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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell
540 points by deadcoder0904 on Jan 19, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 613 comments
Previously asked on 2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167



Correction, previously asked 26 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095

Obviously still nice to see what people have built who missed the last post!


I make this e-paper calendar: https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...

It syncs with Google Calendar.

To be fair, I currently does > 500$/month in revenue not earnings.

If it doesn't count let me know and I will delete my comment.

EDIT: I am currently out of stock sadly. If you want to be notified when I am back in stock, you can leave your email here: https://forms.gle/tNcCcYrNBu5nWKgJ9


Oh my gosh, I love this. I even love the name. My fiancé and I were even talking about how we wanted to move the house towards more "invisible technology" (magic mirrors, things like this, maybe the Frame TV if we get a good deal and figure out a good spot for it, etc)


Recheck the frame tv. I wanted one until I realized it's just a thin tv thats motion activated to stay on/turn on and show a static image.


How does that differ from what it is advertised as, or from what you expected?


I assumed it used some technology that made it look less like a digital display and more like a analog object. Also, I (stupidly) assumed that it was similar to an e-ink display I that it could display images when it was powered off.


It does more than just static images, it can play videos/gifs as well. I just bought one for our living room a month ago and love it. Its a good QLed TV, not as great as an OLED but that’s not why I bought it. It’s great for it is and you can buy custom made frames too. We have the 65” definitely recommend


How is it different from a regular tv?


I am curious: as a HW project how did you go through the CE / FCC certification process and production 0-series batch? Did you have some investor or paid from your own pocket?

Asking as somebody who thought making some embedded / HW projects, but the initial cost seems to much to be paid by myself.


The answer is a big "it depends", but there are ways to get basic FCC certification done for as little as $1K-$2K if you contact enough labs and your engineers are reasonably good at adhering to proper design practices (minimize respins and testing repeats).

CE mark isn't actually required in the US, but you'd need it for Europe and other locations. It's more involved, but all-in testing can be done for <$5K for EU if you're careful.

> Did you have some investor or paid from your own pocket?

> Asking as somebody who thought making some embedded / HW projects, but the initial cost seems to much to be paid by myself.

Crowdfunding is how it's done for HW products. Investors aren't going to be interested in anything small time (less than $10-100mm potential revenue + recurring subscriptions) unless they're friends and family or something like that.

It's a lot of money, but it's not out of reach for someone with a tech job who uses crowdfunding for the major production push.


My understanding as someone who works with embedded RF, is that if you use a SoC that is already FCC certified you don’t need additional certification, as long as you don’t do anything stupid like modifying chip registers that effect signal strength. This is a reason espressif chipsets are very popular in consumer electronics that require RF.


At least for CE it is not so easy, the "whole product" has to meet the requirements. Using an certified chip / module lowers the risk of failing, but you have to pay for the measurements and certification anyway. (Which here, as I heard, can be about 6 months engineering salary.)

(For crowdfunding you need a good campaign and probably some ads / self-promoting which also could be expensive.)


Also curious about this.

I’ve done a lot of research on CE/FCC and while it seems possible to do CE yourself (since you can self-certify) you are on the hook if you miss something, like certain required tests (and doing some tests can be very expensive).


I think if you self-certify you have all the responsibility. (I do not know you as person or you as an organization.)

But if this thing just emit in a wrong RF band, it could mean insane fine fine from the local-frequency-band-office. And this is a very likely scenario (not like what happens if it catches fire and kill somebody...).

Anyway, I heard you should aim (at least) to the US market, which needs FCC. (eg. 300+ million people with one language vs. 30+ language in Europe.)


Yours is a product and mine was just made for fun but I really like your project and had a similar journey last year.

E-paper is a perfect use case for a dynamic shelf calendar

https://lengrand.fr/complete-setup-epaper/


This is pretty cool, though it would be nice if it worked with caldav instead of just google calendar :)


I think so too :D

It's definitely something I am having in the backlog, but I cannot promise if and when it will be implemented.


