My little hardware book, Computer Engineering for Babies launched on Kickstarter a few months ago and blew my mind by raising almost $250k. It’s a simple book with buttons and LEDs to demonstrate different logic gates.
I just shipped out the first batch of books a week ago and now waiting for the next batch of books. It’s gotten pretty demanding pretty quickly but I’m really excited about it. I’m hoping I can soon employ my little sister to manage all the shipping. She’s been an Amazon driver for the last 2 years and I think she’d appreciate a change of pace.
Kudos for providing jobs. If I were to create a successful company, making others busy doing something nicer than what they would otherwise have given themselves would be the greatest accomplishment I could think of, professionally. But starting with oneself on exactly that is not a bad starting point, at all.
It adds more complexity to relationships, but it can also keep families/friends closer because they have more shared goals.
There are some cultures where family businesses, where most members of the family work and participate, are the norm. Quite a huge population of people operate that way.
I would be interested to hear other founders' first-hand experience with this.
In my experience, hiring my younger cousin for occasional work during school/uni breaks has been great, but involving close friends looking for work has been disastrous 3 out of 3 times.
My parents worked with my grand parents before taking over the business and I have occasionally worked with them through the years. You don’t really hire family members. They join you in the family business. It’s a different dynamic but I t doesn’t really cause issue because the family business has always been a part of our family life. The frontier between personal life and work is very blurry but that’s nothing unusual for SME owners.
There's a huge difference between bringing your children into the family business (presumably also preparing them to inherit it) and employing your sister to work for you at your business.
In my parents business it has been a disaster 100/100 times. All friendships all family relations have been completely destroyed by them trying to run a business together. I know it's just an anecdote, but yeah, I'd be careful.
>There are some cultures where family businesses, where most members of the family work and participate, are the norm. Quite a huge population of people operate that way.
Yes. Among Indian comunities, Gujaratis (particularly the Patel sub-community who own the majority of US motels, the Ambanis - Reliance group, big) and the Marwaris (some big Indian businessmen among them, like the Birlas, Ruias, Goenkas), are examples of this.
Possibly Kashmiris (handicrafts shops), Punjabis and Sikhs (auto parts shops, dhabas, etc.), Bunts (a Karnataka sub-community, Udupi restaurants), and Chettiars (gold and jewelry shops, money-lending, trading abroad) too.
And I am only writing about those I know about. There could be others too.
Their parents have no interest in turning their kids into programmers (to my great dismay!) but this looks like something they'll have a blast with anyway.
I saw a TikTok of your book another day, & saved it. Would love this for my future kid.
How do you manage sakes tax collection & other stuff like shipping & such? Assuming you are in US. Do you use Shopify or Etsy or dome online one? Did u apply for a seller's permit to deposit sales tax? If manually, how do you calculate sales tax, because its based on buyer's address right?
I haven’t spent much time on sales tax yet, but I do know there are Shopify plugins (tax jar being the one that comes to mind). I’m currently in Squarespace but don’t love it, and will probably swap to Shopify soon.
Looks so cool! Do you have any blog or writing to share on the actual process of producing the physical books, which are very customised? I.e. this isn't something someone could fulfill using Amazon's publishing service.
That’s on my todo list. The tldr is that I designed the circuit myself and just started messaging people on alibaba, and that’s how I found my PCBA shop and my book manufacturer.
Honestly, I don't see how "for babies" could be trademarked since it's a literal phrase describing the product. "For Dummies" is not used literally.
That's not to say generic words / phrases cannot be trademarked. Just look at Apple. However, trademarks for a generic term must be very limited in scope initially. If the brand obtains substantial recognition, then a broader trademark may be granted. These broader trademarks are typically reserved for household names. Even Apple had trademark issues when they entered the music industry due to Apple Records.
> Honestly, I don't see how "for babies" could be trademarked since it's a literal phrase describing the product. "For Dummies" is not used literally.
Neither is "For Babies" specific to the series I am describing. The book series is not for babies, as far as I am aware, very few, if any, babies are capable of reading, let alone fully understanding stories that are read to them.
"For Dummies" effectively means using laypersons language to convey complex topics more easily. Not, as you said, to literally mean the readers are of low-intelligence.
Likewise, "For Babies" effectively means using language, images, and story telling to convey complex topics more easily to young children, not just for literal babies.
I have about 6 years of applied AI experience and I have been trying to work on something that can use that experience and be useful to others.
Ended up building an analytics based platform that uses data analysis techniques to generate trade ideas for retail investors [0]. Started it as a hobby July 2019, but it ended up growing quite big. The plan was to generate about $1k/mo but we are generating about $120k/mo these days with over 3000 paid users. I think I'm the most fortunate person in the world, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine this much.
I still work on it solo and have no plans on hiring a team, because solo is where I have most fun, and that's important.
Selling hope to the hopeless. Nice. If any of this worked, you would either use it yourself to make FAR more than $120k a month or sell it to a quant fund for an 8-figure payout.
How do you answer the following inevitable questions?
If you have good trade ideas/signals, then why do you not use them yourself? I assume you do not use them yourself because it' does not make sense to share your edge (if you have one). If you do not have an edge, how can you be offering "trade ideas"?
These are common questions people ask that haven’t actually been involved in generating trades professionally.
But people who have don’t ask those questions because finding edge in the markets is actually pretty easy. Finding edge that is scalable is the hard part.
For professional traders it doesn’t make much sense to engage in all the small edge trades because it won’t pay more than your opportunity cost if you did something else. For retail traders that constraint isn’t true.
Now, I don’t have any idea if this particular product actually offers good trades, but it’s not true that as a class you can’t make more money selling profitable trades than you can using the trade yourself.
Well, sure - it could certainly be the case that it's easier to scale selling trade ideas than trading them on yourself - hell there's a whole industry around it (alphacapture). I am somewhat skeptical, especially as this is marketed towards retail who have fewer instruments to guage themselves if the product their getting actually offers trade ideas with positive expected value or not.
Same could be said about a concept of solo traders. If you are as successful as you claim why don't you run a fund? However, a lot of people do solo trading as its more of job/hobby where the only thing you risk is your capital. Plenty of people don't have stomach to deal with others lifetime savings? (or even potential of such person in your client pool)
Its different. Not everything scales as nicely and dealing with responsibility is going to become a burden soon. Here you are selling your advice, most likely all traders have similar access to this advice and can perform trades with their own judgement.
> Same could be said about a concept of solo traders. If you are as successful as you claim why don't you run a fund?
This doesn't make sense though, running a fund is not necessarily natural progression of being a successful trader. But if one says they have a real edge that the average retail trader can monetize, then why doesn't one just take advantage of it themselves as this is effectively the lowest size of scale.
Initially, just posted in a bunch of subreddits on reddit to get engagement. But the retention was quite low. I still used that engagement to get a couple hundred followers on twitter.
Afterwards, realized that twitter had the most solid trading community out of any other platform. So all I've been doing for the last one year is build a community on twitter now (and of ofcourse discord too since everyone's there these days). I try to post ideas from the system every day, and when people see them work and make some money off of them, they subscribe to the paid plan.
Discord has a massive portion of the overall trading community, so I created discord bots to pull data from the web product, and every data item had our logo on it. That helped quite a lot in expanding the brand name and reaching more people. We're in about 250 discords and reach about 100k members in them overall.
Finally, 12 hours of sitting in front of a laptop every day lol.
I bought a coffee farm in Colombia. Annualized it makes around $800 / month and growing. Should double to $1600 / month next year as we’ve doubled our production. It’s barely profitable, but is profitable nonetheless. The more we plant the more profitable it will get, and we’ll be planting 10,000 more trees soon!
I am dying to hear more about this. Please, if you have time and are inclined, write up a longer comment like some of the others in this thread describing how you got into it and what the process has involved. For starters, how much did it cost to buy the farm?
I can not find it now, but I recall reading a post from the (former?) founder/owner of a coffee company. His goal was to have an ethically justifiable supply chain, free from slavery and human exploitation. Or at least less of it. His conclusion was that this is impossible and became very disillusioned that due to various reasons he would not be able to not be part of the problem.
In my experience living in a poor country, most of the issues brought up against globalized supply chains are either made up or sensationalized by people in developed countries who lack perspective.
Low wages? Actually they are a really good entry-level option for people doing rural-urban migration. Expensive middlemen? They serve a purpose in the marketplace and smooth out logistical inefficiencies. Greedy multinationals? These are often dream work destinations for the locals.
I could go on and on... bottom line is, globalized supply chains aren't broken and don't need fixing
> In my experience living in a poor country, most of the issues brought up against globalized supply chains are either made up or sensationalized by people in developed countries who lack perspective.
Agreed. It's also being heavily used to put a thin humanitarian sheen on what actually boils down to racism/xenophobia - not in all cases of course, but to a significant extent.
> I could go on and on... bottom line is, globalized supply chains aren't broken and don't need fixing
I wouldn't go that far, I'd say instead that they're not particularly more broken/unethical than pretty much anything else in the business world, but are easier for media to point fingers at and sensationalize without getting into much trouble from businesses.
Would love to hear more about the entire story, from getting the idea, to searching for a farm to purchase, and taking over the day to day business, managing staff, etc.
After reading all this, I admit I feel kind of silly for working so hard (50-60h a week on average) to earn my Silicon Valley FAANG comp.
I am wondering how much survivorship bias is at play here, some ideas look relatively simple compared to the amount they bring in. Or maybe one really has to take the leap of faith and trust that there is demand for virtually anything?
Maybe it’s not so simple, my partner opened a small e-commerce store selling some genuinely nice craft she produces, and has been seeing $0 revenues even with some aggressive ads campaigns, so go figure.
My job currently compensates me above $1M a year depending on stock price (public FAANG company), so I never even considered it worthwhile to invest my evening/weekend time in a side project, and always funneled every second of non-recreational time back into my job. But maybe I’ve been doing it all wrong when I see people bringing in several thousands a month for minimal time investment after the product is stabilized.
To somewhat answer the thread: my “side project” is my investment portfolio of boring index funds, where I funnel all my savings. This year is up about 15% (unrealized gains) and realized income of ~$50k via dividends.
Certainly huge congratulations to the business owners, very humbling thread.
The powerful part of passive income isn't that you could make some more money, but that you could make more time. Even with a huge salary, you've sold your best 50 hours every week, as well as most of your mental energy. The richest people still have the same amount of time. Making $50k a year passively is worth so much more than making a few hundred thousand a year actively. It could mean having your whole life to yourself.
You are much luckier and more of a “survivor” than any of them I feel. I also work at Faang, but only graduated college last year and only make 200k a year, barely. I will never reach your income at a job with where the stock market is at now, and how much the competition increased, you rode the wave all the way to the top of the corporate slaves pyramid.
So I’ll quit next year to start something because otherwise I’ll never become anywhere near rich with my income.
I am not entirely sure your premises are correct, but it certainly boils down to personal opinions so no point in debating.
Just for fun, I went back to my 1040 tax statements for the first three years of my career, about a decade ago: $35k, $65k, $89k.
The fact that you are starting with $200k is fabulous and not to be taken for granted imho. If you are able to put the majority of your after tax savings in the market, compounding over a decade might surprise you even if we are at an all time high.
$200k is a lot, but it doesn't really go far in the bay area if you don't want to cohabitate.
That being said, people have done more with less under similar circumstances, and thinking $200k is not enough is harmful. I used to make $130k, then I made $90k, and now I make $300k and I don't feel any different, even though I once thought it would make me happier. I don't regret focusing on my career, but I now spend time doing things that make me happy instead of working all the time.
As the saying goes, "you can afford anything, not everything." it's important to determine what brings you most joy. For me, it's being able to buy meal kits so I don't have to worry about cooking (save time).
Of course, saving / investing money is important too.
I’m in a similar situation as a backend tech lead at a FAANG-like company but I also have a side project web app that generates about $500/month from ad revenue. I find that I learn a lot from the side project that helps me at my day job like front end development, ux, listening to user feedback, deployment all the way out to end users, and programming in other backend languages I wouldn’t have an excuse to play with at work.
Also the higher up I move on the engineering ladder at a bigger tech company, the more valuable it is to spend time doing things that aren’t coding. The side project lets me scratch my coding itch while doing the more valuable stuff all day.
Running a side project or a full business is not just about Money (even though money is imp. part of it). Lot of people just like creating things, sometimes they accidentally end up monetizing it and some are looking to create a product that can make some money but then doesn't take a whole lot of time to operate. However, most side project will never beat FAANG level income especially $1M incomes.
You are one of the most privileged people on the planet. Making 1M for working 50-60 hours is amazing. I say this as a business owner myself. So unless you have the real entrepreneurial itch to create something of your own, you are almost always better off working at a FAANG and investing all that cash that you already are doing.
In your position, you have so much leverage in the job market, the most sensible route would be for you to maximize on that. Get a silent auction going of companies bidding for your talents, then get a job that is fully on your terms
More importantly if you want to put survivorship bias on your side, never develop anything until you have a working sales funnel.
Put $1000 aside a month on a design and site for your idea, followed by a marketing person w/ a budget.
