

Ask HN: What has been your most profitable side/weekend project to date? - riskish


======
conesus
NewsBlur - <http://www.newsblur.com> \- a visual RSS feed reader with
intelligence. I have a few hundred paying users and a few thousands free
users. I develop it almost entirely on the train, which I'm on for almost an
hour and a half everyday.

It's a ton of work and is profitable in the sense that the hundreds of dollars
a month in server costs are just a bit more than covered by the premium users.
But otherwise, it did help land me a number of great connections, both in NYC
and SF, where I just moved.

I code in the open. NewsBlur is entirely on GitHub:
<http://github.com/samuelclay>. The iPhone app I'm working on is also there,
so some folks use it as a way to send me issues, others go so far as to add
their own pet features. It's kind of neat to see a community spring up around
the code itself.

~~~
mathursuhas
Very cool UI. May I ask what laptop you use for coding on the train? I spend
~2 hrs on the train everyday and have been trying to figure out what would be
a good laptop to code on. I realize personal preferences play a role, but it
seems like large laptop is a hassle to hold, and a small one is difficult to
code on because of the smaller screen space.

~~~
conesus
A 15" MacBook Pro. So I bike 4 miles with this thing strapped to my back, then
hop on the train (Caltrain, where bikes are treated like kings). I think I
just got used to schlepping 5.5 lbs. around.

I recently came from NYC where I would use the same laptop on the A train. 15"
is exactly the width of my legs and the seat, so I would comfortably take up
my area, but no larger. I can't work on a dinky 13" screen, so 15" or bust for
me.

------
nonrecursive
Clean Up Your Mess (<http://www.visualmess.com/>) is just a mini visual design
tutorial and not a product, but it was a side project and it's made a few
hundred bucks from amazon ads. I did not intend to make money from it, so it
was nice surprise that I did.

~~~
nonrecursive
The OP asked about profitable side/weekend projects. This is a project I
worked on on the side, and it made money. So why did my comment get downvoted?

~~~
clyfe
Most awesome to-the-point short web design booklet, I bookmarked it the first
time I saw it on HN some moths ago and visit religiously. I lost the bookmark
at some point and made great efforts to find the site again. Great job. (I'm a
programmer not designer but I like the instant gratification of the booklet.
It's similar in feeling to <http://bonsaiden.github.com/JavaScript-Garden/>
for JS)

~~~
nonrecursive
Thank you! I worked very hard to keep it short and useful, and it's nice to
see that appreciated. Thanks, too, for the link to JavaScript Garden. I've
only scanned it, but I love the table of contents and I know that will come in
handy.

------
Osiris
I only have 1 side project, which is a utility for Windows laptops (a battery
meter). It does about $1500 to $2k per month in sales. I've been thinking
about expanding it to have a Enterprise (B2B) product.

I'm trying to get another idea I have into a startup, but I haven't been able
to get that off the ground.

~~~
optimus
Where do you sell such apps?

~~~
Osiris
I just have a website. It's almost all word-of-mouth, blog posts, and people
posting on forums recommending it that drives traffic. I do some Google Ads.

~~~
rexreed
How much does the app cost? Are these one-time sales? If so, what's your best
source of customers?

~~~
Osiris
It's a one-time sale. It's a freemium model. You can download the app and get
limited functionality. You can purchase for $10 the "Pro" version which is a
serial number that unlocks the advanced features.

For a while I was doing cheaper time-limited licenses, like $1 for 6 months,
$2 for 1 year, etc and $10 for lifetime.

Best source of customers is from free users. I started the app as free until
version 3.0 when I switched to freemium. Sales have been fairly consistent
each month for years, with spikes when a blog picks it up.

------
callmeed
An instructional DVD I made on SEO for wedding photographers and their
websites (<http://photographyseo.com>).

Recorded screen casts and mastered it in iDVD. Did a run of 1,000 at
Discmakers for about $900. Sold out the initial run (@ $79 per disc) in under
2 years. Now we just one-off them or give them an option of viewing online.

Looking back (or if I do it again), I would probably do it as just an ebook or
online videos to avoid shipping hassles.

Regardless, it's been a fairly easy ~$80k.

(BTW, if any HN folk want to see it for research purposes, let me know)

~~~
amitagrawal
This looks like a nice number . How do you advertise your product?

------
larsberg
Made a wireless stumbler for iOS in about two days that sold a bit over $100k
total.

Admittedly, I spent probably another day in random debugging for version 3-ish
of it (just went walkabout in Chicago with a debug build, logging AP details
when it had bad behavior). And then ungodly amounts of time answering e-mails
and on the phone with the iOS app review team, but that was long after the
"weekend project" phase.

~~~
alexkearns
Very nice bit of work but what is a wireless stumbler?

