
Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't? - JayNeely
A friend pointed out a bunch of the &#x27;tell us about your successful side project&#x27; threads suffer from a survivorship bias. They&#x27;re still great for inspiration, but I suspect we could learn a lot about challenges and wrong approaches from each others&#x27; failures.<p>So what&#x27;s a side project you built hoping to generate revenue from it, that hasn&#x27;t actually earned you much &#x2F; any money?<p>Why do you think it hasn&#x27;t been as successful as you thought it would be &#x2F; what would you do differently if you did it again? How much time&#x2F;money did you spend building it, and what kind of iterations &#x2F; improvements did you make to try and salvage it?<p>Appreciate any and all answers!
======
herval
Not sure if it qualifies, as I actually managed to make money for a few
months, but: MyGuestmap (now long dead) - started it in 2007, put Google Ads
and some donation button. It allowed people to create their own little maps
and embed them on blogs, where people could place pins and say something.

Got to 40k maps in a few months (it somehow got viral in a forum, then went
from there). I even made $1k in ads one month. Some of the users included
indie artists, setting up maps for fans, and diverse groups of people (there
was a map for "moms of kids with cancer", for instance, which is pretty cool)

 _Then_ Google banned me for serving ads in porn sites. Then Paypal banned me
(and took my funds) for taking money from shady accounts. Then my hosting
service asked me to leave because they found "adult pics" on my site. A quick
audit on the profile pics revealed that there were quite a few maps with porn
content (including all the illegal stuff). I took stuff down as fast as I
could, but never managed to get Google to pay me again. Tried my luck with a
few redesigns, setting up a new adsense account (got shutdown immediately),
etc. In the end, I let the domain expire and that was that. At least I didn't
spend a lot of time or money on it...

Ouch.

Edit: registrar > hosting service

~~~
monknomo
I know it's a rule; if a user can add content, someone will add porn, but why
add porn to maps?

Were people putting a pin in and commenting with a naughty pic? What does that
mean?

~~~
herval
There were entire groups of people using it for “dating”, uploading nude
photos, etc (you could upload a single photo along with your pin). I also
found at least one bestiality-oriented group, with “meetups”, so... there was
that. :-|

~~~
byoung2
If you had the stomach for it, it would be interesting to just make it a map
service for adult content. There are ad networks and billing providers that
specialize in this sort of thing, and AWS allows porn (legal, that is).

~~~
OJFord
> (legal, that is)

Is any major platform more restrictive than the regional law?

~~~
byoung2
When I checked cloud providers' terms to see if we could build a crawling
infrastrucutre for my last company, I noticed Rackspace did not allow adult
content of any kind, but thst may have changed since 2011.

------
westoncb
I've maxed out a couple credit cards and spent all my severance pay etc.
trying to finish building this '3D abstract visual debugger,' which I'm
calling Lucidity [video]:
[http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd](http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd)

I started working on it in 2014 and it's been on my mind ever since. I applied
to YC with it a long time ago (was not accepted, and I can see _so_ much wrong
with the application I sent now...) I was laid off in November so I jumped
back into the project and have been working on it since.

The main thing I'm planning on changing up now is: it's too general
purpose—closer to a platform than a specific product. So next I'll focus on
building one particular product on top of it: something kind of like Chrome's
object browser (which you get when using console.log)—but showing dynamic
structural changes in time (steppable/reversible), and being multi-language.

The other main issue is that, even though I'm trying to get it into user's
hands as soon as possible, it has been a giant task for me to get even an
alpha of this thing together on my own,—though I am damn close now. And my
sister has been helping a bit recently.

Edit: direct link to video:
[https://youtu.be/KwZmAgAuIkY](https://youtu.be/KwZmAgAuIkY) (looks much
better full size!)

~~~
mandatory
I'm in love with this, I have nothing constructive to add but you should be
really proud of this work. Reminded me of this video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4)

Think you're on to something that this talk points out very well.

~~~
westoncb
Thanks! That's funny, before starting at a programming job a few years ago my
soon-to-be-employer (at a tiny YC startup) said to me, "you can be like our
own little Bret Victor!" I should re-watch that one though since I only have a
vague recollection of it. I enjoyed his "Inventing on Principle" talk quite a
bit.

------
ineptech
I made Word Nazi, which is essentially just a dirty version of Taboo (in the
same way that Cards Against Humanity is a dirty version of Apples to Apples)
in app form.

Lessons learned:

* I should've paid someone to do some decent graphics, turns out "minimalist aesthetic" is not the same as "no effort put in to design"

* Making it a free demo, with the full game available as an in-app-purchase, sounds like a good deal for the user but in actuality sets off peoples' "IAP == crapware" alarm

On the upside, I also made a fake corporate website
([http://ineptech.com](http://ineptech.com)) to promote it and that was so
much fun that I'd probably waste all that time again.

~~~
ineptech
For those checking out the ineptech site, please don't miss the poetry
compiler joke! It's the bit I'm the most proud of. It's in an unlinkable modal
so actually I'll just paste it here:

    
    
        Upon a stack of bits, about so tall,           // Boolean[] isprime = new Boolean[n];
        just think, O traveller, what we could do      // Arrays.fill(isprime, true);
        if every other bit was set to false            // for (int i = 4; i < n; i+=2)
        beginning with (but not including) two?        //   isprime[i] = false;
        
        Now take two lowly numbers, A and B            // for (int a = 3; a < n; a += 2)
        that equal three and two. What would happen    // {
        if they, by twos and ones respectively,        //   for (int b = 2; a*b < n; b++)
        were incremented in a nested fashion,          //   {
        
        And if we falsified, at every turn,            //     isprime[a*b] = false;
        the value offset by A groups of Bs?            //   }
        Then to the aether let those bits return,      // }
        to fly back home to Eratosthenes!              // return isprime;
    

(You may have figured out that I put a _lot_ more time in to the silly
programmer jokes in the fake site than in to the app. Wonder why it never took
off...)

~~~
vram22
Very creative, congrats.

The fact that you made it a poem, reminds me of some extempore poems that I
made up as a kid - inspired by reading a book that my uncle bought me as a
gift - The Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense [2]. It had a lot of funny poems,
limericks, etc. in it.

Here are two I made up at the time:

Poem 1:

Mr. Jolly had a brolly [1]

Its handle was made of silver, and its body was made of gold.

And Mr. Jolly used the brolly when it was very cold.

[1] Brolly is a Brit term for umbrella.

Poem 2:

I climbed up a mountain.

There I saw a fountain.

One, two, three, four, five!

In it I'd like to dive.

Go ahead, laugh. It's meant to be funny and silly.

I'll also mention a few good ones I read in that book:

Into the drinking well

Which the plumber built her.

Aunt Eliza fell.

We must buy a filter.

Old Father William:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Are_Old,_Father_William](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Are_Old,_Father_William)

[2] The book is suitable for kids of all ages:

[https://www.google.com/searchq=the+golden+book+of+fun+and+no...](https://www.google.com/searchq=the+golden+book+of+fun+and+nonsense)

~~~
vram22
>[https://www.google.com/searchq=the+golden+book+of+fun+and+no...](https://www.google.com/searchq=the+golden+book+of+fun+and+nonsense)

Sorry, typo in that URL. There should be a "?" between the "search" and the
"q":

[https://www.google.com/search?q=the+golden+book+of+fun+and+n...](https://www.google.com/search?q=the+golden+book+of+fun+and+nonsense)

------
arcatek
I built [http://start9.io](http://start9.io) three years ago - the idea was to
somehow manage to show video game publishers that a 'professional' vintage
gaming platform was something that could attract users. I wanted it to be the
Netflix of the retrogaming.

Unfortunately, I never managed to find cofounders that were as much motivated
as I was - each one I worked with was working on it as a hobby more than
anything else, and I usually had to tell them what to do, which was exhausting
considering I was the only developer to develop such a big beast. Adding
marketing on top of that was just too much. We still applied to Y Combinator
with the last cofounder I worked with, but he wasn't really ready to move to
another continent for the project and quickly started looking for excuses to
drop it. He got one when we ended up not being selected :) We're still
friends, but I learned that it's hard finding people to build things.

I'm still extremely proud of this project, tho. Both technically and humanly,
I learnt so many things! And the project is still running without needing much
maintenance, so I guess it's still a success in some way. Plus, it helped me
to find jobs, since people are usually a bit impressed when you can explain to
them in interview how gameboys work under the hood ... :)

~~~
wyldfire
FYI, PICO-8 [1] is a similar commercial project AFAICT. Maybe you're right
that there is a market there.

[1]
[https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php](https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php)

~~~
arcatek
I'm sure there is! Sega announced last month that it would be releasing its
catalogue online[1], and let's not forget the success of the SNES Mini,
released last year. I was just on the market too soon, and especially without
any connection to the people that could make the dream come true (hence why we
applied to Y Combinator - more than the money, the network would have helped
us). Oh well. :(

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/21/15846752/sega-forever-
net...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/21/15846752/sega-forever-netflix-of-
retro-classic-gaming-ios-android)

~~~
Nexxxeh
To clarify, NES Mini was last year, SNES Mini is this year's sequel.

------
shahbaby
To own a firearm in Canada you have to pass a certain test. I made a simple
quiz app
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca2.testprojec...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca2.testproject.shotgunstudios2&hl=en))
that would help people prepare for that test. My main goal was to learn how to
make apps. It did generate revenue in the beginning but it was enough to buy
coffee a few times a week. Then the government updated the firearm regulations
and now everyone has to take a mandatory course before they write the test.

This change effectively made my somewhat useful app almost completely useless,
at least in my eyes, because now there's little incentive to self study.

I could have tried harder to market it but I'm glad I left it alone.

Lessons learned: \- Politics suck. Any business related to firearms is going
to be vulnerable to government regulations. \- Money matters. Once you start
charging for something, you automatically feel the need to deliver a product
of higher caliber. You also get immediate validation on whether or not your
idea is worth it and how much it could be worth.

~~~
rhizome
Even with the mandatory course, are failure rates too low to make it worth
pursuing as a simple study aid? Assuming pass/fail stats are even available.

~~~
shahbaby
It's still useful to some people (works offline, quick/easy access to
important info, less to cram in your head during the course) but it's a small
part of an already small niche. Population of Canada is 10x smaller than the
US and not as firearm friendly.

------
bdukic
I built Thrail ([https://thrail.io](https://thrail.io)) 6 months ago wanting
to solve my own difficulty to find and book quality outdoors activities in a
certain area, especially when coming to a new place (tourism or recent
relocation).

I think there are multiple reasons why it wasn't successful as I believed it
might be, most importantly because I built something without first researching
the market enough, and failure to do so got me building something which wasn't
very helpful to people.

Another important issue was marketing. I'm developer myself, and even though I
tried my best to get the word out there, the results weren't as good as I
imagined they would be, on one side because I had no idea what I was doing,
and on the other, because I didn't spend enough money on higher quality
marketing.

I spent couple of months building it but I don't regret that time -- although
this conclusion is probably specific to my personal situation at the time,
where I had just closed the shop on my own development agency of 3+ years and
wanted to get a break by working on something fun. Additionally, out of all
the "weekend projects" I started over the years, this was the first one I
actually "finished", and that means something to me, regardless of the
outcome.

If I get into something similiar in the near future, I would definitely pay
much more attention to the aspect of getting the feedback to build something
people actually want to use. And marketing, definitely marketing.

~~~
roryisok
Marketing is hard. Is there some kind of service out there where marketers
will help you sell your app for a share of revenue?

I'm not trolling here, just in case I've missed a really obvious one

~~~
bdukic
I haven't come across anything similiar to what you're suggesting, although
I'd probably be very interested in opportunities like that.

The closest thing I found to something like that was Simbi
([https://simbi.com](https://simbi.com)) but I hesitated to make an actual
step forward as I never heard or read of anyone going down that route and
wasn't sure if that was the "right way" to do it.

------
seltzered_
Thimble for Mac ( [https://thimblemac.com](https://thimblemac.com) )

It's a plugin to bring gesture-shortcuts to graphic design tools (Sketch,
Photoshop, etc.). I've worked on it in bursts of my spare time for a few
years, and took a break from development the past several months. At some
point I started calling it more of a 'passion project' because I just really
wanted to see other forms of UI in the world outside of the sandboxes of
gaming, and a hope that it'd maybe serve as some portfolio piece in trying to
work as a software developer/designer.

At the moment I'm trying to motivate myself to work on it again, partly
because even in a touch-bar age I still find myself using it. Yet at the same
time need to figure out how to get it past a beta phase and to a point where
I'm more comfortable marketing it.

The hardest thing is trying to find time/motivation, it's easy to endure
isolation and keep the day job when you're excited with the product and
haven't gotten feedback yet. It gets vastly harder once you start wanting more
of a social life again and the numbers so far haven't made it seem like a
product worth going full-time on.

~~~
weaksauce
I could see that being pretty successful if you finish it. good luck!

~~~
seltzered_
Thanks! It's technically available as a beta, right now I send invites by hand
to whoever signs up.

------
fest
Spent about three calendar months (logged 120 hours IIRC) and few hundred EUR
building a simple hardware product- small dongle to stream drone telemetry
over WiFi (MAVLink to WiFi bridge).

Could sell just 5 of them, still have about 30 in stock, so commercial
failure, but at least got two things out of it:

1) Bragging rights about having sold something to large aerospace
organisation. 2) Finished something from start to finish.

~~~
RangerScience
> 2) Finished something from start to finish.

Solid!

------
WalterBright
I wrote a javascript compiler. At the time (2000), it was twice as fast as
Microsoft's and 20 times faster than Netscape's. I was correct in anticipating
that js speed would become very important, but my implementation was ahead of
its time and didn't get any traction.

It has since been rewritten in D and is Open Source:

[https://github.com/DigitalMars/DMDScript](https://github.com/DigitalMars/DMDScript)

~~~
grok2
Is it still compliant to the EcmaScript spec? Whats the latest spec it is
compliant to? And how fast is it now compared to V8, etc...

~~~
WalterBright
ECMA 3. Haven't run any benchmarks lately.

------
dejv
I've build complex app for managing vineyards and wineries. It has tons of
features: time tracking, input tracking, harvest and production features,
mapping, tons of budget/cost analysis.

It turned out, it is hard to convince farmers to ditch their trusty excel
sheets and notepads and start typing all those info into computer program. I
managed to find few customers, but they haven't stick for longer than one
year.

I spent about one year of fulltime work (spread over two years). I always
tried to expand the product: I started with vineyard management software, then
add the production part and then started coding all the CRM, POS and warehouse
management. I hoped to attract more users with more complex solution, but I
was wrong.

After three years I am still using it daily (I do own winery), but I am only
active user right now and I did give up trying to sell it. I do some
occasional development, from time to time when I need something in my farm,
but thats it.

~~~
ToJans
This is a common mistake: building a product based on assumptions, and not on
the market's demand. I've learned not to add a feature before I have someone
who paid an advance. Secondly: your product might be to overwhelming and doing
to much; experience has thought me that complicated products are a though
sell. Try to reduce it to it's most basic use-case, and sell that (a simple
app that doesn't require any explanation at all). Once you have paying
customers you'll be able to upsell by offering your more advanced features.
People are reluctant to change, so you need to expose them gradually.

~~~
vram22
>This is a common mistake: building a product based on assumptions, and not on
the market's demand. I've learned not to add a feature before I have someone
who paid an advance.

I first came across this sort of advice here:

The Montana Mogul: RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte (Part 1)

[http://www.sramanamitra.com/2008/07/31/the-montana-mogul-
rig...](http://www.sramanamitra.com/2008/07/31/the-montana-mogul-rightnow-ceo-
greg-gianforte-part-1/)

Interesting story. RightNow was later sold to Oracle, IIRC, for a good amount.