I wanted to let you know that I find your approach to future features refreshing, in contrast to the typical over-promising you typically see.


Yes, and also honest.


If you are okay with gpl software/backend, you could reuse some code of one of my side project: https://apps.kde.org/kalendar/ (support google api, caldav, etesync and Outlook calendars)


That's pretty cool. Love to see a hardware project.

What's the profit margin like?

E-ink displays are expensive. That price point seems not enough to generate decent income.


> E-ink displays are expensive.

I was curious... from what I can find online the wholesale price of an e-ink display is not that much cheaper (if any) than buying an equivalently sized Kindle. What is the viability of a business model that involves rooting a Kindle, loading whatever calendar display software you need, and shipping it inside a pretty wooden frame?


That's what I thought this was on first look. That's a Kindle in a frame!


I read somewhere that the e-ink expense is because the company which controls the intellectual property chooses to make it a low volume, high cost product. Not that it is inherently expensive, and I am surprised they don't try the opposite strategy, make it cheap and everywhere.


> I read somewhere that the e-ink expense is because the company which controls the intellectual property chooses to make it a low volume, high cost product.

I've only read that here (repeatedly!) on HN and blogs that then cited throwaway HN posts which never respond to my requests for at least some verifiable evidence. Have a look through my comment history.


I was under the impression that standard black/white e-ink is no longer patent encumbered, could totally be wrong tho


Would love a link/source for this if you have one.


I was curious about this too. From the dimensions listed on the website, it looks like the screen is about 6.3×3.7 inches, or about 7.3 inches diagonal.

There seem to be 8-inch e-ink displays for sale on AliExpress for $20-$40, actually much cheaper than I expected. No idea about the quality though.


Wow, this is great! I was actually just thinking about hacking something like this together on my own, but $200 seems really reasonable for a pre-built product, and it looks much nicer than it would if I built it! :) Any plans to support non-Google calendar accounts?


I would like to support other formats, caldev, outlook etc. I am limited by time and money, not imagination :D


Just a heads up: my company blocks this site as malware


I wonder if there is a service that (somehow) detects your site has been flagged in various categories by big company firewalls, and alerts you. Wild guess: whatever system feeds into the lists that get blocked in this way probably has a lot of false positives.


It is blocked on OpenDNS as well.


shop.invisible-computers.com?

Any idea what could be causing this? I am at a loss.


I have an extension called FakeSpot that I use to detect fake Amazon reviews. To my surprise, it flagged your site as well with the following note: "Please research the seller because: * Limited Internet presence * Website is missing common professional website attributes * Limited Internet presence and history"

It doesn't expand on any of those points, that's all it says.


Your site comes up clean on VirusTotal [0] and URLscan [1]. You should be able to request a recategorization from OpenDNS.

[0] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/c20f7917192a4f9ea1e1c74f4...

[1] https://urlscan.io/result/231cca00-86ee-4c57-b99e-0a76a4b269...


Wild guess, but perhaps it's the - (dash)?


I agree, very cool. Here what I do not like so much:

a) the wood frame seems to be too large (probably there is a technical reason for this), but still. Not much too large though, just maybe 25%?

b) the wood (at least from the pictures) looks cheap (plywood?)


It's multiplex. The device in the last picture has plywood but it's an older version.

Multiplex is actually nice since it's cross laminated and thus retains its shape. I experimented with solid wood and it started arching after a few weeks.


Great job. These look absolutely fantastic and I love the idea. It seems like the perfect use case for e-paper.


I made one too with inkplate. The software is open sourced. More details here: https://link.medium.com/DeyY5FlcXmb


Really awesome. I’m working on a hardware project myself, nice to see a success story.

I’m curious about the enclosure, do you cut it out of wood yourself or are you using a supplier for it that cuts it/glues it for you?


