Ask HN: What has been your least profitable side/weekend project to date? - latch
======
patio11
I had half-coded an apartment manager for landlords for e.g. collecting rents,
doing maintenance, and the like, prior to realizing a) Paypal fees were
untenable for rent collection, b) I wasn't going to get into a regulated
industry while part-time, and c) I had no way to sell into the space. So I
shot that idea in the head prior to launch. (I still use the domain for an
HTTP proxy.)

Then later I started work on WidgetBakery. You know widgets, those lovely
little embeddable Javascript/etc code pieces that you create so other people
can promote your website for you? I thought it would be cool if you could do
that without being able to program, so that e.g. a laundromat or plumber could
have their own widgets, thus getting them qualified traffic and improving
their SEO. I did not talk to any laundromats or plumbers prior to coding it,
naturally. When I finally started talking to people after half-building it, I
realized that all of my customers were going to be black hat SEOs in seedy
industries (payday loans and the like), and that it was highly likely Big
Daddy G would nuke my site from orbit within a matter of weeks or months from
launch.

So, that's a few months of dev time and a few thousand dollars of investment
(VPSes, designer time, etc) that I won't get back.

Appointment Reminder also has been lagging expectations, but I still have
hopes (and better, a plan) for that one. Sadly, immigration issues are a bit
of a tax on my time/focus this month. (Severity: Deportation bugs tend to get
worked on first, what can I say...)

~~~
dwwoelfel
_So, that's a few months of dev time and a few thousand dollars of investment
(VPSes, designer time, etc) that I won't get back._

Was this before services like Heroku and Google App Engine existed? The free
tiers make failing much less painful.

Edit: One of my failed apps, <http://app.reminderbear.com> is still in
existence thanks to Google App Engine. It has about 10 or 15 happy users that
can keep using the service forever. It only costs me $10/year for the domain
name.

~~~
patio11
I do not optimize my development practices for "least cost in event of project
failure", principally because the maximum cost in event of project failure is
not a meaningful hardship for me at this point in my life.

------
geuis
<http://jsonip.com>

I was thinking about sticking ads in as a property on the JSON object, but
that'll double the bandwidth of the response size. =)

~~~
latch
FWIW, I built something like this for myself years ago because I needed to
know when my ip changed. I locked it down so I'd be the only one able to use
it. When I first saw jsonip.com, I kicked myself.

The brilliance of jsonip.com isn't really the service, it's the vision that it
should be free and world-readable.

------
dwwoelfel
I made Idyllic Past[1], a webapp that emails you a weekly comment from your
Hacker News and Reddit accounts. The eventual goal was to catalog all the
things the user liked on the internet and present random items to him by
email.

I was hoping to capitalize on nostalgia by running ads in the emails.

Unfortunately, I got only 3 signups. The post I made on HN was completely
ignored (only about 20 people visited the link), and the post I made on Reddit
ended up with a net score of 0.

Oh well, lesson learned -- gauge interest on a proof of concept before
spending the time to build a full product.

[1] <http://www.idyllicpast.com>

------
imack
My iPhone app Freakr:
[http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/freakr/id434088944?ls=1&m...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/freakr/id434088944?ls=1&mt=8)

An app that game out of a drunken discussion with some gay friends about how
to establish boundaries with a random hookup. I mostly made it as a gag, but I
guess it does solve a real world problem. Irony is that it is the least
profitable (free, adless), but has more user engagement than anything else
I've made and it hasn't been out a week yet :-P

~~~
prawn
With an improved design, I could see straight teens running with that for
giggles as well and it going viral within schools. Get some ads in there!

------
akarickchen
I made a game. It's like astroids.... but you blow up ads. It's called
Adstroids. The big idea here was for people to to get hit by the ad and you
would then be sent to their site.

<http://adstroids.com>

------
jonp
<http://birthdaysudoku.com> \- personalised sudoku puzzles.

I've never made any money from it, but I get a kick out of knowing that people
in far-away places are using something I've made.

------
shazow
I have a tendency of not monetizing weekend projects. Perhaps I should?

<http://colorblendy.com/> I did during a SHDH meetup with @limedaring, then
couple months later during another weekend I released v2 with colorpickers on
the Google Chrome store for free too: <http://bit.ly/chrome-colorblendy>

Another weekend I dug up an old game I wrote in an afternoon at school in
Python called pytron. My roommates and I spent hours playing it—turned out it
was quite fun with multiple players. I ported the game in an couple afternoons
to JavaScript, called it LineRage: <http://bit.ly/linerage-chrome>

I still have "monetize this" on the TODO list for both of these. Was thinking
of releasing a "pro" version of Colorblendy with CSS parsing and a saving
feature. Also a campaign version with a bunch of levels of LineRage for $1.99
or somesuch. Someday.

