S3stat (http://www.s3stat.com) brings in enough to live on, and funded me while I was traveling last year and bootstrapping the next thing. It also has the advantage of pretty much running itself on autopilot, so I can sometimes go entire months without opening the IDE or doing anything beyond responding to the odd customer email.
I'd highly recommend building something like that (a low-maintenance income generating business) as opposed to the sort of zero income "shorten urls then tweet them from your location on your camera phone" thing that requires 14 billion users and a Google buyout before you see your first dime.
It's a strange niche to be in because it's something people are looking for but there was basically nobody doing it when I started out. It goes squarely against the two most fundamental pieces of business advice you can get: "Never build a business based on a missing feature of a popular software product", and "If there's no competition in the space, be warned: there's probably no market there".
Evidently, there are actually a few good left ideas out there that nobody ever thought of doing before.
It's something I've heard many times, and something that I agree with.
You want to build a business, not a feature. Unless you can come up with more features, it's difficult to grow the business.
Then of course there is the risk that your feature will come standard in the next version of "popular software product." If your audience is niche, then you are likely safe, but if your feature appeals to all users of the product, it's inevitable that it will eventually be included in a future version of the product. You end up doing the R&D for free.
I so very much agree with you. And once you make a small self sustaining site, you can then think of stuff that need not necessarily bring in money instantly but can be exciting to work on.
As somebody else deduced, the public site is ASP.NET.
The heavy lifting is done in C# as well, on a pile of EC2 machines that gets spun up each night. Back before EC2 Windows instances came out, it was running under Mono, with the help of a bunch of Ruby scripts to handle everything that Mono let me down on (such as ALL the downloading, uploading, talking to webservices, etc. that require pieces of .NET that is hard to implement and non-sexy and thus didn't get implemented by the Mono team).
Now it's all C#, leveraging a half dozen Amazon Web Services and running on EC2 Windows instances.
I'd highly recommend building something like that (a low-maintenance income generating business) as opposed to the sort of zero income "shorten urls then tweet them from your location on your camera phone" thing that requires 14 billion users and a Google buyout before you see your first dime.