The screen following getting their card should be a page letting them know you aren’t onbaording new customers, their card hasn’t been charged and you’ll let them know when you’re taking on more customers (eg. The product is built)
> The screen following getting their card should be a page letting them know you aren’t onbaording new customers, their card hasn’t been charged and you’ll let them know when you’re taking on more customers (eg. The product is built)
If a website did this to me they'd also be getting a very angry e-mail and zero recommendations from me.
Yup agreed 100%. I see this often as a suggestion for testing your project hypothesis and I think it’s a terrible idea. Starting your relationship with a customer by misrepresenting your state of development is bad advice.
They aren’t customers as they haven’t bought anything.
Second not spending hundreds of thousands to millions in dev on a product with no market vs having to buy a new domain because your site went viral and you now have millions of bad reviews. (Hint: this never happens) Is great advice.
There’s also other ways to do it, my friend was creating a course so I got her to do all the marketing first, set a date six months out and used the proceeds of the first sales to fund development.
What I’m trying to get at is to verify sales you need to get people to put their money on the line.
Then you're not the target customer. I hear this often that people, especially on HN, don't like this tactic, but most people don't really care, they'll just shrug and move on.
For me at least, the answer is that my side projects are about more than money (though they are about money too!). Developing things myself is the primary goal - it’s deeply satisfying to build your own project from the bottom up without having to write specs, argue about design trade offs, do code reviews, etc. The fun is just being able to build without the social overhead. As soon as you have people working for you, that whole equation changes.
Honest question: why not leave FAANG/SV, take a relaxed remote job of maybe 30h/week and live in a low-cost, warm and cosy Mediterranean city (since you mentioned you're from Europe that shouldn't be a problem)?
In a similar boat. Out of curiosity, what's your target number? How do you make sure you're not getting stuck in an infinite "just need about 30% more" loop.
I'm thinking 3M in invested assets should do. If properly diversified (real estate + stock) that should be sufficient to generate about 90k/year of passive income.
Close to $10M for me, currently sitting on about $4M. I fully understand the 4% rule and a conservative 3% withdrawal rate wrt historical returns, but I have no confidence that those will continue to be true moving forward.
So for my calculations I am assuming my portfolio will have a 0% real growth, and that it will just keep up with inflation after volatility. In the best case I am expecting about 65 years to live (wildly optimistic), so my withdrawal rate is 1/65 ~= 1.5%.
I understand this might be overly conservative, but everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and when I pull the plug I better be damn sure I won’t go broke ever.
As mentioned earlier I should be getting there in about 5 years with some luck, so it’s not too long. If the luck won’t materialize maybe I will revisit my plan and the opportunity cost trade-off.
How is that silly monetarily? If extra work get's you even a 5% raise, that's $50k year pre-tax that will compound (with future pay bumps/stock grants). What is the equivalent amount of time to build a side project to that level? That said, if you spend extra time that does not translate into extra pay, it's essentially opportunity cost of a side income.
Silly because the two types of income are not fungible in my mind. With a job, I am a mercenary of my time and the income will dry up immediately if I decide to stop (let’s set aside the long tail effect of investing the savings). With a successful side project, it becomes a very passive income, like many people mentioned below.
Ultimately I guess I am genuinely jealous of people clawing back their own time, while I am working incredibly hard with life passing me by, that’s it.
I'm not sure if its realistic calculus to think you'll be easily able to make $1m passive income side project. Would you trade $1m a year for $100k passive?
It’s clearly tough to say without having a real opportunity in front of me, but if the passive income was diversified enough and with minimal time investment, I would most definitely trade my 60h/week job for a side project bringing a fraction of my current income (the exact fraction would be on a case by case).
I think I personally am at the point where time is a scarcer resource than money. Getting a lower paid job or consultancy is not an alternative either, both would still be too big of time commitments.
You’re doing well so I don’t think you are doing it wrong. But given that base, could you build a side project dedicating just a couple of hours per week to the effort? If/when it turns into a product, great. If not, you’ve not used up all of your free time making something. I’m obviously oversimplifying but curious if you think 2-3 hours of side-work per week is still a non-starter?
You're already earning 50k/year through dividends, if you can live with a lot less money then just quit and start some side project. Or just take a part time job and live for a while.
I think you answer this question when you say you “never considered it worthwhile to invest [your time] in a side project” but: how much of that perspective is based on comparing ways of earning income vs the desire to want to build something yourself?
I think for me it’s pretty clearly about maximizing the total income (immediate and cumulative for passive sources) per unit of time invested, as opposed to building something myself. This might also be the reason why I never actually started anything, which is just a different way of stating what you quoted from my previous message.
Maybe you have a case of “the grass is always greener.” 1 million dollars a year is a lot. Couldn’t you pretty easily save up and take 5 straight years off if you wanted? What’s to stop that from happening?
Fear. Specifically, fear that I would walk away from that kind of income forever and that I could become destitute in the future (I have a weird relationship with money, having grown up rather poor).
I have read your comments about income, spending patterns and dreams about a simple life in the Mediterranean.
You've played the money game smartly and won. You just don't seem to realise that yet. You've described fear of poverty instead.
Can I respectfully suggest you to consider seeing a good psychotherapist if that's not yet the case? A therapist can help you conquer your fear. Please do read my suggestion in the friendly way I wrote it!
No tips, it’s truly all about luck. My job is not particularly difficult or anything, I mostly herd cats all day without producing much, as I am at the whims of massively over engineered systems that are almost impossible to comprehend.
The only thing I would say that can affect your luck is to always say yes to any opportunity that has a chance of taking you forward, even if it is incredibly uncomfortable. A couple random decisions I’ve taken in my life that affected my luck:
- Relocate at a young age to the US from Europe, leaving a promised incredibly cushy job (imagine well paid, for local standards, European tech job with 60 days off a year etc) for a crappy internship at a no-name American company, with no promises whatsoever. I relocated entirely by myself, leaving family, friends and (ex) partner behind. I am still separated from them.
- Took some risks in my career, joining early stage startups to build experience while most of my coworkers would call me crazy for taking a 50% paycut from the job where we were all “stagnating” maintaining old systems.
- Accept new work opportunities even if they mess up your life. They said: “Do you want a job for a 50% raise in NYC?”. I said: “Yes Sir, I’ll be there next Monday and throw my San Francisco life down the toilet, break my expensive rental lease and convince my girlfriend who lives with me that we will have a long distance relationship for a while”.
- Live a frugal and minimalist life like a college student, it’s easier to take bets in your life when you don’t have a mortgage/car/kids and your monthly expenses are under $3k in a very expensive city.
Most people I know would say a sound NO to all the above, and I’m not saying they would be wrong in doing so.
I don’t have a clear plan for the future, right now I’m just accumulating assets until I get to a point where I can feel financially unbreakable. I might be getting there in ~5 years with some substantial luck, or never if shit hits the fan.
I decided a long time ago that I won’t have kids (not for financial reasons), so there is not much urgency in my life beside the itch to get back more personal time.
Current dream is to early retire with my partner in a small beach town in Mediterranean Europe, and live a simple life.
Good luck - does your financial planning team say you can retire now? The one at your bank? They can help define the details, if you've not done that yet.
I've been drawing pictures and publishing them as desktop wallpapers for ~20 years now, selling Vlad.studio accounts with unlimited access to downloads [0]. In 2021, I earned $4761, which means ~$400/month. It's not horribly little amount, especially for Russia (where I live), given it's a side project. However, I feel I need to do something more active, rather than just drawing new pictures.
Promoting and marketing is alien space for me (as well as for many other designers and developers here, I'm certain). Please wish me luck promoting and marketing my art in 2022 :-)
Thank you! Vlad.studio is not a big source of income these days, but it sure is a huge source of inspiration and appreciation. I am addicted to positive comments, I must admit :-)
Oh man! I've been a lifetime member for ...wow, two decades indeed!, and I have saved hundreds of your pictures. These have been my favorite desktop backgrounds almost exclusively (although I now make some generated art which sometimes is worth showing/using).
This might not be your cup of tea, but if you had facebook (even though I don't like them, this is how it's done) and twitter where you post one image every week or month, it might grow like it did for Alexander Jansson (https://illustratorcentrum.se/author/alexander_jansson/)
Thank you! I do have Facebook and Instagram and they seem to be my main source of traffic. Every week / month is the hardest part, but I'm hoping to make it happen in 2002!
Hi Vlad,
I love your pictures and I'm using your wallpapers for more than 10 years for sure on all my devices (including mobile phone). Hmm I did not check your page for some time, I think I know what I will be doing today .
I love your artwork, some of it reminds me of this style that I have bought prints of https://www.mateo-art.com/ You need to add the option to have prints delivered like they do!
Also, on your site it took me too long to realise that the 'next page' image was a link.
You know that if you really did just keep up the pace of new art and enjoyed it as a side project you might have a sustainable business in a few years stress free… or you could go the marketing route and possibly end up eventually hating the work.
I mean it could go either way, just make sure you also consider the upside of a fun (slowly / organically growing) side business.
I was there actually :-) Some time in 2010+-, Vlad.studio was my primary source of income. Good times! Then, life events happened, and I left wallpapers abandoned for several years. I've been increasing my pace of drawing last couple of years, and I do enjoy the comeback! However, I'm also honest with myself that you can't step in the same river twice. Or maybe you can :-) I'll draw and see!
thank you! I never actually learned to draw, and I still believe I am not good at drawing :-) but I'm a pretty good designer, so I practiced skills of turning my pencil sketches into polished designs. And a "favorite" visual drawing style naturally occured along the way.
Sell maybe $1k/mo of these through the website and another $3k through Amazon at a margin of around 50%.
The biggest things that I see a lot of people get wrong in the hardware business is the importance of manufacturing and logistics. It doesn't matter that you're constantly producing new and improved revisions of your board if you're out of stock all the time and overseas customers have to pay extra for shipping.
This literally made me say "WTF?!" when I went to the page.
I think you're burying the lede here. It's only $29 inc worldwide shipping! WTAF, that's awesome.
I'll be ordering one as soon as Christmas is out of the way.
Any plans to add an EU or UK distribution point? I'm prepared to wait the 2-3 weeks for free UK shipping tbh, but if you're adding more local distribution early next year I'd hold on.
Oh yeah, thanks for pointing that out. The one time I'm not in a shilly mood (Christmas and all) and the post actually gets interaction. Murphy's Law!
>Any plans to add an EU or UK distribution point?
Sorta kinda maybe. I did have one, but a whole lot of VAT compliance bullshit caught up with me. In most countries, GST/VAT is handled automatically by large eCommerce platforms (if you sell something on eBay to an Aussie, for example, we'll pay 10% GST regardless of the item's physical location and the seller won't even necessarily know).
However, the EU requires every single individual business with any stock located on EU soil to register and file individually in every single country where the stock is distributed regardless of revenue. I can only assume this is to create jobs for bureaucrats.
Now that Brexit has happened and the UK's laws have changed to something sane, I'll probably get something set up over there. This will be months, though. Trying to set up a (different) startup while raising a small child means a lot of Espotek stuff gets pushed to the side!
> Now that Brexit has happened and the UK's laws have changed to something sane
Interesting perspective - in the main everything around international trade got a whole lot more complicated for us here in the UK since leaving the EU.
VAT is just as complicated as it used to be, especially if you sell into Northern Ireland. The only thing that improved is we don't have to do those bloody EU sales lists.
> However, the EU requires every single individual business with any stock located on EU soil to register and file individually in every single country where the stock is distributed regardless of revenue. I can only assume this is to create jobs for bureaucrats.
You've just misunderstood what EU was it's not a . You have to file individually in every country because they are individual countries: you wouldn't expect to file for VAT also once for all Asia, would you?
Yeah, I might have read the parent comment, thought "oh neat, good on ya", and not thought more of it if you hadn't pointed out that it's $29. Also it has open source software! Which runs on Linux! I had to order one just now for the funs and learnings.
Good job AussieWog93, and all the best to your business!
The logistics are covered by a mixture of Amazon FBA (USA/Canada) and a Chinese 3PL company (all other countries). The only orders I handle myself are the Aussie ones, as well as large orders to overseas universities.
I try to keep at least 6 months' work of stock at any time spread across multiple locations. Given the way social media and online communities work, sales tend to be very bursty. When it got on Hackaday, for example, I sold something like $12k worth in a weekend.
I did run into issues at the start of COVID, as American universities would place huge orders or ask 100+ students to do it individually, but we're now robust to this too!
In terms of manufacturing, this is also outsourced. Full PCBAs are made by a group in Shenzhen. The only work done in-house is packaging them. Combined with the above, this makes the chain immune from the Slashdot effect. If (when) we go viral, I just fulfil every order remotely and then replenish the stock with a large order.
I built a board game in 2021 that has been just breaking the cutoff for this post, all I do is mail out a few games a week as we get orders. We do all our own fulfillment to save money. Currently trying to design a real video game. I got lucky with the board game because it targeted a really niche audience (rock climbers) and so we weren't really competing with the full board game market, which is honestly super saturated. I think launching a real video game will require taking a similar strategy, and I have some good ideas for this. If you know how to do 3D modeling and animation and have always wanted to make a game as a side project, send a message.