~~~
iliis
A program that looks out for any wireless networks it can detect. Mostly used
to find an open access point, debugging wireless lans or just to map them. See
eg. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardriving> for more.

------
patio11
Hello World attached to a random number generator.

~~~
riskish
what?

~~~
sidmitra
He's talking about Bingo Card Creator

------
sahillavingia
Gumroad - <http://gumroad.com/> \- right now I'm trying to turn it from a
million dollar business (current valuation) to a billion dollar one. :)

~~~
ForrestN
Cool! Just out of curiosity, what's the justification for the million dollar
valuation?

~~~
sahillavingia
The valuation of the last round was greater than that. A combination of
potential and % chance of reaching that potential. So really, plucked out of
thin air by those with money :)

~~~
maxklein
Seems to have very little traffic, when viewed in alex though.

~~~
sahillavingia
Most traffic is on gumroad.appspot.com links for security.

------
CRASCH
I once did a fixed bid contract that was sized by someone else at $150K.

I completed the bulk of the work over three days. I spent about 40 hours on it
total including the production roll out.

I most likely could not pull that off again because I had very specific domain
knowledge. I knew the software I was modifying and I knew exactly what to do
over all of the various systems.

~~~
Aron
Jackpot.

------
peteforde
Hampton Catlin (creator of Haml and Sass) was working with us at Unspace when
he went home for the weekend and came back having written iWik.

He made $60k or so before ultimately selling it to WikiPedia and becoming
their director of mobile development.

Not too shabby!

------
mvkel
I made a very simple iOS gym log app for my own needs and decided to sell it
in the App Store. I think I've generated almost $5k in revenue. So, not a
'business', but it certainly paid for my developer account! :)

~~~
riskish
Cool, do you have a home page?

~~~
mvkel
<http://pumpapp.tumblr.com/>

Iroically, the app isn't truly native, but was built in jQTouch. When I get
around to it, I'm planning to finish a native version, which I think it
desperately needs to be.

------
MattBearman
My most profitable side project is actually my newest -
<http://bugmuncher.com> \- it's been live about a week and I'm already quite
profitable. Admittedly it's a very low overhead project (costs around $30 /
month to run), but so far it's looking good.

I think the reason it's doing better than anything else I've launched is
because its my first one that isn't entirely ad supported. My advice to anyone
looking to launch a side project is try to go for something people will pay a
monthly fee for as opposed ad revenue.

~~~
fakelvis
Neat. Remind me of the feedback integration on Google+ -- is this where you
got your inspiration?

Love it...

~~~
MattBearman
Thanks for the kind words. If I'm honest I think 'inspiration' may be playing
it down a little, I pretty much just ripped off the Google + feedback tool :)

As soon as I saw the G+ tool I knew it was something people would want on
their website. I also knew I wouldn't be the only person doing this, which is
why I went for a really lean approach, and managed to go from idea to first
customers in 2 and half weeks.

~~~
MattBearman
I think I should probably add that I didn't rip off any of Google's code, just
the idea :)

------
sfalbo
I made a juror selection app for the iPad that generates about $1K / month

<http://www.front9technologies.com/ijuror.html>

------
zbruhnke
I started working at what was supposed to be a contract job to fix some
computers for a guys business (at the time it was literally just a place that
made copies) back in 2007.

I was still in college but me stopping in and telling the guy how much some of
these customers having boxes of paper copied could benefit by having them
scanned and organized led to me having my own company and employees as a
sophomore in College which did just that.

I eventually built a host of sharepoint plugins which sold for a nice exit
while I was still in school. I still havent finished school yet, but man did I
have some fun with the money lol

------
JesseAldridge
I've made about $100 in ad revenue over the lifetime of this game:

<http://crookedgames.com/game.php?name=space_grabber>

Almost covered hosting costs!

------
ForrestN
<http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com> and
<http://www.contemporaryartvenues.com> earn about $2,000 per month, and
indirectly generate lots of web design business.

------
dangrossman
I wrote a WordPress plugin in about 4 hours to run a website listing web
hosting company reviews. Simple affiliate stuff. The plugin was generic, it
would add star ratings to WordPress comments and display average ratings for
the post and such. I used the plugin to run my own site, then also built it a
little site to sell to anyone else that wanted it. In 18 months it sold over
$200,000 in licenses before I sold rights to the plugin to another individual
for $90,000.

~~~
alohahacker
i think i bought your plugin ;)

what is that wordpress review plugin everyone uses?

