
Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make? - cezarfloroiu
As it&#x27;s a new year 2015, let&#x27;s re-open this topic to see how things are going on this front :)<p>It can be a SaaS app, a mobile app, or any side project that is netting you recurring revenue
======
gedrap
There was a number of similar active threads over the years, some great ideas
in them:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7094402](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7094402)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107588](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107588)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8246255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8246255)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4639271](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4639271)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5903868](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5903868)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358111](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358111)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387789](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387789)

~~~
jayleno
commenting for reference later.

Thanks for gathering these

~~~
rrrrrraul
Good idea, me too.

Thanks !

------
leesalminen
I spent all of 2014 building a SaaS for dog daycare/kennel owners. The MVP
turned out beautiful. Went to a few trade shows towards the end of last year
and people went crazy over the software.

0 outbound marketing yet, and already have 22 customers at $100/month. This
year my goal is to scale up to 200 customers.

It's a really weird market niche where no one has built software for in 10
years. Pretty neat.

~~~
ef4
This pattern works _all over the place_. Get to know any kind of small
business owner and you'll see they need good software that doesn't exist.

Partly that's because they can be cheap and hard to market to at scale, which
discourages deeper-pocketed software companies from going after them. But if
you're solo and just interested in a lifestyle business with recurring
revenue, it's a very reliable path.

~~~
MichaelCrawford
A close friend of mine earns a lot of coin by pointing out to medical
marijuana dispensaries that they have terrible websites. They are happy to pay
him for redesigns.

I've been thinking of doing something like that, but my aim would be to find
websites that I regard as sucking particularly hard.

~~~
leesalminen
That's interesting. Every single one of my customers has a terrible website.
Every. Single. One.

We're looking to expand into a subscription service that provides a CMS w/
dog-centric themes to our customers.

Shoot me an email, we should talk. Email address on my profile.

~~~
MichaelCrawford
Start with a dedicated dog-centric CMS.

Now make a dedicated cat-centric one.

Surely they will have some common elements between them. Find a way to make a
pet-centric CMS.

Eventually you will have a flexibly configurable CMS that you could sell to
many local businesses.

But you are better off writing a couple of hardwired, dedicated CMSs, then to
try writing that flexible one from the very start.

My very first shot at Warp Life for iOS, a Conway's Game of life
implementation, had a frame rate of about two per second. Now it's about 8,000
per second.

Now that I've gotten it up to 8,000 per second, I'm getting some real insight
as to how to optimize it.

There are other reasons one would want a Life App than because it's fast. MY
Life App is for those who care about the speed; not everyone does.

------
tkiley
"Profitable side-project" might be an unstable equilibrium. If you're doing
something without scale, it will die when you lose interest. If you're doing
something with scale, perhaps it should grow into a bootstrapped startup.

inquicker.com started as a hobby / learning opportunity (2005) and grew into a
side project with about $20k/yr in recurring revenue from corporate customers
(2008).

Eventually, it turned into a full-time job (early 2009) and I found a co-
founder (late 2009). We hired our first four employees in 2010. In 2011 we
signed our 100th customer and hit $1m in recurring revenue. In 2013 we hit $5m
in recurring revenue.

~~~
bbcbasic
For a rational actor, it should be an unstable equilibrium.

If you can make more profit per hour spent in your spare time that in your
job, then it won't be long until you quit and spend all of you time. If not
then you will give it up, unless it is just a hobby. (Hobbies might be
exception to the rule)

------
wesbos
I wrote a book and video series on Sublime Text -
[https://SublimeTextBook.com](https://SublimeTextBook.com)

It's done about 80k in sales in 3 months - I'm in the process of writing a
blog post about how I did it, what worked and what didn't. It's not
inexpensive, but it pays for itself quickly so people are fine with spending
the $45 on the book + videos.

Feel free to ask questions here so I have content for the post.

~~~
k__
How did you get into writing?

I tried to write blogs and had to write papers for university, but I always
struggle.

I have the feeling that some people can produce much text from nothing, where
I put my ideas into a few sentences...

~~~
wesbos
It was really hard to write - took me 1.5 years, tons of research and re-
writing. This isn't something I slapped together over a weekend. Far from
passive income.

Creating content for me is always hard, but once it's done, I love to deliver
it (via talks, teaching, videos or books...)

~~~
yitchelle
Thanks for sharing. Writing for a 1.5 years is a long time. How did you stay
motivated to keep going?

------
mappum
An Android app I made in a few hours makes $500/m from ads, and has 1M+
downloads on Google Play. It claims to be a radar detector for your phone, but
that's not even possible (it's actually just completely random).

The description says that it is for novelty purposes, but the reviews show
people believe it works and it has a placebo effect. Most reviews say things
like "I drove past a police station and it went off! 5/5".

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vox.radard...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vox.radardetector&hl=en)

It's funny to see it up in the top 20 of the Transportation category on Play,
alongside companies that are heavily VC funded.
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/TRANSPORTATION/c...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/TRANSPORTATION/collection/topselling_free)

~~~
spyder
This app should be reported as having a misleading description or at least it
should be in the "games" category not in the "transportation".

~~~
Justsignedup
Had he not pointed it out to us, nobody would be the wiser.

------
doh
A year ago I developed an universal video downloader site
[http://savedeo.com](http://savedeo.com).

I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but people liked the site and kept
coming back. Year later the site generates around $30k a month and the
operation costs are around $90 (close to nothing).

The site is very lightweight as it doesn't really downloads anything. It just
extracts direct links to the files.

There are a great challenges that I have to deal with (like YouTube blocking
IPs, sites changing designs all the time, etc.).

~~~
stevenh
You're pushing malware via popups.

To convert one video, I was subjected to each of these popups three times:

[http://i.imgur.com/qqK77qp.png](http://i.imgur.com/qqK77qp.png)
[http://i.imgur.com/eCAtjOi.png](http://i.imgur.com/eCAtjOi.png)

You're probably paid per install, unless the distribution model for malware
has significantly changed in the past six years.

Assuming $2 per install, that would mean you're infecting 15,000 machines per
month.

At bare minimum, this malware you distribute probably maliciously replaces all
ads loaded on the infected machine with ads controlled by the hackers who
created the malware, and it does this for the remainder of the lifetime of
that machine.

The legitimate site operators currently obliviously and naively praising you
in the comments here are the very same victims who are robbed by the criminals
you are colluding with via this ad-replacing malware you distribute. Their CPM
and CPC numbers are suffering because of crooks like you.

All that aside, none of this takes into account the people who are duped into
calling the 1-844 number in those popups who then have their bank accounts
cleaned out by the scam artist on the other end who succeeds in socially
engineering the victim into sharing their credit card details.

What you're doing isn't praiseworthy; it isn't impressive. It's despicable.

~~~
a_bonobo
That's weird, I'm not seeing these popups, and Google says the site is OK:
[https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=savedeo....](https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=savedeo.com)

~~~
discardorama
If indeed the claim is true (I have not verified it), it is possible that the
malware creators don't offer up these popups to Google's bots.

~~~
stevenh
The directrev.com malware installation popups I provided screenshots of were
triggered by this script embedded in savedeo's post-conversion page:

[http://cdn.directrev.com/js/gp.min.js?s=S0004793](http://cdn.directrev.com/js/gp.min.js?s=S0004793)

Checking that script, we see a lot of "gunggo" references, which is the ad
network doh admits to using. Gunggo apparently owns directrev.com, and both
are considered pretty shady from what I can gather:

[https://nodpi.org/forum/index.php/topic,5379.0.html](https://nodpi.org/forum/index.php/topic,5379.0.html)

Savedeo.com is ranked 49,679 on alexa. I'm guessing it gets around 9,000
visitors per day. With such little traffic, and no legitimate product or paid
services being offered, there is absolutely no remaining way to earn 30k per
month other than to spray hapless visitors with the most aggressive/malicious
advertisements known to man.

Here are the stats from his ad network which he showed off earlier:
[http://i.imgur.com/LfgWL7D.png](http://i.imgur.com/LfgWL7D.png)

I'm assuming those numbers are ad impression counts. There is no possible way
savedeo.com is receiving anything close to that many page views per day. If it
were, his alexa rank would be closer to 1,800; certainly not 49,679. I run a
site approaching the alexa 2000 range, and it only gets half as much traffic
as his ad network statistics screenshot boasts. Since the numbers in this ad
network screenshot cannot possibly represent savedeo.com's traffic, we are
left to guess what they actually do represent.