Greg used a similar technique to what you advise.

~~~
vram22
The part of the interview series about Brightwork (Greg's first startup) and
their telesales process and why McAfee acquired them, is also interesting.

------
mw_goodjava
I spent a couple years building
[https://infiniquest.org](https://infiniquest.org) in my spare time. This is a
site where you can both create and play interactive fiction games, using an
engine I built entirely from scratch. I mainly built it to prove to myself I
could complete a large project start to finish. I also had the motivation that
my son and I could make games for each other, but by the time I finished, he
was big into Minecraft and had no interest in text adventure games. :D I had
hoped to make some income with it thru ads and paid features, but I never
tried too hard to build up a user base, and now it sits there largely
unmaintained for the last several years. Last year I completed a proof-of-
concept integrating it with the Amazon Echo - that was kinda neat, but there's
a lot of work to be done to finish and polish it... and considering there were
no users to begin with, I lacked the motivation to undertake that.

~~~
roryisok
Whoah... That just gave me an idea... An Alexa app to run d&d games!

It sounds awesome though, as do most of the projects in this thread. I'll be
bookmarking it.

~~~
tahw
omg That is an awesome idea. I feel like it would be really fun to write and
super entertaining to shout at a robot DM when things go pear-shaped.

------
ianleeclark
I have a project which may never generate revenue, despite the fact I spent 2
months after hours working on it. I did a dumb thing and dove directly into
the project without first finding a fit or customer base for it.

More or less, it's a scheduling application that allows a user to set when
they're open and allow anyone to book that time for however much the original
scheduler valued that slot of their schedule. It's a good base application,
but without customers, it's wasted potential and engineering time. Guess I'll
add a link: [https://kronikl.io](https://kronikl.io)

There is an added benefit that I built up a lot of custom Vue components and
flask modules which can be added to later projects (braintree painments,
address inputs, settings pages, &c.), so I'm not considering it a complete
loss.

I've decided to pivot most of my time to a more marketing based approach for
the time being and, once customers role in, tailor the solution to their
needs.

~~~
philfreo
Feedback: bad name, but VERY bad homepage. Nobody wants to ready paragraphs to
understand what a product does. SHOW US the product.

The basic pitch you described here sounds good, but compare your homepage with
others in a related space: [https://youcanbook.me/](https://youcanbook.me/) or
calendly.com/ or [https://clarity.fm/](https://clarity.fm/)

~~~
projectramo
This.

The first thing I did is go to the page to see if what it does. I know what it
_claims_ to do, but the actual mechanics matter.

And then I want to know how much it costs.

Without those two, I might as well use a competitor that lets me see what it
does and for how much.

------
kidproquo
Hmm, this is going to get depressing. Oh well. Here goes.

I think my main problem is that I create solutions that are great for my
problems.

Flaming Notes[0] - iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Web game to learn music
notation. Total revenue: 10 USD over 2 years.

MelloNote[1] - Android app to sync audio files with text (lyrics, guitar
chords, etc). Think 4-track subtitles that can be used by a band. Earnings: 6
USD in 1 year.

Tasktopus[2] - Desktop kanban app (Windows, Mac and Linux). Earnings: 500 USD
in 1 year.

See N Tell[3] - A web-based sentence construction game to help 5-10 year-olds
to learn words via images from Google Image Search. Earnings: 0

[0]: [http://www.adhyet.com/flamingnotes](http://www.adhyet.com/flamingnotes)

[1]:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adhyet.mel...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adhyet.mellonote)

[2]:
[https://gumroad.com/l/ADWm/tasktopus](https://gumroad.com/l/ADWm/tasktopus)

[3]: [https://seentell.me](https://seentell.me)

~~~
foxhop
having my son play with seentell.me - he's 5 going into first grade.

Update: he loved it and wanted to keep playing - "I want to do more! I like
the music!"

~~~
kidproquo
Hey, awesome. Let me know what he thinks of it.

Update:

Glad he liked it :-) Now I have 2 satisfied customers.

BTW, you can create your own custom lesson plan by clicking the Settings
button. That will take you to
[https://seentell.me/settings](https://seentell.me/settings).

------
Xamayon
I created [https://SauceNAO.com](https://SauceNAO.com), a primarily anime
focused reverse image search engine in 2008. While it's purpose has never
really been to make money per se, it's been extremely expensive to operate.

It's been pretty successful usage wise, but paying users are another matter
entirely. Donations and account upgrades keep the lights on, barely covering
the hosting costs of the main collocated front-end server, but lack of funds
is a constant struggle. I've spent tens of thousands over the years on
hardware and hosting costs, and expenses keep going up as coverage expands. As
for why, I guess there's just not enough of a reason to upgrade at the moment.
Free is hard to beat, I'm my own best competitor.

The site's current design is basic to say the least, and the account creation
page does not leave users feeling especially comfortable about the site.
Everything about everything needs polish.

Related to that, I'm almost finished with a redesigned and much nicer looking
front-end, but that probably won't magically solve all my problems. ;)

~~~
sogen
Kill the free site.

~~~
Xamayon
If making money ever became critical, of course severely limiting or stopping
free access would be an option. I've really enjoyed seeing the site grow over
the years though, and killing off free access would almost certainly hamper
that growth. Not to mention the effect it would have on the internet at large:
Even more source requests everywhere! No one wants that~

~~~
sogen
Just saw the website, wow so basic!

 _thumbs up_

------
greysteil
I built Dependabot ([https://dependabot.com](https://dependabot.com)), a
service that checks your dependencies are up-to-date every morning and creates
pull requests for you if they're not. Intention was to make dependency
management suck less, whilst also adding a bit of runway to a bigger startup I
wanted to do.

* Spent 2 months building it - much longer than I'd thought. The work required to get from a prototype (2 days) to a SaaS product (2 months) was way bigger that I'd thought. So much polish, and so many edge cases to consider when the client goes from "you" to "anyone else". Lesson: building something for other people takes a lot longer than building something for yourself.

* Tried to launch on Hacker News but failed to get any attention. Our blog post on "10 years of Rubysec data analysed" never made it off the "newest" page, despite being pretty solid content (spent two days building a Jupyter Notebook so anyone could replicate our results, etc.). Was a big psychological hit at the time. Lesson: there's lots of randomness in launches - don't rely on them to much.

* Thought GitHub Marketplace would list us and help with distribution, but it's been extremely hard to persuade them to. The jury is still out on this one, but they (understandably) want us to have lots of users before they invest in even assessing the app. Lesson: don't rely on the goodwill of third parties - unless you've got something they want/need, you'll be stumped if they decide they're not interested.

I haven't given up yet, and I still really believe in the product, but it's
been a much harder journey than expected! Marketing has been by far the
toughest part, and I don't have a solution to it yet.

~~~
KenCochrane
That's pretty cool, I have been thinking of building something similar, but
for Python. How hard is it to add new languages?

What is the tech stack?

Does it cost much to keep it running?

~~~
greysteil
Thanks!

Adding new languages is as easy as the package manager makes it... which is
normally still quite hard! The core logic for Dependabot is open-source here,
including all the language-specific logic for Ruby, JS and PHP, and a starter
(lots of work still required) for Python: [https://github.com/gocardless/bump-
core](https://github.com/gocardless/bump-core).

For the app itself, we used Ruby (because we'd built the original core gem,
which was
[https://github.com/gocardless/bump](https://github.com/gocardless/bump), in
Ruby at a work hackathon years ago).

Costs under £50 a month to keep running at the moment, creating about 2,000
PRs a month. We could really do with getting it into the GitHub marketplace so
we can start charging people and cover those costs!

------
jefflinwood
Cat Game Aquarium - an iPad app for cats

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cat-game-
aquarium/id56449037...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cat-game-
aquarium/id564490378?mt=8)

I've had this iPad app up and running for about 4 and a half years - I don't
think I've broken even yet on the amount I paid an artist for the graphics for
the app. I did the coding for it myself.

RobotBridge PDF Conversion as a service (API)

[https://market.mashape.com/jefflinwood/robotbridge-pdf-
conve...](https://market.mashape.com/jefflinwood/robotbridge-pdf-conversion)

This service is pretty straightforward, and has users, but doesn't really
cover the server costs. On my list of things to do is to switch it from
PhantomJS to headless Chrome, and then to migrate the server.

------
dizzystar
I built a large inventory, product management, CRM, channels management etc
etc system. The idea is to integrate all the non-talking and buggy systems
needed to run a small e-commerce business (most small e-commerce companies are
using money-losing systems and "fixing" the issues with Macro-enabled Excel
books). It was also open-source because there is zero way I'd ever take the
whole market alone.

The idea, I think, is sound. I worked on the system for over a year, and there
are many interesting ideas. The big problem is that it took way more resources
to launch than I could ever do alone. I would need sales, support, sysadmin,
developers, designers, etc. Everyone calls it my billion-dollar idea, but I
truly couldn't and can't do it alone.

The lesson learned is, think big, but not so big you can't handle the work-
load. If you are working every day and falling behind two days, the side
project is far too large.

[https://github.com/dt1/itemhut](https://github.com/dt1/itemhut)

~~~
ToJans
Find an entry into a market, and don't offer the world, but figure it their
most painful integration point and fix that. Find multiple customers for that
single integration point before you even start building anything. You need to
learn to walk before you can start running: baby steps and validation after
every step make sure that you only risk wasting your last step, as opposed to
the whole journey.

------
mailinatorguy
[http://clickrouter.com](http://clickrouter.com)

I built it because of a need and it's worked fabulously. It's hands down
doubled my monthly affiliate revenue (i.e. to be clear, that's in the 4
figures).

I think where it failed however is that it's really hard to explain and I sure
haven't cracked it. I get a few signups a day, few use it at all.

It's not for everyone - but it definitely works for me and it would work for
anyone in the same boat (someone who needs to affiliatize hundreds/thousands
of outgoing links)

~~~
robzyb
This is not a product that I'm interested in, but may I provide some feedback
on your website?

It took me a little while to understand what Clickrouter does. The very first
line, "Monetize Outbound Clicks", contributed a lot to my confusion. It made
me think that maybe you were just a frontend to e.g. Amazon's affiliate
program.

It was only when I read Step 4 of "How's it work" that I understood what it
did: "Watch ClickRouter route each click to your best (i.e. most profitable)
merchant network every time !"

I would've been much happier if the very first line was something like
"Maximise your revenue by automatically using the best affiliate links."

Straight away I know _why_ I should be interested in your product, and how it
works.

------
tomschlick
[https://zonewatcher.com](https://zonewatcher.com) After having multiple
clients change their DNS settings without warning and then email us when shit
hits the fan I knew I needed some type of warning system. This checks every X
minutes and saves each version so you can see the revision history for all
your DNS zones across many providers.

I make ~$50 a month right now with it, which is enough to cover the hosting. I
haven't really marketed it much beyond my twitter circle of friends but
hopefully others will find it useful.

It took about 3 weekends worth of work to complete and is based on Laravel
Spark.

~~~
regecks
Signed up to paid plan, thanks. This is something I had looked for previously.

Some suggestions (only because I really want you to succeed!):

\- Please consider the use case where I want to protect against a domain
having its nameservers changed at the registrar. I don't think you currently
handle that case, as e.g. pulling the NS records from Route53 will always show
Route53 as the authoritative NS, which may not match what the registrar says.
This is actually the main feature I want.

\- I couldn't find docs or advice regarding how alerting or notifications
work. I don't even know if I will receive alerts.

\- Please support "plain" DNS-based checks. As in, ability to add a zone and
add a number of records (e.g. MX) that I want checked and it is done via DNS
protocol query to the authoritative NS.

\- Fix the "flash of not-yet-parsed-by-Angular content" that appears on the
signup page, it's pretty jarring on a medium latency connection

\- For the credit card form, I had some misgivings about putting my details in
until I dove into the HTML of the page to check that you weren't sending the
card details to your own server. Maybe add a "powered by Stripe" icon or
something.

~~~
tomschlick
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll get those changes integrated :)

------
saimiam
Back in 2007, I made neverplayalone.com to find activity partners. Within a
few days of launch, someone pointed out three things - Meetup was gaining
traction, URL sounded risqué, and never to use negative words like never in
the URL.

In 2010-11, I worked on lug-it.com to let people carry stuff in their luggage
for others. It leveraged FB's social graph to engender trust. I just wasn't
ready to market and grow the user base because my cofounder decided that he
was going to be the "vision" guy and I was going to do all the work.

I launched a couple of iOS apps one of which got thousands of downloads in a
month but since it was very niche (BLE/iBeacon related), I stopped working on
it.

~~~
madamelic
>let people carry stuff in their luggage for others

There is no possible way that could go wrong. Especially when TSA or Customs
asks: "Are you carrying anything for someone else?"

Then you go on to explain, "Oh yeah, I am, but I know them. They are paying me
to do it."

~~~
saimiam
Well, there's obviously that but since we built this on your FB graph, you'd
be delivering stuff from either friends or friends of friends at worst. I feel
Walmart is doing this and worse by asking neighbors to deliver your stuff.

In fact, I often carry stuff for my compatriot coworkers and friends to/from
the home country. This was just a more regularized and systematized version of
that.

All said and done, you're right - even my cofounder and I felt a little
uncomfortable being mules for others even if the item being sent was totally
innocent.

The one and only delivery we made successfully was from Toronto to London via
New York for the then CIO of British Telecom. He loved the idea so much that
he covered it here [http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2009/12/02/hauling-bits-
around...](http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2009/12/02/hauling-bits-around/) on
his blog.

------
Harkins
TwoFactorAuth, a Rails gem for supporting the open U2F hardware two factor
authentication standard.
[https://www.twofactorauth.io](https://www.twofactorauth.io)

When the standard was released 2.5 years ago I figured that exacting security
code against an unevenly documented API was worth paying for, but nobody
understood what 2FA was, why SMS is garbage for 2FA, that you could now get
devices for a couple bucks that would work on dozens of sites while respecting
your privacy, etc.

I spent about a month coding and tried to sell it for a couple months, but I
simply didn't have the resources to try to do all the education needed. I put
it on the shelf.

But this spring I've gotten a couple inquiries about updating it to Rails 5.0
and 5.1, so I guess the knowledge is getting out there. I did another survey
and there are still no drop-in libraries for the languages I'm comfortable in
(Ruby, Python, JavaScript, PHP) - either they require a lot of fiddly
customization or they're half-finished hobby attempts.

I'm considering updating the gem, automating the license purchasing, taking
steps to enforce the dual-license, and seeing how it does.

------
nikivi
I have not built this project with the main goal to earn money from it but
just to build something that I thought was missing in this world.

I am trying to visualise all of world's knowledge with interactive mind maps
focused on learning anything in a linear way.

Here is the search engine that searches all of these interactive maps :
[https://learn-anything.xyz/](https://learn-anything.xyz/)

Both the search engine and the maps are open source so I am not so sure how
and if I can ever make money from this aside from the Patreon page that we
have set up for the project.

If anyone has any ideas on how one can monetise this in a good way, I would
love to hear it. We don't want to put any sponsored content in there as that
would defeat our vision of having most quality resources available for all
subjects.

~~~
crush-n-spread
Hi, I noticed the initial load time is quite poor... Maybe I had a bad
connection but you might want to do some testing on initial load times for
your site.

~~~
nikivi
Sorry about this. We only have one server and it is based in Amsterdam. We
will try to expand to other continents soon so the load time is fast
everywhere.

~~~
dotmanish
Getting a 502 Gateway error right now, so can't check the site. However,
general advice: run the site through Google's Page Speed checker and see if a
CDN + gzip compression etc can improve things to some extent before relocating
primary servers.

------
jpobst
I built [https://communiroo.com](https://communiroo.com) because I couldn't
find a quick and simple _single_ website to expose bug/feature tracking + SO
type questions + forums + support requests for my other things I was building.
It seemed (and still seems) like it fills a need for mine and everyone else's
side projects.

I think the biggest issue is marketing. I tried a few Twitter/Facebook ad
campaigns that didn't really pan out, and an HN submission that didn't make
the front page. But really I haven't done much to market it, and it just sits
there chugging along with few users other than myself while I work on other
stuff.

