
Ask HN: Who is riding his weekend project straight to profitability? - spIrr
Many of us are working on weekend projects. Some are being built just for fun, while others are being launched with the aim of generating some income.<p>I would like you to share the story of your revenue-generating weekend project, which would be a great inspiration for the rest of us.
======
Peroni
My little genius friend & I are working on a side project currently but it is
starting to look quite viable.

In a nutshell it takes any word or PDF document, strips all the formatting and
repopulates a new word document with predefined fonts, layout etc. Sounds
simple & basic? That's the point. We're near completion and once we launch it
will be a simple service that can have a significant impact on the industry I
currently work in.

~~~
olavk
That is a great idea.

~~~
Peroni
Thanks! We think so too. Always keen to hear other applications for the
service though. I haven't had sufficient time to investigate how relevant it
may be to other industries but I know there will be more significant
applications other than our current focus.

~~~
semanticist
This is a common feature in CRM software for the recruitment industry, where
they want to rewrite people's CVs into the agency's 'house standard' (and
remove the candidate's contact details, too).

If your version performs better than what some of the existing players are
using, you might be able to OEM/white label it for them.

~~~
Peroni
The current CRM features available are _terrible_. The other issue is that
they generally come bundled with a CRM that companies are paying in excess of
7 figures for. We have a stand alone product that is efficient and affordable.

A lot of recruitment companies, at least here in the UK, pay significant
annual salaries to an 'admin' person to sit and format CV's all day long. Why
pay them £25k a year to execute a task that takes them about 20 minutes when
you could pay us about 70-80% less (pricing point yet to be determined) for a
product that executes the task instantly?

~~~
semanticist
Your competitors in that market are people like Daxtra (my former employer)
who do CV parsing and extraction.

They also do CV reformatting, and because they've got structured data to work
with can even entirely recreate a new CV based on the candidate's data.

If you want to move into that market as a stand-alone reformatting product,
you'd need to integrate with the range of CRMs in use (Adapt, EZAccess, Itris,
etc - some of these have CV reformatting built in, too). This is a market
where they want it all to 'just work', and you'll end up dealing with some
really really demanding people.

And you also risk an established player deciding to extract out their
reformatting tool as a stand-alone product and leveraging their existing sales
network to block you.

Which is why I was suggesting OEMing it to CRM developers, which would let you
side-step companies like Daxtra. If the recruitment agency isn't doing enough
business to afford to get Adapt or whatever, then they're either just starting
up (and will drop you for an integrated solution as they grow) or about to
fail.

Edit: just looked at your profile, and I'm pretty sure you'll know all about
Daxtra. :o) If Volt aren't using it already, ask your account manage for a
demo of reformatter, and keep in mind that Daxtra could turn that into a
stand-alone SaaS offering pretty easily.

------
petercooper
I don't have a current one to share but back in 2005 I decided to do a 24 hour
project in Rails and built a tagged source code site called Code Snippets (it
wasn't the first code snippets site but the first with tagging to get any
traction). I let it run in the background with just a couple of tweaks here
and there for just over 2 years and it was making $1000ish per month from
Adsense with zero effort by me. I then sold it for a healthy 5 figures. It's
still running at a new URL: <http://snippets.dzone.com/>

~~~
nicksergeant
Interesting. I wrote <http://snipt.net> not long ago, but have had no such
luck with AdSense (only made about $30/mo on 30k monthly uniques). Would you
mind sharing your traffic that got you up to $1k/month?

~~~
petercooper
I think it was around 250k pageviews per month. I don't recall the uniques as
I don't pay attention to them (unless the visit-pageview ratio is really
weird). It looks like they have it up to around 600-700k per month now:
[http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=sm2snippets](http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=sm2snippets)

The butt fell out of Adsense for many areas in 2008-2009ish though and I've
never had any further success with it in the _developer_ space (though I did
very well in the mass market up till about 2009). I run some other reasonably
successful sites in the developer space and Adsense is basically a no-go -
results as bad as you've mentioned.

If I were in your shoes, I'd dabble with some affiliate programs. I've already
been doing this and having success on my developer focused sites. Only high
quality stuff but latest books, e-books, courses, events, etc. I notice you
have Carbon on there and if I recall correctly, they approached me and the CPM
was laughably bad (though this may have changed..), I want/need to be making
$5-10 CPM overall from display advertising.

------
ka010
I just recently realized how many great ideas and projects I've wasted over
the years with not riding them to profitability or even releasing them.

Now whenever I come up with something that doesn't leave me alone for a couple
of days I just go for it, without any expectations.

The last one I launched was a very simple iOS App
(<http://airlocationapp.com>) which was actually done in less than a weekend,
pitched to only a single blog and generated about $700 since launch, which was
roughly one month ago.

My best selling apps, a suite of remotes for iOS (<http://reemoteapp.com>)
actually started off as weekend project just like that but initially hit a
bigger niche and now turned into my main project/income.

~~~
pokoleo
I like the idea of the reemote app.

I can't read the text on your website though, and I'm sure that I'm not alone.
(the captions under the logos)

~~~
ka010
Thanks, I've stopped messing with the current site, gonna rollout a entirely
new one very soon.

~~~
freddy
Would love if you wanted to use <http://confered.com> for your mobile app
site.

------
asymptotic
I'm part of a project that's an art piece management solution for galleries to
use for exhibitions. Right now galleries use paper reports to track art pieces
between exhibitions, and we want them to use tablets. We currently have a
gallery interested in the project.