------
latch
mogade.com sucks down about $170/month in hosting costs. 2 $35 web servers, 2
$50 db servers (all for redundancy). (i use the hardware for other things too)

It has been my best learning project (what gave me the knowledge to write
mongly.com and the little mongodb book). It's also solid Rails experience
which is important for me given that I want to transition out of .NET.

Closing in on 500 000 scores store (it's 1 score per user per game, so it
gives you an idea of how many unique users). Around 100 games use it (all WP7)

------
MattBearman
Mine was <http://tripcost.co.uk> \- I built it about 4 years ago, back when I
thought I could do _everything_ , hence the horrible design and questionable
HTML.

It was featured on a fairly well know UK TV show (working lunch on BBC2) which
got me loads of hits, so I thought I was made. Of course the traffic dropped
off in a couple of days, and in the 4ish years it's been live I've earned a
total of $100 in Google Ads.

I learned from it though, now I buy design, I've improved my front end
programming skills, and I know that you have to keep working on something to
keep the hits coming.

I've also learned that making money from ads is very hard, as you need a
serious hit count to make any money.

~~~
mootothemax
I'm not surprised that you made so little - the ads displayed are _useless_ ,
frankly. It's always a pain with AdWords with a site like this - somehow you
need to include enough keywords about your service so that the ads
displayed'll be relevant. Admittedly, I'm viewing your site from Warsaw in
Poland, but I'd hope to see more relevant ads than "Raft Trips Under $100" -
I'm sure if AdWords was displaying, I don't know, "Save Your Fuel Costs!"-type
ads, you'd have made decent money by now.

~~~
MattBearman
True, the ads could be more targeted. I do get ones on there for things like
red diesel which is fairly relevant.

But even with better ads I wouldn't make much as I only average about 50 hits
a day. I think there's a bit of potential in the site, it just needs a re-
design, the car database cleaning up (HUGE amount of work there), and some
promotion.

I'd like to have another go at it, but currently all my free time is devoted
to BugMuncher.

~~~
mootothemax
_the car database cleaning up (HUGE amount of work there)_

I can only imagine! FYI, I tried BMW E36 - which is the 3 series, and it
listed old 5-series instead. But I really don't envy you that task ;)

I really like BugMuncher, BTW - just please hire someone to make the Feedback
button a bit prettier :)

------
gravitronic
I hadn't made a website in years so to get back into it I built two client-
aide only sites with jquery. I'm a terrible designer so, bear with me :)

\- <http://www.drinkpacer.com> \- select your target level of drunkenness and
track your drinking. It keeps you on pace using very estimated math.

\- <http://www.draw140.com> \- this was to be like Paint but for twitter.
Unfortunately Unicode rendering differences between clients and platforms
makes what you see not usually match what your followers see.

I don't consider either of these a failure though, I learnt a lot.. In the
case of Unicode, a lot more than I ever wanted to :)

~~~
latch
hah! the first one is completely useless. You should totally make an iOS
version....I bet anything you could make money at 0.99$ (assuming it hasn't
already been done).

The second one is pretty neat. It needs some polish, but I can't help but
think that could actually be somewhat useful.

Good work!

~~~
gravitronic
Thank you very much! Maybe drinkpacer can be my "hello world" once I finally
delve into iOS programming or any other platform.

My friends keep pushing me to pivot it into a game but I don't think it's a
good idea liability-wise...

------
boyter
<http://searchco.de/>

Never made a cent off it. Not that I have tried (to be honest). I am still
working in it though, so one day perhaps. I find it useful though, so that's
the main thing.

<http://www.chunews.com/>

Never made a cent of this either, and the hosting costs are quite large for
what is essentially a smaller version of TailRank (if you remember that).

Lastly, I made a "My Twitter Butler" clone with a website and the lot back in
the Twitter frenzy. Never sold a single copy. I guess I lost $10 for the
domain name and 8 hours of my time to implement it. I was hoping to sell one
copy and break even on my direct costs.