~~~
agersant
This looks pretty great! I would have used it a few years ago, now I host my
project on Github and use their built-in tools.

~~~
jpobst
Thanks! Yeah, GitHub is definitely the way to go for OSS or projects with
technical users. This is designed more for things like closed source apps or
SaaS.

------
throwaway2016a
Not answering the question directly but one issue is that as a developer you
can often make a product for almost free (and it might even be a really good
product) but marketing is almost never free.

Sure you can market with sweat equity. Forums, Show HN, Product Hunt, etc but
to get real money you often have to advertise. And advertising is not cheap.

I do actually have a product in this category but I don't want to post it with
a throw away account.

~~~
neoterics
I wish there was a better way to connect entrepreneurs of varying skills
together. I am in a similar boat as you, but on the other end.

I am a marketer and at times I have ideas (for websites or apps) that I would
like to get built, but since I have to pay for that and since not all ideas
are going to be winners it can become an expensive proposition.

Although threads like this can be valuable since I can reach out to developers
who have created a product that I see addressing a real need in the market and
reach out to them to see if there is any scope to work together, but these are
few and far between.

~~~
ux-app
> reach out to them to see if there is any scope to work together

Hey, you don't have any contact info in your profile, but if you'd like to get
in touch I'd be keen to have a chat, my email is eli@ux-app.com

------
JohnHansen
For one project, a picture-based IQ test for autism, I posted an overview a
few weeks back.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595379](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595379)

Building the adaptive test system for use on the Internet was a great learning
experience that felt a bit like a capstone project for a masters program. The
two main challenges for monetizing it: 1. Finding a market beyond the small
autism research field. 2. Contracts. Since the test was oriented to autism,
many of the potential customers were hospitals and universities with the
former requiring liability clauses that were perpetual (such as addressing
problems from a drug trial 20 years down the road), and the latter requiring a
free license to all background IP so that their research could build on any
results without any possibility of infringement. Even with the help of a
lawyer I was not able to reach agreements under these circumstances. I am
still unsure if it is better to have a set terms of use or leave the door open
for negotiation with potential customers.

I am still pleased having spent the time as the amount of personal and
professional growth has been great. [http://hrs-mat.com](http://hrs-mat.com)

------
ximeng
Not mine but... [http://nodemailer.com/status/](http://nodemailer.com/status/)

~~~
thebiglebrewski
Wow it's so sad that so much effort was put in just to get betrayed by
everyone...

------
garraeth
I built itrackmine.com
([http://mashable.com/2008/12/26/itrackmine/](http://mashable.com/2008/12/26/itrackmine/)).
And its killer recommendation engine (books, movies, and music) -- we knew
what you owned from all stores, not just what you //bought// at Amazon (or
single store) so ours were extremely accurate. Along with a "user A is this
similar to user B" system...and the whole tracking, sharing, mobile app,
barcode-scan, manage-your-stuff-package.

Made $10 over the ~8 years it was up...from one donation. Yey.

~~~
JayNeely
Why do you feel it didn't really generate revenue?

What would you do differently if you were going to do it again?

~~~
garraeth
Neither my business partner nor I are any good at marketing. And we didn't
like how most sites put so much pressure on their users to buy things, click
ads, share with friends, send out marketing emails, etc...so the things we DID
put in were kind of halfhearted, and always out of the way.

We tried selling the data (amazing data if you think about it!!). Anonymous of
course! And/or selling the recommendations (easy enough since everything was
organized by UPC/ISBN). But that's something it seems like you need to know
people -- CEO's/CTO's of bigger companies. We just didn't have the
connections, nor the personalities to kiss that much ass. But we tried for
several years. I think they're all of the mindset that they've got "good
enough" data on their own...or two guys in their garage are too small peanuts
to trust. It's funny that just this week Amazon had a post here about it's
20th year of recommendation engine, ~yey~ -- and they still can't get it right
(sour grapes? yeah...).

If we were to do it again, we'd probably focus on core functions (the site did
A LOT). And seriously work on marketing aspects. Not dark patterns
([https://darkpatterns.org/](https://darkpatterns.org/)) but more organized
and focused efforts.

Honestly though, if we did it again, it would not be for the money - it would
be for a cool product and for our own fun...maybe integrate with Kodi...

We'd be smarter on hosting. We were at Rackspace first for $30k/mo...then
realized we were being hoodwinked and found PEER1 for $1200/mo...then realized
we could get away with a $300/mo DO droplet by converting everything to open
source and optimizing -- granted over the course of the 8-10 years, tech
improved. But, no more MSSQL, no paid search engine (we ended up on Solr --
AMAZING!), no Windows and just all open-source. I ran our recommendation
engine on my computers at home and uploaded results from there. As with
hosting, I think the open source stack has improved a lot.

Smarter on who we hire for PR - I got all our serious PR (Mashable,
LifeHacker, Makeuseof, etc). We spend about $30k on snake-oil PR companies.
Our first PR company took $20k and literally did nothing (not even a press
release blast or PDF) - but suing would cost us way too much time/money so we
ate it and went to another referral - who did the job, but it ended up more or
less a pointless exercise.

After all that time, going into personal debt -- with creditors calling at all
hours, no income in sight, thousands of hours devoted to it, alienating
friends and family borrowing from them to survive, we finally decided to call
it quits.

------
cyberferret
I blogged about my first foray into the world of creating a web app that would
generate recurring revenue for me here [0]. It was my first attempt.

I attempted two other web apps which also had dismal results, before my fourth
(current) one, which is doing great and getting better.

Since writing that blog post, that particular web app (which is still running
BTW) has had a handful of users sign up and is generating around $40-$50 per
month. It covers the AWS cost, and lets me buy a beer every month, so I figure
I will just let it tick along... :D

Feel free to ping me to reply to this thread if you want any more information,
but the (somewhat long) blog post pretty much explains it all.

[0] - [https://medium.com/@dsabar/the-zero-dollar-web-
app-8886bf4ae...](https://medium.com/@dsabar/the-zero-dollar-web-
app-8886bf4ae030)

~~~
marktangotango
Your experience corresponds to mine almost exactly, have you written anything
about your subsequent attempts, and the one that finally succeeded? No contact
info in your profile btw.

~~~
cyberferret
Apologies, I will have to fix up my bio on here. I killed the old one to put
in the Keybase identifier and never went back to fix it...

My current SaaS app that is actually doing well and making money (and just hit
profitability) is www.hrpartner.io

I blog about some aspects of it at
[http://devan.blaze.com.au](http://devan.blaze.com.au) amongst other things.
One day I will sit down and construct a full post on that particular journey,
but I am afraid that survivorship bias might take over and I will forget some
of the hard stuff that happened...

------
CamTin
I built [https://callmom.pro/](https://callmom.pro/) this year in anticipation
of a Mother's day rush. The idea is that we'll call you and your mom once a
week at a set day/time in such a way that your phones both ring and when you
pick up, you're talking to each other.

The site is janky AF because I'm still in the neophyte stages of front-
end/css. I do still think it's a good a idea, so I'm planning a revamp of the
sales site in time for a big push at the holidays.

~~~
danieltillett
It is a great idea. I am not sure it can make money, but it is genius. Have
you thought about making the ring time random rather than set?

~~~
CamTin
I did think about selling it as "We'll force you to call your Mom /some time/
in the week. You may not know when!"

Then I thought I'd want to exclude the middle of the night (don't want to give
people heart attacks thinking somebody died). Then I thought of excluding the
work day (who wants to sign up for a service that will randomly call them in
the middle of meeting?). Finally I decided it would be easier to set a
specific time.

Maybe you're right though. Maybe the angle of "we'll keep trying until we find
a good time for both of you" would sell better.

~~~
danieltillett
Even just making it random around a certain time (say +-15 minutes). Another
idea might be to have time blocks that a user and their mother can choose and
then pick a time out at random from the overlap. Neither will know when they
are going to be called, but it will be at a time that suits both.

You could of course go the other way and just do this without the user
choosing anytime at all. When they register to send their mother flowers
record their number and their mother’s from the delivery details and then just
set up the “blind date” without letting them know. Each will think the other
called them first.

------
kvee
Mailprincess for iPhone and Android (
[https://mailprincess.com](https://mailprincess.com) )

Lets people send checks in the mail from their bank account. Also lets you
send photos you take as documents in the mail or via fax.

Mostly it was built for fun, to play around with Ionic, and to occupy spare
cycles in between client projects. But hoped it would make some money.

So far, just has a few random users.

The main problem is that it's a pain in the ass to get bank accounts verified.
You have to wait to confirm test deposits into your bank account, and, by that
point, most people churn. Considered adding Plaid to get around that and do
instant bank verifications, but it was too expensive to make it worth it from
a user perspective.

Recently started thinking it might be fun to make a web version that lets
users pay with cryptocurrency.

------
rb808
I created a library that helped developers. It made a few hundred $ in revenue
but nothing like I hoped.

Its an experience I've seen a lot. You think if you create a great product and
advertise a little it will go viral - but in reality getting people to use it
in the beginning is the hard part.

Next time I'll try to build the community before the product. Spend more time
on marketing and less on coding.

Plus I think selling to developers sucks, esp now so much free and open source
stuff around. Non-tech Users are probably better customers.

------
sfennell
I built a cash forecasting app ([http://www.money-stew.com](http://www.money-
stew.com)) that I use religiously to verify that I won't have any trouble
paying my bills.

I actually managed to get some traffic and ad revenue ($100< a month) when I
first developed it and got it into the Google web app store and was featured
for a little bit. I think there where quite a few bugs that I ignored and I
stopped work on it for a long while.

I continue to try and improve on it, but it rarely gets the bulk of my free
time.

Its been difficult for me to get _any_ feedback on it, so I bounce back and
forth between feeling like its a worthwhile venture or its just a pet project
that is useful to nobody but me.

~~~
0xJRS
I'd maybe look at the UI of your website, it looks too boilerplate or
wordpress-y. Maybe remove the pink and just make the content fill the rest of
the page for a start. I like the premise but the website has a gut
"cheap"feeling.

~~~
daveguy
Second this. PLEASE get rid of the pink and just have content fill. That pink
is nauseatingly bright and screams "leave now!"

Not as bad on mobile because it's so thin, but on a desktop with wide screen
it is not ok.

I don't usually bikeshed on layout (not a graphic designer), but I am begging
you please.

~~~
sfennell
Fair enough, I am not a graphic designer and I am using Angular Material
colors in the app - I thought they looked interesting enough that it might get
some attention so I used them there - and then carried that over into the
landing/help site.

Sounds like I am doing it wrong though :) thanks for the feedback

------
ComputerGuru
After Google bought FeedBurner then killed Google Reader, I launched a
FeedBurner replacement [0] complete with FeedBurner stats import and all.

I figured Google would kill FB soon enough, the writing was on the wall:
killed Adsense integration, broken stats, halted development, disabled new
cnames for a while, disbanded the team, etc.

I liked to think even one big client from FB ( _cough_ CNN _cough_ ) switching
over after Google finally killed the plug would be worth it. They never did.
It's been _years_ now and FB still languishes neglected, but it seems that it
is fated to die by attrition and nothing more.

[0]: [http://feedsnap.com/](http://feedsnap.com/)

------
wheresvic1
I'm building [https://ewolo.fitness/](https://ewolo.fitness/) \- it's a no-
frills workout tracker that's built from the ground-up to be mobile friendly.

I decided to do it after seeing a total lack of decent workout trackers that
work well on mobile and provide a web interface.

It's made using React, Redux and I don't expect it to make any money :)

~~~
jblok
Hey, I'm just getting into weightlifting. I think this might be a really cool
tool! Going to use it for a bit and see if it's helpful.

~~~
wheresvic1
Oh wow great to hear. It's really an alpha version. Some more things that are
really required for beta are allowing editing workouts and lots more progress
charts!!!

However, I think that for data entry it is good to go. There will be some
improvements there as well like for e.g. better superset indication and
allowing copying workouts.

I'm also very happy to get feedback so don't feel shy.

Cheers!

~~~
carlmungz
Might give this a go as well. One other app I tried only allowed you to use
pre-defined exercises.

------
RangerScience
I tried to make an IMDb for politics a few years ago. I got to some
interesting places - I was consuming the records of the California state
government; elections and house/senate records, to see who was in office when
and what they did (to a limited extent).

I got a mentor, and we pushed me to try to put out any kind of product for
the... 2012? election, so I figured out a neat way to make word clouds of the
legislation written by a person; I figured it'd be a decent bad way to find
out what topics they're active about. I put it up as an IndieGoGo, and had
some fun with friends and family exploring the database, seeing what
interesting statistics we could pull out. Made maybe a grand from 3-10 donors.

Ultimately, as far as I could get as a one-man team, I couldn't actually take
it anywhere solo. Theoretically, one can, with all the tools that are out and
about - but I'd run into the motivation / momentum issue. Carrying an entire
thing on just your own shoulders doesn't work out very well.

I spent a year-ish building it off-and-on, starting as a side project during
the last couple months of regular employment; but I also skipped the country
to hitch-hike for three months, and otherwise didn't dedicate myself to it
like a real job while I was unemployed and "trying" to make it work.

However, I basically taught myself web-dev / RoR in order to do it, and now
I'm a nearly-senior RoR dev, so that all worked out pretty well in the end!

\--

About a year ago, I started making a little mindfulness widget. You'd sign up
on the website, give it your phone number, and it'd text you mindfulness
questions throughout the day.

Currently, I'm working on what's basically dependency management for cosmetic
ingredients (cosmetics are made of stuff that's made of stuff and you need a
breakdown at that 2nd level), _specifically_ for a friend who's a chemical
process engineer and needs more than spreadsheets can deliver. This one I'm
doing properly as a side-project, rather than trying to do it "full-time".

\--

The big take away from these for me is: Have a team before you try to make it
more than a side-project. Doesn't have to be other programmers - it can be you
and a "primary customer" \- but you need other people to share the emotional
burden of keeping momentum.

------
moron4hire
When Google Cardboard first came out and the Oculus Rift DK2 was first
shipping, I had already been making AR apps and anaglyph stereo apps in the
browser. I packed up a bunch of code I already had for Device Orientation API
in mobile browsers, write a new side-by-side rendering effect for myself, and
made it all into a simple framework to make stereo WebGL/Three.js demos easier
to throw together quickly. It basically became the first "WebVR" framework, a
few months before Mozilla and Google had announced anything about officially
working on the API. I called it Pyschologist.js.

It got a little attention, but the biggest surge was when I created a text
editor inside of it that rendered to a texture, rather than using CSS3D
transforms of existing, content-editable text editor components like a few
other demos had done. I called the text editor Primrose, but people seemed to
respond to that branding better than Psychologists, and nobody seemed
interested in a myriad of small components, just a single, integrated
solution, so I sunk the text editor into the framework, rebranded everything
as just Primrose, and spent a ton of time writing a website and basic
documentation.

I've been trying to build a business around VR ever since. First, I tried to
sell the framework. Made $10 on one license sale. I tried consulting services.
Made about $2000 for a company I had joined that pledged to sponsor my
development and do marketing and sales for me. I tried building a WebRTC
teleconferencing app, but couldn't get enough focus from the company to push
it well. After a year of no movement from the sales team, I'm back to being on
my own now and back to trying to figure out my own path.

I think the teleconferencing app idea still has merit, and I have a few other
idea that have some potential, but I don't really know anything about
marketing and selling SaaS. So I guess that is my next project, to learn.

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

------
aerovistae
I thought probably Hands Free for Chrome would see some donations given how
much it could help someone who was disabled, and given how many donations I've
seen more ordinary & simple extensions receive, but I only got $10 the past 3
years, and that was a single donation from a friend who felt bad seeing it at
$0.

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

Barely any users, just around 400 or so.

~~~
eejdoowad
Awesome job with the extension! I think the idea has great potential.