For anybody thinking of following on this path, I would say it's not really worth it except as a fun hobby. I didn't keep track of hours designing/testing very well but we're almost certainly way below minimum wage on the project. Although I've learned a lot about how to make games which has been really cool. You'll make a lot more money if you don't have to manufacture a real product and deal with the high costs of freight and postal shipping. If anybody is curious you can look up "5.15 climbing card game" on google and you'll find it!
On a discussion thread like this one, I think there is no shame in providing the homepage URL. Here it is after using your Google hint: https://five15game.com/
Awesome project. I initially youtube'd you, and there was no mention of your card game. I then startpage'd you and found a kickstarter page with a pretty well-made video... why don't you crosspost your video to youtube? and why don't you get someone to review it?
good point... I'm not sure why we never made the youtube video public. Thanks for bringing it up! This is why I feel like making that first game was good practice, I won't make these mistakes for the second one.
1. Does it have a good rating / breakdown in the BoardGameGeek forums?
2. Does it have a review on YouTube that showcases the main game mechanic?
Ideally, a third party review is always better. The board game community is not a harsh one (it's not like you have oceans of "this game sucks!" reviews -- there is a lot of love for the art) but a third party just seems more... relatable. They are also just trying to have fun.
I really like the idea of games for a niche audience. Does your game lend itself to being a "print & play" game? I launched a Print & Play version of my (very) niche game[0] because I didn't (yet) want to deal with the physical manufacturing and it's been a pretty good experience. Have you written about your journey on creating or manufacturing the game?
In early 2022, I'm going to manufacture a small number of the game using The Game Crafter (it's more than just cards), but the whole idea of manufacturing 500 copies and the logistics of shipping are daunting.
Looks like a fun game, I'll pass that on to some climber friends. Curious - where did you get the cards printed at? Working on a card game myself, but have been putting off researching that much after getting overwhelmed with options.
Depends on scale. For our initial play-testing I bought a bunch of plastic card sleeves and regular playing cards, and then printed out the 3"x5" game cards on my home printer. The playing cards are to make the card sleeves stiff and this way you can really quickly swap out your cards while play testing.
For prototyping the box and the demo copies we tried a few different print shops that operate in the US. The easiest by far is the game crafter, their website lets you upload and proof your cards through a web portal and I found that to be really good for not making mistakes. Unfortunately their quality is lower because the print runs are so small and the cost is pretty high.
If you get to large scale production (>500 copies) you can start getting things printed for reasonable cost. You can work with a chinese manufacturer directly (a bit risky for a first time project) or use one of the US intermediaries. Panda games is probably the best option there, but their minimum run is 2000.
Thanks for the information and details! Yeah, we're using blank poker cards now and just drawing on them for play testing and that has worked well. I'll check out Game Crafter as a next step as I want some nicer sets to send to friends to help play test.
I started an OSS project to enable me and my team to receive webhooks at a big co where Ngrok was banned and so was SSH. It works over an HTTP proxy using websockets. One of the requirements I had was for 1st class container support - so it could be run inside a K8s pod and support LoadBalancers for TCP traffic as well as HTTPS. The OSS project was very popular, but drew very little sponsorship. I then pivoted to a commercial license and got some more sign-ups, but not as many as I wanted - companies were happy to pay up front for a one year static license, but individuals and home users were not.
So I introduced a personal tier that was covered for commercial use - inspired by Jetbrains and added a monthly subscription option for it. Both of those actions helped increase usage and signups with personal users. Companies still tend to want to pay for a year.
Even though this is completely self-hosted software, developers seem to like paying for tools monthly. Some abuse this by cancelling the subscription in the months they don't expect to use a tunnel, or opening the software then cancelling the subscription and waiting until the process has to restart before re-subscribing. Not much I can do about this side of it.
If people are interested, the product is called inlets and is easy to find on the Internet. I also write about my OSS and independent business work each week in a subscription newsletter using GitHub Sponsors (another side project, if you like)
Books I could recommend: Monetizing innovation, Obviously Awesome, 1-Page Marketing Plan & Minimalist Entrepreneur. I'm not affiliated with any of these titles, but consider them core reading for indie devs and for side gigs.
>Some abuse this by cancelling the subscription in the months they don't expect to use a tunnel...
I think I understand how the second case you list would be abuse. If I'm understanding correctly, they're having a tunnel active without a subscription. Is that right?
I don't understand why cancelling a subscription when you know you aren't going to use the service would be considered abuse though. I'm asking as someone who do that without considering it might be abusive until I read your post.
That short notice cancellation flexibility is something I look for in a service, and it enables to sign-up for things I'm unsure of without being tied to them, or I can't afford a commitment to. If there was a minimum contract length, there are services I wouldn't bother with at all.
I generally do it with larger companies though. I look at it as, "I'll pay for what I use, or I won't use your product." (Crunchyroll, the anime streaming with the worst stagnant platform being the example that springs immediately to mind.)
Is there something specific to the way they do it or to the nature of the product? Or is it just a dick move to do specifically to a lone dev or something?
I don't know if I can even call it a side-project any more. I stopped working professionally 3 years ago.
Bought an e-commerce business that was making ~$2k/mo profit and ran it on the side while I had my DevOps job.
That project has now turned into ~$30k/mo profit, and I've bought two more e-com businesses that average ~$10k/mo between the two - these are early and I expect them to scale up once I smooth out a few bumps.
I go through phases of a lot of work, and next to no work. Depends if I'm busy on growing the businesses or just want to enjoy the income. I'm out of 95% of the day-to-day operations and I have a team of 3 that handle most things.
If you don’t mind me asking, what are the e-commerce sites? Also, how does one get into such a business? Were you interested in this space beforehand or did you simply acquire a business that looked promising?
In my personal interactions with people in the e-commerce/drop shipping space, the odds of them telling you what they sell is extremely slim. The barrier to entry for anyone else is very low, so once someone has a winning product, they remain very tight lipped about what exactly it is.
Seconding the interest in this. Some research showed that SoulCeramics and ZenConcessions are two of the commenter's businesses, but I would love to hear details on how he found them, decided to buy them, and then dealt with operating them. Selling popcorn machines and pottery kilns, such fascinating niches to become wealthy off of.
Unfortunately, he won't tell you, because like someone else said, the barrier to entry is so low, that their only real competitive advantage is other people not knowing about the opportunity.
Hi,this sounds amazing. If you have to to post, do you have any advice how what level design f competence is required to analyse a business like these before buying?
Also how did you find the businesses.
If anyone is curious, czue and I chatted about how he built and hosts Place Card Me at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/39-place-card-me-let.... Basically a full break down of his tech stack, lessons learned, etc.. It also touches on his Django SaaS example app he linked above too.
Really nice to see your Django boilerplate is pulling in those figures, congrats.
I literally shared your /open/ page the other day, I find it very cool that you have a USD/hour and that for static-ish projects it makes sense that it only increases! That does put a lot of perspective, since I feel it's similar to some of my open source projects (minus the $) in that it just keeps on giving value.
Awesome, so cool you are sharing it and that's exactly the goal I have (both for myself and to inspire others).
I had the idea of adding a "time travel" feature to it, so you can see literally how terrible the numbers were early on. My hourly rate for the first year was about $3!
This is awesome! Your dashboard is awesome too. I’ve been wanting to track time spent on my side projects, but I’ve never implemented anything. You have a chart for your time spent! So I’m wondering what you use to track that with?
You may want to use Paddle (which takes a bigger chunk of your profits) for that or some other marketplace: in that way Paddle is selling to end customers, taking a cut and then paying you in a business to business transaction.
You are also responsible for other types of taxes (assuming you are working via a limited liability corporation): sales taxes / VAT, corporate taxes, personal taxes, capital gain tax.
Some countries allow you to do some trading without setting up a company but as your earnings go up it will become either not very efficient from a tax perspective or not allowed by the law.
From my experience:
You need to pay VAT in European countries no matter where you're selling from (I use vatlayer.com for getting all the different VAT rates).
You generally don't need to pay taxes in other countries until you reach a threshold of earnings / number of sales.
Quaderno.io is another service which track all these different factors for you.
Sales tax / VAT is displayed and charged to customers and you need to pay it to the relevant authorities every quarter.
Then you can pay yourself a salary (which is a cost) from the money you received in the company, based on your country's personal income rates.
On what's left, on your company's profit you need to pay corporate tax rate, based on your country's corporate tax rates.
On the remaining profits in the company you can generally chose to pay yourself dividends (on which you pay other taxes, based on your country's tax rates on dividends).
If you sell your company, you'll have to pay capital tax gain taxes on the profit you made with the company (the delta between the company's capital and how much you sold it for).
Do you mean, sales taxes or personal income taxes? How a person manages those depends on their country. If you can, hire an local accountant to help or at least get advice. If the amounts get large enough you may need to open a business for yourself.
Someone already added a great summary below, but yeah the short answer is "it's complicated". I personally have a single LLC for the businesses and also now hire help to make sure I'm compliant.
When you say invested, was this as in time (you wrote the content and worked on SEO yourself), or did you pay to outsource this? I'm struggling with this myself at the moment.
Hi Cory—your dashboard is really impressive. Did you have to reboot the wedding place card app? Because I remember you commenting somewhere—I can't remember where—that it had tanked. But obviously since this is an end-of-year report that can't be true, right?
Just curious- how did you advertise/market your saaspegasus solution? I Google “boilerplate python and Django SaaS app” and your site is not front page, so I figured SEO probably isn’t the answer.
That's odd. It's mostly SEO and content, actually.
I believe it's in the front page for Django SaaS, Django boilerplate and related terms. I haven't gone as hard after Python keywords, though I probably should...
Your Open Project Dashboard is really cool. Do you have a system for keeping track of everything? Is it somehow automated? I'd like to create something similar for my own work.
Thanks! The tech behind it is pretty embarrassing.
Source data is Stripe (profit), Toggl (hours) and a tiny amount of manual accounting for expenses. I manually dump the raw data once a month into a CSV file, and then have some Python scripts that do intermediate calculations and transform the output to JSON. Then a tiny bit of JS to wire up the charts. So, in short, not automated at all, but takes ~10 minutes a month to keep up to date!
Love that dashboard! Makes me wonder what your Line Impact would be for the various projects, seems like you get a lot of business value from each line of code.
Probably the secret is that I try to spend as much time marketing as I do coding... (I usually fail but I'm guessing I still manage to market more than most devs)
Place cards was a ton of content, SEO and a long game.
Chat stats is so niche that I've literally just shared it a couple times on reddit and that's basically it. But somehow Google has figured out to show it for relevant queries.
I went full time independent in June of this year which gave me a lot more time. Since then I've averaged 60-80 hours a month on it, so I guess it's approaching a half-time job...
I am surprised you're making $1000/mo when you're not printing and sending out the cards. Have you thought of doing that? Would it make it more profitable?
Yeah, I'm sure it would but it would also increase the complexity a lot. I like how simple and low-touch the business is - it's one of my primary criteria for choosing projects!
I made that cool frontend for FTP server with an interesting twist as I've abstracted:
1. the backend storage: meaning it connects to a wide range of existing storage like FTP, SFTP, S3, Dropbox, ...
2. the authentication layer: meaning you can use your own identity provider to put your S3 buckets behind your corporate SSO
3. the authorization layer to create business rules
At its core, the software is a framework to develop file manager like web applications by implementing a simple interface (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/f7a4e52703...). This does enable all sort of interesting use case. For example, the mysql implementation shows database name as first level folder, tables as second level folders and each row in a table is shown as a file within the table folder which a user can edit directly through the generated form built from the schema information. That way people who are used to the Dropbox interface can edit the database directly, create shared links, search through stuff without having to know about sql
Most of the money comes from companies who needed various degree of customisation and support or didn't want to host on premise.
seo and specifically creating online tool for niches like "ftp online", "sftp online", "s3 client online" and referral from existing customers who share the product with others.
We sell glass water jugs targeted at desk workers, to help remind you to drink enough water. I created it because I wasn't drinking enough water.
Running paid ads has been very hit or miss, and I don't have a knack for the marketing. But word-of-mouth has been good for us and we get the odd corporate sale here or there.
Pigcat, if you ever need advice for marketing ideas, feel free to pm me. I have a 14 year marketing career under my belt spanning growth & inbound for B2B/B2C/D2C businesses.
I know exactly what it's be unable to come up with the ideas that stick in putting your product in front of a receptive audience of buyers. Especially in this day and age, where it can feel hard to find the confidence or angle for an organic non-spammy message.
That's pretty brilliant. I have the same problem, and I think the time gradations are a perfect solution.
I saw your other comment about down-selecting factories. How do you do quality checks? For example, as a wild hypothetical, how do you know the product isn't made in hazardous environments or isn't safe?
I did do a bit of QA myself: dishwasher cycles; hot & cold liquids (a good test of borosilicate glass); drop tests from very low heights (it is glass after all).