Here's my guess: It's the number of ads served to infected machines per day
via the malware he helped install through popups like these. Assuming he's
infected 25,000 machines, each infected device would only need to maliciously
replace 20 legitimate advertisements on victim sites per day for him to reach
this absurdly high impression count. If that is indeed what is happening, he's
earning roughly $1.50 per thousand ad impressions which is fairly standard.

~~~
billyhoffman
I'm interested in how you are extrapolating daily visitors from Alexa rank.
You mention having a 2000ish ranked site and knowing the page views from
there. I imagine its not a linear relationship. Do you have other data points
you are using? Any other information you could be provide would be super
appreciated.

~~~
usamec
This can be also helpful:
[http://www.similarweb.com/website/savedeo.com](http://www.similarweb.com/website/savedeo.com)

------
jasmcole
I wrote an Android app based on a blog post of mine which got popular:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jasmcole.w...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jasmcole.wifisolver)

[http://jasmcole.com/2014/08/25/helmhurts/](http://jasmcole.com/2014/08/25/helmhurts/)

It reached the reddit front page for a day, and earned £3,000 during that day.
Since then, it's averaged ~£150 per month, with only small input from me
(minor updates)

~~~
Osmium
I saw your write-up on this before; very cool work. Could you talk a little
about the programming side of things and what you had to do to go from your
initial mock-up (what did you use for that?) to the Android app, and how that
process went? I saw that you'd written it was your first time with
Android/Java.

~~~
jasmcole
Thanks! And sure, I wrote the initial simulation code in Matlab, which is very
simple, just adding 2D arrays which Matlab is fairly quick at.

I then saw the traction the blog post was getting, so wanted to capitalise on
that quickly. I had an Android phone, so for simplicity (and ease of
monetisation) decided to write an app for that. From zero knowledge of Java it
took probably 30 hours over a weekend to get the app out, then perhaps another
10 hours over the next week on a few updates and bug fixes.

Getting the app up and running was relatively simple, most of the time was
spent looking up API functions in Google's SDK documentation (and SO!). The
only complication was making sure the CPU-intensive parts ran in a separate
thread to avoid locking up the UI, and dealing with different device display
sizes and resolutions. Everything else (dealing with input, generating images
etc.) wasn't particularly difficult, but did take time to implement.

------
zrail
I wrote a book[1] a year and a half ago that just recently crossed $42k in
total revenue. These days it consistently earns $1.5k/mo without much further
input from me, other than tweaks to the landing page copy and updates once in
awhile when Stripe or Rails changes significantly.

[1]:
[https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com](https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com)

Edit: If you'd like to read a preview, you can do so here:
[https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/read](https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/read)

~~~
aakilfernandes
I was thinking about doing something similar. Do you recommend using your own
domain name (like nathan barry) or having a custom domain?

~~~
derefr
Why not both? Make a custom domain for the book, then treat your own site as
if you were guest-blogging on it to pump link juice to the custom domain.

That way, your venture ends up with the combined page-rank of your personal
brand and the exact-domain bonus. (Whereas if you just redirect from one to
the other, you lose one or the other.)

------
tomrohlf
I created a card game that I sell on Amazon. I have it manufactured in China
and sell it though Fulfillment by Amazon.

Quite a change from my day job working in software but I enjoy the diversity.

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PJKCXJC](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PJKCXJC)

~~~
mcphage
Mind talking some about how you do it?

~~~
tomrohlf
I'm happy to answer some questions... can you be a bit more specific?

~~~
mcphage
Well, what kind of companies do you work with—a printer, and a distributor?
Any others? How did you find the ones you work with—and how did you know that
they were the right ones? What have you done for marketing—gone to trade
shows, paid for advertising, giving samples to the right people, or what? How
well is it doing? Have you sales been steady, increasing, or was there a big
burst at the start, and a trickle since? Um... that's what I can think of off
the top of my head.

~~~
tomrohlf
I work only with a printer... Amazon is my distributor. I found them on
Alibaba.

I'm starting to ramp up my marketing but to date I've done some adwords and
advertising on Amazon.

Sales are steady, I don't reach $1000 every month but the holiday season more
than makes up for it when you average it out.

~~~
mcphage
Thanks for the info :-)

------
robinhood
I've created five years ago
[http://www.totalwireframe.com](http://www.totalwireframe.com), based on a
hunch that it would interest people. It's a site where I sell libraries for an
obscure/niche market.

The first year, I sold for $0 of librairies. In 2014, I've made ~$45,000 and
it's 100% passive income. I'm not proud to say that I've worked a total of 30
hours on the site last year (it sounds as if I'm lazy, and I'm not). Moreover,
I've never spent a single dollar on marketing, no matter its form.

It works so well that I've taken the decision to leave my daily job to work on
the site full time. I (perhaps naively) think that if I make that much money
while doing practically nothing, I can surely make a ton more by actually
working on it every day for a year. On Feb 1st, I'm making the jump.

It has been tough to get there though. The first year has been a disaster. I
nearly abandoned the site. Then, one day, I started to gain traction. To this
day, I have no idea why. Then, months after months, the sales went up. It took
me weeks and weeks of work to create the libraries I'm selling today. I also
did a lot of variations, based on the feedback I received from my customers.
My customers are the best, I think. They like what I do, they give me a lot of
feedback. In the course of my business, I also did stupid things I regret
immensely, like copy a competitor (but honestly it was not intentional), and
I'm really, really not proud of this.

Sales have reached a peak of $7500 for the month of May 2014.

The site is based on [http://jekyllrb.com/](http://jekyllrb.com/) and is
hosted on [https://www.webfaction.com/](https://www.webfaction.com/), on a 9$
per month plan. As the site is static, I just need Nginx. That's it. GetDPD
allows me to collect payments with both Paypal and Stripe.

To let people pay and downlaod, I use
[http://getdpd.com/](http://getdpd.com/). They are fantastic. I've tried a lot
of other options and even though GetDPD looks terrible, it's a great product,
well worth the tiny monthly cost.

I hope my story will let people know that it's totally feasible to do a great
business as a side project. I honestly wonder EVERY.SINGLE.DAY how come it
worked for me, but well,... it worked :-)

~~~
rifung
Great story! I'm also extremely curious as to how it started to gain traction.

I'm wondering if it has to do with where the site appeared in search results.
For example if Google changed their algorithm or if perhaps your web host
somehow changed something?

Do you remember when it started to gain traction?

~~~
robinhood
It took off after 9 months. I have NO IDEA why. I know, it's not sexy to say
this, but it's the truth.

------
earlz
I'm making about $500/month (was $800/month when bitcoin price was better) by
code reviewing altcoins for exploits, undisclosed premines, and other scams
that can hide in code. I have an arrangement with an exchange for a monthly
fee, and sometimes am paid by others as well.

I've successfully stopped 1 full blown exploit (admanteumcoin) where there was
code that allowed a block to mine any amount of coins desired, (and had RPC
calls modified to hide this).

I started out doing it to try to help the altcoin ecosystem, because it's
pretty interesting, and because it's a great way to learn more about
cryptocurrencies and all their implementations. My code review directory (that
isn't actually up to date) is on github:
[https://github.com/Earlz/coinreviews](https://github.com/Earlz/coinreviews)

~~~
SyneRyder
Do you do code reviews outside of altcoins? After reading your page I
immediately wondered if you're a freelance code reviewer & what languages you
specialize in. If so, you should add more details about that in a Services /
Work section of your site, and link to those details at the end of your blog
posts about code reviews.

Kudos on your About page too, instantly builds connection through good taste
in music & drinks!

~~~
earlz
I've never really considered it. Reviewing altcoins is easy because all you do
is figure out a known-safe coin it's forked from (since everything eventually
boils down to bitcoin) and check the differences.

I really don't pay enough attention to my blog these days, but glad you like
it :)

------
modoc
10MinuteMail - [http://10minutemail.com](http://10minutemail.com)

Temporary email. Got lucky with traffic, and run two Google Adsense ads.

~~~
GordonS
How much traffic do you get to make $1k+ a month with Adsense ads?

~~~
modoc
I get 3.7-4 million page views per month from 850k-1 million unique users.

~~~
GordonS
OK, that is a lot!

What sort of hardware do you need for that kind of load?

~~~
zrail
That's approximately 2 hits per second. If you're serving static content (or
heavily cached) you could handle that with a Raspberry PI. Heck you could
probably do it with an arduino.

Edit: this depends heavily on your traffic pattern, of course. Super bursty
traffic from Reddit, TechCrunch, etc is going to swamp your IO, but CPU will
never dominate the equation.