Judging from my five minute test drive, you could probably increase adoption
if you made it 'discoverable'. It's hard to determine what to do once it's
installed. Turns out, you have to click the browser action to start listening
for user input. After that, you have to refer to the website to find out what
commands are available. It would be great if there were on-screen suggestions
of commands to voice. Using it was really frustrating and unreliable until I
read the instructions on the web store page to disable 'ambient noise
reduction' on macs. Showing an 'instructions' page on installation would help
a lot. An instructional video would be great too.

Other nitpicks: * I couldn't get dictation to work. * More tab manipulation
commands would be nice * I'm not a huge fan of the link hints placement and
styling

I'm actually developing my own keybinding extension like
Vimium/cVim/VimFx/Surfing Keys

[https://github.com/lusakasa/saka-key](https://github.com/lusakasa/saka-key)

with the intent to use the codebase to later create a voice commands extension
like yours.

After all the work I've put into my extension, I can see why only $10 in
donations for your efforts is disheartening. Good luck!

~~~
aerovistae
Late response from me, but thank you very much for the feedback.

I think adding an instructions page + video would be great, I agree.

I'm surprised you couldn't get dictation to work. That distresses me. Much
time went into that. The link placement is rather tricky, and I'm not sure
what type of styling would be less obtrusive and equally readable.

------
anothradam
I built [http://greetingbin.com](http://greetingbin.com) as a platform for
uploading images of greeting cards along with some metadata to the cloud. Then
you could throw the card out and still have a digital copy of it. Needless to
say, I have no users. Granted, I didn't do any marketing, but I realized that
in actuality I never used the product myself, so why would anyone else use it?

~~~
mankash666
This could actually be a viral hit.

1> After uploading all sides of a greeting card, use some
animation/visualization that will allow you to interact with a single card by
clicking/swiping.

2> Allow this to be embedded into FB/Twitter

3> Make the service free - the most likely monetisation will be advertising,
so it's all about MAU

------
Eric_WVGG
[http://lookwork.com](http://lookwork.com) is a "visual RSS reader," subscribe
to RSS feeds minus the words. Sort of a mood/inspiration feed for artists and
graphic designers.

First launched free around 2012 I think. Then there was a relaunch where we
tried to go subscriber-based. At the time, the only online payment options
were Paypal (shudder) and Amazon (a mess to configure). The subscription model
flopped, so we relaunched free again.

We have a very small set of very rabid fans, but have had difficulty
explaining this thing to potential users. Fortunately the Digital Ocean
hosting is cheap enough that we can just leave it running on autopilot. (the
old AWS hosting was a money pit)

~~~
daveguy
I get a "sorry you can't use this page on mobile" ...

While connecting from up-to-date chrome on win10 desktop!! You are probably
weeding out a good chunk of users for no reason.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
sigh… yeah I knew someone would chime in with that. Yes, this was built a few
years earlier when browser compatibility was in a serious shithole. Sorry you
encountered that.

------
crisnoble
I built [http://thejobist.com](http://thejobist.com) (lame tagline: A job-
search search site) as I was learning web development and looking for a web
development job. I built it with grand vision to expand user submissions,
working voting, featured sites, relevant ads and the list goes on. However,
once I found a job, I let it dwindle. It still gets a decent amount of traffic
considering how little effort I have put into promoting it in the several few
years. I still think that it would be possible to make it more useful and
revenue positive but I seem to have a bit of ADHD when it comes to side
projects.

------
sudshekhar
I built [https://www.indoclinic.com](https://www.indoclinic.com), an online
doctor consultation service. The idea is pretty similar to Healthtap/Practo.

We managed to sign up some doctors and got a few users to consult via the
platform but ended up closing down the project eventually, mostly due to lack
of traction and avenues for differentiation.

Lessons learned: \- Do proper user research before starting to code \- 'Better
customer service' is not really an advantage unless you know how to spread the
word and/or are willing to spend years on your product

------
lampholder
Timezones are annoying, and alas I often found myself needing to do timezone
time translation across multiple locations simultaneously, so I built
[https://timezon.es](https://timezon.es) (in jQuery - it was a while ago). An
early version had ads, but with total earnings of ~$2 after multiple months of
operation I never bothered re-adding them after a redesign :)

I guess doing any advertising at all might generate traffic, but it seems
unlikely ad revenue would cover ad spend. For now I just appreciate its being
there 'cause I find it useful :)

------
fnbr
I built [https://bugdedupe.com/](https://bugdedupe.com/) last year- the idea
was to make it easy to remove duplicate bug reports by using some academic
research I worked on involving machine learning.

The system worked well, but I struggled to find users, and it died a sad,
lonely, death.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Who did you shop it around to?

This sounds like a really useful idea; I've seen piles of duplicate bug
reports arise when a common issue hits many people at once. One suggestion (if
you didn't already try this): you could go to major Linux distributions and
projects that get a huge number of bug reports, ask nicely if you could try it
over their bug reports, see if you can get good results, and offer to provide
it to them for free if they'll mention that they're using it. Then show the
results to companies with projects that get similar volumes of reports, and
ask them to pay for the service.

~~~
fnbr
That's a really good idea. I'll try that.

------
binarymax
In 2011 at a hackathon I built rsvp.io (now points to a silly game of mine) to
allow wedding couples to easily create a custom wedding invitation rsvp page.
A unique code could be added to a paper invite, or the page used on its own.
After the hackathon I spent another month or so refining the site. I never
took it far enough, but might have made a little money had I tried. Some ideas
that I never took forward were partnering with printing agencies for paper
invites, and affiliate income for gift registry.

It did get used once however, for my wedding in 2013 :)

~~~
dotmanish
I can visualise this being used - you can have a cute-looking QR code
(surrounded by a shape/design of your choice to not make it look "standard")
to rsvp. You can even have stickers printed (instead of complete cards) that
can be stuck on everybody's physical wedding card.

------
Mz
I have had a bunch of little websites that didn't do much of anything. Some
problems that have plagued my projects (especially health-related ones):

1) Credibility.

I am getting well when the world says that cannot be done. Most people don't
want to believe this at all. So I get called crazy, a charlatan, etc.

2) Inherent monetization challenges in the problem space.

I am convinced that part of what is wrong with modern medicine is that money
gets made off of _treatment_ , not off of _positive health outcomes._ This is
a conflict of interest for healthcare providers who have no motive to actually
get you well and lots of motive to give you just enough improvement to keep
you willing to keep paying for more.

3) I'm a woman.

This has made it hard for me to network, etc. A lot of men who know what I
want to learn either will talk to me to hit on me or won't talk to me because
they don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. Trying to make connections has
been really hard.

4\. I know how to get well, I don't know how to do business.

I know how to accomplish a thing, but I don't know how to accomplish all the
stuff that goes into turning that into a money-making venture.

5\. I'm very eye catching.

I have a long history of attracting a LOT of attention. I have really
struggled with figuring out how to get the attention off of ME and onto MY
WORK. It is getting better, but this has really been frustrating.

There are no doubt other issues, but those are a few things off the top of my
head.

~~~
devopsproject
> I am getting well when the world says that cannot be done

No one is saying this. The "Health and Wellness" industry is booming

> I am convinced that part of what is wrong with modern medicine is that money
> gets made off of treatment, not off of positive health outcomes

Crazy charlatans want treatment, preferably expensive and\or ongoing

> I'm a woman ... I don't know how to do business ... I'm very eye catching

I'd start by scrubbing your profiles. The first thing I read about you was
about being homeless, peeing on a tree, and unicorn farts. Maybe it is satire
but you should make it easy for the people doing business with you sort fact
from fiction.

~~~
Mz
I am routinely told it cannot be done for my condition, the health of the
"health and wellness" industry not withstanding.

And you are, ironically, proving my point that a lot of attention ends up on
me, and not in a good way, rather than on my work.

My life is a case of "fact is stranger than fiction." I am confident that
trying to lie about it in order to make it more palatable would only compound
the problem. I am making progress, in spite of continued comments of this
sort.

~~~
prawn
_" And you are, ironically, proving my point that a lot of attention ends up
on me, and not in a good way, rather than on my work."_

Your two comments here have talked about you and not about your work. You
might be able to get attention focused on your work by linking to it and
talking about it more specifically? All the other top level comments I read on
this post included details about the project and often a link/name.

~~~
Mz
[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/06/announcing-w...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/06/announcing-
works.html)

It is an announcement of a couple of Reddits I have started. It is probably
the least worst thing I can link to, given how terribly it tends to go to link
to my health projects.

I have had several health sites and kept killing them because they weren't
accomplishing much and it was a constant shit show for me. I tend to dislike
linking to my health sites on HN because there are a lot of people who will
just be incredibly ugly about it and other people tend to not call them on it.

An inherent problem is that I am getting myself well, so talking about _me_ is
kind of unavoidable. I do have a son who has the same condition who is also
getting well. Out of respect for his privacy, I tend to talk somewhat less
about him. There are no large scale studies of what I am doing.

I still don't know how to monetize it effectively. I have a tip jar and there
are a few affiliate links on at least one of my health sites, but I have not
put Google AdSense on it because of the sorts of ads it would likely attract.
Most likely, it would attract ads for "miracle cures," just buy my supplement.
It wouldn't be responsible to allow that on the site.

I am unwilling to become a "consultant." I have known others in the
alternative med space who have gone that route. I am convinced that is the
same model that causes an inherent conflict of interest for doctors. Doctors
prescribe medication to get short term results with long term costs. Although
there is always a handout included with a long list of side effects, they take
credit for the short term benefits and blame the long term costs on your
underlying medical condition, not on the fact that you have been taking their
drugs for years.

I have been getting well doing the opposite: I trade short term costs for long
terms gains. It is a hard ask to tell people to put themselves through hell
for long term gains. It needs to be voluntary and the locus of control needs
to be with them, not with some outsider. Providing a mental model, detailed
information on specific things that help with certain issues and an example to
follow is the best answer I have.

I still wrestle with how much to just talk about what I do and how much to
back it up with links to research. My typical process when I run into a
problem is to discuss it with my son, ask him to look up info related to a
particular organ or bodily process or whatever and when we feel we have
identified a pertinent issue, look up what nutrients are involved. Then
research which foods have those nutrients.

It is possible this will never catch on. I have been working on getting well
for about 16+ years and I have had blogs on various topics and been an active
participant on various forums for a lot of years as well. I get told I am
being irresponsible for trying to talk about what has been helpful to me.
Meanwhile, people are dying and the doctors don't have answers. I get stuck
between a choice of being accused of being irresponsible while I attempt to
help or covering my ass, saying "not my problem" and letting people die who
don't have a real solution. So far, I keep erring on the side of trying to
find a way to effectively and safely communicate what I know in hopes of
helping people in an essentially hopeless situation.

~~~
prawn
Have you tried the Patreon model? Ebook or courseware might work if you have
loads of original content, but Patreon could be appropriate if you're figuring
things out and sharing personal research and practices.

~~~
Mz
I do have a Patreon, but people who actually have CF have no money to spare as
it is both debilitating and incredibly expensive (see
[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-wrong-
me...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-wrong-
metrics.html)). Other people often tell me this is not pertinent to their
lives. I think it has broader applications, but it has been really hard to try
to figure out how to convince people of that.

------
icey
I've been working on [https://docsift.com](https://docsift.com) for a couple
of months but have been having a hard time finding users to offer any
feedback.

It's meant to make it easier for journalists and citizen activists to review
bills, document dumps, etc (and on the pay side, help law firms read through
and review discovery materials). A challenge has been that I'm neither a
journalist or a lawyer, just someone who is motivated to help out where I can
when I see something that seems screwed up; and wanted to build a tool that
would make it easy for people to take 5 minutes and help read / review a bill,
etc when they were on the bus or when they had some downtime. The failure mode
is obvious in retrospect: I started building it without knowing people
directly impacted by the problem I was trying to solve -- it was a good
problem to solve in theory; but without a concrete problem to solve it's very
hard to land on the right set of solutions.

I still tinker with it (uploading docs that seem interesting, messing with
features), but I've mostly moved on to other projects until I find the set of
people who are presently feeling the pain.

~~~
dotmanish
> * I started building it without knowing people directly impacted by the
> problem I was trying to solve*

You can still search for journalists on Twitter / websites and reach out to
them for feedback.

------
nbrempel
I built [http://bustaprice.com](http://bustaprice.com) as a shopping price
comparison search tool.

It searches several APIs like Amazon and BestBuy and and also scrapes product
prices from various shopping websites. The results are presented ordered by
price.

The Amazon access has been revoked for lack of original content and a few of
the scraping rules are now stale, but it wouldn't be too difficult to update
those. It still works though!

Initially I planned on sending affiliate traffic to sites to earn a small side
income as well as possibly some display advertising.

After getting rejected from the Amazon program, I lost a bit of steam
(although I believe I could flesh out the site some more and still be accepted
into the program).

If I were to put some time into it again, I would add many more sites to
scrape and integrate with a couple more larger store APIs. Then I would add a
"price drop notification" feature to try to get visitors to return to the
site.

I spent a couple months building it in evenings and weekends, plus many months
thinking about it before that. The only money I spend on it is $7/mo for
heroku costs.

I still think it has some untapped potential but I don't have much spare time
to think about it right now.

~~~
archit3cture
what level of traffic do you have ? comparison websites were hit seriously
when google shopping started to occupy the top of the serps.

------
nevster
I have a whole bunch of registered domains I haven't done anything with. For
example :
[http://www.procrastinationjournal.com/](http://www.procrastinationjournal.com/)

~~~
whatnotests
Gonna get around to it _any time now_.

------
acreux
[https://theothermail.com](https://theothermail.com)

TheOtherMail generates throwaway email addresses so you can try new products
and services with no risk. We deliver all emails from your generated accounts
to your personal email address so you don't have to remember stupidly long
emails.

We spend a few dollars per month to run it, and we haven't made any money yet.
Give it a try!

~~~
danieltillett
Have you thought about building the reverse application? A service that
screens out all throwaway emails so only users who register with a real email
address can use a service.

~~~
bpicolo
That's pretty much an impossible to win game of cat and mouse

~~~
danieltillett
Impossible for perfection, but a solution that is 99.9% effective would still
be a viable solution. I do it manually with people who sign up for our test
system.

------
ttcbj
I spent two years building an automated system for building resident block
schedules. I made it to a beta with a very large residency, but for a
combination of technical and incentive reasons it was impractical to grow. I
actually revisited the concept recently with a revised business model that
might have addressed some of the growth challenges. I did a kickstarter, but
didn't generate enough interest to pursue it again.

I also spent maybe 1 year prototyping a system meant to analyze the
performance of wealth managers. I used financial statements from friends and
family to see whether I could produce anything useful. But, the more I got
into it, the more I realized it was difficult to produce a compelling
automated analysis, even given a complete history of all the manager's
transactions. It was too easy to swing the result by subtly changing the
assumptions.

I also investigated an all-inclusive management system to help foundations for
public high schools manage fund raising, etc. Again, I did a kickstarter-like
campaign for it, and found inadequate demand.

------
codazoda
Oh, boy, lots of them!!!

I'm good at "releasing". I'm not good at deciding what to build (demand) and
I'm not good at the marketing side.

My latest project helps you get more followers and increase user engagement on
Instagram. It's a Google Chrome extension called Magis. It's currently
bringing in $30 per month with $25 per month in fee's for the payment
solution. Yay $5 profit; if you don't count my time.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magis/kahkfpeemmmj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magis/kahkfpeemmmjcbkffjmebbgkdmjglobi)

My previous project helped you validate your idea before you create the actual
product. Apparently it was a bad idea because all it really seems to do is
piss people off. Anyway, meet FauxBuy.

[https://fauxbuy.com](https://fauxbuy.com)

Those are just the last two. I build a lot of stuff that's not profitable.

~~~
scottLobster
Yeah I can see fauxbuy losing customers. I'm not going put a "buy" button on a
product page that doesn't actually allow people to buy said product... what
would I tell them? "Smile you're on candid webpage"? "Thanks for your
interest, we look forward to giving you this product in several months!"?