~~~
dangrossman
It was called WP Review Site. I don't know if it's still widely used, the
current owner unfortunately seems MIA at this point. He's let the affiliate
program balance drop to $0 and go offline, and isn't responding to support
questions in his forum.

------
jarin
Ok, so as far as non-client work goes:

The first iPhone app I ever made was a very simple Shopify app for seeing your
orders and checking inventory. I dropped the ball on keeping it up to date
because of client work and Shopify ended up buying a competitor to make into
the official (free) app, but at its peak it made about $2000/month and up
until I pulled it from the App Store a few weeks ago it was making around
$300/month.

~~~
rexreed
We're building some apps for Shopify too - what was the name of your app?
Which app did Shopify purchase? As a side question - what has your experience
with Shopify been as an app developer?

~~~
jarin
It was called Shopkeeper, and I don't remember the name of the app they
purchased but it was subscription-based (this was long before the in-app
subscriptions) and supported more than just Shopify.

Developing for Shopify was great. Their API is good to work with, and they're
very developer-friendly in general.

------
jdg
Boxcar (<http://boxcar.io>) started out as a weekend project. The prototype
(v1) was literally built in a weekend.

Now we have a great team, have raised a seed round and are killing it in
general!

------
einaregilsson
My current hobby is writing simple cardgames in javascript. Currently I have
Hearts - <http://www.hearts-cardgame.com> , Idiot/Shithead
<http://www.shithead-cardgame.com> and Crazy Eights <http://crazyeights-
cardgame.com> .

Am getting my first payout from Google Adsense this month, about 120 $. Which
isn't much, but they're pure client side games, require no maintenance or
anything so I'll just keep getting a small check every month :)

~~~
skuvnar
How did you advertise your sites?

~~~
einaregilsson
Basically just posted about them on Facebook. Two of them also have links on
the Wikipedia article for that game. And they all link to each other.

The biggest referer is Facebook, with Google coming in second. Ive also
created all of them as Chrome Apps in the Chrome Web Store so people can
"install" them there. (basically just a big bookmark on your New Tab page in
Chrome)

------
duck
Hacker Newsletter - <http://www.hackernewsletter.com>

Sold about $1000 worth of advertising so far and have had more than that in
donations. Lots of ideas to do more.

~~~
danoc
Only Newsletter I actually enjoy receiving!

~~~
duck
Awesome, glad to hear that!

------
euroclydon
Cupcake Wrapper Creator. Stats over the first five months:

26,358 Pageviews

4,837 Unique Visitors

235 Trial Users

20 Paying Customers

$283 in Receipts

Over 4000 Designs Created

Over 7,000 PDFs Downloaded

------
ja27
After a football-related post on my personal blog got a surprising amount of
search traffic, I threw up a quick Blogger blog with similar posts for a few
football teams. The traffic rolled in. I threw on some more and eventually
added baseball which was a much bigger source of traffic. Right now baseball
season is earning me about $10 a week. I think I've spent less than 30 hours
on it total. Not a great return on my time so far but it just keeps cranking
away and Google keeps paying me. I've certainly spent more time on projects
that have earned zero.

~~~
trafficlight
Is it information about pro teams/leagues? Or is it information on the sport
itself?

~~~
ja27
Just short specific information about each team. Pro baseball is my biggest
money-maker, I guess because there are more games during the week and day
games, when people are at their computers to search and possibly spend money.
College football is second place. Pro football is surprisingly weak in
comparison. Hockey made a little during the playoffs, but NBA and even college
basketball playoffs aren't even a blip on my traffic.

------
timsegraves
I've made $40 in pro subscriptions (2) and about $50 in ad revenue from
<http://www.twistertracker.com> While the money isn't yet covering hosting
costs I've learned a ton and managed to gain 1500+ free users and 1200+
twitter followers at @twister_tracker.

It's a pretty seasonal site so I'm hoping to grow it more next spring with
additional features and a better pricing model.

------
petercooper
Back in 2005 I decided to implement a tag-based source code snippets
repository over a weekend. Mostly as a way to keep my hand in with Rails. So I
did. It went fine and built up over a couple of years to serious traffic but
only about $800/mo in Adsense. I sold it to Dzone for low/mid 5 figures and
they still run it (but they have proper big name advertisers).

------
Birejji
Birejji - <http://birejji.com> Was earning $100/day with adsense as a normal
chat site (with 2M+ impressions per Month), but adsense banned the site due to
"fraudulent clicks" (I've always had a consistent CTR so no idea what happened
there). Since then it's turned into a Paid to Chat site.

------
yobfountain
For a game hackathon I built an engine/CMS for creating phone-based choose
your own adventure stories (<http://uchoos.com>). It's not actually a
commercial product yet but I won $250 from twilio, so it's technically
profitable.