Nice!! How big are those displays, and if you don't mind sharing, how much do those displays cost from your supplier? Last time I checked, e-paper displays were pretty pricey on their own.


The display is 7.5 inches, from Waveshare. I pay retail.


Looks like your form is restricted to org members only


Whoops, is it fixed now?


Yes.


Hi man, beautiful product, if this were an external monitor, or at least a website kiosk, I would buy it in a heartbeat. :D


I like how minimalistic it looks. Families might want a larger sized one to hang somewhere prominent in their home hah.


Yea, I keep eying bigger displays but they are $$$$$


have you thoughts about offering this as software service for something like the Remarkable?


I haven't thought about it, no. Not sure if that would be a good spot to be in, as a business.


Oh man I love this! Definitely keeping my eye on it. Any chance at Outlook integration?


I can say it's in the backlog, but I can't say if and when.


This is awesome. I would 100% buy a battery operated version


100% I agree. Makes non-sense the eInk (low consumption) but power cord.


In defense of cord, I find battery powered (and wireless) things a a lot less "magical" than their alternatives for long lived devices.

"Oh, that's not working today. I guess I need to charge it."

Corded seems a good fit for a static location device.


does this connect directly to google or is there a proxy?


It goes through a proxy that handles the authentication towards Google.


If it was available, I'd buy it right now! :)


If you sign up here I will let you know :)

https://forms.gle/tNcCcYrNBu5nWKgJ9


Very cool and love the design of the display


Awesome


Very cool product!


very cool! I absolutely want one.



I'm not quite there yet, but I'm up to $300/mo iteratively building an uptime checker: https://onlineornot.com/

I started with literally just a Lambda function that checks if static websites were still online, added an email alert if it's offline, wrapped authentication around it, integrated Stripe, and shipped it.

Eventually, I added Slack/Discord/SMS alerts, team invites, support for checking APIs for both uptime and correctness, support for checking JavaScript apps, and more.

My trick for launching into 200 competitors providing the "same" service and still getting customers?

- I work two hours a day, every weekday on OnlineOrNot, and no other side projects. I've had this streak going for about nine months now.

- I focus particularly on features that solve my customer's pain (and I ask my customers what that pain is)

- I'm ruthlessly iterative. If I can't get a feature done in two hours, I figure out how to cut scope down to a two hour block, and ship that. Then iterate on it.


I admire you diligence with cutting down features to hit the self imposed deadline.

I've been ferociously learning game dev and have allowed myself unlimited time to jump down rabbit holes. Now that I'm actually building a game I need to remind myself to just build it with what I know.

It's an interesting switch in mind set. Still learning obviously, only now I'm pulling together knowledge buried deep within rather than from tutorials.

I'll keep in mind scope and remember your inspiring diligence next time I'm tempted to peek in a rabbit hole.


What was your motivation for building it? As you said, there's a lot of competition, did you anticipate that it would be difficult to differentiate?


I didn't see any competitors in the space solving the problem the way I would solve it (good UX + a focus on developer-experience), I wanted an uptime monitor that didn't piss me off with my own freelance clients, and I figured if there was room for a 200th competitor, chances are there would be room for a 201st.


Nice. I am also interested in the consulting -> discover problem -> saas route. I reckon your customers really are buying for their existing trust in you.


Highly likely.

I've also spent a year or two consistently writing about React and building an audience, and the service can monitor React apps too.


That's great, thanks!


Love your focus and commitment, especially the 2 hours a day every weekday for nine months streak.

I'm going to try building a similar discipline with my side projects. Not much would get done in 1 day obviously, but the amount of things that can get done over a longer timeframe like 6-12 months is huge!

Thank you and wish you the best!


Cheers!

Especially worth noting how things can snowball after several months of consistent shipping.

You're not just starting from scratch every two hours, you've already got work to build on top of, to keep you growing.