If the product is ready to ship, then ship/market it and see how it does. If
it's not ready to ship, then do what research you can to make sure it's not
absolutely stupid and then build it and find out. At the end of the day the
market is unpredictable past the broad strokes.

Sorry to shit all over your idea, something that would help validate prior to
shipment would be nice. I'm not even morally opposed to the idea of pitching
people a fake product and seeing if they click, you'd just need a way to
separate the fake product from the real thing you're building and hope they
come back for the real deal, and that could be tricky.

~~~
codazoda
Yeah, I understand the anger part. The thing is, I've read this in at least a
couple of books. I think Tim Ferris suggested it in The 4-Hour Work Week and I
also think it's mentioned in The Lean Startup. Oh well; I like building stuff.

~~~
Someone
It doesn't require much to change that; just make it clear that people don't
buy a product, but buy into a dream instead, and require your customers to
inform would-be customers that they buy into a dream.

With such a change, sites like Kickstarter.com have people happily _pay_ to
press that fake buy button.

------
dejawu
I got fed up with Evernote Web and built my own:

[https://nanote.co](https://nanote.co)

It used to have a payment form but I felt like it wasn't polished enough, so
now it just says to email me for a (free) account.

I still use it every day for my own notes, so I suppose it was a success in
that regard. I've also got a few friends on it too.

~~~
dotmanish
I liked the page and the clear explanation.

Does it need to be an Evernote replacement, or can this be a Chrome extension
/ etc that eventually stores in your Evernote account itself? I did read the
text at the bottom of the website, but one thing to do note is that people
trust the 'Evernote' brand for their data storage. You can offer this on top
of Evernote/Onenote as a separate extension/layer.

~~~
dejawu
Ooh, I'd never thought of that. I suppose it's possible, but then I'd be at
the mercy of the Evernote platform. Would their device limit affect me?

That's a really interesting idea though. Maybe I could make it cloud backend
agnostic..

------
LarryMade2
[http://doPlaces.com](http://doPlaces.com)

Partly because I suck at marketing my stuff (and am very low-income). I expect
it to bring revenue but it has also been a thing for me to hone various
programming, design and marketing skills, trying out some new concepts, etc.

Have learned and am still learning a lot from it.

------
ghettosoak
[http://lickth.is/new](http://lickth.is/new)

I built the first version of LICK in 2015 because I was frustrated with the
(then) state of distributed note taking. And because I wanted Sublime Text-
like editing capabilities. I... didn't really have a business plan, but I
guess I had hoped to retrofit features into later versions. Being a (not)
starving bootstrapping developer filled a fun space in my life, but then life
got in the way.

I made the 'new' version to prove a point last year, but it's riddled with
bugs and flaws. I still use it religiously to plan my smaller projects, and my
shopping. If I had to do it all again, I would have shipped sooner. Duh. Maybe
someday, it'll dethrone the mighty Evernote – but until then, it's my glass
castle... :)

~~~
kjksf
As a fellow note-taking application maker
([https://quicknotes.io](https://quicknotes.io)), a friendly advice: you need
a better landing page.

Show me how it looks before asking for signing up (screenshots).

Better yet, have a demo with publicly visible notes.

Reduce signing up friction by allowing twitter/google/github/facebook logins.

In "what is this" you talk a lot about you and technologies used. People don't
care about that. Write about how lickth.is is better/unique than other
options.

Read [https://www.julian.com/learn/growth/landing-
pages](https://www.julian.com/learn/growth/landing-pages) for short yet
comprehensive tutorial on good landing pages.

Also the name is bad and tagline both icky and not making much sense.

I'm not saying that will change much. As I've learned the hard way, note
taking apps without clear unique selling point are a hard sell those days.

------
palerdot
I made hotcold typing - [http://hotcoldtyping.com](http://hotcoldtyping.com) ,
a touch typing learning tool with instant feedbacks. I released initially as
chrome app with free and pro versions. Pro version didn't go anywhere. Since
then I changed to 'support developer' version and made the tool free in
website also. So far, I had only one buyer for ' support developer' version.
But still, I'm proud my work in the app.

I never had any intention to add ads, and always wanted to have a clean,
hassle free experience for the learner. Even though, I could make a few bucks
from it, I'm not interested in it. It does not have any maintenance costs.
Just a static web app hosted on github.

Edit - fixed the web address. was typing from phone :)

~~~
Something1234
your web address is not resolving.

~~~
palerdot
Fixed it. Was typing from phone :)

------
tuan
I created [https://videoplaylist.online](https://videoplaylist.online) a few
months ago. The idea was to alow users to quickly tag youtube video using a
bookmarklet, and then play these youtube videos. It has a `quick select`
feature that allows user to quickly create a temporary playlist and put the
entire list on autoplay loop.

I wanted to create this app because I listen to music on youtube a lot, and I
usually add the videos that I like to a youtube playlist, but I did not find a
way to quickly pick videos from multiple playlists/bookmarks (i.e. mixing) and
play them. The `quick select` feature does just that.

Nobody seems to think this is a good idea (and they are probably right). So
I'm the only user of my own app :)

~~~
bkyan
I created a youtube playlist app, as well, and I'm also the only user of my
own app. :) [http://play.mindcast.com](http://play.mindcast.com)

Note: It's desktop-only as I use it from my desktop, and since I'm the only
one using it, I didn't bother supporting mobile.

------
cploonker
Marketplace for painters and those looking to hire them
[http://ehirepainter.com/](http://ehirepainter.com/) Inspite of investing
~$50k in marketing efforts, could not get enough customers to list their
projects.

~~~
moflome
Thanks for sharing. There's probably a whole category of challenges in
launching a marketplace. What did you learn?

------
tplick
I made a site for playing turn-based board games (
[https://new.amecy.com/](https://new.amecy.com/) ). Sign-up is free; I was
eventually going to charge a small fee for extra functionality, but I haven't
gotten enough users to make it worthwhile.

One of my main problems is that the site is not too useful unless you sign up.
You can see what's going on on the site at
[https://new.amecy.com/main/observe](https://new.amecy.com/main/observe) , but
it's clearly not as much fun as playing the games yourself.

------
michaelbuckbee
I often create side projects trying to see if a random concept is worth
pursuing.

I built a service called "MeetingBetter" with the notion that you would setup
your meetings in whatever system you're already using (Google, Exchange) and
you'd also invite start@meetingbetter.com

When it got the invitation it would handle some basics around collecting
agenda items, followups (if it was a recurring meeting, etc.) I'd thought of
it kind of like Calendly. Anyway, not enough of a pain point and no really
good traction channels, so I've abandoned it.

------
SimonPStevens
[http://sites.creou.com/](http://sites.creou.com/) \- A low cost site design &
host service based on a custom template engine. Could never get traction with
it. It does have one paying customer who is paying slightly more than what it
costs me to keep hosting it, so it stays running. For now :-)

[http://intouch.creou.com/](http://intouch.creou.com/) \- A mini crm type tool
for small businesses. Never really finished this, the home page is pretty much
a placeholder. Most of the site works if you sign in though (test account
username: test@test.com password: test.123) but it's ugly and not mobile
friendly. Functionallity wise it does pretty much everything I had planned for
it. (Also this is currently just running on a free azure account, so if more
than about 3 of you visit it at the same time it will probably give up and
die)

[https://gumroad.com/products/sqlconfirm](https://gumroad.com/products/sqlconfirm)
\- a SQL unit testing plugin for visual studio. Only put this page up a few
days ago, so it's made zero money yet, but maybe this is the one that will
take off :-) Haven't made any effort to start marketing it yet because there
are a few bugs I wanted to sort out first. Could do with picking up a few
users who would give feedback though, so if it looks like something you're
interested in, ping me.

------
nitramm
My idea was simple: When you are at some party/pub, there is always some
friend which wants to go home and everybody is trying to convince them, that
they should have one more drink. So, I have created
[http://morebeer.today](http://morebeer.today) and
[http://morewine.today](http://morewine.today). It's easy reaction time test
where it's very easy to pass. They never got popular enough to be worth adding
some ads there.

~~~
nitramm
Some stars from yesterday. Around 60 people visited morebeer, 30 finished the
game and 1 person have shared it.

------
docsapp_io
I built DocsApp ([https://www.docsapp.io/](https://www.docsapp.io/)) two years
ago and launched around 8 months ago.

So far no revenue because I focus on building features. While DocsApp already
launched 8 months ago, I still don`t see any growth in term of active users.

So far only one active user with two sites and few users sign up to test then
abandon completely, possibly go to competitor site with much expensive
pricing.

Here is what I think did wrong:

1\. No marketing effort to reach more users.

2\. UX really important.

3\. Actively reach out to users to gather feedback.

~~~
dotmanish
> _So far no revenue because I focus on building features._

You can possibly reverse the funnel. Reach out to mailing lists / IRC channels
/ Slack channels to get feedback from developers and _then_ develop features
accordingly.

~~~
docsapp_io
Good idea. Definitely will do that!

------
jcadam
My first attempt was a music site called "Rhythmscore" (no longer own the
domain) written mostly in bad PHP. It was awesome, 100% ad-supported, and it
was obviously going to make me filthy rich. Small, indy artists would upload
their music, and visitors to the site would listen to songs (in random
shuffle-order) and give them a numerical rating. The songs with the highest
"Rhythmscore" would be displayed on a leaderboard, etc.

One thing I discovered, which surprised me, was that it was very easy to
convince artists to get involved and upload their stuff (free exposure I
guess). Getting regular users/music fans to care was not. I think I made a
grand total of ~$40 in ad-revenue over about a year before I shut it down.
Lesson: Ad-revenue doesn't work unless you're getting truly _massive_ amounts
of traffic.

Next attempt was a homeschool tracker-type application written in Ruby-on-
Rails. The thing shuffled along, zombie-style, for 2 years with about a dozen
paid subscribers before I conceded that it wasn't going to be successful and
shut it down. Lesson: Stay away from the homeschool market. Egads, those folks
are cheap (I should have known: we homeschool our son, and I'm cheap).

I'm currently preparing to launch my latest attempt, a productivity (intended
to be a B2B SaaS, though could be useful for personal productivity as well)
application written mostly in Clojure on the backend and ES6/mithril on the
frontend. It's certainly my best work (from a technical standpoint) so far. I
wrote it to use myself for a few things... We'll see if anyone else finds it
useful. I certainly learned a ton building it.

------
cploonker
I built a corporate 360 degree employee feedback system. It is basically
google-page-rank-algorithm applied to feedback system and few other
mathematical tricks to auto-normalize. Not sure though so many HR heads liked
the idea but i could not make them write a cheque. You can look at the first
video on this page:[http://www.groupraisal.com/](http://www.groupraisal.com/)
to know the details.

~~~
daveguy
Please get rid of the video titled "What the ____? " on your home page. It is
very unprofessional. If I was in HR, or even if I wasn't, I wouldn't touch
your company after seeing that video on your home page.

------
ronbeltran
Last year around November(2016) I finally had the time to build my first
mobile app. My goals are: to learn React Native and build a mobile app and
publish it to Google Play. At my previous work I'm pretty much knowledgeable
in integrating CRMs (ie.Salesforce, SugarCRM and Highrise.) into Gmail via
chrome extension so building API backend wont be a problem. I noticed at that
time that only Highrise CRM has no official Anroid/Ios app offering so I
decided to implement it myself. Initially I implemented highrise tasks feature
and figure out later what the users need via feedback. I completed the app
within a month uploaded it to Google Play[0] and built a simple website[1] for
it. Being a Highrise user who opt in for their new products announcement, one
moring around December (2016) I got an email from Highrise announcing their
official mobile apps for android and iOS. So that was it. I had no chance of
competing with the official apps. I got around 5 install on Google Play which
already had uninstalled my app.

Expenses:

$10 for the domain

$25 for Google Play Developer Fee

around $20 for few months api backend hosting (Digital Ocean $5/month) then I
migrated the code and hosted to free Heroku plan to save cost.

[0]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.taskongo](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.taskongo)

[1] [http://www.taskongo.com/](http://www.taskongo.com/)

[2] [https://help.highrisehq.com/mobile/](https://help.highrisehq.com/mobile/)

~~~
dotmanish
This general space has a lot of long tail CRMs that companies subscribe to -
and they don't have a good mobile support (still in 2017). You may want to see
if you can make a "general purpose" interface in the space with minimal common
functionality and integrate it with others.

------
mars4rp
I created [https://CoWriteStory.com/](https://CoWriteStory.com/) last year, it
is a platform for people to cooperatively write stories.

I was sending lots of private messages to r/WritingPrompts/ users, and got
tons of positive feedback but reddit blocked my account and keep blocking my
new accounts.

it is a good product but like lots of developers I failed at marketing and
attracting users!

~~~
squiggy22
Have you heard of [http://nanowrimo.org](http://nanowrimo.org)

Find out where these people hang out including hashtags etc. Huge community of
starter writers.

~~~
danielsg
I've been trying a similar approach. I developed an Electron app called First
Novel App which is supposed to help writers silence their inner editors.

It's available free to download at
[http://www.firstnovelapp.com](http://www.firstnovelapp.com) which redirects
to a Gumroad store.

~~~
roryisok
That's a really interesting concept - the snippets idea reminds me of The Road
by Cormac McCarthy. No chapters in that book, only paragraphs

~~~
danielsg
Thanks! I'm also working on a web app version of it.

------
davidw
Before I made LiberWriter, which has made money, I created a site called
"Squeezed Books" with the idea that it'd be an open-source wiki type book
summary thing. Book summaries are handy for popular business books that could
have been a 5 page article rather than drawn out into a book.

The lesson: Advertising revenue is not a sustainable thing unless you get
massive amounts of traffic and have low costs.

------
jjharr
I spent a few thousand building a very detailed database of seed-funding
entities that included all the staff and their backgrounds, detailed areas of
interest and past investment, and more. I planned to turn it into an actually-
useful seed funding search service. But I got distracted with another project
needed to pay my bills. Time and persistence are the greatest obstacles to
side projects IMO.

~~~
rhizome
Like a seed-only Crunchbase?

------
Jack000
if you read indiehackers there are a lot of stories that go like "we found a
high traffic keyword, did a lot of seo and make xxxx from
ads/subscriptions/sales etc"

the issue with this approach is that the top 1-3 links on google serp gets
more traffic than all other links combined. I'm currently at #6-7 with 200
clicks a day and 3% ctr. Not really sure how to climb up beyond that level..

~~~
wusatiuk
If you want me to have a look and get so thoughts out of seo perspective, let
me know.

~~~
Jack000
cool, it's [http://colormind.io](http://colormind.io) here's what my search
console looks like right now:
[http://imgur.com/a/kWkUJ](http://imgur.com/a/kWkUJ)

~~~
dawnerd
Oh cool, you built that? Been in my bookmarks. It's really nice!

~~~
Jack000
thanks!

------
fundamental
I built the Zyn-Fusion user interface for the ZynAddSubFX (
[http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net](http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net) ) musical software
synthesizer. I spent roughly 4 months coding, testing, and (light) marketing
the new interface, but sales have been quite modest since it's release. This
project was originally motivated by user demand for improvements in the
ZynAddSubFX interface, centering around usability concerns. Before building
the project I talked with the community and sent out surveys, but
unfortunately the prep work overestimated the interest and underestimated the
time needed to polish the application. That said, the Zyn-Fusion subproject
was targeting relatively short term crowd funding, so I didn't expect it to
turn into a huge revenue source.

As per doing things differently, I don't think there was another solution to
accomplishing the goal given the complexity/demand and in a few months it will
be available for the open source community.

------
Prefinem
I still do occasional work in ColdFusion so I thought it would be nice to have
a Package Manager. So I went and built [https://cfpm.io](https://cfpm.io). We
used it internally for a couple of things, but it never took off. Most likely
because who uses ColdFusion still, or maybe it just wasn't easy enough to use.

------
samuell
I made a udemy-course called "Drastically improve your speed on the Linux
commandline" [1].

It has generated enough to cover the a bunch of domain names, but not much
more, and I have many times questioned whether it was worth burning 3 weeks of
more-than-full time work one summer vacation I was otherwise supposed to spend
with wife and kids.

In a way I'm happy I tried, but I have also learned that making any
substantial money requires tons of work.

I guess the topic is kind of narrow, with a quite small audience consisting of
(I assume) mostly productivity/ergonomics-geeks ... out of which not everyone
scouts around for courses at Udemy.

I was planning to add a few more courses around it and give some discounts for
taking course packages etc, but never really found another uninterrupted bunch
of weeks like that summer when this course was created.

Ideas and feedback always welcome.

[1] [https://www.udemy.com/command-line-
productivity/](https://www.udemy.com/command-line-productivity/)

------
joshwcomeau
I built Uncover ([https://uncover.cc/](https://uncover.cc/)), a service to
track your favourite authors' newest releases. It's monetized with Amazon
affiliate links.

I wasn't expecting much from it; my goal was to break even on server costs and
domain, so ~20$/month. To date it has made $0*

(*technically it did make ~$2 in revenue, but Amazon deactivated that account,
I had to sign up for a new one. So my actual received total is $0)

Ultimately it's not a huge deal; I built the project for myself, and it serves
me well. I've already discovered 3-4 books I likely would have missed, so I'm
super happy to have put in the time!

Lessons learned: When you build a super-niche product mainly for yourself,
don't be surprised if it doesn't automatically attract a following. Also,
don't set yourself up for disappointment: build stuff because it's fun, not
because it's a means to an end.