~~~
dpcan
Depends on your users I think. If 50% of that traffic is during a 10 hour
window of time each day, that could be around 70 views per second. And pulling
email for an account could be more costly than a static page view. Then if
he's getting that many views, he could be processing tens or hundreds of
emails a day per account more or less.... Could get expensive.

~~~
discardorama
> If 50% of that traffic is during a 10 hour window of time each day, that
> could be around 70 views per second.

How do you get that? Assuming 4M/month, that works out to 130K/day. Even if
all that traffic comes in a 10-hour window, that works out to 130,000/36000 =~
4/sec, not 70/sec.

------
mafellows
Lead generation service for mobile developers: iOS Leads -
[http://iosleads.com](http://iosleads.com) & Android Leads -
[http://androidleads.net](http://androidleads.net)

Have an assistant that helps curate freelance/contract positions from around
the internet and through opportunities I hear about offline. I'm a mobile
developer, so it's an effective side business to be working on.

Many people have scored new clients and worked on interesting projects through
the service. Some people find it's not for them. Definitely offer a money-back
guarantee if you're working on something digital/saas. No reason to be taking
people's money if they're not getting value out of your product.

Another valuable lesson: we did really well with podcast advertising thanks to
Release Notes ([http://releasenotes.tv/](http://releasenotes.tv/)). If you can
find a podcast with 10,000 - 20,000 listeners that serves a niche, you should
be able to produce a nice return. IMO our landing page is terrible, but it
converts quite well.

~~~
corobo
Out of interest regarding the podcast advertising - how much does that sort of
thing cost? Obviously there's going to be differences based on the podcast,
listeners, etc but as an vague number were you looking at $hundreds,
$thousands?

~~~
mafellows
Per episode with the size audience mentioned, you're looking in the hundreds.
Start out with one advertisement to test the waters. I ran one advertisement
that had good results (5-10x return). Like an idiot, I assumed I milked the
cow dry and should look for other podcasts or advertising mediums in general.
That was dumb. I booked a couple of episodes again with Release Notes that
produced the same ROI.

If you're having success with an advertisement, don't be afraid to double down
and spend thousands. Ideally, you should get a bulk discount from the show.

I don't have conversion rates based on % listener or cost per listener. Would
love to see podcast advertising evolve to this point in the future, but it
certainly hasn't yet.

The folks at Baremetrics ([https://baremetrics.io/](https://baremetrics.io/))
run an awesome service for monthly recurring Saas companies that use Stripe.
If you know what your lifetime customer value is, you really have more faith
in your advertising dollars.

~~~
corobo
Awesome stuff thank you - I'm currently creating a podcast hosting service,
advertising on podcasts themselves seems an obvious choice to look into. I aim
to have something that allows podcasters and advertisers to easily interact -
that bit about ROI for advertisers has given me a bit of inspiration! :)

------
tjradcliffe
It would be fascinating to see a complement to this thread, "Side projects
that never got any traction". The tech press has a huge bias toward reporting
on "what works" based on projects or companies that succeeded, without ever
looking at the many projects and companies that do exactly the same things as
the successful ones without ever getting anywhere.

I've been very successful in the technology world, including running my own
scientific and software consulting company for many years, but as a novelist
and poet I've been a complete failure, despite approaching the two in very
similar ways. Maybe the markets are simply very different, or maybe it's just
luck, or something else. So I think it would be interesting to see some side-
by-side of projects that took off and projects that didn't.

There are lots of really interesting things people are posting here, but I bet
for every success story there is a story of failure that involves a great many
of the same elements, yet somehow never grew beyond the "that was an
interesting way to spend my spare time for a while" stage.

~~~
bbcbasic
I guess there are 100 failed projects for every financially successful ones.
So it could get a bit TL;DR.

Here is one that makes $5-$10 a month from admob. A lot less than I hoped:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.martincapo...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.martincapodici.babypiano&hl=en).

Most of the installs are from non-english speaking countries. I spent about
$20 on Fiverr to get the descriptions translated into Russian, Portuguese etc,
which helped me get a few more downloads. I now have 1000 downloads, 250
current installs, and about 10 new installs (and 10 uninstalls!!) per day.

~~~
rab_oof
We need a thread about most revenue from least investment ($, time). :)

------
tootie
Reddit thread on this subject from yesterday:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2rb487/people_who_h...](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2rb487/people_who_have_built_sites_for_a_passive_income/)

------
dynofuz
I made
[http://bankofamericaroutingnumber.com](http://bankofamericaroutingnumber.com)
It took less than a day and makes about $150/month. Not quite the 1k but not
bad for minimal work.

~~~
dangson
Did you also make
[http://www.chaseroutingnumber.com/](http://www.chaseroutingnumber.com/) ?
Looks exactly the same.

~~~
frogpelt
There's a link to it and a Wells Fargo version at the bottom, so I would say
yes.

------
adzeds
I created a soccer app that provides information on betting. It trickled along
nicely and then in November it jumped to £3k (~$4.5k) then December it jumped
to £7.7k (~$11k) and looks to be on that line still as it is on £2k after 5
days of January!

~~~
adzeds
I have also just started to allow 3rd parties access to my data!

I plan on expanding this functionality over the coming months as well, as
there are a number of websites that keep requesting feeds and API access to
the algorithm predictions.

~~~
mantenpanther
Do you mind to disclose your data source(s)? Every now and then I've ideas in
this space, but ultimately I'd need a (free or very cheap) API with history
soccer results and match data - which I did not find so far.

~~~
adzeds
I use a number of sources and several systems that I have built myself for
collecting live score data on a daily basis.

A good place to start out would be here: [http://www.football-
data.co.uk/data.php](http://www.football-data.co.uk/data.php)

------
itengelhardt
I wrote a SaaS app for SEO professionals that helps them find link
opportunities for their client's websites -
[https://www.LinksSpy.com](https://www.LinksSpy.com) .

It currently makes about $1,200/mo. I do somewhat detailed income reports over
at [http://www.it-engelhardt.de/income-reports](http://www.it-
engelhardt.de/income-reports)

------
cade
This is fudging the question, but after many months of nights-and-weekends
toiling, I launched [https://www.land-of-nosh.com](https://www.land-of-
nosh.com) out of beta testing _today_ and hope to be making $1,000+/month at
some point!

My wife has always hated the meal planning/recipe organization and sharing
process and available tools (she'd used a few different products). After
asking lots of friends for recommendations and hearing enough times, "I use X,
but I don't like it, so if you find something better, let me know." it seemed
like a promising lead for a side project!

Worst case: I make no money, and my wife finally has the meal planning tool
she's always wanted.

~~~
WesleyJohnson
My wife and I are terrible about planning meals and often end up going out to
dinner which wrecks havoc on our checkbook. The problem with meal planning is
I'm a terribly picky eater and there are few things she doesn't like. I've
looked at meal planners/recipe catalogs in the past and I don't know that I've
seen any that offer any sort of learning tool to find recipes you'll like
based on your ingredient preferences. Of course, I suppose part of the fun in
something like this is choosing new things to try instead of always relying on
your old favorites. I'm not sure if your software does this or if there would
be any interest from customers outside of myself, but I thought I'd mention
it. Anyway, just the musings of a potential customer. I may check this out
regardless, it looks really good. Kudos for launching.

~~~
cade
Thanks for the feedback! I'm really curious: how do you envision your ideal
system for discovering your preferences and recommending new recipes based on
them? (Obviously, there's lots of ways to approach that, but I'm interested to
know your take!)

It'd be really fun to have enough data on user's recipe preferences to see if
sensible groupings ever emerged as a basis for useful recommendations. (I
guess not unlike Netflix's projected ratings.)

------
reuven
I wrote an ebook ("Practice Makes Python", [http://lerner.co.il/practice-
makes-python](http://lerner.co.il/practice-makes-python) ) for people who have
learned Python basics, but want to gain fluency. I'm working on videos for a
higher-tier offering, and then will start to market it more seriously.

I only launched the book about 1.5 months ago, and I'm at about $1500 in
revenue. I'm definitely hoping to see greater income with the higher tiers
(including video) and greater marketing. I'm also speaking with some companies
about them buying site licenses of the book, which would increase the revenue
even more.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
FWIW I just finished a beginners python course on Coursera - Programming for
Everyone (PR4E,
[https://class.coursera.org/pythonlearn-003/](https://class.coursera.org/pythonlearn-003/)).
There's no natural follow on as the course uses a book for which only the
first part has been translated in to a course. There were a lot of people on
the course asking what to do as follow-up; might be a lead for you.

I just signed up for your samples as 'pbhj' if you want to get in touch.

Incidentally, when one adds themselves to your email list for samples it takes
you to [https://lerner.leadpages.net/new-practice-makes-
python/thank...](https://lerner.leadpages.net/new-practice-makes-python/thank-
you/) but there's no route back other than using the back button. IME this
tends to mean people will just close the tab, providing a route back or on to
a related page might help conversions or give you chance to get affiliate
conversions or what-have-you.

