Ask HN: What is your one-person sideproject that makes over $1k/month? - riskish
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dangrossman
Improvely ([https://www.improvely.com](https://www.improvely.com)) and
W3Counter ([https://www.w3counter.com](https://www.w3counter.com)) both
started as side projects. Together they bring in almost $40K/month now.
They've grown so much that running them has become my main business, so
they're not side projects anymore, but I'm still a one-man operation.

I created the first version of W3Counter back when good web stats were
something you had to pay for -- before Google Analytics existed. That I did
mostly for fun; I loved watching the hit counter of my "resources for web
developers" site going up, and wanted to see all the new visits as they came
in and what people were looking at. I added a bunch of new features and
reports in 2006 and 2008, and updated the design a few times, but it's not
changed a whole lot since the beginning. Somewhere on the line to picking up
~80K users organically, I decided to monetize it by offering paid
subscriptions for some extra reports and e-mail summaries.

Improvely's basically the result of taking a side project and writing it from
scratch a second time to try to build a serious business out of it. I was
running a kind of marketing business and needed to track the performance of my
ads, but I was poorer back then (in college) and didn't want to pay for any of
the existing conversion tracking tools. I built a (horribly named) link
tracker called W3ROI that did everything I needed, and paid a web designer to
make a sales site for it to see if I could sell it to anyone else on the side.
It never made enough to be a primary source of income, but I learned enough
from the customers it did pick up, and reading some great stuff on HN, to do
better the second time around when I wrote Improvely over the summer of 2012.

I have another side project that might go somewhere. A relative of mine opened
a retail store, and I helped out putting together their e-commerce presence
and getting a shopping cart hooked up to their physical inventory system. In
the process, I built a neat little contact form plugin for that e-commerce
platform, with some unique features you don't normally see in contact forms. I
threw it up on that platform's plugin directory and it's now actively used by
more than 11,000 other stores, delivering thousands of mails a day. It's got
hundreds of perfect reviews in the plugin directory, and two companies have
approached me about acquiring it. I'm thinking about monetizing it somehow,
but haven't had the time.

~~~
kgc
Does W3Counter make money directly, or does it mainly serve as a referrer to
Improvely?

~~~
dangrossman
W3Counter has a couple hundred paid subscribers. It's a freemium service. Less
than 1% of the users make the optional upgrade to a paid subscription, but
that's enough.

------
Errorcod3
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8844083](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8844083)

Same post from January 2015 for a reference.

------
andersthue
[http://www.watermark-image.com](http://www.watermark-image.com) a windows
image watermarking software. Using the funds to bootstrap
[http://timeblock.com](http://timeblock.com) :)

~~~
goodoldboys
Just a heads up - your headline on timeblock has a typo. "Corporation" should
be "cooperation"