~~~
mabbo
Amazon emails me directly whenever me favourite authors release a new book.

~~~
joshwcomeau
So, for myself I needed something for audiobooks. Audible is owned by Amazon
but AFAIK they don't offer a similar service.

Also, I don't want email notifications. I get too many emails, and ignore
anything in the "Promotional" tab. Plus, I'll see the email while I'm at work,
which isn't when I'm looking to find my new book.

I wanted a thing I could check when I finish my last book, to tell me right
away what has come out since.

EDIT: But yeah, I also recognize that this is an extremely niche set of
circumstances! Amazon's email notification service is probably what most folks
would want.

------
suresk
I optimize my spending heavily around cashback credit cards. I wanted a way to
make it easier for me and my wife to keep track of which cards we should be
using, so I built CashbackOptimizer[0] and iOS[1] and Android[2] apps for it.

I've had lots of side projects fail like this one, and I am starting to
realize they are all for similar reasons:

1) Too specific of an idea. After I built this, I found that not many people
cared about optimizing cashback, or at least not enough to want to invest time
in an app or website for tracking it.

2) Poor UI. I'm not great at UI, and I haven't been able to get great results
from places like Upwork - I think they do a lot of great design for brochure-
type websites, but I've had a hard time finding people good at designing apps.
I've also tried to partner with UI people by giving them ownership in the
idea, but it always works out the same - they start out excited about the
idea, and while I sink a ton of time and money into an idea, they get bored
and don't do much.

3) I'm not great at marketing and SEO, and don't have many connections for
finding someone good to work with.

I wish I could find a way to find reliable, motivated people to partner with
for small app/website ideas, as being able to build things from the software
side alone isn't enough.

0\. [http://www.cashbackoptimizer.com/](http://www.cashbackoptimizer.com/) 1\.
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cashback-
optimizer/id1198107...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cashback-
optimizer/id1198107277?mt=8) 2\.
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ionicframe...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ionicframework.cashbackoptimizer889506)

~~~
tenzo
This is a nice idea

Have you tried posting somewhere like
[https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/](https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/)
\- you might have some luck in finding users there given the audience

------
jesses
[https://www.gigalixir.com](https://www.gigalixir.com) is a platform-as-a-
service for Elixir apps. It only just launched a few months ago, but so far
hasn't generated a profit. I spent 6 months building it and still hope it may
take off as Elixir gains in popularity.

~~~
nicolaslem
I had the idea to do the same thing dedicated to Django. I eventually stopped
as I realized that I clearly underestimated the amount of work required to
make it work better than Heroku.

The landing page is still visible at
[https://prodmatic.com](https://prodmatic.com)

~~~
jesses
Totally! The building and deploying is the easy part. Then you have to worry
about configuration, secrets, versions, rollbacks, migrations, TLS, logging,
load balancing, database hosting, backups, billing, maintenance, reliability,
security, capacity, and usability, not to mention marketing and customer
support.

------
ryandrake
Maybe this doesn't count because I wasn't really serious about making money
with it. Long time ago, I wrote an unofficial iPhone app that you could use to
log into your Vonage account and listen to your voicemails, rather than using
their (then) not-mobile-friendly web site. Vonage did not publish an API, so I
scraped their online portal's HTML and figured out what GET calls were needed,
and just mimicked them from the app.

Of course it was totally vulnerable to 1. Vonage deciding to change their
backend or internal API and 2. Vonage deciding to legally destroy it, neither
of which happened. At the end of the day I didn't put any marketing into it
and decided it was too niche to continue supporting so dropped it from the app
store. Took a few months of weekend work to do the first release and then a
couple of days a month to maintain it.

------
dividuum
I built [https://geolua.com](https://geolua.com). It's a geocaching like
system that runs server-side Lua scripts in a VM that control user interfaces
on in one or many browsers. I guess it's best explained if you just have a
look at the website and try this "adventure":
[https://geolua.com/adventure/all-widgets-
demo-132](https://geolua.com/adventure/all-widgets-demo-132). Just click on
the "Start this adventure" button.

It never had a real monetization strategy, so I never made any money from it.
But it was fun developing and I learned a few things I could use for my
current product [https://info-beamer.com](https://info-beamer.com). So it's
still a win.

------
travelhead
My site [http://www.mortalchess.com](http://www.mortalchess.com) allows you to
solve chess puzzles in a mortal combat style game. You get health with each
correct move, and lose health if you spend too long thinking. Over 160 levels!
I've made $0 dollars :)

------
ryannevius
I built an aviation scholarship aggregation and donation platform for general
aviation pilots (i.e. those who may not end up pursuing a career in aviation,
or those who are self-funding their education). I made a few cents from ads
and donations, but nothing noteworthy. The project is long gone now.

------
ikeboy
I spent a grand or two building Icanpriceit.com, but never launched/promoted
it.

If I did it again, I would set aside a lot of time promoting it and focusing
on it. Eventually it just took away from my main business and even though I
love the idea I stopped thinking about it. Maybe I'll go back one day.

------
mrieck
[http://www.superanimo.com](http://www.superanimo.com) \- HTML5 cartoon and
gif editor

I didn't have a plan to monetize it, but I thought it would become a startup
and I'd have users and funding by now. I've worked on it about 5 years so far.

------
wonderwonder
I made a clone of etsy focused on a specific industry. Vendors could open
their own store, upload products take payments etc. I got 7 vendors signed up
and site earned total sales of just under $18 Of which my cut was 64 cents
before I shut down. A lot of fun to build though :)

------
jackschultz
Might as well throw in Product Mentions
([http://www.productmentions.com](http://www.productmentions.com)). Scraping
reddit to figure out which Amazon links are mentioned, and displaying them on
the site. I was going to add affiliate links, but didn't seem really correct.
Still have the possibility of companies getting in contact about looking for
mentions of their brands to make sure users aren't complaining. Obviously I'm
sure there are other companies who do this, but always could be an option that
I already have the code for.

And also planning on throwing in HN Amazon link mentions using the API. Even
if making no money, always fun to see what people are talking about on sites
like Reddit.

~~~
xcubic
What does your architecture for crawling looks like?

------
logfromblammo
I wrote, edited, and published-as-EPUB an entire fiction novel. It made about
$22, before taxes. I then decided not to bother publishing it in print, due to
obvious lack of demand.

It didn't really cost me anything but my leisure time, though. I'm still
working on a second one (but I don't feel quite so motivated to finish it in a
timely fashion).

If I cared at all about making money off of it, I'd have to hire someone to
market it, and then maybe also hire a second person, so that I never have to
interact with a marketing/advertising person directly. Making things is fun.
Selling things is horrible torture. I pity those startup founders that have to
do both, even if only for a short time.

~~~
roryisok
The majority successful authors don't get their first book published, or their
second, or sell any copies of their third.

This is normal, please don't give up!

~~~
logfromblammo
Give up? The goal is to write, not to sell. I already won.

I just didn't get extra gravy on top by getting paid for it.

------
kureikain
I always need a hosted monitoring myself. In the end I decided to build my
own[0] and hope to make some money from it. I get some users but so far no one
has paid yet and staying on free plan :).

\---

0\. [https://noty.im](https://noty.im)

------
averageweather
[http://www.averageweather.io](http://www.averageweather.io)

I have no content, thus no SEO, which has dramatically limited traffic.

Paid search is extremely effective to get people on my site, but AdSense
doesn't cover the costs.

~~~
techaddict009
This is pretty good project. I can help you out in SEO. I have done various
projects where main source of earning is Adsense. If you wish to colloborate
and grow it mail me vivek at eyuva.com

------
supermdguy
I made passagemaster.com, an online app for memorizing anything. It used a
review system that focused on not only memorizing things, but not forgetting
them. I mostly made it to learn about web development, but half hoped I'd get
at least a few users. The only marketing I did was emailing a blog to ask them
to add a link, which failed. It's been up for about 6 months now, and I
currently have 0 regular users. I only spent about $40 on it, so it wasn't
that much of a loss. I ended up using it when job searching, and I now have a
full time web development job, so it was definitely worth it.

------
rgj
[http://www.sifrgenerator.com](http://www.sifrgenerator.com) was made to
generate SIFR fonts, way before webfonts were commonly used.

I spent a _lot_ of time generating Swf files using PHP and learned a lot. The
site got a lot of traffic but apparently it didn't target an audience that
clicked any ads at all.

It made less than $150 in Adsense in about seven years. I did sell a backlink
for $250 and I ended up with around 150,000 font files that were uploaded over
all those years... ;) Still need to build a find-and-download-a-font site and
attach it to the upload database...

------
georgeecollins
I made an Android Wear game. I did not think my first game would make money,
but I thought if I learned how to do it I could make other games that could
generate revenue.

In my opinion the install base is too small and the price point for games is
too low for it to be a good business for me. I spent $300 on a watch,
everything else was free. I learned a lot and it was fun, so I will continue
to update the program.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.moseygames...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.moseygames.blackjack)

~~~
jldugger
You're right that the install base is too small but also: virtually every Wear
user has a competing game platform in their pocket connected to the watch.

~~~
georgeecollins
Yeah - that too. I'm sure there will be use cases for wearable games. But
there isn't much of an incentive to find that use case if there isn't yet much
of a market.

------
cmac2992
I built an ad arbitrage site around shitty 50 slide slideshows. Drove traffic
with Facebook paid and monitized with AdSense. Cleared $2k the first week and
then basically got crushed by Google smart pricing.

------
zappo2938
Simple Yacht Jobs
[http://www.simpleyachtjobs.com/](http://www.simpleyachtjobs.com/) (Sort of,
because I needed something in my portfolio which paid off.) Here is the code
using Angular 1.5, Express, and
AWS.[https://github.com/adam-s/simplejobs](https://github.com/adam-s/simplejobs)

The problem with it is that it is far, far too complicated. I'll iterate
through it again when I use it to learn React and simplify everything.

------
mattbgates
Might not be the same thing, but I had/have built (a) project(s) that I began
with the dreams of someday monetizing, but later realized, maybe I shouldn't,
couldn't figure out how to charge for it, or didn't see a need of why anyone
would pay to use it, and thus, ended up just keeping it as a "free platform".

I'm not upset about the decisions I've made for keeping my projects free, as
if anything, they have taught me a lot, and I tend to use what I learned from
them for future projects. In most cases, I end up turning on an Analytics
feature and studying it, in order to understand the behavior of my users, and
exactly what they are using it for and why, so that I can harness that into
ideas for future projects.

Two projects like this were a blog I run called Confessions of the Professions
(
[http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com](http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com)
). This website was created in order to solicit rants and raves from people
about their jobs, careers, and their workplace. While I wouldn't call it a
complete failure or complete success, as it has been monetized and makes money
through ads, I would've loved to figured out a way to bring in revenue and
make it a full time job.

The reason I say success and failure: It goes viral for days and weeks at a
time, sometimes receiving over 10,000 visitors a day, while other days, it
normally gets its average of about 1,000, though it could be worse. Sometimes,
I cannot fully recognize the fact that I began with just Googlebot, my mom,
and girlfriend as my visitors, and yet I continue to receive hundreds of
emails a year with contributions and people thanking me. I even had a teacher
from an elementary class full of students using some of the articles for their
school project and thanked me so much for creating the website.

Confessions remains an ongoing project.. I'm always writing articles or
receiving them from other people and getting them ready for the website, so
I'd say I spent a good 2 years passionate about it and into it, hours and
hours a day. I've since limited myself to no more than 1 hour per day on it.
Occasionally 2 hours if writing an article.

For the other project, MyPost ( [https://mypost.io](https://mypost.io) ) is a
web page creation platform that allows anyone to create a page with very
little knowledge of HTML or CSS in seconds, or they can completely customize
their page with HTML and CSS as they see fit. And there is soo much that
people can do with it. I created it for a number of different reasons as well,
including as an educational tool for people to learn what it was like to code.
Social media has catered to the population so much that while everyone "can
use social media and the Internet", far fewer can claim to hit the "View
Source" button and actually understand all that makes a website what it is.

As for charging for this, I never could figure it out and hoped to one day
just put ads on the website, but ended up scratching this idea, as the ads
were just too annoying, even for me. I can tolerate some ad popups, but I
created the platform to offer people an experience, not an annoyance. It is
this project that taught me a lot about databases and a lot about what people
want on the Internet, and that is: an easy way to gain exposure. I have plans
for a another project that helps people to do that, similar to ProductHunt and
Hacker News.

The time I spent on this was about 3 months initially and then another 2
months just making some changes, fixing things, creating samples, etc.

I would love to quit my day job and just work on side projects and monetize
them.. as I'm sure many of us would, but I have yet to get to that point
completely. I do have a few projects I built completely with monetization in
mind, and while there is a free version of those products, I built them as a
subscription-based platform. I also have a few other projects in mind that I
have no intentions of charging for.... for some projects, it is more about
gaining exposure and recognition for me.

------
oxguy3
Nothing major, but I put a few sticker designs up on StickerMule's
marketplace:
[https://www.stickermule.com/user/1070831731/stickers](https://www.stickermule.com/user/1070831731/stickers)

It's been a couple months, and my $20ish investment (you have to place an
order for a sticker before you can sell it) has turned up $43 of profit. So
technically it was profitable, but I don't think I've even reached minimum
wage for the time I spent on it.

~~~
JayNeely
Could you talk a bit about what you've done to promote it? Or has it been a
hands-off, 'whatever traffic the marketplace provides organically' kinda
thing?

------
RangerScience
I kind of want this to be a periodic HN topic, like "Who's Hiring" \- "What's
Stalling", maybe?

Get us talking about projects that we're working on that need a boost of any
kind.

------
zatkin
I started a web app some years ago called UppIMG where you could upload
images. Basically it was a competitor to the predecessors of Imgur at the
time. Too much porn led me to taking it offline.

------
mudge
A web bookmarking app: [http://newsconomy.com/](http://newsconomy.com/)

I built it many years ago. Some people use it. Never made a cent from it.

------
DrSayre
I built [https://cocoa.dog](https://cocoa.dog) recently. The idea is that you
can send somebody random pictures of dogs with a message. Kinda like the Goats
thing awhile back.

I mostly built it just to get some experience building something using Stripe
and was not really intended to make a huge amount of money. But Im not sure if
anybody has really used it. Im guessing the novelty of sending people pictures
of things from a random number has worn off.

------
timbowhite
[https://vidgen.io](https://vidgen.io)

It's a web app that generates summary videos of online articles/content.

I launched it in February and it hasn't made a dime. I was charging ~$3 per
generated video, but since it's had zero traction, the videos can now be
downloaded for free.

The main feature it's lacking is a way to customize the generated videos. Once
I get this implemented I will try promoting it again.

Spent about 3 months building it and over $2k in hosting + licensing.

