands of fan-submitted designs. I built the original site in a
few months, but have been steadily expanding it for 5 years now.

~~~
joshvm
That's cool, I think there are probably several fields that you can apply this
approach to - the obvious one which has been done is cooking. I.e. if you have
so many ingredients, what can you make that also maximises your use of
leftovers etc.

I wonder if electronics would work the same way. I have a lot of random crap
in my component bin, odd sensors and things that need projects. I guess a
curated list of e.g. projects you can do with a BMP180 would be nice, rather
than having to google. On the other hand a pressure sensor is a pressure
sensor, so there wouldn't be much variety.

~~~
someotheridiot
Yes, I've had lots of suggestions for applying the tech to other things but
the problem is I have no interest in those other things :)

------
phacops
5 years of bootstrapping a nutrition & fitness tracking web/mobile app for me.

After the first few months it was only making enough income to cover basic
hosting costs and not much else, so I ended up getting a job (well, co-founded
a different startup with good funding). In the next two years, I was just
doing the bare minimum to keep it running, and it grew 80% each year. Start of
year 3, other startup failed and I had spare time to invest in the site and it
was making maybe 8000/month in revenues, and the decent yearly growth has
continued so that now in year 5 I can comfortably live on the business, and
have a few employees / contractors to help with support and development.

------
checkavailable
I'm surprised very few people here (no one?) is selling physical stuff. I have
a profitable side project selling stuff online. I found a manufacturer through
Alibaba, set up a website and now most of the work is dealing with shipping
items.

~~~
martin_a
I can just speak for Germany, but selling physical stuff is not that easy
here. There are lots of regulations, for example on taking back and recycling
used batteries, if you shipped them with the product, and stuff like that.
Lots of things to take care about and have in mind, so selling physical stuff
is not that popular as a side project, I think.

------
matheweis
I build iConvert Icons [see
[http://iconverticons.com/online/](http://iconverticons.com/online/)] six
years ago without any intention of making money off of it.

Unfortunately about three years into it, it became a full sink (negative time
+ negative money). I was actually going to sell it off for a couple of grand
about that point, at which my wife encouraged me to have a go at making
something out of it.

It was profitable within a month, and has been ever since. Not enough to pay
[my] bills, but it pays for itself and enough left over for some other
hobbies.

------
leviathan
2 years. I built (
[https://itunes.apple.com/app/id714882169?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/app/id714882169?mt=8)
) three years ago as an idea to test shooting videos at 60fps on the iPhone.
At the time there was no iPhone 6 and you couldn't shoot 60fps videos with the
default camera app. I did zero advertising of the app, and it's currently
bringing in around $100/month.

I have a major update that I've been working on for the last 2 months, but
other than that it seems to be running all by itself.

------
taphangum
Don't have it anymore (sold it in 2013) but
[http://myapptemplates.com](http://myapptemplates.com). Took it from $0 to
$3,000 a month in about 1 year

~~~
xcubic
Why sell?

~~~
taphangum
Stupidity. Did it to raise money for the ' _big_ idea'. Went nowhere. Next
time, I'll hold.

------
snehesht
I made an app to generate .gitignore files, It's as simple as a brick.

[https://gitignore.xyz/](https://gitignore.xyz/)

but it doesn't make any money though.

------
boyter
[https://searchcode.com/](https://searchcode.com/) is my serious side project.
It has been profitable (If you ignore my time) for several months now. However
it took 5 years to get there. I am planning on making it unprofitable again
soon to allow it to scale up to the load requirements it needs. Most of the
profit is though ads and the fact I run it on a shoestring budget (less than
$100 a month).

If the downloadable version takes off that would really help as well.

------
shireboy
I wrote [https://leanpub.com/trellodojo](https://leanpub.com/trellodojo) in
about 4 months to start, and periodically spend several hours a month updating
it. It earns ~100 to ~300 a month. I do have some ideas for software and other
digital content that I can't seem to get traction on. Reading the rest of this
is motivating though. Keep up the good work everybody!