Most factories worth their salt also undergo some third party testing and I asked for these certificates which detail the chemical breakdown of the glass. Granted, I suppose these could be forged, and I would have no way of knowing.
Finally, there is quite a lot of back and forth with videos on Whatsapp, where you see the factory floor, and get a sense of the type of show they're running.
Part of the down-selection process is also just how willing each factory is to engage with these types of questions!
This is awesome. Great idea, great execution, and great story. You scratched your own itch and turned it into a business. Thanks for sharing the project and background.
I found a factory on Alibaba. I started with a list of about 40 factories that seemed legit and might accommodate a small order (MOQ in their terminology). Since it was a custom shape that I wanted, I shared my designs, and after a bit of back and forth, I eventually settled on 4 factories. I paid for a sample from each, and one factory was far superior. I then had to negotiate down from a MOQ of 2000 units to eventually do a first order of 200 units. Once that one sold out, I ordered 400 units, and now I order 1000 units at a time.
Fulfillment is done in house (I live in Toronto), and the warehouse is my basement!
ahh very awesome! i do have one other question at the moment. is it common for the factory to provide individual packaging already for certain size of products or is it more like sending a pallet over and packaging is sourced elsewhere? thanks so much for entertaining this - this thread has been really cool!
As a disclaimer - I don't have a lot of experience manufacturing in China, but I can tell you what I learned from my experience! And from what I can tell it is extremely common, yes.
Our factory works with other factories they know to provide that kind of thing. For our first order they gave us a choice of plain cardboard boxes or white glossy ones. These boxes were clearly custom shaped because they fit the product perfectly. After selling the first 600 units, I then asked them if we could customize the packaging with a design, and they sent us what's called a "dieline" (google it). Our designer did up a nice design on top of the dieline and that's what we're still using.
From memory, I think it was something like 45 cents more per box for the colour printing.
Another example is a little info page that we include. At the beginning I was printing them at a print shop, then opening each box, putting it in, sealing it back up, etc. I eventually asked the factory if they could do that as well, and they did (for a small additional fee)
I bought one too. I tried to make the giant water bottles work and they just don’t for me. They’re too clunky to use. I like that this pitcher is made of borosilicate glass and has a good profile for desk usage. Good job OP.
My life-partner and I both used to work in separate WeWorks, for our full-time jobs. My colleagues (and hers) were very supportive and bought a couple, then people would see them around on desks and word-of-mouth kind of just spread that way! The product benefitted from a bit of a viral effect in the pre-pandemic days :P
Also, one thing I'm really proud of is that a lot of our sales (around 12%) come from repeat customers. I've reached out to many of these customers and a lot of them tell me they buy the first one for themselves, and then the next orders are gifts for their friends.
Eventually I started running facebook ads. That worked pretty well for a while but I really noticed a change after the iOS privacy ads opt-in change. I've run experiments with reddit/pinterest/facebook/instagram ads since, and paid ads are overall just not profitable, at least the way I'm running them! We stopped running paid ads entirely two months ago, and I wish I had stopped a long time ago.
My side project of screen scraping campground websites and alerting people of availabilities has taken off to the point of making more a month than the day job.
Congrats! How did you manage to support so many camps? Do they use just a few reservation engines that you had to code for?
There's no credit card requested for reservation?
Congrats! This was a problem i had no idea existed until i wanted to rent an rv for a trip last year. The whole space is a mess. Definitely bookmarking for future reference.
I designed a healthier men's dress shoe and was able to gain close to $100K in preorders in a Kickstarter this past September; https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oaka/oaka-the-worlds-he.... Hopefully it doesn't stay a side project for too much longer, fingers crossed.
I launched a successful Kickstarter a few years ago. Getting press coverage is critical, but it's difficult to get press to cover something that isn't yet available. To overcome this catch-22, you can (1) have a product that is somehow attached to a current trend in the news, or (2) have enough progress that you can convince journalists that it's not vaporware.
It also helps to have an existing network that would be interested, for example from a related product.
There are companies that you can pay to do marketing. I didn't use one of those, since it seems like many of them probably suck out all the profit from any Kickstarter that actually succeeds. But I imagine some of them could be good partners, depending on what you're making.
>have enough progress that you can convince journalists that it's not vaporware.
I second this. I launched my first and only campaign back in 2016, but even then media outlets were wary. Back when crowdfunding was new and exciting, many of them featured products that turned out to never launch. Once bitten, twice shy.
Those marketing companies can also be a good way to give you the initial market reach with kickstarter so that later on, when you make your product available outside of kickstarter, you have an established customer base. It can be worth losing the profit of the initial run for this.
It's free to use and download with an optional Pro subscription that includes additional features and makes > $500/month.
Key things that have helped the revenue in 2021:
- Released a major new version 3.0 which blocks all YouTube ads and has kicked along sales and improved the conversion rate considerably
- Apple's small business program began this year that only takes a 15% cut instead of 30%
- After a long time developing and updating the app, it now includes most features requested by users, so it's achieved a 4+ star rating on the App Stores
- Downloads were originally weighted heavily towards the macOS version but it is now getting more usage on iOS which is growing the overall sales volume
How much is the Pro subscription please? I can't see it listed on the homepage, and if I go to the App Store page, the "yearly subscription" is listed multiple times at $30 or $15.
The optional Pro subscription is $US30 p/a (with differing prices in other regions).
There's also the free version of the app which includes ad blocking along with a 1 month free trial of the Pro version available in-app to see if it's useful for you before committing to a full year.
Yes it's possible to build ad blockers on Safari using the Apple content blocker API. Support was also added for Web extensions in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey.
The web extension support is what enabled us to deploy complete YouTube ad blocking on iOS in Safari – previously it wasn't possible to do this reliably just with the content blocker API.
On iOS, Firefox Focus (a single tab browser) comes with a content blocker. Hush is another good content blocker. Of course, Magic Lasso (free or paid).
I've only experienced the dictatorial context of Chrome on Android, so would never have fathomed something like this would ever pass policy. Hence I didn't quite pay proper attention to the copy on the website, which does note that it works on iOS. Thanks.
Magic Lasso is what enabled me to finally stop using Chrome on my personal devices and just use Safari. I’ve been a happy (and paying) Magic Lasso user for over a year since I heard you advertise on some Mac podcasts.
All revenue is generated via in-app purchases, and it is about 60% iOS, 40% Android.
People download and print a mission PDF with all the physical cut-fold-and-draw puzzles, then the app offers a $1.99 in-app purchase to unlock the audio narrative/gameplay for that mission. Most revenue comes from mission packs, which are $6.99 for four missions.
I am doing zero advertisement, if just works by word of mouth. I think that is because the game is a very fun and social activity. I also see hundreds (!) of custom missions being created for Christmas in the Mission Editor, there seem to be a lot of escape room-savvy Santas this year.
(I am really happy paying the App Store/Play Store the commission, by the way, as they handle the global tax management - I wouldn’t want to send a tax report to every country in which some user made a $1.99 in-app purchase…)
Definitely a valid point, which is why I use Paddle on my website. 30% is still a huge fee for that, Paddle only charges 5% for example (and that includes payment processing fees).
Ad rates are around $3 CPM meaning for 1000 page views you get $3 so do the math. Sudoku sites are unusual since one page view can last hour(s) as the user solves the puzzle.
I figure since people are posting things making many times the $500/mo threshold, I should post something making many times less. :)
It's actually pretty cool to just wait a few months and come back to a stash of money. Bought a Quest 2 the other day and didn't give it much thought, partly because of little eggs like this.
The effort to grow it is pretty high relative to the returns, but it's also a lot more "sticky." Normal profit streams dry up if you ignore them, whereas I've had my band of faithful patrons for a long time now. People just like supporting those doing work that resonates with them.
I just visited your website, and had fun in the "small internet" sense. Thanks :)
I was very surprised your pages had a .gmi extension but were actually normal html. Then I figured your "memex" engine probably automatically translates gemini content to html and doesn't bother changing the extension (which in retrospect is more of a feature than a bug). Very nice.
I noticed your search engine is not available on gemini. Any plans for that? The spirit of the search engine is a perfect fit for the gemini ecosystem!
Yeah, the memex straddles both protocols, and the urls are the same save for the protocol. It's essentially a single user wiki based on git and gemtext.
The search engine is available on Gemini, just not at that address. Try gemini://marginalia.nu/search
I think I used to have it on the front page, must have fallen off. That, or I removed it because it would confuse HTTP visitors.
I'm planning a bit of a navigation overhaul soon. Right now it's very hard to find all the various projects I'm running anywhere other than at https://www.marginalia.nu/
It brings in right around $500 a month. It is fun to develop, especially that I can dabble into frontend and UI design which is quite far away from what I'm doing daily.
Interestingly, it used to bring in much more but the heydays of apps are over.
I also have an app. It’s interesting I read here on HN about how it would be nice for companies to not sell private data to 3rd parties. I don’t collect data, yet it seems most people aren’t willing to pay even a few $ for software.
On the other hand, the Ti-89 still selling for >$100.
In my experience, a lot of these paid apps are gold, but discovery is tough. The mainstream, ad supported alternative gets all the eyeballs. Maybe there should be an index of tracking-free software, if there isn’t already.
It's kind of shocking though that 1 million downloads equals "only" $500 in ad revenue. I would have expected a much higher value. May I ask what the install base is?
As others said, the active number of downloads is way lower (50k). Even then, I'm pretty bad at marketing and have no idea how to grow it or optimize the monetization.
It seems from 10 ideas 9 doesn't work and even the 10th brings only modest results.
Probably because the user base is by definition pretty small. I never used a graphing calculator and neither see any use for it but those who do use it and know what it is have probably found it already. Seems to me marketing for such a niche product has very fast diminishing returns.
Don't determine the users language by the country the request is coming from. My browser wants English, despite me being in Germany, so don't show me the German page. The good thing though was that besides the language selector nothing else was translated.
I was recently looking for an email forwarding service to use for a few months, initially I was searching Github for a decent OSS project that could do this for me, which is when I found your repo for Forward Email.
The repo code was exactly what I was looking for, but after browsing your site and noticing how open and transparent it all was, I was instantly sold and bought the Enhanced package.
So ultimately, your open source code and business transparency[0] is what convinced me to pay instead of self-host.
We're working on Spam Scanner because we weren't happy with rspamd nor SpamAssassin or any other archaic or non-trivial closed-door tech.
See https://spamscanner.net for more!
Quick question that I couldn't find in your FAQ: Can you reply to forwarded emails? As in can you communicate back and forth with someone sending emails to an alias?
I've used a free email forwarding service which didn't give me this functionality (maybe this isn't common practice).
It's something that seemed small and simple to implement, but has filled a not-insignificant portion of nights and weekends for over six years now. Then covid came around and dried up most of my consulting income, so I figured why not really prioritize it and see how far it can go? Still small, but growing nicely now.
Also reluctantly abandoned the flawed "build it and they will come" mentality and started splitting time evenly between development and marketing. This has probably contributed more to the project's recent growth than several thousand hours of dev time. Take heed, o ye ambitious developer-founders! :-) Recommended resources: Product-Led Growth, Developer Marketing Does Not Exist, 80/20 Sales and Marketing, BusinessOfSoftware.org talk videos, Microconf talk videos (on YouTube).
My 'side project' is pretty conventional, but it surprises people to learn how much I've earned from it with very little effort. At least once or twice a week, I use my lunch break to walk to the local thrift store. I look up items on eBay as I browse and buy anything that would net me $20+ (basically to cover my lunch). I stick to the 'hard goods' section (things like electronics, games, DVDs, home appliances, books, etc). I avoid clothing which is difficult to browse quickly, difficult to list and difficult to find comparable items. I also avoid anything that would be unwieldy to carry home or ship.
The first year I started doing this, I grossed about $20000. Last year was bad. Our thrift stores shut down because of Covid. In late June of this year, I started back up slowly because our thrift stores came back. My gross for the last six months is $3,238.63. And again, because of Covid, I've stopped going daily like I was which cut into my fun money.
Last year I bought a brand new pinball machine from my thrift store finds.
Some tips:
If you can go every day, you only have to look at the 'new' stuff which saves lots of time.
The eBay app has a barcode scanner so you can look up anything that's in its original packaging by just scanning it.
Don't pass up anything vintage looking that's still sealed (even if it looks worthless). I sold nearly $100 worth of new in package vintage incandescent bulbs a little while back. I got the lot of them for like $10.
Save all the boxes you have coming to your house in advance of starting this. You can't sell stuff that you can't easily box up and ship.
Never use the post office or UPS/FedEx store. You can get a significant discount through pirateship.com (free to use, offers steep US Postal and UPS discounts) or even eBay's own shipping.
EDIT: A few more tips...
Once you're shipping at least one thing a week, buy a label printer like a Rollo Thermal Printer. It will save you lots of wasted time and energy in printing out, cutting the shipping label to size, taping it to the package securely, etc.
Invest in a good industrial shipping tape gun (not those cheap little plastic ones), get good brand-name shipping tape and a couple of large rolls of bubble wrap... also, start saving the packaging that comes into your house from your online purchases to be reused.