I'm the sole technical force behind the project. Front-end is on Android
Honeycomb tablets, back-end uses Erlang for the web server and middle-ware and
PostgreSQL for the database. I also work full-time so progress is a bit slow.

------
pbreit
I learned to program by creating an ecommerce service for my pet store
("Outlet" at <http://cheekob.com>) in my spare time. I am now broadening it to
help other sellers with a new selling format: automatic markdowns
(<http://pricetack.com>). What really helped me was the awesomely simple, yet
powerful Python framework Web2py.

------
joeconway
I taught myself Objective-C for fun last summer, then one day decided to
release an app. I spent about 3 hours coding then about a day sorting out code
signing, artwork, submission etc. As a result of that weekend I've ended up
getting a pretty nice side income from advertisements from the free version
and straight revenue from the paid version. In fairness, since releasing it
I've quite considerably improved the application but its still less than 800
lines of code.

<http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/tooloud-pro/id425137981?mt=8>

~~~
scottyallen
Clever idea. How much are you making from it?

~~~
joeconway
about $100 a month, more if i update it. 100K downloads and been featured a
few times in whats hot and N & N, almost got featured on the front page of
itunes too. Not bad given that I think the application is relatively
pointless. I just wanted to submit _anything_ so I could learn the submission
process

~~~
scottyallen
Wait, 100k downloads and you're making $100 a month? Those numbers don't seem
right to me... Still, nicely done:)

------
asymptotic
Ask HN: Who is riding _their_ weekend project straight to profitability?

FTFY.

~~~
amock
The correct pronoun is "his" since "their" is plural. While there is some
debate about this "his" is still acceptable as a neuter pronoun.

~~~
silencio
"their" may technically be plural, but in everyday English usage can be and
often is used as a singular pronoun. It's a lot shorter than "his or her" and
much more common than the likes of "zir". "Their" also has the benefit of
being gender neutral where even "his or her" fails, especially for genderqueer
people that do not identify with either pronoun.

It is also far less offensive than using "his" to reference all hackers on HN,
among which I fall into the female minority.

~~~
amock
My point was more that "his" is grammatically correct and didn't need fixing
than that "their" is wrong, but why is using "his" offensive? I see "her" used
often as neuter pronoun and I have never found it offensive even though I'm
not female.

~~~
paul9290
Using his is not PC, there are female hackers.

In my experience I thought only other guys coded and then I went for an
interview that went awful. I was interviewed by two people separately. First
was a guy, who was the Director of Development. Before he left the room, he
said Janice will be interviewing you next. I thought she must be the office
manager or HR person and during interview I said "Oh so you do the HR stuff
around here?" She said, "No, I code," to which I replied "You code - huh?"
Needless to say I didnt get that job, yet I learned something.

~~~
rachelbythebay
Your kind is more common than some might think.

"Hi, this is $obvious_female_name calling from $company for $candidate,
please?"

"Oh, I thought this would be a technical interview."

Result? Instant 1.0 score, which basically means that if you hire this person,
I will quit.

Turns out they've hired a bunch of those people anyway, and I quit anyway.

~~~
lawrencejohnson
If you were supposed to be performing technical interviews, why would you base
the candidates' ratings on something completely non-technical?

~~~
rachelbythebay
It's not just a technical interview. It's also a "should we hire this person",
and in that case, the answer is no.

------
ZaneClaes
Well I just started on a 28 day experiment... a bit more than a weekend, but
fun nonetheless. Myself and some other travelers are building a travel moabile
app for a contest. We're documenting the whole process and our steps so we can
publish our methods at the end... I'll post the whole thing at
<http://LifeByExperimentation.com> when we're done in about 3 weeks.

------
een1bhs
Made a little utility app for Mac that I needed, about 2 months ago, I was
giving it away free with donations but after a lot of emails promising
donations for this or that decided to flip the switch and start selling it.
Been selling for a week now making $100+ a day! Im working on a few other
projects in hope that combined they can become my main income.

~~~
spIrr
After a little search i found this <http://hddfancontrol.com/> — good work!
Looks good, i will give it a try.

~~~
een1bhs
:-) Good searching! Was shocked to see ycombinator show up on my site
analytics!

------
wowfat
We created one called <http://www.creatorfinder.com/> which helps developers
showcase their verified portfolio.

It also adds a watermark for images created by designers. That helps designers
to show verified websites that they have helped design.

No plans on making money yet. But we do have a fair number of registrations
every day!

------
freddy
I created an app called Scan4Points which uses your barcode scanner to get
nutritional information and calculate the WeightWatchers points. Actually my
wife had "forced" me to make it. She said it was finally something I made that
she could actually use. <http://confered.com/apps/Ryb70>

------
Jim_Neath
My most recent project is £18 in the black :D

~~~
spIrr
Purify, am i correct? Nice work, congrats on the positive income ;)

------
ignifero
I was doing facebook games as side projects a while back. Now they're my main
source of income.

~~~
bemmu
The year of the platform launch I made a small novelty app called Name
Analyzer. While scaling it ended up involving some work, the initial version
was made in a weekend. It no longer exists, but while it was still alive it
spread to a big portion of Facebook users. I got enough savings from it to
feel comfortable to fulfill my dream of moving to Japan and start working on
my own apps full time.

It got 9 million users and made quite a nice sum from ads.

~~~
ignifero
I remember you from the devs forum :). Hope you get big in Japan