~~~
QuasiAlon
fwiw I was in the same situation and found taking a stab at the challenges in
[http://www.reddit.com/r/dailyprogrammer](http://www.reddit.com/r/dailyprogrammer)
helpful.

------
tessierashpool
I wrote a bunch of ebooks and created a bunch of videos. I sold them from my
blog and via Twitter; in fact, although I started in 2010 and have made at
least 10 products, to this day, I only have web sites for one ebook and one
video series. (Count each video in that series as a separate product and I've
probably made at least 20 products.)

TBH, the worst part about this is that it's so easy, I got pretty lazy about
it. This is why I haven't answered the "what did you make?" question - I got
so lazy about it in 2014 that the side projects brought in about half what
they made in 2015. Kinda painful in retrospect.

Likewise, if I had web sites for this stuff, if I built email marketing
systems, I'm sure they'd make more money. I even have a Kindle version of one
of my books, and I still haven't gotten around to sharing it with my
customers. Kind of embarassing, actually.

But even then, I'm well over the $1K/month mark. No worries there. All you
really need to do is create stuff that people find worthwhile.

~~~
innguest
Thanks for sharing this candidly. It motivates me (an incredibly lazy person)
to put something together at least.

------
wolframhempel
I wrote a GPL licensed layout manager ([https://golden-
layout.com/](https://golden-layout.com/)) that also comes with commercial
licenses. It's been out for three months now and seems to appeal to financial
institutions. Revenue is ok, especially since most sales are the more
expensive (399 GBP) multi domain license, but a lot of the bigger customers
don't want to just purchase it through the website, but rather enter into a
more bespoke contract which comes with some overhead.

~~~
endeavour
How did you go about marketing this? Did you have contacts at financial
institutions or they just happened to stumble upon it?

~~~
wolframhempel
Actually, all I did was post it on hackernews. This generated a lot of initial
momentum, but page views are now slowly declining, so I guess I need to find
new channels to promote it.

------
someotheridiot
[http://rebrickable.com](http://rebrickable.com) \- using your existing LEGO
collection, find other stuff you can build. Thousands of custom designs with
building instructions and parts lists.

~~~
QuasiAlon
awesome awesome idea. any willingness to disclose a few numbers?

------
iurisilvio
Small niches are cool, but you probably can't live from ads. Choose a lame
subject with lots of users and make a clean and easy to use website.

I have a small directory website. It's pretty boring stuff, but it is a good
source of almost passive income. Never published it. I just created the
website and sent the sitemap to Google Webmasters. It's 8 months old and I
have 400k pageviews/month.

I have lots of projects in idea stage, I want to execute at least two in 2015.
My plan is to reinvest all money from this first side project to create
others.

~~~
joshdance
With 400k page views what does your Adsense look like?

~~~
iurisilvio
I don't send all my traffic through AdSense, some go to other services, which
give me less profits with less rules. I have a CPM around $2. depending on the
ads platform. AdSense is definitely the best one for me.

I started with AdSense 3 months ago and I'm still afraid of being banned and
lose all my revenue. I don't explicitly violate any terms, but it is not
original content and can easily be framed as doorway pages.

------
edmazur
I built and run [http://bots4.net](http://bots4.net). It's made a little over
$40k since opening in 2011.

bots4 is a freemium text/browser-based robot fighting game. It was making
$3,000/month at one point, but revenue has dropped significantly since then
(and it fluctuates a lot based on the activity of whales). Operating cost is
$25/month for Linode VPS hosting. Here's the revenue history as of August
2013:

[http://i.imgur.com/rqcxQgv.png](http://i.imgur.com/rqcxQgv.png)

It makes money purely through in-game purchases. Players can buy what are
known as "stars" for $10 USD each. Stars let you order items for your bot so
that you don't have to camp for them. The alternative if you don't have stars
is to wait for your item to appear, so stars ultimately don't enable you to do
anything you couldn't do without them, but they are a big convenience,
especially in late game where certain items appear very infrequently (still
only O(hours) though).

If you want more info, you can read through my posts here (linked to archived
version because it's not loading on the original domain):

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140210074542/http://community....](https://web.archive.org/web/20140210074542/http://community.bbgamezone.net/revenue-
promotion/$100-per-day-with-online-games/25/)

------
brianpetro_
Create a Job Board, use the latest social routes to drive traffic and build a
list.

The amount you make from the Job Board post is heavily dependent on the amount
social followers (drives traffic and makes purchasing more appealing).

[https://www.angularjobs.com](https://www.angularjobs.com) started making
~$1000/month in revenue with a highly targeted social reach of ~10k followers.

Technical co-founder type? Take what you know about programming and offer
recruiting services to the early users of your site. Both companies and
developers visit job boards, providing both the clients and talent needed to
collect recruitment fees(over 10K in major US cities).

My main gig is [http://www.LinkPlugApp.com](http://www.LinkPlugApp.com) where
I play a technical role.

LinkPlug is how I drive traffic to the JobBoard from social media accounts
like the ones below(click a tweeted link to see an ad for the JobBoard):

[https://twitter.com/AngularJS_news](https://twitter.com/AngularJS_news)

[https://www.linkedin.com/groups?groupDashboard=&gid=4896676](https://www.linkedin.com/groups?groupDashboard=&gid=4896676)

[https://twitter.com/angularjobs](https://twitter.com/angularjobs)

edit: added Twitter account examples.

~~~
sfteus
If you don't mind me asking, do you populate the initial listings on the job
board by your self (by finding job listings and posting them), or leave it
empty upon launch and just offer a period of free listing to get started?

~~~
brianpetro_
I was populating the board with jobs for companies I scored recruiting
contracts with.

These contracts made building the JobPosts and driving traffic worth my
time(contract = collect a sizable a fee when someone you refer to a position
gets hired).

JobPosts drive the organic traffic to JobBoards, so make sure you take SEO
into consideration when posting.

I also started with a much lower rate to post on the JobBoard, never free, but
as low as $29 at one point. As the traffic grew, so did the price. Now a
JobPost costs $349.

~~~
mandlar
Where did you find these recruiting contracts? Are they easy to obtain?

~~~
brianpetro_
Call/email people in charge of hiring in your niche.

Most companies are very familiar with this type of contract.

------
ronaldgl
I wrote a puzzle app for iOS -
[https://itunes.apple.com/app/id906543727](https://itunes.apple.com/app/id906543727)

It's free to download and try it out, but then I charge for additional
puzzles.

I was keen to give a complete version of the app for free (without ads) so
that people understand clearly what I'm offering. This strategy seems to be
working with good and returning custom. Not $1k yet but some reason for
optimism ;)

~~~
Osmium
What's the current situation with In-App Purchases and patent issues? I'd like
to do fund a smaller project of my own but I'm put off by the problems other
developers have had in the past.

~~~
ronaldgl
A good question.

I didn't take this into a great deal of consideration - I haven't seen any
press or heard anything about it since 2013, and I felt that publishing
something good would have value beyond this concern.

This is the latest I can find regarding Lodsys/in-app purchase patent:
[http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/01/03/ding-dong-patent-
tro...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/01/03/ding-dong-patent-troll-lodsys-
is-finally-probably-dead-after-its-domain-has-expired/)

------
megaframe
Combination Machine Learning, NLP, Neural Networks, stock analyzer. Does
automated day trading. Not HFT style stuff. More what a bank pays an analyst
to do, type of trading, but smaller scale since it's only my personal funds.

~~~
billmalarky
Is there a reason this isn't scaled out as a service?

~~~
megaframe
SEC rules. To do that you need become a trading advisor (similar to a hedge
fund), which requires that you have made over $200k/yr for the last 3 years or
that you have $2.5Mil in your own assets.

While I've done consistently well so far, I've only been at it full force a
few years, and I started with my own cash which isn't nearly that much.

The followup is usually turning this into a business and getting investors...
if you looked at my resume not much would make you think I have the skill set
for this (though I've spent 3 years building this on my spare time). I'm also
not sure I'm really up for the whole start-up thing, I enjoy my somewhat
relaxed work schedule/hours. I value my personal life more than this stuff.