Get a bunch of 'newsprint' packing paper for packing up your stuff.
Basically: don't cheap out on supplies.
Stay organized. I use a set of plastic bins in the basement to store my items once they're listed.
As someone who used to have to buy everything secondhand, this makes me sad. I can't tell you how exciting it was to find something that you wanted but knew you couldn't afford going for a reasonable price at the thrift store. I feel like by buying up all of those quality items, you're depriving people in less fortunate situations from experiencing the same sort of happiness.
agreed, this is scummy. thrift and secondhand stores exist to serve a certain underprivileged segment of the population. not to facilitate arbitrage. but to each their own.
I’m on the fence about whether this is scummy. On the one hand, it is diminishing an institution that families like my own relied on to have halfway-decent things for our home. On the other, thrift stores could sell these things themselves and have more revenue to support charitable causes if that’s what they should be doing. I don’t think GP is a scum bag, but when a VC backed iPhone app shows up to gig-economize mass thrift store raiding and selling online I’ll be bothered.
That said, I don’t think “we shouldn’t let everybody shop there then” is meaningful. Means testing is itself expensive and would likely penalize the very people who need thrift stores. Some things depend on the members of a society having a shared sense of what is and isn’t decent. Halloween candy is free but if I organize gangs of kids to empty out every candy bowl and sell it online, Halloween won’t be any fun.
A lot of the quality stuff in thrift stores is bought by professional buyers and resold. I'd guess 90%+, it could be country dependent. It's part of the thrill to find underpriced items and make a good profit. If there are still a lot of bargains to be made at your local thrift stores, expect these bargains to disappear when pro's discover them or when stores discover that they underprice. Whatever is still left as a bargain is simply your niche knowledge advantage.
I recently found pirateship and it is indeed significantly cheaper than retail shipping prices. I told my mom about it and she refused to believe it isn't a scam!
USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc. all charge consumers "retail" prices that have very high profit margin for them. Businesses negotiate significantly lower rates that are closer to the real shipping cost. Pirateship acts as a broker, allowing people to access those lower negotiated rates.
Same here, though I'm more keen on finding free items on the curb and/or posted on FBMP and CL. I also buy a fair amount from those places as well. We sold a Jeep Wrangler interior carpet set for $175 + shipping that we picked up for free from FBMP.
Right now making about $500/month with $150 going to a 10x10 climate controlled storage unit. At the door going into our unit is a dumpster and we found about 5 huge bags of toys that my wife is going through and listing. We've sold about $30 worth of free stuff from that single dumpster.
In July 2021 I did really well but was going balls to the wall with it and probably made close to $1000 that month. But I got burnt out quick and slowly started getting back into it. My wife has pretty much taken over it as her part- to full-time job (once she gets started on something she can't stop). She has successfully listed about 5 items a day for the past month.
Absolutely correct about the thermal label printer. Bought a brand new one for a fraction of the cost off of FBMP ;-)
I bought a tape gun and wasted more tape than what actually got on the box so ditched that.
Agree with don't skimp on shipping products. Makes life way easier.
I just make sure that I will net $20 before I commit to purchasing an item from the thrift shop. This is:
final eBay sale price
- eBay fees
- shipping // unless you have the buyer pay actual shipping
costs
- the cost I paid for the item
--------------------------------------
my net profit (hopefully more than $20 for my time and effort)
last week this happened:
two refrigerator filters new in package ($3.99 each) - selling on eBay for about $40 each - retail for about $50 each.
My total sale price was $69.95 for both (I undercut the lowest listing by a dollar or so and offered 'free' shipping)
My shipping cost was about $5. My eBay fees were about $10 - they take quite a chunk.
$70 - 25 = $45 profit
I probably could have held onto them longer, charging a higher price and not offering 'free' shipping, but sales have been slow because I haven't been buying much so I made them too good to pass up.
$45 for about 20 minutes of hustle isn't terrible. It took me all of 3 minutes to list them on eBay. I plopped them on my kitchen table, snapped a picture of them, searched for the same item in the 'sold' section of eBay. Clicked 'sell one like this' link, filled in a price, selected a shipping option and clicked 'post'.
Looks like 2021 and earlier, there's a cap of $20,000 before you need to report to IRS using Form 1099-K. Assuming the author is from the US, they may have stayed below this limit and not needed to report. However, beginning in January 2022 the limit is dropping down to $600 before needing to be reported using Form 1099-K.
Yep, I haven’t exceeded the reporting amount yet. Hopefully my tax situation doesn’t get overly complicated. If it does, I may need a new side project.
In Florida, estate sales price their stuff such that it is hard to flip. And by estate sale, I'm talking about the companies that come in and price everything, organize the items and are running the cash register.
If it is an estate sale run by the individual owner this is usually good and nothing more than a garage sale where everything is sale including the proverbial kitchen sink.
This is a really cool idea. I don’t live close enough to a thrift shop to justify this on more than a once-a-week basis unfortunately. I might have to start trying this though!
Yep! Definitely look them up when you see them. There are lots of rare and hard to find ones... I focus on things like Criterion, box sets and anything that looks 'odd'. I picked up a five disc Anchor Bay set of WWII movies for $4 and they sold for nearly $15 each.
Don't skip on CDs, VHS, Cassettes or vinyl records! Though be sure to check the condition and that the correct disc is definitely in the case before you buy it.
Vinyl records are difficult to grade, so I would avoid them unless you can play them and reliably grade them OR they're sealed OR the surface on both sides appear immaculate. Sadly, they usually just add to my already overstuffed vinyl collection instead of winding up on eBay.
VHS and audio cassettes are hot right now as well, so if you see some classics, definitely give them a look on eBay before you pass on them. They usually have a barcode.
Typically someone will drop off their whole collection at place, so consider buying items to sell in a 'lot'.
A complete hardback Harry Potter book set is $100+! (usually $2 a piece at my thrift shop)
I almost have a complete set from my many trips to the thrift store, so pick them up when you see them!
I think a lot of people like the hobbyist collection aspect of DVDs. There's also a pretty significant contingent of people who want access to films that have no (or no consistent) streaming options. Also, lots of films and TV shows that do not have licensed content.
Funnily enough, the digital scale I use for all my shipments was a thrift store find! I don’t know about discount shipping supplies. I sourced nearly 100% of my supplies from Amazon. I did have to invest in some nice vinyl album mailers after adding vinyl records to my repertoire. There is definitely a large up front cost for shipping supplies to avoid using those pack and ship places and their high prices.
Probably somewhere around 13,000 I would guess. I haven’t been keeping track as it is still just a fun hobby-ish venture. I enjoy the thrill-of-the-hunt more than the money-making aspect. Though if the tax situation makes it complicated I may have to reconsider. It did net me a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pinball machine!
The iOS app is much newer and much more niche, but it’s starting to break ground.
For now most of the revenue is in macOS but my ultimate goal is to make iOS be my #1 platform in terms of revenue. That’s because, simply, I’d rather offload a lot of marketing and deployment/payment bandwidth to the App Store to focus on the products.
May i ask, if you are avoiding the MAS because of technical restrictions or because of the revenue cut?
I'm also developing a Mac app and did not decide yet on MAS vs. Paddle vs. an application to Setapp.
Just bought mission control plus (As soon as I read the description, my first reaction was "Take my money", I wouldn't have minded paying 15-20 usd for that but to be fair, 8.99 meant that I just bought blindly instead of doing the free trial). Experience buying on your site is not great:
1. After entering my credit card details, I'm redirected back to your site without any message (I did receive a confirmation email a few minutes later)
2. It's a nitpick, but there's nothing I dislike more than forcing me to convert to my local currency. First the exchange rate is much worse than what my credit card charges, second I lose out on miles.
You have so many of them. How much time do you use for customer support? I'd like to publish multiple apps, but I'm afraid that customer support will take all my time.
It's slowly growing, but to be honest the pricing needs to be increased. Profit margins are paper thin (ha!). Still though, it's been fun putting together the website, integrating Stripe etc.
Biggest issue is book publishers. Wow their ordering systems are archaic!
We can't hold stock on hand because we don't know how many subscribers we'll have each month. The issue with not holding stock is that we can't get reliable stock levels from any publisher or distributor. Ordering is a matter of emailing asking for a stock list, waiting to receive the stock list, then sending an email placing the order as quickly as possible. Frequently we'll order only to have them tell us books we ordered are on back order and we'll receive them in a month or two. It doesn't matter how often we say we can't do this, they don't care. I just want to get in there and build real-time stock management and ordering for them!
This is made substantially harder by the fact my wife creates associated resources and activities for each book. We can't deliver different books to different subscribers because she'd then need to produce additional activities & resources for each of the books. There's already 8 different books each month.
>It's slowly growing, but to be honest the pricing needs to be increased. Profit margins are paper thin (ha!).
Looking at your site, the first thing I noticed is that you use AusPost (I'm assuming you'd be paying MyPost Business rates).
Especially for larger packages within the same city, Sendle generally has better rates and turnaround times.
Have you looked into alternative logistics options?
>>We can't deliver different books to different subscribers because she'd then need to produce additional activities & resources for each of the books.
Is there a reason you can't ship new customers books (and resources) from your existing back catalogue? This could solve the inventory problem too.
> Is there a reason you can't ship new customers books (and resources) from your existing back catalogue? This could solve the inventory problem too.
Sorry, I missed this.
We've discussed this and I'm keen to give it a go in some form or another. If we continue to grow I think it'll become a necessity. However, each month has a unique theme that's consistent across the 4 age brackets. So we can't necessarily send out previous month's stock as it won't match the month's theme.
What we have started doing though is selling one-off bundles in addition to our subscriptions. These are selling reasonably well considering we haven't really pushed them. So I think we may be able to offer past subscription bundles in a similar fashion. The only thing that gives us pause is that we've noticed other book subscriptions have attempted this and had issues clearing out their excess stock. Whether that's a reflection on their product, their website, or the fact people just aren't interested in "old" stock, I'm not yet sure.
We've looked into this quite a bit actually. Auspost did work out the cheapest, at least initially. However, Auspost's recent price increase was particularly painful. Children's books have fairly large dimensions, so our pricing is largely dictated by parcel size, rather than weight.
I can't remember whether this factored in, but we are ourselves reasonably remote. Technically Melbourne, but not really. So I think the typical advertised rates aren't always accessible to us.
It doesn't help that Auspost recently implemented some sort of automated parcel measuring/weighing and it's incredibly wrong. We use the exact same box for every single delivery, yet we randomly receive bills to our business account claiming we've underpaid postage due to the odd parcel supposedly fluctuating in dimensions, by over 10cm in some cases!
Needless to say, we will definitely be revisiting this again. Will for sure check-out Sendle again. Thanks!
My wife recently published such an emotional development book in Slovakia [0], and it became a bestseller there. She's now translating and expanding into other countries.
A long term goal for us would be to work directly with authors. We'd love to publicise authors writing quality books, and I imagine it'd be helpful when doing a print run to have 100% confidence X books are going sell.
Unfortunately, we don't yet have enough subscribers for this to work. Because we only use a book once, and our subscribers are split across four age brackets (with different books), we're currently only ordering a small number of each book.
Love it (as a parent)! And, wow, it sounds complicating (as a business owner)!
Wonder if there's an indie children's book writers guild you can tap into instead of having to go through publishers, which you can then print yourself from places like https://www.lulu.com/
I'm largely speculating, however I suspect the situation would be slightly improved in the US/Europe. Some of the distributors are local branches of international publishers/distributors. Hachette for example do have real-time stock management and ordering, and I think even an API. I inquired about this with the local arm of Hachette that we order through, and they didn't really know what I was talking about. I assume they use it internally, but there's nothing exposed.
With the big distributors, I think the situation may be improved elsewhere in the world. However, given we're after social emotional development themed books, we do tend to branch out and order from smaller boutique publishers. I imagine their operations would be similar worldwide.
I built a free reverse geocoding api about 4 years ago ( https://api.3geonames.org ) Usage grew steadily sometimes crashing the server. So I loaded the software on GCP and AWS Marketplaces. Those needing a dedicated api launched their own servers for a fee. It has made an average pf $500 a month since I made those machine images available on https://3geonames.org/api about 2 years ago.
Yes, of course you can use it. The API is free, does not require an api key. The only issue is when many use it and the server crashes. It runs on a t2.micro free tier EC2 instance.
Have a saas I built for a large company to manage their marketing and advertising. Deployed about 8 years ago. Two employees, myself and my brother. Built it in php, and javascript and was the first web based app I had ever built. Got paid about 150k to build it and then we have been netting ~$2500 a month (we then split it 50/50) for the last 8 years. No upgrades or additional work done. Most months all I do is send in the invoice. Hardest part was remembering to renew the ssl cert each year. This month was the last month as the company has switched to a standard solution across all their departments. Was a good ride now I have to figure out something else to build. Worked a regular job this whole time as well.