~~~
saibotd
searchco.de is rather cool! maybe if you would use a sans-serif or even
monospaced font, it'll be even cooler. Also the example on the frontpage
(something about SQL) leaved me helpless.

~~~
boyter
Thanks. I'll convert it to a monospaced font now.

------
angryasian
I wish I could reply to everyone on this thread, but I'm more interested in
what they did to market these services ? If you do absolutely as little as
possible to get people to use your services, any endeavor will be an
unprofitable one.

~~~
saibotd
Mostly I post it on reddit.com - this is kinda hit or miss. Either the first 5
people have a good day and upvote/leave a nice comment, or they'll ignore it
for eternity. As I am scared of re-posting on reddit, that's it ...

With <http://gamesuggest.net/> I actually tried some SEO (on-site, no tricks)
- that failed miserably.

------
teuobk
In terms of least revenue, that would probably be my webcomic,
<http://www.zoitz.com/> , which has had millions of views but for which the
only revenue has come from a small textbook licensing deal.

In terms of greatest loss, that would be my photo deblurring tool,
<http://www.blurity.com/> , which is suffering from my failure to achieve
product-market fit. It's had some revenue, but its need for a powerful server
has kept it in the red.

~~~
latch
The comic was cute. It's a shame you gave it up. I always thought that kinda
stuff was a lot of work though (I've read some thoughts on this from Gary
Larson). Seems like the kinda thing you need to keep up regularly to ever
grow.

Kinda makes me think that a "syndication platform" for we comics might not be
a horrible idea.

------
mootothemax
<http://campaignbar.com> \- which I'll be relaunching properly in the next few
weeks.

Marketing plan consisted of posting links to various sites... and that's about
it. No wonder that I haven't had a single user pay for it. Honestly it's been
a painful loss - a good 30-40 hours of development (yay Firefox addons! I'm
now relaunching with Chrome) and spending around $40 on themes. So, it's been
a complete and utter loss so far.

That said, I now have a marketing plan and high hopes :)

------
theycallmemorty
<http://www.cupcalculator.com> \- World Cup Results calculator - I made $20
from Adsense in about a month, which more than covers hosting on
nearlyfreespeech... however google won't send you your money until you've made
$100. So if I put the time into it to update it for each world cup, I'll
eventually get my $100 in 2026, at which point I'll have spent approximately
$160 on domains and hosting.

------
saibotd
All of them:

<http://gamesuggest.net/>

<http://saibotd.com/redditmag/>

<https://market.android.com/developer?pub=saibotd>

<http://saibotd.com/advancedgifplayer.html>

I am actually not in it for the money, but some of these projects have zero
(0) active users and that's kinda sad for me.

------
ideamonk
I ran snapsta.com for a year along with a friend. It was a websnapping
service, which eventually we got bored of, but had good fun writing it. And
then Lenny(<http://lennified.appspot.com>), a mail alert service that uses
gmail feed and Twitter to send out sms alerts wherever supported. Oops its
currently broken (oauth url issues)

Never made a cent out of any of these.

------
ajhai
<http://picmos.me> \- Online tool to create photo mosaics using your facebook
photos. I'd spent considerable amount of time building it. I'm using linode
512 plan to host the application which is costing me ~$20 per month and the
domain costed me ~$10. I enjoyed building the product but failed to attract
users and haven't made a single penny yet.

~~~
MattBearman
Funnily enough, I had exactly the same idea. Your site looks good, and I think
has a lot of potential, it's just very hard to promote FB apps, such a crowded
market.

------
dools
<http://smsmyride.com/>

<http://cueyoutube.com/>

<http://pimpmysalary.com/>

I've never made money from them, nor have any of them gained significant
popularity (although pimpmysalary.com is actually receiving an entry every 3
mins. Or so - maybe that's my breakthrough success!!)

~~~
prawn
I had something vaguely like smsmyride (called regomail) that was web
messaging between number plates (a 'rego', amongst Australians). Obviously,
there is a massive chicken and egg problem.

~~~
dools
_"Obviously, there is a massive chicken and egg problem"_

Yeah tell me about it! I got written up on lifehacker[1] and I received quite
a few emails and comments (some on the page and some not) basically saying
"but it won't work unless everyone signs up!!1".

The funny thing is that if everyone who said that to me had told their
friends, the chicken/egg problem would probably have been sold.

My standard response when people tell me something I've built has a
chicken/egg problem is "right, so how many people have YOU told about it?"