~~~
zackify
Would be nice if you could put a url in without https in front. Otherwise,
this is a really cool idea. It makes sense that most people wouldn't find it
worth $3 though.

I'm trying it out now :)

~~~
timbowhite
Thanks! And good point about dropping the http/https in the URL validation.

------
traway3301
I wrote [https://qriusity.com/](https://qriusity.com/) as a part time project,
I have always wanted to build a quiz app but there were hardly any quiz APIs
available for public use, so I decided to take on the effort to build one
myself, working on extending the db, right now it has around 17k questions,
need to work on the API and content. Suggestions welcome on improving the API
and legal aspects of collecting questions.

------
catattack
[https://catattack.co/](https://catattack.co/) ...Launched on Product hunt and
made some money, but I haven't put much effort into in since. It still makes a
few bucks a month, but I feel like it could do a lot better. I keep thinking
I'll fix up the code and add some features but never get around to it :/ I'd
be willing to sell it, that would make me something :)

------
sjs382
[https://privateforms.com](https://privateforms.com) has made some revenue and
had about 10 or 15 customers at one point, but I've definitely not recouped my
time investment into it.

I haven't iterated or done anything in an attempt to respark interest.

It still works and I have a few customers still (including myself). I really
just had a hard time marketing to those that I thought would be my customers
(mostly journalists and lawyers).

------
Sohcahtoa82
Probably doesn't count, but I'll post anyways...

I've written the beginnings for two games, but didn't flesh out and complete
the game mechanics because I haven't wanted to deal with the legal expenses
involved in establishing an LLC and trademarking my assets, so I haven't been
motivated to complete and release them.

I don't want to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on legal
protections and then only make back $50.

~~~
RangerScience
Why do you feel the need to trademark your assets at this point?

I mean, it sounds like your blocker to making them worth something is that
they're possibly not worth anything...

...so why not make it, and then if it starts making money, pop the trademarks?
People aren't likely to notice (and steal) unless it's successful enough
anyway.

...plus, AFAIK, you can't protect game mechanics; it's something like they're
considered the same as math: can't copyright, can't patent.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
You're right.

I think I'll make the game for now, polish it, etc. I'll make the LLC if I'm
ever ready to release. If I make any money at all, then I'll trademark.

Game mechanics might not be able to be protected, but I'm worried that
wouldn't stop some other major game company from bringing me to court to try.
If a game is similar enough to an existing game, they could have a case.

------
etewiah
Been working on this for about a year now.

[http://propertywebbuilder.com/](http://propertywebbuilder.com/)

Everyone says open sourcing it was a mistake but I really don't enjoy
marketing. I tried selling it as a closed source SAAS product but hated that.
Right now its gaining traction so I'm hoping in a year or so it will be well
know enough that I can charge for a premium version.

------
ankit111
There are other unique IP Address numbers which are<a
href="[http://www.192168-ip.com/192-168-2-1/">192.168.2.1</a>](http://www.192168-ip.com/192-168-2-1/">192.168.2.1</a>)
used for other unique systems. One of a unique IP Address number is 10.0.0.1,
and it is a Class An IP Address.

------
rsync
"Oh By".[1]

I launched this about a year ago and while it has made more than zero dollars
(some folks have indeed paid for personalized, editable Oh By Codes) it
doesn't really make any money.

I am very busy with rsync.net and much more so these past 12 months so I
haven't had the time I would like to invest into Oh By. I continue to believe
it's a good idea.

[1] [https://0x.co](https://0x.co)

~~~
akamaka
I didn't immediately understand what the purpose of this was. It might be a
good idea to include a photograph or visual which demonstrates a typical use
case, and to craft a short, simple tagline which explains the product.

------
GBiT
I started niche scanner reviews blog
[https://www.scanviews.com](https://www.scanviews.com) but it not working from
10 posts I wrote with my not native English language. It's not working. Idea
was to make gsmarena alternative for scanner and digitalization reviews. I'm
getting like 1 cent per month from it.

------
tmaly
I built [https://bestfoodnearme.com](https://bestfoodnearme.com) with the hope
of making it easier to decide where to eat. I am still trying to find product
market fit and iterate on improvements.

I think it has not found much traction as I have to prime the pump in terms of
content. Finding the right audience also would help.

------
roryisok
I wrote a todo list app for windows phone called listage, which had neat fast
entry and auto categorising features. Free with in app purchase to unlock
advanced features. I built it for myself but secretly hoped it would take the
world by storm, which it did not. I sold 5 copies. That's probably 1/4 of all
the windows phone users left out there :)

------
simonswords82
Without looking through the responses (yet) I can guarantee the vast majority
of any failed projects here can be contributed to a lack of focus on sales and
marketing.

For us techies (and I include myself in this although I do sales and marketing
for a living, so I've beat it out of me) it is far too easy and safe to return
to what we know...AKA the technology.

~~~
rwallace
I've looked through 3/4 of them so far, and most of the failed projects here
are actually because there was no market for the product in the first place.
Then there is designing the product wrong (so it doesn't do what the user
wants, or doesn't clearly do so), not having enough resources, and not
charging enough money. Lack of focus on sales and marketing is an issue in a
few cases, and in those few cases it can certainly be a killer, but it's not
the most likely reason for project failure.

------
pelmenept
I've built a surveying and feedback platform for businesses.

Basically after embedding code on your site, you can launch feedback surveys
on your page to keep improving product or service. You can also send email
surveys to your customers.
[https://insightstash.com](https://insightstash.com)

------
alexpotato
Negotiate With Us ([https://negotiatewith.us](https://negotiatewith.us))

I was running a career coaching business and this was a stab at automating the
training of people for salary negotiations.

Soft launched it a couple months ago so maybe it's too early to say "it won't
make money".

------
pawelkomarnicki
[http://cookarr.com](http://cookarr.com) was supposed to get donations/patreon
but I decided to keep is as my private hobby site for some time. Still
figuring out if I should monetize things like nutritional information or go
into the cooking assistant direction.

------
wunderlust
Budgeting tips (cash income) back when I was a restaurant server was hard, so
I recently built [https://www.tipoutapp.com](https://www.tipoutapp.com) to
make this easier.

It works well (I think), but I haven't gotten around to marketing it yet, so
no one really knows it exists.

------
meesterdude
I created a service for behavioral and cognitive changes
([http://willyoudidyou.com](http://willyoudidyou.com)). Spent many months
working on it, had a handful of beta users, but traction has not been there
overall - despite pushing in various marketing efforts.

~~~
dotmanish
You may want to:

(1) check how many visitors are scrolling 6 pagefuls to understand the 6
pictures. You can use crazyegg, etc heatmap kind of tool to measure. I
personally would've preferred to just be told in a single picture, but that's
just me.

(2) I'm not sure how helpful is the "Help us Launch" callout at the top. You
may just want to put the e-mail form up there. And instead of using "Help us"
phrasing, a blunt "Get notified of our launch timeline", etc. probably would
convert better.

------
garysieling
[https://www.findlectures.com](https://www.findlectures.com), though not
expecting to make money either. I've had a lot of interesting side-
conversations from it though. E.g. lot of people email me speakers they like,
and I got a conference talk out of it.

------
t0mislav
[http://random.fyi](http://random.fyi) What I learned is that people like more
one simple website doing one thing well then one website try to do all the
things. My other website which work one thing only brings me revenue.

------
fiftyacorn
I built gpsheatmap as a starter django project -

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

I think bad SEO and the website not being polished is the issue

Currently thinking of either selling it, or redeveloping it as a wordpress
plugin for sports clubs

------
alain_gilbert
I made an app to help track/visualize multi projects dependencies.
[https://www.manticoreapp.com](https://www.manticoreapp.com)

It solve more or less the same problem as GitLab multi-project pipeline which
was recently released.

------
brianolson
I built a personal data self tracking app (quantified-self stuff) and I still
use it but no one was nerdy in quite the way I was to want to track things
similarly. [https://uyday.com/](https://uyday.com/)

~~~
jmcphers
You might dig Daytum: [https://daytum.com/](https://daytum.com/)

------
taway_1212
I built an online poker bot that was making around $500-$1000 per account.
Maintenance was a bitch though (poker sites have a lot of bugs and my bot had
to work around a lot of them) so I abandoned it and got a job instead.

~~~
mod
What game did the bot play?

How was your variance?

Did you use an established framework? (I know at least the one popular one
existed a few years back)

------
nicholas73
[http://sudokuisland.com](http://sudokuisland.com)

Never gained enough traction, with competitors across pages of Google search.
Was hoping for at least a modest 100's of dollars per month.

------
pawelkomarnicki
Https://Storage.cubitoo.com – my little tool to manage clutter at home and at
the office. Somehow I chickened down to actually take the dip and open the
commpany,maybe I will run it for free some time.

------
chad_strategic
I wanted to practice a little more more with nodejs. To me it's pointless to
learning a programming language without a project. Eventually, I will convert
it from PHP (codeigniter) to angular 4 so that I can learn angular 4.

I also was banned from adsense, for machine generated content. Regardless, I
really like amazon and my product you can't really use adblock, so I put
together a website that monitors amazon daily prices.

I get most of my hits on facebook feed. Regardless I don't make as much money
as I would like, but it gives me something to do when my regular job is
annoying me. Plus I got some nodejs programming experience and database
construction experience as well. So all is not lost.

Http://www.bestoftheinternets.com/Deals I might be looking for a growth
hacker...

~~~
techaddict009
Whats the current traffic? You might be earning good via amazon affiliate.

------
byandyphillips
I made a simple website that lets you send compliments to your friends (no
negativity allowed) [http://www.letskudos.com](http://www.letskudos.com)

~~~
kazinator
That is impossible to police even if a committee of humans looks at every
message and deliberates for 20 minutes. Negativity can be encoded in
communication between two people in ways that cannot be detected if you don't
have the private context.

------
calafrax
I have done a handful of side projects that have lost money and lots of side
projects with time spent on something that has not be productized.

I don't really thing you should do a side project with the anticipation of
making money.

My focus on side projects is doing R&D and building skills or tools that will
pay off in my paid work. From that perspective I don't really consider
anything I have done to be a "loss."

I do open source but only to demonstrate something I plan to sell later or to
establish ownership of IP.

Spending money on R&D is a great investment since you can deduct on taxes and
get an automatic 30% return. That is much higher and guaranteed return
compared to "investing" in stock market.

~~~
jmcgough
Would one need to create an LLC or something to claim R&D credits?

~~~
calafrax
Talk to a lawyer or accountant about that.

------
ac_z
Perfume Doom on iOS. It made a minimal amount of money but it was still less
than the annual fee for the Apple developer program. I spent maybe a month
building it.

------
kevinwang
Last year, on college, I started working on a bot to consistently win money in
daily fantasy basketball. I think I went negative before I paused working on
it.

~~~
sudshekhar
Sounds interesting!

Can you explain how your bot worked from a technical perspective? And/or what
did you learn from the whole experience

~~~
kevinwang
Pulled data from nba stats API using a Python library, created features in
Python, then fed the data into pretty basic machine learning models. Only
achieved slight gains over just assuming a player's performance was going to
be his average over the past year.

But a big part that was pretty effective and not even predictive related was
using a modified knapsack algorithm to fit the best predicted value into one
day's roster.

I never proved the algorithm, though...

------
goatherders
I launched Devzil.la and wp extra care (wpextracare.com) both still active,
both good ideas, but Ihave done no marketing for either and thus no revenue.

------
kennycarruthers
Fileloupe for Mac ([https://www.fileloupe.com](https://www.fileloupe.com))

Videoloupe for Mac ([https://www.videoloupe.com](https://www.videoloupe.com))

These are both macOS applications that have yet to reach enough in sales to be
sustainable. However, I work on them full-time in hopes of reaching
sustainability in the near future.

 _" Why do you think it hasn't been as successful as you thought it would
be..."_

Exposure and importance. Getting exposure for a macOS application (or any
application for that matter) is tough. The lion's share of excitement these
days is around mobile applications and web services. Trying to get publishers
excited enough to write about a desktop application is challenging...

Importance is something that's taken me a little bit to understand. There
might be some "utility" or "nice to have" applications for macOS that make a
decent living, but I think if you really want to turn an application into
something that has long-term sustainability, then you need to find a way for
your application to become essential to a user's workflow. Excel, Lightroom
and Final Cut Pro are all essential applications to their respective user's.
Fileloupe and Videoloupe are "nice to have" apps in their current versions.
People enjoy them, but they aren't essential.

With the exception of maybe a few outliers, I'm not convinced that you can
make a living selling macOS apps for $10 and hope to make up revenue on
volume. I think you need to get into a higher price range and if you want to
sell a more expensive product to someone, then it has to fall under the
"essential" category and not the "nice to have". That's my goal with Fileloupe
2.0 and Videoloupe 2.0, but there's a ton of development to do.

(Oh, and I'd forgot how much more work went into making a macOS application
versus an iOS application. To say that my original time estimates were off is
a laughable under-statement.)

 _" How much time/money did you spend building it..."_

Development on Fileloupe started in the spring of 2014 and version 1.0 shipped
in the summer of 2015. Development on Videoloupe started in the summer of 2016
and 1.0 shipped in the spring of 2017. Living expenses have been cut
drastically over the years so that I can continue to do this full time. (Hint:
Living in Thailand is a lot cheaper than living in San Francisco or
Vancouver...) Sadly, I don't belong to any special "comma club" so there's an
end-date to this dream if profitability cannot be reached.

"What kind of iterations / improvements did you make to try and salvage it"

I learned a ton building version 1.0 of each product. Arguably, I learned more
than I should of and likely would have been better off starting with a bit
more of a plan and clearer vision for each app. Regardless, I now have a much
better idea of what each app should be and I'm hard at working on version 2.0
for each.

~~~
KingMob
I can see how the issue of importance would be relevant. Is there some feature
you can add, and then advertise, that would solve a burning pain for your
target audience?

~~~
kennycarruthers
I believe so, which is why I'm working on a version 2.0 of each application.

In the case of Fileloupe, version 1.0 is "just" a file viewer at the end of
the day. It's a really fast file viewer with some neat features, but it's
still just a file viewer and thus it has to compete against everything from
the macOS Finder to Adobe Bridge and Lightroom.

Fileloupe 2.0 adds the ability to create libraries that are persistent across
app launches. Photographers have a dozen applications out there that let them
organize their photos but there aren't many applications for organizing other
types of media that use a similar system of albums, ratings, color labels and
flags.

For example, videographers have few options for cataloguing and organizing
their raw footage outside of the Finder and professional media suites.
Fileloupe 2.0 will allow them to organize their video files in a similar way
to how a photographer might organize their photos. (And it's not just
applicable to videos. You could organize graphics, PDFs, documents and just
about anything else.)

I've never really had a macOS user tell me they were desperately in need of a
fast file viewer, but I have had many tell me that they want a better way to
organize their files and media. I'm hoping to solve "that problem" with
Fileloupe 2.0 and thus make it a much more essential application for a set of
users.

------
thephyber
A website to answer the question "what kind of dog food should I buy?"

It was a price comparison website that allowed you to quickly find the best
priced dog food (unit price -- like $ per 1 pound weight) and it could be
filtered by dog food ratings (you could compare expensive 5-star quality
ingredient foods while ignoring any of the cheap 1-star ingredient foods).
There is an independent website that reviews dog food based solely on
ingredients, created by a veterinarian that I used for assigning SKUs to
quality cohorts. I felt that most of the reviews on e-tailer website were
heavily opinionated, based on anecdotes -- not data, and many were brand-
sensitive ("I only buy so and so brand because all other brands suck").

The site was fully built, had some decent SEO, it integrated with 12
e-tailers, I registered and tagged all of the products for many affiliate
marketing systems, I bought several hundred dollars worth of AdWords campaigns
and iterated about 6 times. The scraper and display website took a few months.
I spent a few days cleaning obviously erroneous data. It took a day's worth of
time to sign up for all of the affiliate programs (effort staggered over a few
weeks). I built a few scripts to automate the browser to search the affiliate
websites for the correct affiliate links (some programs were much more
customized than just adding a site-wide tag). I ran it for over a year and
there was only one conversion that was paid by the affiliates, but it was too
small for them to cut a check.

The idea, after the website was built and running, got some interest from a
former CEO (now VC) and from a wealthy friend of the family, but I never
followed up with either. I felt like all of the hard work of the product was
done and the majority of work remaining would need to be marketing and
generating inbound links.

I'm still convinced that there is a need for more price comparison websites
that are unit-price indexed. Amazon doesn't have search by unit price and only
occasionally has unit price. Things that come in packages of varying size
(like dog food, batteries, household detergents and liquids) are hard to
compare for value. I found two other sites with this idea, one was shut down
and the other was focused entirely on supplimenting Amazon.

One problem I had is that the fine print on most of the affiliate programs
prevented me from competing on many of the necessary AdWords search term
keywords that I would have needed to advertise to get any real traffic.
Basically, I felt my web interface was superior to both the e-tailers for
finding the right product, but I couldn't compete for that AdWord traffic
because my competition with them would drive up their marketing costs.