------
kevinburke
<http://goodmorningcmc.com> I sold ad space at the top of the email to
students for $5 per day, to about 500 students. Made about $250. I had other
motivations than money but it was still nice to earn some back.

------
herrherr
getmetricmail.com creates simple Google Analytics reports and sends them to
you as a PDF. Currently 3000 free users. A handfull pays, so it makes about
$100 per month. A good example of Freemium gone wrong.

~~~
prawn
I've signed up to check it out. As Alex said, it's a good idea, nice design,
etc.

Maybe the feature exists and I didn't spot it, but if you white labelled it so
that web designers could send out branded messages to their clients as a
value-add, I think you could see paid accounts pick up a bit.

Edit: OK, first email is in. Seems that I have to click a link or get an
attachment - this is why I already avoid the Analytics mailed reports. Any
chance you can just send the data in the email or does the API not permit it
for some reason? I probably wouldn't use this going forward if I had to click
through to something or open a PDF, I know that's sulky but just how it is.

~~~
herrherr
You can receive pdf attachments directly, so you don't have to click on the
link. Nevertheless that's not what you're looking for, I guess ;)

We thought about putting the data directly into an email, but the crappy
HTML/CSS support in the gazillion email clients, make this a pretty tough job.

~~~
prawn
Yeah, I think Analytics does PDFs from memory and I cancelled all of those.

Can appreciate the frustration with HTML/CSS support - maybe if you kept your
layout really simple and/or called it an Old School theme. Mostly I'd be
looking for anything that quickly showed me if there was something wrong with
a site (or right, e.g., major incoming link).

Wonder if you can throw in some marketing factoids like "Fourth straight month
with an increase in traffic" or "Traffic growth continues; fourth straight
month" - the sorts of things a marketing guy can repeat to the boss without
any more time or research.

------
csomar
I made a few JavaScript scripts that I'm selling on CodeCanyon and the last
month I made around $200. I'm thinking of expanding the business, but this
time in ThemeForest building WordPress Themes.

------
phatbyte
<http://www.jpictag.com/> A Jquery plugin for image tagging. It had some cool
steady sales for over a year, which gather a reasonable money.

------
ebcase
Domainr -- <http://domai.nr/> \-- a search engine we built for finding
available domain names.

~80% of its revenue is registrar commissions from successful referrals (domain
name purchases, hosting, ssl certs, etc.), and the other 20% is from ads (from
adpacks.com).

We launched it in 2008, and both traffic and revenue have been growing slowly
but steadily ever since. These days it's covering our respective apt rents (in
the Bay Area) each month.

~~~
MPiccinato
I use this all the time, thanks for making it so easy :) Helped me find
HopOnTheB.us which is still in the works.

------
wensing
I started Stormpulse purely as a fun hobby project in late 2004. Incorporated
in 2007. Can't share revenue numbers, but this year we should be profitable
with a team of 5.

~~~
symptic
I enjoyed reading about Stormpulse in the Hacker Monthly: Startup Stories.
Congrats on the hard earned success!

~~~
wensing
Thanks!

------
dmpatierno
iScrob - <http://iscrob.com> \- a Last.fm scrobbler for iOS. It's free with
ads, or $5 with no ads. I released it almost exactly 1 year ago, and it's
averaged about $20/day in revenue since then.

It's unique because there's some trickery involved getting around the strict
iOS backgrounding requirements, and most of my competitors haven't done a
great job with it.

~~~
mise
"Solve a difficult problem" is certainly one way to create value that you can
sell. Thanks for sharing the figure.

------
dpcan
My android games, hands down.

~~~
riskish
Cool, what kind of games/how much did they bring in?

~~~
dpcan
Over $100k so far (after google fees, but before taxes and expenses)

I don't like publishing which games they are because there's already a lot of
competition in their genres, no reason to extend it. However, for each, I was
actually one of the first few of their kind when the market was just getting
rolling with paid apps.

~~~
riskish
Wow, 100K over how many months? So after taxes maybe 60-70K?

~~~
dpcan
Yes, my taxes in April were pretty heavy, but I put a lot aside because I saw
it coming.

I'd say most of the income came in over a 6-7 month period of really amazing
sales.

------
zvrba
This: <http://zvrba.net/software/cspim.html> I didn't get any money for it,
but I got a publication on a peer-reviewed conference:
[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5438...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5438087)

------
aeden
I started DNSimple (<https://dnsimple.com/>) a year ago and it's doing pretty
well. It's a side project but I put a lot into it, so it's really like a
second job. I currently put all of the money back into it rather than paying
myself, so profitable might be pushing it.