I'm open to suggestion on that last one but it's not something I've done
before.

~~~
billmalarky
Can you contact me (check my profile for email). This is fascinating and I
would love to discuss it further but communication via hackernews is pretty
limited.

------
smhanov
I have three side projects that together became my "full-time" job. I'm able
to spend a lot of time with my kids since I can work fewer hours. I'm tired
all the time due to a 4 month old baby, so I'm not doing a lot of things I
should.

My method is simple and has only four steps. 1. Write something cool and put
it online for free. 2. Wait 4 to 5 years. 3. Gather all the emails asking if
they can license it or pay you to adapt it. 4. Then slap on a price/marketing
page emphasizing what everybody asked for.

[http://websequencediagrams.com](http://websequencediagrams.com) is my SAAS
business. When I was working on 3GPP at RIM we had to spend hours in Visio
moving boxes around, and pasting the results into word documents. It was a
challenging layout problem. By 2007 I made a python script that did sequence
diagrams automatically and put it online. I began to get emails from companies
saying they wanted to license it, so I obliged. After I left RIM, I converted
it into a freemium product. I have about 400 users paying $9 to $15/month.

[http://zwibbler.com](http://zwibbler.com) gets about 70 visits a day. It's a
javascript drawing library with full-service from me. Again, it started as a
free HTML demo, and I began to get emails requesting me to adapt it for pay.
Instead, I created the front page that offers a complete solution for $1500.
By answering emails and talking on the phone, I can get 3 or 4 clients a month
without even trying. I figure out what they want and reposition the buttons to
do it.

My favourite is [http://rhymebrain.com](http://rhymebrain.com) because I don't
have to do anything. Google just transfers $1-2K into my account every month
for Adsense.

~~~
celticninja
how does rhymebrain generate income? i dont have adblock and i am not seeing
any ads when i view the site, not even after a number of searches.

~~~
smhanov
Right now they only appear for people that arrive from a search engine
directly to a word page.
[http://rhymebrain.com/en/What_rhymes_with_purple.html](http://rhymebrain.com/en/What_rhymes_with_purple.html)

My theory was that those people are looking to buy something. Also I hated
ads. But I'm going to enable them universally soon, if only to stop the
constant emails from ad companies.

------
cx42net
I've built VoilaNorbert
([https://www.voilanorbert.com](https://www.voilanorbert.com)) with a friend
more than a year ago just for our purpose, and got LifeHacker(ed) in September
(2014) with more than 20k visitors in one day. We decided to re-write it to
include a paid service and we now get around 450 € per month that we split
together.

Among that, I started selling Prestashop modules on May 14, and now I get
around 800/1000 € per month from this.

Getting money on your side project is (imho) the best feeling in the world.
You get notifications (email for Prestashop, SMS that I configured for
VoilaNorbert) at every sales, and when you receive them, oh that feels great!
:)

This lead me to learn something very important : you have to finish what you
start. It's my big default, I always stop in the middle. Norbert and the
modules for Prestashop was an exception, and now they make money!

~~~
mapster
Very nice. For the life of my I couldn't understand this Viola Norbert. What
does it do?

~~~
cx42net
Thank you :)

VoilaNorbert helps you find the email of a specific person in a company.

Say for example you have the full name of a person (the CEO) and his company's
website. You can use Norbert to try and find his email. Using his personal
email, you will have more chances to reach him than just using contact@... .

Norbert simply try and check the existence of general combinations of emails
(firstname.lastname, f.lastname, etc) until one is found.

------
nickcano
I made a fully autonomous bot for a 15 year old MMORPG. The bot can completely
play the game with very little intervention, and I have about 2,000 people
paying $5.75 monthly for it.

~~~
jere
Interesting. Everquest? Asheron's Call? Bots were pretty big in AC, but I
recall them being rather simple and using them could get you banned.

------
rememberlenny
I found a great article by Walter Chen yesterday about how to he brought his
business to $1000 recurring revenue yesterday.

[http://blog.idonethis.com/how-we-got-to-1-000-in-
recurring-r...](http://blog.idonethis.com/how-we-got-to-1-000-in-recurring-
revenue/)

Im working on a similar service using SMS.

------
jonoalderson
I run [https://www.daysoftheyear.com](https://www.daysoftheyear.com), a
calendar website which lists all of the weird, funny, odd etc national days,
holidays events. Alternative celebrations, like 'Ferris Wheel Day' on Feb 14th
(vs Valentines Day). They're all real celebrations researched, described, etc.
It was built (and rebuilt several times, and constantly iterated) by me, from
scratch, on WordPress, in my spare time over a period of years.

The site generates >$1.5k per month at the moment from AdSense alone, without
any marketing other than SEO and broadcasting to the social followers we've
accumulated. This revenue is secondary to the real and long-term value being
generated in the form of large numbers of membership/email subscriptions and
social followers.

~~~
bnzelener
This is a cool project - must have been fun to do the research on and build.
Are you using any optimization techniques for AdSense? Would love to hear them
if you don't mind sharing.

~~~
jonoalderson
It's great fun, and the research is never-ending. Up to ~1,300 unique 'Days'
at the moment, and tons more to research. Loads of months, weeks and years to
do too, which have taken a back-burner.

No AdSense optimisation at all; barely touched the account. The most
sophisticated it gets is that it's using the async code (which we got access
to quite early on), and there's a bit of conditional logic which fires to
determine which size to serve based on the viewport width. Love to hear any
ideas you have - though AdSense is really a temporary cost covering measure
while we grow the email database, develop the app, etc. We'll bin it when
we're large enough to move reliably to other methods.

------
frist45
I wrote a book called Build a Ruby Gem (
[http://brandonhilkert.com/books/build-a-ruby-
gem/](http://brandonhilkert.com/books/build-a-ruby-gem/)). After release, it's
required very little work and has totaled about $20k in 9 months since launch.

~~~
gedrap
How did you market this book? Do you think having 1k twitter followers helped
with sales?

~~~
frist45
Mostly in places I knew Rubyists hang out online. Message boards, link
aggregators, etc. Twitter helped very little towards sales. Although I use
Twitter here and there, focusing on capturing emails was more valuable.

------
novelco
I launched a side project in 24 hours last month (which I documented here:
justinmcgill.net/24-hour-product-challenge-twist/).

It is called LeadFuze (www.leadfuze.com) and it's an email prospecting and
outreach service that generates leads via email. Good for B2B businesses and
startups, or even companies looking to validate ideas.

I've managed to hit $1k/mo ($1,100) in recurring revenue within 30 days. Going
to be a much bigger focus of mine now that it is gaining traction.

~~~
mapster
Very interesting app. How did you launch and gain users?

------
jafingi
I started a little niche webshop in 2011. In 2014, the monthly revenue were
around $2500/month.

It's not passive income, but I only use ~ 1 hour a day on it (packaging etc.)

~~~
ozh
Is there any potential for improvement? Like, devote more time to it and make
more? 1 hour a day = 31 hours a month = $80/h, roughly put.

~~~
jafingi
Sure! And I have big plans for 2015. Both being bigger in my home country, and
expand to other countries with the same concept. In Q3 of 2015, I hope to have
tripled the monthly revenue!

~~~
ozh
Time to team up with someone abroad... What's the niche about? :)

------
greenpinguin
I'm working on multiple ideas. haven't cracked the 1000/month yet, but have
put together a common repo I use as a starting point for all my projects. It
recently got featured on the Google Developers Channel:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_7zdqz01sk&list=PL2fzhe-
bAE...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_7zdqz01sk&list=PL2fzhe-bAEC1eSoe4j_-
tGiv4_lFZ8gpE)

------
flippyhead
[http://fetching.io](http://fetching.io) makes well over $1,000 / month but
we're just getting started ;)

~~~
mandeepj
How it is different from google.com\history besides tagging and notes?

Just curious. Not trying to put you down.

------
ironman86
How We Earned $10,120 in 30 Days by Sending Horse Poop to People: Amazing
Kickstart of a Marketing Experiment

[http://www.shitexpress.com/blog/how-we-earned-10120-usd-
in-3...](http://www.shitexpress.com/blog/how-we-earned-10120-usd-in-30-days-
by-sending-horse-poop-to-people-amazing-kickstart-of-a-marketing-experiment)

------
ambr
How are you guys marketing these?

I'm not making anything close to that but I've worked on a side project of
mine for months with no gain. At this point I'm debating if I should just move
on. It's not revolutionary but but any advice would be beneficial.

[http://www.psswrd.io](http://www.psswrd.io)

~~~
heliodor
My visit to your site started with a spinner that lasted about 7 seconds
before I saw any content. Might want to fix that. You can have a beautiful
landing page without heavy tech or heavy content (whichever is causing this
problem). Then, once the content loads, I can't read anything because the
custom accelerated scrolling is sending me all over the page.

I'm guessing you could see a nice improvement in your conversion funnel if you
fix these two issues.

------
thenduks
My first real side-project-turned-business is/was Bugrocket
([https://bugrocket.com](https://bugrocket.com), launched March 2011, bug
tracking for small dev teams). Subscription-based and grows very slowly, it
mostly hovers around $500/month in revenue. The market is just feels really
small these days between Trello and GitHub Issues being decent now (in 2011 it
was very lacking).