~~~
louisharwood
I'm currently writing something to be published on leanpub. How do you take
care of marketing/promotion? Do you just leave it to sell or do something more
proactive?

~~~
shireboy
To market, I make comments on HackerNews mentioning it as an aside ;)
Seriously, marketing is the hardest part for me. I feel like I have something
worthwhile that has helped 1500+ people learn Trello, but marketing and self-
promotion is not something that comes natural to me. I will say, my first sale
happened by accident via the platform. I accidentally hit publish, and was
surprised when I got my first sale before I even knew I was selling anything
;)

Since then, I've put on Google Analytics so I can see my traffic sources. The
top referral sources are:

\- Direct and Organic Search. I wish I could figure out how to understand
those a bit more...

\- A card on the official Trello Resources Board. I got up the nerve to "just
ask" and they put me there.

\- Some comments/articles on Lifehacker. I commented and link to the site, and
they've referenced a few of my template boards (which link to the site).

\- Reddit/HackerNews. I don't want to be spammy, but if it's relevant I will
link to the site like what I did here.

\- My own blog and trellodojo.info. I've had a longtime personal nerd-blog and
am trying out trellodojo.info as a dedicated "niche site". I plan to do some
other products out of there.

So, yes, their promotion does help, but I do see spikes when I actively
market.

------
tempestn
I created searchtempest.com as a hobby project in 2006, starting with zero web
knowledge, although a bit of programming experience from electrical
engineering. Within about a year and a half it was earning enough to pay my
(very modest) rent. By 2009 I quit my day job to focus on it full time. Added
autotempest.com around the same time and now have several employees working on
the two. (The first hired around 2010 iirc.)

~~~
RhodesianHunter
Did all of the "No affiliation with craigslist." warnings come after some
legal action?

~~~
tempestn
No, craigslist hasn't taken any legal action against us, perhaps because we go
to significant effort through legal reviews and measures like those
disclaimers to ensure that we don't infringe on their rights. (We also don't
scrape their results, or indeed visit their site at all; we get everything
from public search API's like Google Custom Search and the Bing search API.)

------
ruffrey
I run mailsac.com and skim a profit. I failed to properly sell to a couple of
customers that would have made it fairly profitable (at least two very large
companies use it for email testing). It has a decent number of users and
signups but I haven't spent the time to figure out if there is more they'd pay
a lot for. It took about two years of literally doing nothing to make a
profit.

------
atsaloli
After six years of doing it on the side, I'm now doing it full-time (for a
year and a half) and have one employee/apprentice (for the last half year). I
provide IT training and consulting.

Started out with CFEngine, now offering Git training as well. Companies fly me
in for 1-5 days to train their staff. I love getting to see different parts of
the US.

~~~
vijayr
This is a cool gig, at least for a while :) Especially if one is young and
childless, as travel becomes easy.

~~~
atsaloli
Exactly. My employee is going to do the travel from now on as much as
possible. He's younger. :)

------
docsapp_io
[https://www.docsapp.io/](https://www.docsapp.io/)

I built DocsApp in 1 year and now is ramen profitable.

Tech stack:

* Play Framework (Scala)

* PostgreSQL (RDS)

* S3

* Docker (cloud.docker.com)

* Scaleway

* HAProxy

~~~
workingspaceacc
May I ask which S3 plugin do you use ? Haven't found anything useful for
Play!.

~~~
docsapp_io
Use AWS Java SDK since my S3 usage just simple upload file.

~~~
workingspaceacc
Alright cool, why did you decide to go with Scala instead of Java ?

------
logicb
I had done couple of projects before and one of them was somewhat successful.
I made around $1.5k from that. Giftcardzilla an aggregator for discounted gift
cards. I had to shut it down after Google Penguin update.

Currently building AppsUlagam.com (apps world) as a mobile app discovery site
for apps with Tamil language content.

~~~
logicb
Clickable link [http://www.appsulagam.com](http://www.appsulagam.com)

------
ricw
Built www.sum-reviews.com over the course of a year (14 months), probably 2-3
man months of full time effort. It's now pretty automated though not enjoying
the marketing part as much, that a more mature project requires. Having said
that, it's kind of self entertainment / joy.

------
gtheme_io
[http://www.gtheme.io/](http://www.gtheme.io/)

I run GTheme.io for 2 years and now ramen profitable. Current site running
with minimal management.

The site selling premium ghost.org theme.

------
tmaly
I have been working on a side project about food dishes, but it does not even
have a revenue stream. It is more a labor of love. I have been at it for over
a year now.

------
radicalachraf
I recently started doing some competitive programming and going trough
advanced algorithms...not really a side project but i'm looking forward to
make a Network Monitoring service something that runs in your computer and
acts passively to monitor system changes... to protect against malware mostly
. -My current side project isn't even 10% complete but it's on my scope I'm
working on a micro virtual file system for important documents...due to the
rise of Ransomware and people being lazy I think that making a
secure,encrypted virtual filesystem could be a great idea . Those are my
thoughts only

------
JustSomeNobody
Not currently. Lack of ideas/inspiration/perspiration.

It'd be nice to have a few on the side making enough to support hobbies
though.

------
SaijoGeorge
for me it has been [http://allthefreestock.com](http://allthefreestock.com) ,
it's not a serious side project and the only revenue has been ads.

------
lostmsu
No, but I am trying.

------
edoceo
18 months

------
conqrr
Man i always post such questions but never get responses at all. Sigh.