~~~
hoodoof
Are you dog fooding your own app?

------
55555
choosejarvis.com -- not really a side project, but doesn't make much money.
has revenue of a few hundred dollars per month. Would sell it instantly for
$15,000 even though we invested $100k in development.

converthero.com -- would sell this for $10-15k. It's a opt-in popup maker.

> Why do you think it hasn't been as successful as you thought it would be?

Marketing is hard.

~~~
ekpyrotic
You should be able to sell Jarvis to PR, marketing, and communications
companies -- at a price point much higher that you're currently selling on
your homepage.

Have you conducted any cold emails/sales call campaigns to those clients? I'm
pretty sure you could find buyers at $100/month, if not more. I see the
immediate value.

How have you been marketing this so far? What audience have you been
targeting? What routes have you been using, i.e., PPC, direct outreach, cold
calls?

I would be interested to work on this with you: j@greenaway.me

------
failrate
I have never had a successful side project.

------
ac_z
Perfume Doom on the iOS store.

------
gwbas1c
All of them

------
mod
I built a SMS marketing web-app. It's basically a contact-management and mass
messenger, nothing fancy. Heroku/django/twilio/stripe stack. People can sign
up for your list, and you send them deals or events or whatever as regularly
as you feel like.

I built it for a niche that is not very tech-savvy, and largely couldn't be
targeted by SEO, because my partner was going to handle sales. The partner
faded away almost immediately and there hasn't been any real revenue to speak
of. It pays for itself.

It was built for my own business as the original customer, and that business
still uses it, but nobody else does. At our peak we had maybe 4 paying
customers, but our onboarding wasn't great either (we were brand new) and they
didn't all see the value in it.

Anyway, I think with more sales and better onboarding we'd have had a good MRR
and not much churn.

Heroku has more than doubled their monthly fee since it started. It used to be
profitable with one customer, now it is breakeven, +/\- a few dollars. I think
I'll move it soon to a $5 VM and it should make about $60/month at that point.

I made some mistakes:

1) trusting my partner to make sales. I already knew they weren't a
workaholic.

2) No vesting cliffs or anything. We just have 50/50 and that's it, so I was
not interested in working on it solo and paying out half the money, nor
starting a fight for full control. I wouldn't lose much to rename it and take
it elsewhere, but I wouldn't feel right about it. Anyway he quit selling
within a month (about 15-30 hours invested iirc) and so we were dead in the
water. I'm close with him and so I left it at that to avoid damaging our
personal relationship.

3) I used long-codes, which is a nono for mass-texting. We had some dropped
texts, or we think we did (it's very hard to diagnose). Shortcodes were very
expensive at the time; I don't know what the options look like now. You can
probably pay for access to someone else's shortcode. We don't notice any
issues with the remaining customer, which has a list of a couple hundred
folks.

I haven't touched the code for over 3 years and it still runs. That's pretty
impressive, probably my most solid system. Also some kudos to heroku for not
breaking it somehow in that time.

I've never shipped any personal project since then, although I'm getting close
on one now. I continued to make the mistake of picking bad co-founders, so for
this one I'm solo. I don't expect to get rich, as I have no marketing plan and
I find most marketing distasteful. So maybe I'll get lucky, or maybe I'll
expose myself to some strangers on here or somewhere when it's ready to sell.

~~~
jlev
There's a need in the non-profit space for something that does this well and
is relatively cheap per-message. Big players like MobileCommons and
RevolutionMessaging charge 1k+ per month for SMS blast capabilities based on
list size. If you have an API or the ability to import/export CSVs you could
probably compete at the low end of the market.

Or make it open source?

------
mindcrime
We haven't made any money at Fogbeam Labs[0] yet. I could talk a lot about the
reasons why, and why I'm still crazy optimistic, but it might take a while to
write it all up. Maybe I'll do a blog post one day. I think it's all too long
for an HN comment.

That said, I can try to distill out a few key points:

(in no particular order )

1\. Doing this as a "side project" while the founders still work day jobs. I
think doing that is fine, but it limits how fast you can move and how
aggressive you can be.

2\. And (1) goes hand in hand with this one, which is "not being focused
enough". I should have emphasized a "what is the single most important thing
we can do _now_ to generate revenue" approach from the beginning. Instead, we
worked on this "grand vision" which is pretty cool, but took forever to get
close to having a shippable product.

3\. Early on I was thinking mostly about on-premises deployments, with the
idea of rolling the code into a SaaS version as "next step". In hindsight,
that was probably exactly backwards. Going SaaS, and going "down market" in
terms of customer size would have made it easier, I believe, to get initial
traction. IoW, as Mark Suster put it[1] "hunt deer, not elephants".

4\. Not taking my health seriously enough. As some of you may recall, I had a
heart attack[2] near the end of 2014. And while I lived and was able to get
back in the saddle, that whole ordeal happened at a _really_ bad time from a
company perspective and cost us basically the entire following year, as I
recovered both physically and mentally. In hindsight, I was pushing myself way
too hard, and not doing the things I should have been doing w/r/t diet,
exercise, etc.

On the flip side, we have done some things right. Probably the most notable is
keeping the burn rate extraordinarily low. We spend a small enough amount of
money that I can fund our current activity level out of my pocket nearly
indefinitely. Which is a big part of why we're not out of business despite
having no revenue. And now things are starting to look up, as we have one
really solid prospect in the pipeline and are deep into the transition to a
SaaS delivery model for the "old" products, and have a really cool new SaaS
offering stirring as well.

The interesting point for us will be if we can sign even 3 or 4 relatively
small deals and get some real traction established. Then we can decide if we
want to go pursue outside money or not, or if we want to just keep doing the
organic growth thing.

[0]: [https://www.fogbeam.com](https://www.fogbeam.com)

[1]: [https://bothsidesofthetable.com/most-startups-should-be-
deer...](https://bothsidesofthetable.com/most-startups-should-be-deer-
hunters-7fdecf58f4f6?gi=e6ce05a92130)

[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8550315](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8550315)

------
LaundroMat
All of them :)

------
hellbanner
Arcade game developer here.

I loved the game concept of ABA's "Defeat Me":
[http://wonderfl.net/c/9ykQ](http://wonderfl.net/c/9ykQ) . SHMUP where each
enemy is a copy of you. Round 3 you fight a clone of Round 1, Round 2,
mirrored.

but I disagreed with several major design decisions:

1) Rounds were too difficult (a deadline came in very fast, the bullets were
nearly the size of the ship) 2) Player movement & weapons changed rapidly
(speed & number of shots per spread was a modulo on the level number 3) Losing
meant you retried the same level.. at that point in the game, you basically be
stuck. I wanted the game to restart.

I improved on the game with pixel-perfect collision, weapon animations and
other design decisions like letting the player screen-wrap around the edge but
not the clones, regaining time on the deadline when you killed a clone and
more.

I even experimented with a co-op, 2 variants of 1 Versus 1 mode and a Replay
site before removing them for the core experience.

I made the game because I wanted to play it. Making money was a secondary goal
but I'm proud of the game and find it way more fun than most games I've
played. How many games do you know that have an AI procedurally determined by
_your_ movements?

Revenue earned: 3 * $10 on "pay what you want" from itch.io. 1 from a friend's
friend who overhead on a Skype chat that I made a game, 1 from an indie
developer at a games meetup and 1 from a friend when I sent them a link.

\+ < $100 from iOS sales (I switched from the iOS app to Desktop
(Win/Mac/Linux with Eletron packager) for a better experience and more fun
coding.

I think it's cool that $10 was the amount chosen by 3 people who didn't know
each other as a valuation for the game. However it's disappointing that all 3
were people who knew me.

I sent out ~100 emails to game reviewers with download links and got 1 brief
article but no revenue.

Why: Discovering games is hard. Marketing to people who would like this kind
of puzzle-y arcade game is difficult to reach without looking like a spammer
or spending $.

Differently: Not try so many weird experiments with gameplay and focus on the
core relentlessly + Playtest more.

Iterations: 2 prototypes from TigJam. 2 more iOS versions then another re-
write for an App Store launch. 2 Javascript versions (the latter being
launched) + 1 seperate version for multiplayer.

Time: Hundreds of hours. Maybe a thousand? A lot of this was done earlier on
when I was less experienced with programming + design. I playtested a lot

Lessons for Game Developers: Playtest _often_ , stick to the core
relentlessly. Carve away crap that doesn't fit no matter how cool it is or fun
to make. I spent too much time iterating on mobile interfaces when gamepad
controller support was _far_ superior and passed "the bar test" (give to
strangers at a bar and watch them cheer other strangers on as they pass the
controller around).

Play [1], An old trailer [2]

[1] [http://QuantumPilot.me](http://QuantumPilot.me) (redirects to itch.io)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy_GBLM_6Qs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy_GBLM_6Qs)

~~~
s_m_t
I just played your game, it is extremely fun but I think there is a lot of
missed potential and to be honest I would never buy it in its current state.
It feels like a tech demo rather than a full game. My unsolicited advice is as
follows:

The art is boring. Most bullet hell games either have a mecha or anime art
style with a lot of flashy effects. The closest in style to your game is
probably geometry wars but your game lacks all of the color, warping, and
particle effects that makes geometry wars look cool. You should invest money
in the art.

It is very interesting that whenever you die in the game you are essentially
killing yourself, or some sort of past version of yourself is killing a future
version of you. There should be some sort of narrative element to highlight
and expand upon this idea. I think it is way less interesting to sell it as
"your enemies learn from you" when you could be selling as "a battle against
all your past selves", way more emotional content in the latter, you're
fighting all of your mistakes, all of your hubris, all of your near-
sightedness, and every shot you take is another nail in your coffin.

To expound on this emotional element your character should be some sort of
actual character, not just a green triangle... This doesn't mean you need a
big backstory or cutscenes or anything major like that, something as simple as
a drawing of a cute girl with a couple lines of dialogue will suffice. the
thing you actually control can still be a spaceship but the player should know
there is a character inside of it and they should know what they look like,
you could make it so off to the side of the screen the characters face could
pop up and react to what is going on. Go to tumblr and ask some type of fan
artist to draw you a 'time traveling spaceship pilot that battles her past
self and is really cute" and pay them for their work. Then when you die you
can see that same character pop out of the space ship that killed you and
celebrate ;)

You should rethink the gameplay progression and how the levels work. It
doesn't seem clear to me why you split up the gameplay into discrete levels
rather than having continuous play with 'respawning' enemies. I don't see why
I have go through the weapon type progression linearly each time either
(shouldn't I be able to collect or switch weapons or something?), reminds me
of my main issue with geometry wars which was that I had to play for about 15
minutes before the game really became fun and that I had to redo that boring
15 minutes every time I died. Just start me with the fun gameplay or make the
ramp up period very short.

~~~
hellbanner
Thank you for your feedback!

I will have to think about the art. I went for minimalist approach where
nothing but core mechanical data is shown.

I see that this kind of minimalist approach isn't super popular (you + others
have commented, I forgot to put that in my first comment).

In my next game (a 2P versus game, also available at www.Combo.Zone ), I
experimented with excessive particle effects but art is a major weakness of my
development.

Characterization + avatar: Spot on points, thank you.

There is poem at the end that sort of explains the story, but it's very tacked
on. What I'm taking from your feedback is that some sort of context - no
matter how thin - is critical to keep players engaged.

Levels: Thanks for bringing this up. Fully continuous gameplay felt a little
too confusing + overwhelming - by clearing a wave down to the last enemy you
get a moment of relief.

It takes under 5 minutes to get through all of the levels, at which point the
game changes and you get a continuous set of 8 clones (still kill from 8 to 1,
then the 1st in the list is replaced by your last pattern) with random
weapons. It's the most fun part of the game IMO but it's difficult without
knowing what all the weapons are (identified by color).

I tried a weapon unlock system where you scored points for killing enemies +
could purchase a weapon between stages to upgrade. More accurate shooting gave
you more points faster so you could skip the easier parts quicker the more
experienced you were.

I'm sorry to hear you found the first parts boring so quickly.

If you want to try the more fun part, open up game.js in the source and change
line 626 to " this.quantumpilot = true" ... to make the weapons random every
level.

And ah crap, you helped me find a bug. With the new 2 color scheme for each
stage, the final stage would still have all the enemies the same color instead
of being differentiated. Thanks stranger.

I will send your comments to an artist I know and get their take on it.

I'm leaning towards leaving the game as is though, and moving onto new
projects. My next big project is all about characters - a Choose Your Own
adventure where you see the same events from different perspectives. You start
as a barista in a coffee shop and whoever you give coffee too is who you play
as next until they return.

~~~
s_m_t
> Thank you for your feedback!

No problem, I love ranting about video games

>Levels: Thanks for bringing this up. Fully continuous gameplay felt a little
too confusing + overwhelming - by clearing a wave down to the last enemy you
get a moment of relief.

I hadn't considered that, it could be that something like a continuously
scrolling background could get the feeling I was looking for. I guess it has
something to do with having a sense of location or presence in the game. This
might seem a little bizarrely nitpicky but when I get teleported back to home
position at the beginning of each level it feels sort of wrong... like, is the
space I'm in now even the same space as the last level, has any amount of time
passed for my spaceship since then? I'm not sure if anyone else cares about
this sort of thing though...

>I'm sorry to hear you found the first parts boring so quickly.

This is a very common issue I have with games like this, geometry wars,
asteroids, etc. I want to be playing the crazy parts! It's a difficult problem
because the early parts also have to function as a sort of tutorial and a
breathing/ramp up period and you also might not want dynamic difficulty
because of things like high scores so it isn't a trivial problem. It isn't
unique to your game at all and I'm not sure _anyone_ has solved the problem
satisfactorily.

>If you want to try the more fun part, open up game.js in the source and
change line 626 to " this.quantumpilot = true" ... to make the weapons random
every level.

Awesome, thanks!

Cool game, I'm gonna follow your future games, the choose your own adventure
barista game sounds interesting

~~~
hellbanner
Thanks for the solace re: difficulty. It's a fine line because if you offer
players "jump into the crazy parts" they may jump in and decide it's just too
much.

You're the first person who's called out the warp back to the bottom!

Your X position is maintained. I warp you back in the Y because with the
clones spawning, you could be right in front of them as they shoot with zero
reaction time.

An earlier iteration had you maintain movement control while each clone phased
in (took about 3 seconds total), with the path they would follow being drawn
out temporarily. I liked the positioning + keeping your control aspect but
everyone who played ( from games to bar patrons ) kept mashing shoot.. they
wanted to keep fighting, so I took it out for the sake of minimalism.

Thanks! You can follow on my itch [http://Combo.Zone](http://Combo.Zone) or
look for quantumpotato on Devlogs
[https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?board=27.0](https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?board=27.0)