[1][http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2009/09/sms-my-ride-lets-you-
wa...](http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2009/09/sms-my-ride-lets-you-warn-other-
drivers/)

~~~
prawn
FWIW, I ditched regomail. It didn't even make enough to cover the domain
renewal.

You could enter your rego to check for messages. To try and boost pick-up, for
anyone checking an empty inbox, I auto-added a randomised and semi-believable
message. Not sure if it helped much, but obviously not enough.

Slightly related, I also started building a little web site for people to
track cars they'd owned and driven with a view to building relationships
between past and new owners for the hell of it. "I wonder what happen to that
'74 Civic I traded with that girl for three bottles of wine?" Domain
drove.com.au was free when I checked. Took me half a day to build most of the
site but by then the domain had been taken and so I bailed - stupid.

------
poissonpie
Two come to mind

A thought a day app that just completely tanked. It only gives you 1 thought a
day - most others seem to be every possible thought you could want at any
time. Mine just didn't catch on. C'est la vie.

Then there was the site-flipping attempt that just didn't work out at all -
the content was all dream and alt/complementary therapy related. Just didn't
hit the spot apparently.

------
ww520
<http://www.topchan.tv> was just released about 2 months ago and have never
made a dime. The hosting is for free for now so the net is $0. But I have
never really wanted to charge for it. It's more for building for myself, and
see if others find it useful.

~~~
angryasian
similar to youtube leanback <http://www.youtube.com/leanback>

------
quickpost
<http://mmabuzzsaw.com/>

Aggregators don't make money!

~~~
Despite
Oh that is awesome. I've wanted something like that.

Sorry it doesn't make money!

------
pdenya
<http://knottablenecklaces.com> makes me about enough to cover costs and
google ads. I'm not sure if this counts around here since it's not a software
product.

------
beerfarmer
<http://workola.com> and/or <http://clock.workola.com>

I'm a non technical founder, so this is just a script I purchased online and
put behind one of my domain names. Just needed to get the feet wet and go
through the process of releasing an app. It's got 100+ users so I'll get back
to promoting it once/if I can attract a technical co-founder. Just launched
<http://fishtaank.com> so we'll see how this one goes...

------
DanielBMarkham
receiving.it -- a free site to keep track of lists. The idea was that it could
start for stuff like Christmas presents and perhaps one day morph out to be a
generic receiving service for small businesses.

Fun little project. The stretch goals were writing my first app in
F#/Unbuntu/AWS, so it's not like the effort was wasted. I find the best thing
to do with any project is to have a solid set of secondary goals that you can
reach no matter how the original project turns out. (I've also found out that
it's critical to keep projects small.)

------
ecaroth
www.drunkenweb.com - Didn't intend to make money off it (project for fun to
learn python and play with css3/html5), but I hooked up amazon associates w/
targeted ads. Made ~$6 in 11 months :-)

------
yemkay
<http://www.tmemo.me>

A reminder service for power Twitter users. Didn't get enough hits to generate
any Ad revenue.

------
cmsj
My iPad app PicTour that turns the device into an automated picture frame.
Turns out nobody wants that - sales have been abysmal!

------
lysol
All of them.

~~~
jivejones
me too :(

------
seancron
The one that I haven't released yet.

------
ForrestN
Still un-released tamagatchi engine that will probably never make a cent!

~~~
szermer
My idea to create a Massive multiplayer Masturbation Simulator. I found myself
stuck in private beta for weeks.

------
bauchidgw
non of them - weekend projects are about experience first, money second - what
does work, what doesn't work - how much effort is it? every project that does
not just stay in "idea space" is a huge win. and an infinite amount more
valueable than any great billion dollar idea that is still stuck in someones
head.

said that: checkout <http://replycam.com> \- i learned that any technology
that you cant easily iterate a (project) killer (in this case the flash webcam
booth app)

------
pjscott
I took the Murmur3 hash function and ported it to C, adding documentation as I
went. After all, even the greatest technical achievement can be held back by
lack of basic documentation. It's a great hash function, very fast and well-
behaved, but to date this project has brought me neither wealth nor fame. Of
course, it's only been online since earlier this afternoon. If you need to
hash something, for whatever reason, I hope this will be useful to you:

<https://github.com/PeterScott/murmur3>

------
jarin
Any of a number of un-monetizable blogs :)

------
genieyclo
All my time wasted meticulously trolling too many sites to count.

------
biesiad
www.laundryqueue.com - resources management tool. This is how I learned Ruby
on Rails, but still have no idea how to gain users.

------
mikezupan
tried to do something with my domain womencantdrive.com when fml came out but
nothing ever happened of it. Now it's down

------
josscrowcroft
Every. Single. One. But I don't care!

------
molecule
all of them?

