

Ask HN: Side Projects Gone Big - outrightfree

This Ask HN made for a great thread a few years ago [1].<p>To quote from the original &quot;I&#x27;ve heard many of you love to create side projects for fun, but I also heard that few of them actually took off and grow into a profitable business. So feel free to list if you have any. Statistics will be welcomed as well!&quot;<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1772224
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implicit_none
www.lessonwell.com

I wouldn't say that this project of mine is "big" in the canonical sense, and
it is only meagerly "profitable" by a loose interpretation of the word; but
this has been a huge side project from my personal point of view. Essentially,
I started this when I was teaching high school full-time and needed a better
website for my calculus class. The "big" impact of this project is that it
opened a door to a new career for me: I'm now a full-time software engineer
and thus measure its profits on the order of my current salary, which is
hugely significant to me.

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rachelandrew
[http://grabaperch.com](http://grabaperch.com)

Started life as a side project of our consulting business, is now all that we
do. Not big as in making us millionaires big, but it's a profitable business.
I wrote about a lot of the story of Perch and the stuff we learned in my book
(another side project!) [http://rachelandrew.co.uk/books/the-profitable-side-
project](http://rachelandrew.co.uk/books/the-profitable-side-project)

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michaelbuckbee
[https://www.expeditedssl.com](https://www.expeditedssl.com)

A Heroku add-on I made at assist with SSL installation. Really deliberately
chose to build in someone else's ecosystem where I wouldn't have so much to do
myself.