Next, my wife and I started CourseCraft
([https://coursecraft.net](https://coursecraft.net), launched December 2012,
e-course creator tools + we handle transactions for 5%-9% of sales). Since
it's transaction-based it's a lot less consistent monthly, but growing faster.
A typical month is $300-$400 in revenue, but it's been a lot higher (and a lot
lower) here and there.

------
jeremyjarrell
I create videos, mainly focused on agile techniques, that I distribute online.
Currently all of my videos are on Pluralsight but I've signed deals to start
branching out to other distributors with new content in 2015.
[http://www.pluralsight.com/author/jeremy-
jarrell](http://www.pluralsight.com/author/jeremy-jarrell)

Currently the videos generate about $3,500/month in revenue. There's little
out of pocket expense for the initial production of each video (stock imagery,
reference books, etc) and no ongoing expenses after production is complete.

I started out just focusing on topics that I was interested in but didn't have
a lot of success. Once I started approaching things as a business my return
improved dramatically.

------
dirtyaura
Something to think about: Based on the answers here and in the related Reddit
thread it seems that information products (e-books, targeted blog posts, link
collections) still generate better revenue (either sales or ad revenue) than
pure software products as side projects.

~~~
karterk
A lot more people who write books talk about their experience than those who
run a niche profitable SaaS app for obvious reasons (competitive advantage).

In my experience, it's much easier to have a stable recurring revenue from a
SaaS app than a book. Books go out of date much faster.

~~~
Osmium
On the other hand, a book can't go bankrupt/get shut down/go out of service
after you've bought it and invested time into. In that sense, it's a safer
purchase.

------
ralphholzmann
Send to Dropbox. Allows you to email attachments to your Dropbox. Makes
roughly $2,500 a month currently. More info in this other thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8699687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8699687)

~~~
quaffapint
This was another one of those ideas that popped in my head that I went to
check google on. Already done. Nice job.

------
raffi
I launched Feedback Army on HN in 2008. It's consistently paid my part of my
Washington, DC rent for years. I gave some details about how I marketed it on
its blog and in the side projects book someone put together awhile ago. Sadly,
I can't find a link to the side projects book or I'd post it here.

[http://blog.feedbackarmy.com/](http://blog.feedbackarmy.com/)

I owe a lot to Feedback Army. It was the first thing I made where I made money
without putting an hourly value on a unit of my time. I learned to think of my
business as a system for fulfilling what I promised and collecting money from
customers. This side project was a great way to cut my teeth on some business
and service fundamentals.

------
chias
I made a a community built around sharing creative writing, story telling,
digital art and artistic expression. It also has a few browser games and a
"digital collectibles" aspect to it. I started it about a year and a half ago
with a digital-artist friend.

It's got a standard F2P model for the collectibles aspect: you can get
everything for free by playing the games / posting in the forums, or you can
pay for it. It probably doesn't make as much as it could as I refuse to employ
"dirty F2P Tricks", but that's a personal choice.

Check it out if you care to :)

[https://www.mycenacave.com/](https://www.mycenacave.com/)

------
moveelo
Mine was not over $1,000/mo but I'm working to get it there.

[http://undupe.com](http://undupe.com) was something I spun up one day, it
gained a little interest and now it runs around $400+ a month(with under 10
users). Not very much, but a nice start.

I'm working on moving this one up a notch past $1,000/mo while adding other
small products to my portfolio.

$1k/mo is still a milestone I've been working on reaching. Up until now, I've
been an active contract developer.

Still have lots of product tests running and seeing what will be next.
Eventually, this will turn into a nice portfolio of digital assets and income.

------
leehro
I have two apps in the iOS app store. One launched in 2009 (Filer) and the
other in 2010 (FLAC Player). I've been really lucky that both have done so
well, especially 5 years on. I maintain them for major iOS releases and
hardware changes, but the little time I have I try to work on new stuff and
supporting them. My wife helps with support emails now, which has been a huge
help.

Neither app has any server-side components, so they don't cost me anything but
squarespace fees for my website and my iOS dev program membership.

Edit: Oh yeah, they're both paid apps and I don't fiddle with the pricing

------
umrashrf
reddit.com/r/SideProject is a great place to look for such projects.

~~~
henrygrew
it's private

~~~
publicfig
You went to /r/sideprojects, not /r/sideproject

------
joesavage
Around two years ago now I created a League of Legends champion
information/countering website:
[https://www.championcounter.com/](https://www.championcounter.com/)

Growth was slow but steady, and the site now receives ~1.4M pageviews per
month. The money to keep things up and running comes through banner ads - it's
not a huge amount (have only started hitting just about $1000/mo in recent
months, and don't know how long that'll last for), but it's still a nice
revenue stream to have.

------
jchatelaine
I made [https://QuickMail.io](https://QuickMail.io) for lead generation
(making +$5,000/month)

This is the quick (1 min video) version of how I did it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0y28HmcqUo&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0y28HmcqUo&feature=youtu.be)

This is the longer version: [http://blog.quickmail.io/category/journey-
to-1k-paying-custo...](http://blog.quickmail.io/category/journey-to-1k-paying-
customers/)

~~~
xrobotx
congratulations, how do you get new customers ?

------
tolas
Artwork Archive -
[https://www.artworkarchive.com](https://www.artworkarchive.com)

It's an inventory/career management platform for working Artists. Slow but
steady growth, mostly word of mouth and recommendations by influencers in the
space. Me and one other business partner. We had our first $1k month in our
4th month of operation. We are well over that now and with current growth it
should match the income of my full time job in the next year or so.

------
rk0567
~$1k+ per month from few side projects.

\+ pc builder site [http://assembleyourpc.net](http://assembleyourpc.net) (I
created ~1.7 years ago, generates revenue from Adsense and few affiliate
programs, 2-6 hours of work (per month))

\+ other niche tools : [http://portchecker.co](http://portchecker.co) and
[http://signature-maker.net](http://signature-maker.net) (weekend side
projects, 0-2 hours of work(per month))

------
heintzsight
Although we haven't hit the $1K/mo just yet, we're getting close. Perhaps
overly ambitiously, we started [https://ceanow.org](https://ceanow.org) \- we
saw a need with the bad advice that was given to startups and wanted to
educate the "advice-givers." Our audience is primarily accountants and
lawyers. It's a SaaS model in education and there's been a lot of interest.
The big problem is the time bandwidth.

------
lukasluke
I created a videotutorial course to teach people how to design and code
trading robots - udemy.com/build-your-trading-robot.

It's doing about 1.5k/mth. Launched it 2 months ago. Took me 6 months to
create it. Still adding content to it though, will probably take about 1 year
more before I complete it.

The site that hosted the course did most of the marketing for me so I just
focused on the product. Startup cost was about $150. Spent it on microphone
and digital writing pad.

------
phrasemix
I created a website for folks learning English as a foreign language:
[http://www.phrasemix.com](http://www.phrasemix.com)

I've been running it for the last 5 years. The first 2 years, it was just a
blog that I maintained for free. 3 years ago, I started selling access to
audio recordings of the lessons as a subscription.

The site generates about $2K per month off of around 300K monthly visitors. It
continues to grow but very slowly.

------
benblodgett
[https://hopsie.com](https://hopsie.com)

I wrote a site creator for non-profits that allows them to create customized
fundraising sites.

~~~
Cyph0n
That doesn't look like a side project but great work nonetheless!

------
w0ts0n
I have a few small joke websites that run on a vps. I set most of them up as a
kid. www.downloadmoreram.com is around $500 m/o on it's own.

------
v_ignatyev
I created [http://builds.io](http://builds.io) and
[http://udid.io/](http://udid.io/) The first one is the store destributing iOS
apps removed from AppStore. And the second one is the service to get UDID of
iPhone in one tap. Together they generates revenue around $1000 month on
subscriptions and AdSense.

------
chezmo
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358778](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358778)

~~~
shovel
Interesting that Joel's post only had 1 comment back then - nobody really
cared about it. I wonder which of the posts from _this_ thread will end up
following Buffer's trajectory.

------
hpeikemo
I created an iOS app
[http://ideon.co/theconverted/](http://ideon.co/theconverted/) as a side
project. I've had hopes to be able to survive entirely on revenue from my own
projects instead of relying on client work. I'm very far from that goal at
this point, but the extra income is nice.

~~~
karolist
Looks awesome, do you mind expanding a bit on how the GUI/animations were
built?

~~~
hpeikemo
Thanks! GUI and animations are all custom. I wanted very specific multitouch
capabilities that would not be practical by using standard gesture
recognizers. So a lot of work went into imitating the rubber banding and
momentum scrolling of the all-familiar scroll view. It was definitely worth it
in my view. Said gestures manipulate two base values; origin, and scale (1D
scroll and zoom.) Values on each side are defined as a multiple and an offset
of the base (linear function.) All numbers on screen are basically entities of
a particle system and are spawned, positioned, and destroyed according to
their relation to origin and scale.