Its a pretty specific niche product. The code is also terrible :) Every time I had to make a change i was terrified, so many files with redundant functions and just spaghetti code. I hadn't programmed for a little over 4 years when I wrote it and it was my first time coding anything outside of c++. It did make me love web development though and set me off on my current career. Actually excited to build something new, future is bright :)
It’s hard to call it a side project because it became my highest revenue stream now after a year of building it, but I started a youtube channel with a friend. However, given that I put in less than 6 hours a week on it (working less and taking a smaller cut of profits), it still feels like a side project.
We started in January and are now at ~30k a month and growing steadily. Our revenue streams are split by ad revenue, patreon, sponsorships, and other various income split somewhat evenly. It took a year of working with seeing no profits, but now we are growing at a steady pace and just hired our first employee (an analyst, we are a finance youtube channel)! We see it more an an e-learning company with youtube as it’s main marketing base, as we are building out career courses (for investment banking and MBA stuff), a newsletter, and sites for helping people with their investments.
I’m the editor, and I vastly cut down my editing time by building out a program that does most of the editing for me using ffmpeg to automate 80% of the work. A video that might take 8 hours to edit only takes me 2 hours, and I think thats the biggest reason it feels like a sideproject still because of the optimized workflow.
I definitely could, but as of now all the parameters and algorithms are so specific to the content that we produce that it would take some time to generalize it. Something I'll work on in the future for sure.
I use it extensively in a program I wrote out. I have it automatically trim out silence in front and end of clips and combine it with an algorithm to detect mistakes and take them out. Then it zooms in and out of clips and attaches pictures to create slideshows and adds transitions and cover pages etc based on a text file that gives instructions. Here’s the channel if you’re curious: https://m.youtube.com/c/rareliquid. All the transitions, photos, backgrounds, zooms, etc are automated.
Any silence longer than two seconds/48 frames (or any length I program it for). Programming for claps would be easy as well and I’ve considered it, but I thought just staying silent would be easier for Ben (guy in the vid) than clapping all the time. Mistakes actually happen incredibly often.
Not exactly a side project though -- more of a spinoff project, since I got started on it because Tarsnap needed FreeBSD support in EC2. Most of my recent work has been far beyond what Tarsnap needed though.
For the past 2 and a half years I've been running a YouTube channel with semi-automated content. The content in question is threads on AskReddit. I know a lot of people look down on content like that (tbh myself included) but to be fair most content on YouTube is very low-effort. It's not getting close to the views it used to, but now it makes an average of about $1k/month.
Our content is a lot higher quality than most other similar channels, mainly because the software I made automates so much. Which is why I think this one stood out. I effectively spend an hour a month or so just maintaining the software, while the actual work of uploading/making thumbnails is outsourced to someone I know. He spends maybe 15 minutes per video and we upload daily. It's a fun side-business to have but I don't expect it to be viable long-term unless I somehow pivot it into something else.
I didn't realize this was a thing. Who is your audience? I assume people who want background stuff going on while doing something else (like a podcast etc). Otherwise why wouldn't they just read reddit?
It's exactly this. I know of a couple people who will throw on a reading of a thread from a popular subreddit (AskReddit, TIFU, etc.) and treat it like any other podcast.
Sure thing. It has 2 parts, frontend (web gui in React) and backend (Nodejs + Puppeteer)
I have a web GUI for fetching thread comments from the Reddit API and where the user can quickly pick which comments should be filtered out. It also lets the user know if a comment is "bad" (violence etc.) from some automatic string matching so they can be filtered out or edited quickly.
Then on the backend I fill a HTML template with the comment data making it look pretty. Then I use Puppeteer to render and screenshot it into an image. Then I do a "segmented reveal", revealing one sentence at a time using HTML classes and CSS, depending on what part of the text is currently being read. It also scrolls down so the sentence currently being read is in the center of the screen, and does some other stuff like censor bad words using the CSS blur filter. Then I use ffmpeg with a bunch of complex_filter entries to add TTS audio to the screenshots, add transitions and stuff and concat it all together.
It's really not that complicated, but learning ffmpeg and making rendering reasonably quick and correct was a challenge.
I'm a SWE turned diy biologist and among the services I offer is bioprospecting for biotech startups. My most recent client hired me to gather soil samples from different biomes and running assays from my home lab to determine if there are any enzyme-producing organisms of interest.
Glad to hear of your interest in bio! I haven't delve much into the business side, but that is something I'm planning to get into on my YouTube channel and Instagram (both are under EverymanBio).
I'm doing a small enough volume that automation isn't quite needed yet. The process is basically creating a soil dilution, culturing some special media broth and then plating samples the next day. If this small experiment shows promise, there's talk of implementing something like Opentrons.
I've earned about $1500 a month for the last ten years helping senior citizens use Windows PCs. I also sell refurbished laptops for about 1/2 of what new laptops costs. I've sold over 200 laptops in the last 3 years.
All it takes is a little patience. I only charge $25 an hour and have more work than I can handle.
I have been helping people of all ages, including many seniors, with their computers for the last 30 years. I finally hit a point now in my 40s where I just can't do it anymore lol. I love people, and I love helping people, but after you've written something down explain it three times and walk somebody through it five times, and they call you the next day asking how to do that thing you showed them because they can't remember any of it...
You're a better man than I! Also, raise your rates a bit. You are undervaluing yourself significantly. Even if you doubled your rates you Will still be in plenty of demand. And for those who simply can't afford it just give them a discount back to your old rates. I was charging 75 an hour for a long time and that was cheap in my area.
I run https://webtoapp.design where I convert websites to apps. Been working on it for 2 years now. I started it while attending university as a side-project, but now my studies have definitely taken a step back. That has allowed me to get the business to around $1500/month (bad months are $500, best month was $4000). That's been possible due to free education in Germany and me being able to move back in with my parents during covid while still attending online lectures. So I'm thankful that all of those circumstances are working out well for me.
My goal is to fully automate the rest of my manual tasks in the business and focus on distribution for the next year. Hopefully that will allow me to scale to around $5000/month.
Homechart (https://homechart.app) is my solution to "app fatigue": too many productivity apps (todos, calendar, recipes, shopping, budget, etc), no integrations, few self hosted, painful monetization.
Take every personal productivity app and put it into an all in one, integrated experience. Available for free (self-hosted container) or in the cloud. No ads, written in Go/Typescript.
I look at working on Homechart as slowly whittling (coding) a large piece of wood (backlog) into a finished product. Thankfully the piece of wood grows in size every month, I really enjoy the whittling aspect. The thought of selling it or bringing in corporate processes (product managers, sprints, etc) would kill my enjoyment of working on it.
API server written in Go talking to PostgreSQL with an in memory cache (Go ttlcache library is awesome) or Redis. Frontend is Mithril/Typescript, uses capacitor for the Android/iOS apps.
I built an API/IAAS (sort of), https://approximated.app, to make it really easy to connect end user's custom domains to any web app.
It offers automatic SSL for unlimited custom domains and subdomains through dedicated reverse proxy clusters. Each comes with a dedicated anycast IP address so that your users can point an apex A record at it and be geo routed to the nearest region of your cluster.
You can add virtual hosts for domains, subdomains, or specific paths through a really simple API and it'll handle SSL and verification automatically in a few seconds during the first request.
It's been really fun to work on, plenty of hard problems to solve and it's been really useful to people, including myself. I had a baby boy this summer so I've had roughly zero time to market it in any way but there's still tens of thousands of domains running through approximated clusters now so it's been growing a little bit at a time on its own.
Current future plans are for edge caching (nearly done), ddos mitigation, and then hopefully something more interesting like colocating serverless workers or distributed apps maybe.
Sort of, yeah, but with a heavy focus on businesses who want to offer custom domains to customers of their own apps. For example, how Shopify lets you connect your own domain to their platform (not a customer, just an example).
Also a different business model (pay a monthly rate for servers in however many regions you want) with some different benefits and trade offs. CloudFlare SSL for SAAS didn't publicly exist when I started this, and it's economics ($2 per domain) still don't make sense for a lot of apps.
In the future, I'll probably look at whatever CloudFlare will have a hard time offering under their business models, and do those so that people have options. Even just the same features but with different pricing models can be really useful to companies with different constraints and goals.
I earn more than $500 a month with [redacted], a phone contract comparison website for the UK market.
[link redacted]
Today, 90% of my time is spent on content marketing, followed by improvements to the website.
Data is automatically pulled once a day. Parsing the data feeds can be frustrating, as there is no consistent format or documentation, therefore I need to code around many possible edge cases.
I do all the web design and development work myself.
Stack:
Front end: plain JavaScript
Back end: Node.js
Host: $10 DigitalOcean droplet
Web server: Nginx
SSL: Let's Encrypt with certbot
Proxy: Cloudflare
Database: Postgres
Caching: Redis
Indexing: MeiliSearch
Most of the traffic comes from organic search. It took me more than a year of SEO work to get any traffic at all from search engines. I was a bit naive about how much marketing I actually needed to do - I almost gave up several times.
Your day job is OK with this? I forgot what I signed, but I believe my contract has a clause that says they own all the technical output of my brain. Did you tell your manager you have a side hustle?
I've been thinking of something similar if I can build a sufficiently relevant specialty knowledge.
I am not sure why people keep repeating this. As long as you are not using company's property or time, what you do in your personal time is your business, not your employer's.
IANAL, but I believe in some states it is completely illegal for employers to add such clauses in employment contracts. Even if that clause exist, it is highly unlikely to be enforced in courts. We need to stop taking this abuse or living in fear of our employers.
And given this particular industry, there shouldn't be a need for anyone to give away that much to their employer. Simply walk away and find another position.
And before it is mentioned, ofcourse there are niche situations where that one and only position with this requirement is available and nothing else. But those are outliers and not worth mentioning.
In the context of how not to be screwed over by an employer, and with the frequency and distribution of tech jobs in mind then yes, I believe that the number of situations where no alternative positions exists and the employer requires the complete sign over of all IP generated by the employee at all time to be so low it has no meaningful impact on the discussion.
And thus brings no value to such a discussion. That does not mean I dismiss the existence of such situations. I simply decide to see the whole forest, rather than focusing on a single tree.
And in case it had eluded you, we who work in the tech industry (which I would hazard a guess is the majority here on HN) are all privileged beyond what most of humanity has ever experienced in terms of job security and wages (even when taking into account the great big gab between the lowest and highest levels).
Some folk decided that whiteboard interviews are broken, and the more enlightened way is to pay candidates to work on more representative tasks that take longer, and pay them for their time. GP is exploiting one of the failure modes by treating these interviews as paying gigs.
1) I created a course called Learn Programmatic SEO. It's an excellent intro to SEO for someone new to the field, and it teaches the SEO approach through which companies like Canva, Zapier, Veed/Kapwing and others grew their search traffic to become $10-$100mn+ ARR generating companies.
The course was made in Feb 2021, I spent a week crafting and editing the content but the learnings came from before it. I've done almost no marketing for many months now and I still average $500-$600/month, completely passive income. Lifetime income from the course is ~$20,000.
2) I created a habit tracker spreadsheet which earns $50-$60/month, again completely passive.
The template is really simple and easy to use, and I believe it can make more. I built another site called https://www.dailyhabits.xyz and I'm planning to drive some traffic from it to the habit tracker spreadsheet to grow revenue to $200-$300/month. Let's see how that goes!
I created a game wiki site ten years back. I started optimizing it for SEO this year, and am about to pass $900/month. My goal is $1k/month. It's super passive and I don't do much.
Tech stack:
Static site hosted on S3 (less than $1 a month) and Cloudflare for CDN.
I started by making a simple timeline style logging / journaling app for personal use couple of years ago.
I shared it on Reddit and got great feedback. The app has completely changed since then and now it's a task management and organizer tool.
The app has premium add-ons where you can buy add-ons separately. It was getting complicated to manage it and the only scope to get more revenue was to add new features.
I moved the app to subscription based in May this year and it's been going great.
The app has $2.5K MRR and the only costs that I have is domain, server and Google Ads.
The game Twenty that I posted on here many years ago as a ShowHN[0] post took off from that very post and is still earning in that ballpark. I keep trying to find more time to work on it and other projects too, but somehow as my kids have gotten older and my spare time in the evenings gets shorter, I haven't managed it.
I'm an author. I write books of science projects you can perform on your loved ones.
For each of my four books, I got paid a decent advance. One of the books has been quite successful and has earned back its advance, so I now get royalty checks. An audiobook deal and half a dozen foreign-rights deals have sweetened the pot.
It's not what I would call a passive income method, however, because a lot of work goes into it, even years after publication.
If you are considering writing a book, I'd highly suggest finding a literary agent. Worth every penny of their 15% commission.
What’s the work that goes into one of your books years after publication?
Or, since you mentioned your advance, I assume you have traditionally published. In that case I thought your publisher would handle all the operational issues, eg marketing.
Or do you mean the work goes not into the older books but into drafting and editing the newer ones?
Yes, for all four books, I got book deals with traditional publishers.
A small number of top-tier authors -- those whose books are virtually guaranteed to be bestsellers from day 1 -- tend to have marketing and publicity teams that will continue to be active well after publication.