~~~
intelekshual
DNSimple is a side project? I would never have guessed; it's such an awesome
service. Keep up the good work!

~~~
ebcase
Agreed that DNSimple is a fantastic product -- we just moved Domainr's DNS
over to it, which went very smoothly.

------
nait
Apart from contract work, there's currently only one. It's called Snippets
(<http://www.snippets.eu>). It replaces the caps lock key with note taking
functionality. Although I wouldn't call it profitable, still trying to figure
out how to get traction.

~~~
tertius
Change to "The easy way to take notes".

Pay someone to do some copy writing.

~~~
nait
Thanks for the tip. I'll take a look into it.

------
gschwarzer
I made a silly Mac vs. PC parody video with South Park characters for a
college class final project that went viral and made me a few thousand dollars
through various ad deals: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id_kGL3M5Cg>

------
svigraham
I am building a learning system to feed me only content that is relevant to
me. I blogged here. [http://saranyan.com/post/7946363708/consuming-content-
the-ri...](http://saranyan.com/post/7946363708/consuming-content-the-right-
way)

~~~
phyllotaxis
How would you distinguish your approach from, say, StumbleUpon?

------
alexkearns
Tiki-Toki (<http://www.tiki-toki.com>). Web-based software to create
interactive timelines. Launched four months ago. 10,000 sign-ups. About $500 a
month in subscription revenue from premium accounts.

------
daimyoyo
Great stuff here. Thank you for the inspiration to keep going. As an aside, my
only side project that has made me any $ is a blog from which I've earned
$0.24. Not enough to withdraw from, but better than nothing.

------
chime
I did some stuff one afternoon about 4-5 years ago and it continues to pay my
mortgage ever since. It's the goose that lays the golden egg and under no
circumstances do I mess with it.

~~~
consultutah
Any chance you'd share what it was?

~~~
rexreed
He got a goose. It lays eggs. Gold ones.

------
nam
With some student colleagues we build <http://sharedesk.at> during last
semester. Its a file sharing tool build on node.js , was fun :)

------
prawn
I've got a site collating interior design photos for inspiration. Makes about
US$2k+/mo fairly passively from ads. I would spend maybe 10 minutes on it
every six or so months.

~~~
tocomment
I'd like do do something similar for landscaping inspiration. Any advice?

~~~
prawn
I have to say honestly that I think I just got lucky. I had a site with decent
PR that I pushed/linked towards the interior design site and it gave it a good
start. From there, it's been Google traffic and AdSense/Text-Link-Ads. Nothing
I've done has been particularly smart - the site is ugly, it's rarely updated,
the categories were picked on a whim, etc.

~~~
tocomment
Where would I find content for the site?

~~~
prawn
I've emailed you.

------
voidfiles
I made <http://wacchen.com> in a couple of weeks. I have rewritten it a couple
times since. I eventually sold it for 7k.

------
blazzar
Just a simple office picture blog for me that earns $200-500 month: \-
<http://officedesigngallery.com>

------
bearwithclaws
A print magazine that publishes existing online articles.

~~~
spIrr
Yeah, Hacker Monthly is awesome!

~~~
bearwithclaws
Thank you!

------
akanet
Selling videogame cheat source code to interested cheating websites: a few
thousand. Was surprised to find such a robust market for that stuff.

------
trungonnews
<http://likehub.com/>

No revenue because my AdSense account was banned a few years back. :(

------
duiker101
my 30 minutes project <http://hackertyper.net> !

------
feint
pen.io

------
albertogh
I made an iOS application for reading comics in literally 6 hours. I released
it back in May and it's currently earning me ~$1000 a month via ads.
Impressions are still increasing by ~25K each day, so profits are likely to
increase in the coming months.

~~~
optimus
What kind of comics?

~~~
w1ntermute
Probably manga. The US manga market has expanded hugely since I started
reading manga (~8 years ago). Just about any genre (or subject matter) you can
name has manga dedicated to it, which contributes to its ability to appeal
across all age groups.

The other big thing is that most of the hardcore fans (those who would also
like to read on their iOS devices) like to download & read scanlations (A $10
manga volume takes at most 90 minutes to read, so this is an expensive hobby
for a hardcore fan, many of whom are children. Also, the hardcore fans prefer
the scanlations because they allow them access to manga that hasn't been
released in America or has been Americanized by the official English-language
translator/publisher.), which are easily placed on an iPhone/iPad, whereas
American comics would much more often require legal licensing.

------
diolpah
My current company, which operates a number of ecommerce sites, started out as
a side project. It's profitable, but it is no longer a side project, so it
does not exactly count.