------
sauere
Not $1k, but might be a inspiration anyway: 2 years ago i made some simple
LAMP+HTML/CSS Videotutorials and put them on YouTube. Production quality isn't
great but better than 90% that was on YT at the time. Along with that, created
a little site with the Videos and some code examples. Videos + site are making
me $100/month.

------
rainhacker
I developed a wifi hotspot locator using NYC Open Data. It is deployed on
Google App Engine: [http://elemental-shine-793.appspot.com/](http://elemental-
shine-793.appspot.com/)

Source Code:
[https://github.com/rainmaker7/locator](https://github.com/rainmaker7/locator)

~~~
morenoh149
I was about to make something similar but then found
[http://www.wifimap.io/](http://www.wifimap.io/) was a thing

------
iguanayou
[http://bestattendance.com](http://bestattendance.com). Built it over a summer
back when I was a high school teacher and had summers off. Not sure I would
have been able to do it without a nice 3 month block of time. Doing side
projects on weekends and evenings only is pretty tough.

------
ca98am79
I made [http://park.io](http://park.io) last June

I got into this stuff because I am very interested in domains - especially .io
domains

At first domains were just a fun hobby - to collect for future projects. But
then I sold a few and bought a few more and scaled it out.

I created park.io to automate things.

~~~
detaro
Note: blocked third-party scripts seem to break your site unnecessarily. The
site loads fine, but the full-screen loading thing keeps covering it. Yeah, I
know, my fault for running ublock, but maybe that is easily fixable.

Also, do you plan to extend to more TLDs?

------
ehsana
I developed a chrome extension in the early days of Google+ (2011) as a side
project to help me remove inactive people from my google+ circles and unfollow
unfollowers. Circloscope is now a full-fledged Google+ circle management tool
which can help you build and grow your audience in Google+.

------
ClintFix
I sell 6 and 12 month leadership development programs to companies. I make 50%
of the sale. At $50/mo per employee on the program, I make an extra $1000/mo
at 40 employees.
[http://LIFELeadershipCorporate.com](http://LIFELeadershipCorporate.com)

~~~
jasonlotito
Do you intend for the text to blink on your site? Because it blinks for me.
Latest Safari.

I recorded what it looked like. You can see it here:

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/i9jpjzm7035bhg2/blinking.mov?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/i9jpjzm7035bhg2/blinking.mov?dl=0)

~~~
ClintFix
Interesting. It is not supposed to do that. I will look into it. Thank you for
bringing it to my attention!

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Whilst you're on it can you fix the LLR logo roundel not to have floating
pixel cruft in the transparent areas (and poor cropping) and maybe provide a
properly scaled WP logo - that anti-aliasing gives me the jitters ... just
saying ...

~~~
ClintFix
Thanks! I have that stuff on my list already. I appreciate the feedback!

------
viktorhanacek
My site with totally free photos. I made it because no stock photo agency/site
want my photos.

— [http://www.picjumbo.com](http://www.picjumbo.com)

Today it has 1mio pageviews/month, PREMIUM Membership, Photoshop Plugin,
AdSense and some "30-days" ads.

And photos are still FREE :)

~~~
ewams
Viktor, do you take all the photos? Does the site pay for your travel? Great
idea, it is all free but get someone to pay for convenience.

~~~
viktorhanacek
Yes, I think 98% of photos are mine. Some others are my friends who kindly
submit their own photos to picjumbo. Yep, there is some income for traveling
and other stuff :)

------
ishanr
I wrote a book on Google Authority 2 years back and after steadily growing in
sales it gives about 800USD/month now:

[https://gum.co/ppyJ](https://gum.co/ppyJ)

Although I haven't spent a single penny on promotion and selling it for less
than I should I guess.

~~~
majc2
Can I make a suggestion - try a month at $29 and see what happens? If it
doesn't work out change it back.

~~~
rab_oof
Always experiment with pricing. It's easy to misprice ewares optimally by a
magnitude of 2.

~~~
trienthusiast
in which direction ?

------
mihirptl89
I generated $1000/month selling pens to writers, moms, artists and creative .
The project is called Humble Pen. It is a side project. By partnering up with
artists from around the world would hep me promote the brand. It also changed
lives. Win-win situation!

www.humblepen.com

~~~
tvmalsv
Interesting site, but it took a little effort to view. When visiting the site
via Firefox and Adblock Plus, the site renders as just an empty page.

------
ricardonunez
[http://tailoredwp.com/](http://tailoredwp.com/) Recurring revenue is from
hosting services plus some affiliate commissions. It started as a side
project, and I think this year will become my main source of income.

~~~
withinthreshold
Congrats! When did you start?

~~~
ricardonunez
Thank you. Sorry, I only saw your comment today. I created the website in
2011, but for two years I was just doing some testing and SEO on the side. The
last six months I have been more serious about it and the business have been
increasing every month.

------
jsherer
I left my full-time job back in February 2013 (coming up on 2 years). I
currently split my time between consulting and growing my products (a
downloadable and a SaaS). Revenue from my oldest app is still > $1000/month.
Been a fun ride so far.

~~~
vram22
What's the downloadable, if it's not confidential?

------
rab_oof
Several folks do a few hundred / month with a few ad-supported utility mobile
apps. That's enough for gas and food. To get to ramen profitability, either a
good mobile or biz SaaS app. B2C should rarely be depended on for
bootstrapping.

------
magnetpeep
I started thumbnailing porn torrents at
[http://www.magnetpeep.com](http://www.magnetpeep.com), then the Pirate Bay
went down (who I used to index the torrents). I need to get back on that
project.

~~~
stickperson
That's an interesting technical challenge, at least to me. Could you talk a
bit about it?

edit: Could you also talk about SEO and how you market your site?

~~~
magnetpeep
Sure. What would you like to know?

~~~
stickperson
I'm just curious how you go about doing it and how you actually index the
links. Let's say you scrape tbp (or any other site) every X minutes. You see a
link-- how do you know if you already saved that link? From there, I'm
assuming you just have a simple model for each link which you save and render
on the frontend.

I'm used to building pretty simple webapps, so doing something like this is
really interesting to me from a learning perspective.

In addition to the technical tasks, how did you go about marketing your site?

Thanks!

~~~
magnetpeep
Well, I used Ruby on Rails (I'm a Rails dev). Initially I expected to have to
scrape TPB, but checked out google and found there was a PB API. I started
looking into that, and was going to write a Ruby wrapper for it, but then
realized if I was gong to do it that someone else probably already did it.
Looked for a few minutes and found a couple of Ruby gems ready to go.

So what I would do was check TPB every hour, and get the links through the
API. If I didn't have them in my DB, I added them. If I had them I updated the
seeder / tracker info.

Once I have that info, I scan the DB for magnet links that haven't yet been
thumbnailed. I use the transmission-daemon to manage the torrent downloads,
and keep a handful of them going at all times. Getting that working properly
was kind of a pain in the neck.

Once a torrent is downloaded, I use ffmpeg to scan it and make 10 thumbnails
of every movie file in it. The torrents are deleted after they're thumbnailed.

Not much marketing, I just post about it here and there in places where people
would be interested in hearing about it.

I'm hoping TPB comes back up soon so I can refresh my data. It's way out of
date.

~~~
stickperson
I've been toying around with this for a couple hours. Getting the links is
relatively straightforward (I'm using kickass torrents). How do you go about
adding the magnet links to transmission-daemon? You can setup a watch
directory so that torrents will automatically start downloading when you fetch
a torrent file, but that's not what's being done here. I'm assuming you're
remotely monitoring the downloads true, correct?

As for ffmpeg, is that automated or do you have to do some manual work every
time a torrent is finished?

~~~
towelguy
You could use aria2, which is a command line program so no need to deal with a
daemon. Also, you could make it download just parts of a torrent (the start of
the torrent for example) instead of the whole thing and take the screenshots
from there.

------
rosspanda
We make about $300 in donations a month over at
[http://moodpanda.com](http://moodpanda.com) , we don't do it for the money,
its a good way of opening doors and getting invited to events etc.

------
trg2
I have an online SEO course that hit six-figures in 2014. I wrote a post on
it: [http://www.clickminded.com/six-figure-side-
project/](http://www.clickminded.com/six-figure-side-project/)

------
deanclatworthy
I run [http://unfriend.io](http://unfriend.io) \- I used to make over 1000e a
month with an un-named advertiser who decided to revoke my account without
appeal. Now my money comes from donations.

~~~
ersiees
Please Tell me do you really find ihr who Unfrieded whom on fb? Or is it Fake?
Do you use people's data maybe sell it or something?