But for midlist authors like myself, the publisher will do a marketing/publicity push around your publication date, but after a few months, it tends to die out. Which is not to say that they won't seize a good opportunity if it presents itself. But generally it's the author who's setting up their events after that point and figuring out other creative ways to spread awareness of their book, e.g. writing regular blog posts to maintain their brand.
An investment tracking app with a unique view of things (events).
Started just before corona, since I needed something like this myself. Turns out a lot of people were searching for something like that. The fact that many other investment tracking apps are either ad ridden, slow or have a bad ux helped as well.
Started very niche with earnings events. And In the very beginning I invested ~400$ into AdWords to get ~1000 downloads. Those 1000 downloads helped rank my app to get organic growth from that point on.
I own 4 shares in the S&P 500. I developed trading strategies to sell my shares and buy them back at key points using Fibonacci retracements. Best business ever. And if I leave it it still makes money.
I’m nowhere near $500/month but learning to trade simply has taken me years and I’m very proud of my smol accomplishment.
I tend to think this is true. I also tend to think that enough people trade based on technical trends that it should be possible to make money by predicting their behavior.
But it may not be possible for mere mortals to do this — perhaps all the profit is sucked up by HFTs with supercomputers.
A lot of people trade based on technical indicators and there's plenty of simple strategies based around moving averages that aren't complex.
In my hometown of Chicago, a lot of people used to be employed in the pits at the CBO market making. (Basically being around to take the opposite end of a trade and making small profits by selling/buying at better prices.) But those jobs were eliminated by HFTs. HFTs absolutely sucked up a ton of profits. All the traders I spoke to who had traded in the 80's, 90's and 00's said that trading got much much harder from the years 2005-2010.
Retail traders still have the ability to take speculative risk and buy/hold. It just takes a lot of time.
The difference is quantitative finance uses mathematical models where-as when 'technical analysis' is talked about in the (youtube)stock market it generally refers to opening up mspaint and using the line draw tool to 'find patterns.'
I am working on a program to backtest it. Honestly, I still have much to learn. I do things visually. So I take the little fib retracement chart tool in trading view and make the anchor at the beginning of a price movement and align the lines to the closing prices of significant support/resistance (defined mathematically as any 5 bars such that the the middle bar has the lowest low or highest high in like pyramid form.) If I see at least 3 lines of the fib retracement align, I consider the market to be demonstrating that pattern and I make a bet the market will reverse when it hits the highest fib line. This is much easier to see btw and I have a website where I’m going to write this out if you’re interested: https://seanneilan.com/ I have corresponding Python code that automates this strategy too that I intend to post once it’s ready.
No hate. But just remember that when you think that something is a good BUY, the other side (the seller) think that it is a good SELL. Hence, before trading in the stock market (or in any other market which is a zero sum game, e.g. used cars, NFT), you must be sure that you have more information than the seller.
Ofcourse, if you are not trading, or buy a company stock and hope to get dividends than there is no transaction and hence it is not zero sum. But if you are trading it is zero sum.
Of course. Part of the fun is also considering why a trade will go the wrong way too. There are infinite scenarios and part of trading is sketching why scenario X's probabililty is more likely than scenario Y's probability. And this can all be a wash when the completely unexpected happens too.
I lost about $3k doing algo crypto trading (all of that to fees - without fees I made money! aha) but learned a ton about different programming concepts and had a lot of fun.
That's awesome! :) That sounds like an amazing experience. I bet you learned a lot! And 3k is enough to make it memorable but not enough to go into massive debt or anything like that. And sure it's a loss but nobody goes into this trying to lose money. (AFAIK)
I think that trading is ultimately a creative endeavor and no matter how one trades whether it's based on phases of the moon or insider information, one needs to know when they are entering and exiting the market. Trading is an incredibly fun and creative endeavor and as long as one takes the time to precisely define what they are doing, it is great <3
Trading algorithms are often implemented in Python/Pandas so learning hackerrank problems about stacks/queues can make one better at implementing trading algorithms. Some hackerrank problems involve hashes which are verified empirically which calculus. Studying calculus can lead to better understanding of the black-scholes theorem and brownian motion.
There's even an aesthetic nature to really good trades which can lead down an interesting path on gestalt theory and composition. Drawing charts is an art form too. Check out https://www.tradingview.com/u/tntsunrise/ for examples of minimalism in the stock market.
A previous commentor on this topic wrote that I'm studying tea leaves but what if for fun I wrote an image processing algorithm that processed the position of tea leaves in a cup and traded small amounts based on that?
Even something like moving averages has applications in programming language theory. It's easier to implement a moving average in a stateful rather than functional way. It's fun to figure out faster ways of cranking out new algorithms to trade markets which leads to better productivity. Markets move really fast. Old algorithms quickly become outdated.
As long as one does not make huge risks (that aren't well thought out), one can trade based on whatever their imagination leads them to. Anything can be tried and systematically backtested. Most traders won't think outside the box but it's so much more fun when you do.
There's so much synergy between math, computer science, betting strategies, art, drawing, data science and visual theory. Everything one studies in trading can lead to 10 insights in other areas. It's just a genuinely fun topic that can lead to a lifetime of happiness.
Do you know of any studies or articles that shows why backtesting actually works or is useful? I have been reading up on automated and systematic trading, but I do not yet understand how backtesting gives one anything more than warm fuzzies.
For backtesting to work, wouldn't one need to re-run (i.e., playback and not simulate) all inputs from what the real data was (instrument pricing, the weather, social media sentiment, whatever) at a time resolution finer than what your algorithm operates on? If so, that's a massive amount of data that may even be impossible to get.
I'm not sure. I haven't found much on whether or not backtesting works in general. It definitely has its caveats. I think it really depends on what you're backtesting.
Backtesting definitely reveals ways in which trading algorithms can fail though. It can reveal more scenarios than one would initially consider which is super helpful.
Evidence-Based Technical Analysis is a starting point (book), but iirc it was able to show most common indicators aren't able to reject the null hypothesis.
I will also admit I am perhaps overconfident about my strategy. It accurately lined up to when the omicron announcement happened and then I sold my shares in the market and bought them back once I "felt" the market had finished pricing in the information. So I have half a strategy right now. My buy back strat is not great but my timing to short the S&P 500 was absolutely impeccable. And that's why I'm inspired to work on this now.
I've actively bought and sold since 2012. In that time span however, I've probably only placed like 10-20 trades over 10 years. I spend wayyy more time studying than trading. This is also a hobby and I did many other things in the meantime like studying portrait drawing, I started/sold a digital agency: https://buildthis.com/. So it wasn't actively trading. I once spent 8 months studying soybean futures after work only to wind up shorting the dow jones on a recommendation which netted me a couple grand in 30 minutes. If you think about that, that's a very small amount of money to make over 8 months. So I'm not exactly making a lot of money.
But, at the end of the day, I have not lost money. I have only made money even though it is a TINY TINY amount. I'm talking like dollars.
For me, https://unitprice.org and https://okaycup.com — These track prices on Amazon for certain sets of products and finds the best price per unit, which isn’t always the largest quantity item. Revenue is all from affiliate links.
I've been working on Remote Leaf[1] for a while now and it's making about $2k/month(OpenStartup[2]), while I'm still doing my job. Planning to approach remote employers to feature their company profile/jobs starting from 2022.
Fixing that would require me to figure out how to deploy appengine stuff, now that Google requires you to use a whole new deployment flow, with a credit card required.
Not gonna do that unless something more major breaks...
There is pretty much no customer support required - I only received 12 emails about it last year. There have only been a handful of thefts. The vast majority of wallets never get stolen.
Yeah - the whole thing is appengine, fitting fully in the free tier, and getting the html template for that home page working on every browser was the hardest bit. There's no login or anything, and the database is just one record per sale. Wallets are all pregenerated. Checking for theft just involves polling a block-explorer API and sending a mail if anything changed.
Friend and I have recently launched a side project where we give away high quality, royalty-free music. Early days but we’re making ~$800 per month from YouTube’s content ID payments alone.
You appear to be content Id claiming the add revenue of the people that use your music for "free". Calling that "royalty-free" and saying that the music is "free in exchange for a credit/attribution" feels a little misleading.
It is royalty free if they stump up the up front cost, but the idea that using this music will cause you to lose ad revenue on your YouTube videos should be front and centre.
Nah, we're pretty clear about it right there on the homepage of the site. If we don’t register our tracks with YouTube’s Content ID, then malicious actors will register our music as their own and monetise our user’s videos.
Many of the people using our tracks are small YouTubers that aren't even eligible for monetisation. The bigger YouTubers who want to monetise are happy to buy a $39 license.
I run a micro ISP providing gigabit internet access to around 100 businesses that does around $4.5k a month. It started by accident when I got a connection for myself and then shared it with others. My landlord then expanded and invited me to offer it to more units so I made the platform self serve which means apart from initial install it's pretty hands off. Not enough to live on but good side income while I launch another startup!
This is awesome. I'm not from the US but will move there soon and seeing how the internet connections around the area where my partner lives are absolute c*p, maybe this would be an option?
Can I reach out to you somewhere? You can also write to <username> at Gmail.com if you don't want to publish it here.
Thanks! The fibre I use to supply them is a gigabit up and down leased line, so the connections I sell are contended. I could go to 10gb but my customers are small businesses so low utilisation in practice, people like having a gigabit capable connection but rarely need it! The average overall utilisation of my customers combined is around 150mbps.
I created an enhanced multilingual T9 keyboard[1][2] for iOS in 2014 to play around with Swift. It's been doing 600$ on average since then, still going strong. Still use it everyday myself and can't live without it
Thank you for this. My dad has poor vision and clings to his failing t9 flip phone. He likes the flexibility of the iPhone but is concerned about the keyboard, it seems like this might be the solution he’s looking for
Interesting! I hope it can work out well for him - would love to hear about his experience if he gives it a shot. I've gotten good feedback from low vision and blind users, but I've also done my best trying to support VoiceOver in the most optimal way. If he uses VoiceOver, be sure to enable "Direct Touch Typing" in VoiceOver>Typing>Typing Style. Also be sure to go through the tutorials as that should give him the best start.
> Checkbot for Chrome finds SEO, speed and security problems before your website visitors do. Test 100s of pages at a time for broken links, duplicate content, missing titles, invalid HTML/CSS/JavaScript, insecure pages, redirect chains and more.
I started working on it for myself to help automate common checks I was having to do manually when working on websites. I wanted something that checks many pages at once, works on localhost as you develop, and will let you scan again after you've made changes to see if you've fixed problems.
In my 11th year doing Hacker Newsletter (https://hacker newsletter.com). Still enjoy putting it together each week and recently launched a daily version.
I started a 3D printing company generating on average about 2k/month printing small plastic clips and connectors for collectors as well as a few other adapters and jigs sold on eBay.
I'm now working on building out a 3D printing course teaching others how to do the same.
I sell on-demand Python and Data Science courses (my main gig is corporate training). I make around $2000 a month from them. (a little more than self published and published books and more than publishing courses on third party platforms).
BeeLine Reader generates substantial passive income by licensing its reading enhancement tech to companies like Blackboard. [1] These licensees require zero support and don't churn, so if I stopped working on it the income would keep coming.
The B2C tools (browser extensions, iOS apps, PDF viewer) do require some maintenance and customer support.
I launched BeeLine on HN [2] and have had the pleasure of working with various folks from the HN/YC community, including Insight Browser and The Program Audio Series. Hit me up if you have a relevant project and are interested in partnering — most of our HN-sourced partnerships are no-cost.
Mine is a humble little personal finance app called GreenBooks (https://greenbooks.app). For the last few months, my proceeds from the App Store is ~$500. That is after Apple's 15% cut. Not bad for a side project.
I built an in-browser 3D world for life coaches so they can create better experiences for their communities. Audio & video chat in a game-like world, where exploration and socializing is for health, happiness, and personal growth. We're averaging about $400/mo right now through customizing worlds and building features as requested.
You guys are using y.js to implement the world right? Are CRDTs commonly used in the video games space? And if you don’t mind explaining, why did you go with y.js over Automerge?
Yes, we are. Yjs has been very performant in both size and space. Automerge may be competitive now/soon, but we needed something that worked out of the box.
I don't think CRDTs are commonly used in video games, at least not yet. We're using data sync in this way for collaborative world editing. I think it will be much more common in the future as it reduces boilerplate API code and puts the focus on the UX (which we are definitely still working towards!).
I wrote a bunch of study materials and practice tests for passing the Chinese language exam equivalent of the TOEFL in China. It was doing well for several years, but the site broke (or was hacked) suddenly and is now making zero dollars. I have no idea how to fix it, but the business was completely passive aside from sending out the study materials, which were all digital.
Essentially, I'd get a purchase and have the files sent to the customer, costing me a couple minutes for the $20 or so from the sale. About one sale per day equates to around $500 a month.
I have an Etsy store where I sell my illustrations. It doesn't make $500 every single month, but averaged over a year it is around that mark. I think I could grow the sales if I spent more time on it :-)
You could make more sales, and grow your audience if you streamed the creation process. I'd love to watch you put one of these together and would pay for that.