~~~
yogodoshi
He explained it in its FAQ:
[http://www.sadlyunfriended.com/faq.php](http://www.sadlyunfriended.com/faq.php)

------
jonweber
TickChek.com is a side-project I launched in collaboration with my
university's wildlife laboratory to offer tick testing for Lyme and other
diseases. We've grossed over $4k in out best months this last year.

------
RealGeek
I built [http://www.ranksignals.com](http://www.ranksignals.com) SEO tools.

It's a SaaS app and a Chrome Extension. It has tens of thousands of monthly
active users and makes $x,xxx per month.

~~~
putna
How do you get those backlinks? They are pretty accurate

------
nitinsingla0999
Inspired by this thread i just created this site (took me couple of hours
today), monetizing by Amazon associate program. :

[http://www.watchaisle.com](http://www.watchaisle.com)

Will complete it by next weekend.

~~~
mlwarren
Are you pulling the watch pictures from Amazon manually? Or have you automated
it to some extent?

~~~
nitinsingla0999
No pulling from Amazon manually. I'm doing lot of research manually and trying
to find very best watches. Not sure if this can be automated but great point!!

~~~
mlwarren
There is an Amazon API for that, but since you're trying to curate for only
the best watches, manual work best.

------
sjtrain69
I built a niche website about Cockapoo dogs monetised with an ebook
[http://www.cockapoo.me](http://www.cockapoo.me)

Why?

200,000 searches per month on goggle UK + moz keyword difficulty of 31% =
opportunity

~~~
trienthusiast
and how is it going?

------
samsnelling
I launched my first "real" SaaS this year,
[https://embedkit.com](https://embedkit.com) \- and got just 1 enterprise
customer to net 1k revenue a month.

------
shovel
I publish Hackerpreneur Magazine. It's a free app in the Apple newsstand and
revenue is from subscriptions (in app purchases).

[http://hck.co/mag](http://hck.co/mag)

------
seekingnames
Have a website that allows folks to create custom logos and backgrounds for
their google search engine. People can type anything they want, choose a logo
and choose a background.

www.lyfts.com

------
dalacv
I have some shitty Udemy courses that net me just over that much:

[https://www.udemy.com/u/andrewvega/](https://www.udemy.com/u/andrewvega/)

------
v_ignatyev
I made ShotBuf iOS app ([http://shotbuf.com](http://shotbuf.com)) and earned
$100 on sales in 2014 :) It's kind of fail story))

------
michaelbuckbee
I developed a service that does SSL installation for you on Heroku:
[https://www.expeditedssl.com](https://www.expeditedssl.com)

~~~
nailer
Sounds like a great product! Some questions.

1\. Your video mentions you 'buy the SSL certificate' for users. How does that
work? Are you a CA or do you resell another CA?

2\. Your video mentions latest security practices - are you selling EV
certificates? Or just 'encryption to someone who owns this domain'
certificates?

3\. If you resell another CA, how can the identity verification process be 20
minutes?

Pardon all the questions, but I'm currently waiting on godaddy, who take 15
days, so I'm interested in this stuff.

~~~
nailer
Ah I just watched your video and I see you resell rapidssl. But the video also
showed the certificate being generated on your server, rather than making a
CSR on the desktop. Wouldn't you then know the private key?

Again, sorry for all the questions and thanks for answering!

------
quinnftw
I haven't seen too much profit yet, but
[http://www.linkwallet.ca](http://www.linkwallet.ca) pulls in a little bit.

~~~
findjashua
how is this different from pocket?

------
fuckall
I sell drugs.

It's a lot harder than you might think.

My clients give pretty reliable recurring revenue, so much so that it's gone
from a side project to a full time gig for me.

~~~
tekromancr
How do you scale customer acquisition? That seems very risky the moment you
move outside of friend-of-a-friend networks.

------
blaurenceclark
[https://www.linktexting.com](https://www.linktexting.com) text to download
forms for mobile apps!

~~~
logicb
Interesting. What you did for marketing this?

------
mooktakim
[http://tweet-a-lot.com](http://tweet-a-lot.com) \- #tweet-a-lot is a great
way to start your own contest to encourage twitter users to post with your
hashtag. The service uses gamification to reward behaviour that helps you
promote your brand to the most followers.

------
Exuma
I started a personal project last year that's currently pulling
$350,000-$400,000 profit a month.

Currently I'm working on scaling very hard.

It was a good year, and it feels good that 15 years of insanely hard learning
have paid off... It feels surreal, like I'm dreaming and I'm going to wake up.

~~~
atom-morgan
Do you have any additional details?

~~~
Exuma
I'd rather not really share. I guess that goes against the spirit of the
thread - Sorry!

~~~
atom-morgan
Not even a link to the product? There could be potential customers here.

------
ingen0s
Amazing thread - 2015 sure looks like a hit already.

------
wildmXranat
Some of these posted ideas are actually pretty good.

------
sam_lowry_
A local community website, earning from local ads.

~~~
maxerickson
Would you mind sharing the population you reach?

------
MichaelTieso
I'm bringing home about $2,500 a month on my side project. This year I plan on
doubling it. The issue is that this is really starting to becoming another
full-time job.

~~~
sarciszewski
That was a little vague. Care to share more details?

~~~
MichaelTieso
You're right. I'm Sorry.

I run a membership site called travelblogsuccess.com. My full-time job is at
WooThemes for WooCommerce. I'm a firm believer of "eating your own dog food"
thus we use WooCoommerce and several other plugins on my own side project.
This has given me a better understanding of the products we sell at WooThemes
as an actual customer on a live site. I learned more about our own products
using it for my side project than learning and testing our plugins on a local
development server.

As for the site itself it does require maintenance so not quite passive. It's
important that we communicate with our community and update our lessons and
courses often. We just introduced a public Slack community yesterday for
example. We're now a team of four and could easily need more help. 2014 saw
huge growth.

Initially I was concerned that my side project was going to take up too much
of my time resulting in having two full-time positions. It did take some
lifestyle changes in the beginning to free more time like spending less time
messing around Facebook or Twitter and optimizing my time spent on my side
project. In the end everything has worked very well. I spend on average an
hour or two each day on my side project. Sometimes more if I'm simply watching
TV while working on a few tasks during my downtime.

Sorry for the initial vague comment. Please do feel free to ask me any
questions.

------
riskpeep
commenting for reference later

------
MichaelCrawford
It's been a few years, but at one time I averaged $3,500.00 per month, with
two months at $5,000.00, from two AdSense units on just one single, quite
lengthy but well-researched and well-written essay on legal music downloading.

I am, today, skeptical that it's worth anyone's while to try to make money
from ads published alongside one's articles. At one time that was widely
accepted as the very best way to make money online, but no more.

I'm getting ready to do a KickStarter project so I can devote myself full time
to this:

[http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/](http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/)

So far I have some remote employers and clients, and some employers in a few
large US cities. After I have lots more remote employers, as well as some in a
few other countries, I'll do the kickstarter.

Someone managed to make fifty-six grand from a KickStarter in which he said
"I'm making potato salad". Not that he was going to sell it commercially, or
had come up with a killer potato salad recipe. I mean like he was fixing his
lunch for the day.

Just a couple days ago, I read that three times as much money is raised from
crowdfunding than from VC.

Consider that with crowdfunding, you don't lose any equity. You also don't
have the problem with a bad VC giving you bad advice, or even demanding you do
stupid things.

There are some VCs who are very, very good. Despite having to fork over lots
of equity, the good VCs are very worthwhile, but IMHO a bad VC is far worse
than not getting funding at all.

~~~
mrfusion
I always assumed you had to know how to make a compelling video to succeed at
kickstarter. And as a correlate be charismatic and photogenic.

~~~
SSilver2k2
I ran a successful Kickstarter with what I believe to be a cruddy video.
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1985705009/pimame](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1985705009/pimame)

I think there are two spectrums to successful Kickstarter videos: Over the top
really well done quality videos, and super low budget (read: $0) iMovie videos
that show sincerity.

Anywhere in between that and you come off looking like a scam.

~~~
DennisP
That is a good point. I helped with a kickstarter for a fusion project. Our
budget was low but we hired some marketing people who spent about $6000
putting together a video for us. It wasn't great but it was the best we could
manage. We got a ton of comments about how scammy we looked, including from
many of the project's long-time supporters.

(Luckily it didn't hurt us too badly, we raised $180K.)

------
DevFactor
Not sure if this counts, but in 2013 I made ~17k off of freelancing &
consulting in my free-time.

I also operate some "for fun sites", which are all small projects for example
a video-game discount aggregator (just scapes sites for discounts) all
together ~$200/mo.