Made a Rubik's cube kind of game for phones (http://eclidus.com) with my buddy and sales were at that level for a while. Then they died down, I couldn't be bothered to market it so I made it available for free. :)
I'll probably try something similar again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I assumed since it's the same-ish principle. I find it fun how people will strive to work so hard to "ruin" a game, but it is definitely impressive to see how they go about to learn the solve. That should be a Show HN in and of itself.
Oh definitely, the whole arduous process of finding a solution and then getting the best time possible is fascinating. We actually wrote a bit about it here in terms of the Rubik's cube itself:
https://www.eclidus.com/our-story.html
Have various sport result apps. Generating roughly 100k dollars a month. No team. Conpletely solo. Started in the very first days of apps. Even had Java apps on windows mobile back in the days. Now only iOS and Android.
I also have a non apps company with +25 employees now. Couldn't have started that without the other business
I started AppMasker (https://appmasker.com) a few months ago. It’s basically a reverse-proxy as a service (using Caddy) and makes adding custom domains to your web app a breeze.
Still working on my marketing pitch so feedback is welcome!
Using Caddy it’s not too hard if you know what you’re doing. But if you have many nodes you’re deploying it’s starts to get more complicated. A lot of people don’t know what they’re doing, however.
Am using Caddy for this exact use-case at work. Thought it would make a good subscription service, but didn't get around to doing it yet. Well done, GP.
If it were back in the old days, I would've charged for it upfront for $5 or so. Instead I decided to make it free to try with an in-app purchase to remove all limitations. Targetting a niche customer base that have already paid at least $22/year for a Pinboard.in subscription and are likely to be disappointed by the current offerings meant I was able to go for a more sensible price. Right now the full unlock costs $15 and includes 3 platforms (iOS, iPadOS, and macOS) with family sharing enabled.
I was able to recruit 100+ beta testers and added some much needed features before launch. Since then it has been a steady pace of one update every month or two which adds either new features, UX improvements, or bug fixes.
The app is highly rated (4.8/5 overall rating) and has a good number of loyal customers who follow me on Twitter (@GetPinsApp).
Hanging out where my potential users are I guess. I announced the upcoming app release on Twitter, mentioned @Pinboard; it got retweeted and people started reaching out.
Not to sound rude, but isn't this kind of a generator to produce spam sites? Easy template, draw others' content through RSS and that's it? Does anyone actually pay for subscriptions and why if the only content is other site feeds?
My side business that I work on outside of business hours is my lifelong passion in filmmaking & photography, although I have done more livestream production as well.
My video/photo/livestream production company produces roughly $6 to $12k per month in revenue at a profit of 40 to 60% depending on the type of work and whether I shoot it myself.
Estimate that 60% of work that I quote are projects that I shoot myself. The other 40% I produce the jobs and have contractors work on them.
I've recently shot for a Fox Studios documentary that has spanned pre-COVID to next year, which is a real highlight for me. I also happened to shoot for the broadcast team at the first music festival in Australia since COVID hit.
Now for NYE, I'll be shooting the promo videos for a large music festival which is an awesome way to spend the holiday season, getting paid to party.
I really love my job and I'm grateful for all the opportunities that it brings me, whilst being able to sustain myself with a full time career in tech.
I'm mostly a photographer (UK), looking to change my business model up when I move and incorporate more video work. I'm intrigued by the livestream production. Are there any resources you'd recommend for someone looking to get into this?
Little late to this party but love the idea. One small piece of feedback: saying all PDFs are publicly available might scare people off. I'm assuming you're generating secure random links? I'd at least say it's only available to anyone with the link.
Thanks. The idea came up thanks to the pandemic. I wanted to make it super simple to make any pdf file reachable via qr code. I’m sure the market is a lot bigger, but I never really spent any significant effort on marketing.
The default autoplay option is too eager, I had ace of spades but 2 of spades was hidden. I couldn't move 3 of spades anywhere to reveal the card under it as the other stacks were autoplayed up to 5 already.
The website is 3-4 years old now I think. I implemented ads around 1.5 years ago. I really didn't think there was money in banner ads anymore before then actually. I sure was wrong!
This is an app to share tasks, duties and manage rotations in Slack. It was an internal tool at my previous company (Algolia), that I rewrote with their permission as a SaaS and sold to them. Growth is slow, mostly driven by Google searches and Slack app store.
One out of 10 signups per month will eventually use the service. For the few ones I've been able to ask "Why did you leave", the answer is: they want a Google Calendar for Teams. Which I am slowly building. This way, the shift scheduling will be more flexible.
Try to save simple Excel file as HTML, and see how many files Excel generates. Also, Excel-generated HTML files are very hard to embed anywhere, too much garbag
I have one, we got to YC top 10% applicant but didn't get in this batch. Hopefully in the next batch: Travi helps users access information about activities, must go places, and things to do from trusted local residents, and provides automatic scheduling of selected activities in an itinerary format.
Yes! I know, we could have picked something non travel related since we launched in the middle of COVID but we have been thinking about the idea for a while and decided to pull the trigger anyway.
3 years ago I started a newsletter about robotics (https://weeklyrobotics.com/) and about month ago I opened it to advertisers and started earning about $600 a month from ads.
I’ve occasionally posted some issues on hn and /r/robotics. Every week I share the issues on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. From these LinkedIn seems to have brought the most interactions so far.
On a couple of occasions I traded shout outs with some newsletters and I think this was the most effective method for obtaining new subscribers.
In aggregate, we were able to generate about $10K for few weeks of work in 2021 working on no-code projects (https://twitter.com/n0c0de1) ... most of it outsourced. Due to low-costs almost fully goes to bottomline.
Our aspiration is around SaaS for real estate brokers that I've dabbled with for many years. Stopped dev work due to boredom to "focus on the big picture". Kind of bleeding a bit since then but the products seem to be quite nice now.
Getting to the sales / marketing phase now and figuring it out (not our strong point ... painful stuff :) )
I have a case management and billing system for Medicaid providers that brings in ~$3k/month annualized. It was a lot of work up front, but generally requires little effort to maintain outside of new features.
I made Nodewood (https://nodewood.com/), a SaaS starter kit/boilerplate. An unlimited-app license is around $500, so a single sale a month puts me into this territory.
It could probably be higher, if I were any better and/or more persistent about marketing, but right now I'm focusing on the last two releases I have scheduled on the roadmap before releasing "1.0" (easy scripting and an easy deploy system), then I'll switch much harder into marketing for it.
The back-end is Node.js, Express, and MassiveJS for DB access, while the front-end is Vue 3.
I'm really happy with my choice of MassiveJS especially, instead of an ORM, since it allows me to make Models in Nodewood as simple JavaScript objects that can be populated either from the database or from API responses. This means that you can use the same model in the front-end and the back-end, with the same business logic, the same validation logic, etc. Saves a lot of time writing (and maintaining) a lot of code in two or more places!
I make $10,000 a month on a side business I started in July, less than six months ago.
I partnered with the guy who helped me build a fence to start a landscaping company. He was making $23 / hour prior to working with me.
I provide all the capital equipment (diesel truck, 14' dump trailer, Kubota tractor), and I do the marketing, recruiting, accounring, legal, management. He handles all bids and actual jobs.
It currently takes me less than an hour a week to do my work as I have delegated a lot to employees in my other company. Starting up was full time for a month.
What I like most about my partner is his humble attitude, desire to learn more, reliability, and hunger for a better life for his family.
He had done lawn mowing and some landscaping for several years prior, but the primary work we are doing now he had not done before.
I strongly think the best opportunities for side gigs that make a lot of money are in the construction trades. Providing a service that people desperately need makes sales pretty darn easy.
> g to expand to other marketplaces (I have a lot of customer who are on Shopify, even if I don't offer a Shopify app) and build other APIs. Hopefully I'll have more time once my sons go to nursery / school.
> I use Stripe for direct sales on the website and RapidAPI (ex Mashape) as a m
How did you learn about "marketing, recruiting, accounting, legal, management" ? Do you have prior background? And what kind of market research did you do to find a hole in the market that you can fill?
My main business, coalitiontechnologies.com, taught me those areas of business.
I learned marketing working for another digital agency 15 years ago, recruiting I just carefully studied the market for years and tried and failed lots of time to learn how it worked, accounting I took two courses in, legal I learned dealing with several small claims and a couple of superior court suits plus a great class, management I learned from Manager Tools podcast and years of trial and error.
My market research was just observing how hard it is to find good construction trades help and then trying to put up some marketing to see if we got leads.
I created a Natural Language Processing startup that developed a multilanguage API. We created a frontend for that API with some success. Couple of years before, the startup died. We let the website running for free several years but the server burned in OVH fire in 2021. Then, I create a MVP frontend in react and add ads from adsense. Now it's making $400/month.
I love it because is 100% passive. Improvement ideas are very welcome.
When we decided it was time to start a family, I quit my job as a Software Engineer in a web agency - but I didn't want to stop working.
I started with a couple of common ideas that we always had to implement for a lot of clients and I built a couple of simple Django-based services on Digital Ocean, in the free time I had from taking care of my newborn.
I'm terrible at marketing, so what I did was to leverage existing marketplaces.
Slowly, over months, I started to build a reputation and build a userbase.
Profits range between 1000$-1800$ and I'm planning to expand to other marketplaces (I have a lot of customer who are on Shopify, even if I don't offer a Shopify app) and build other APIs. Hopefully I'll have more time once my sons go to nursery / school.
I use Stripe for direct sales on the website and RapidAPI (ex Mashape) as a marketplace.
I can't say RapidAPI is been smooth sailing: their payment processing is riddled with fees (thanks PayPal) and there are frequent outages and issues with their proxy.
Still, I think using a marketplace can be a decent approach for developers who don't want to spend their days on reddit or finding their clients.
I run an https://hanami.run email forwarding service with advanced features:
- SMTP
- Maillog: which can eanble you to use IMAP
- API integration to read email as JSON
- WebHook
- Complex routing with regex and custom rule from header
- Sieve filter
Note: We're re-branding to https://mailwip.com due to nameconflict with hanamirb.org
These are really 2 distinct products. I wanted to build a website builder that made sense, which I figured needed a new OS to avoid the nonsense complexity. (It's an overlay OS.) They go hand-in-hand, as every OS needs a killer app anyway, which is the website builder.
The website builder is taking off. I'm providing it for free, with the caveat that I'm going to start a domain registrar soon and I'll ask people to move their domains to this registrar, which will cost about the same as other registrars. So the revenue is not collected for now.
For me the long game is the application platform, which takes a unique, simpler approach. Lots of no-code users started hacking code on Boomla, I'm pretty excited about that. You just write the code and Boomla takes care of everything else.
I'm not sure it qualifies as a side-project, as it started out as such but now it takes all my time, even though it doesn't pay my living. Some border case I guess.
I stake and lend cryptocurrency (stablecoins and blue-chip coins) on lending protocols and exchanges, and am at around $500 a week.
Not really a side-project per-se, but I do quite a bit of calculation on ROI, where to move what share of my funds to, and occasional yield-farming strategies so it does take a up a good bit of time
The goal is to have that stable enough so that I can quit and focus on my actual side projects that I am hacking on after work
Don't want to share the exact amount but for stablecoins you can get 8-12% APR and that's as 'safe' as it gets without having to deal with price fluctuations. So if you were to convert $100k savings into stablecoins, you'd have a return of $230 per week (100000*12/100/52)
For yield farming you are dealing with higher risk, but you can easily get 50%+ APY on liquidity pools, compare that with the 12% above and it's not too hard to get to $500 a week
Got into learning bodyweight fitness from reddit and lacking access to a proper gym back in the day. Started initially as a simple webpage, I've now built a mobile app that earns about $1000/mo, its a way for beginners to get into bodyweight workouts and learn exercises with youtube videos.
I’m working on a c2c marketplace for airsoft gear [1]. Users can buy and sell their airsoft replica’s, accessories and tools to/from other users by posting a listing to the site.
We hope to accept payments through the platform using Stripe Connect soon. Currently averaging €600,- a month.
Just a heads up that the privacy policy and terms and conditions pages are not showing up. The page loads, but there's no text where it looks like there should be.
- We allow users to highlight their listings, which means the listing is shown on the homepage and at the top of the selected category
- we have a verification wizard that verifies the users telephone number and iban, which we charge for as well
We’ve almost finished a Stripe Connect integration, which allows users to pay for items through the platform itself (they now pay in person or by bank transfer). This will contain a processing fee.
I have one: I self-publish science fiction on the side. Although it isn't consistently $500 per month yet. Sometimes it is a bit more, other times less. The income goes up as I build up my backlist, but usually it is a spurt in the month of release that then trickles down to a lower baseline. With each new release, that baseline gets a little higher.
I just shipped out the first batch of books a week ago and now waiting for the next batch of books. It’s gotten pretty demanding pretty quickly but I’m really excited about it. I’m hoping I can soon employ my little sister to manage all the shipping. She’s been an Amazon driver for the last 2 years and I think she’d appreciate a change of pace.