Do you use any tools like Linear, Notion, and/or Github Projects to keep track and organize new features?


I've tried a few tools, the only one I kept using habitually was Trello.


> My trick for launching into 200 competitors providing the "same" service and still getting customers

I feel like this wasn't really answered. I think its just a big space and you market well and have a solid landing page.


I look at it from the perspective of having a successful React blog, having started writing consistently in 2020.

I have different experiences to others on the market, thus I resonate with some more than others.


Very cool. Looks very professional like there is a large team behind it.

How do you market it?


Mainly content marketing.


The website is beautiful. What is your tech stack ?

Going to sign up now.


Thanks!

It's Next.js, so React + Node.js, written in TypeScript.


How did you acquire your customers?


Scrappily - any way I can, whether that's content marketing (my preferred means), commenting on forums, twitter, facebook, broadcasting my domain URL via my phone's hotspot, merch/stickers, etc.

I'd recommend the book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg for ideas.


Is that Gabriel Weinberg that founded DDG?!


Yep


Ok, this is really cool! (I also love the ruthlessly iterative mindset)


So you ship every weekday? Nice.


My side project currently grosses close to $1,400 per month through Patreon.

I run a modded Grand Theft Auto: V roleplaying server with around 1,500 members (around 300 really dedicated MAU.) If you're not familiar with GTA RP, it tries to emulate real life as closely as possible while still recognizing that GTA is an arcade game. Players live lives as if they were real people, buying cars and houses, holding jobs, opening businesses, receiving medical treatment, being arrested, etc.

I've spent around three years working on the gamemode and spend, on average, 30-60 hours per week on it. It's really a pure passion project. Players support the project through Patreon in exchange for priority queue access (when the server is full, players are held in a queue until a slot opens up for them), custom license plates on their vehicles, custom phone numbers, and other cosmetic perks.


My son plays FiveM almost exclusively when he is on the computer gaming. He has been enamored with it for years now. As a parent who is also a gamer, I can't help but chuckle when I hear the conversations going on between everyone. Although it is not my cup of tea now, when I was that age, I would have killed to have such a world available for me to engage with.

Thank you for such a killer "side" project!


The conversations can be interesting to put it mildly. When I get the chance to play, I mainly play a police officer and it has caused more than one moment of confusion when I didn't realize my partner had taken a work call and their co-workers could hear me barking out "lawful orders" from the other room.

Roleplaying games are really great for exercising your social skills and creative expression though, that's for sure.


you should rebrand your server as a Metaverse and sell it to Microsoft for 1.4 million


I mean, yes, you're being flippant, but this is _not a bad idea_


I had a look at the servers for rent through your affiliate, and I did not like that they have 'drip'pricing - starts out at 7.40AUD or so, then the add ons come, like server location or decent RAM. Then on logout they offer e 50% off coupon, so I go back, choose a server and nowhere to put the discount code! SO awesome service, Ilove it I'm going to set up a a server, but maybe look for a better server provider with clear pricing. Also their servers in Sydney were down, so thats a flag also.


Wow, this sounds really interesting. As someone who used to be an avid GTA V player, I can imagine how much fun this can be. Do you have any videos on the mod and/or on the playing experience?


FiveM is the most popular platform for this type of modding, and is the one I use. nopixel is the most popular server on the platform and usually a good place to start getting a feel for what's possible on a modded GTA server.

If you check out https://nopixel.hasroot.com/, they maintain a list of all Twitch streamers currently streaming nopixel.

nb: I have no affiliation with nopixel.


This is so cool! In my free time I love watching GTA RP, especially NoPixel.



I've launched a couple months ago https://linkz.ai

Linkz.ai is hyperlink auto-previews that keep visitors on your website. It's heavily inspired by Wikipedia & Google Docs link preview popups with special extras. For example, when you click on a YouTube hyperlink, it does not take you to Youtube website, instead it opens lightbox with Youtube video on your website. All with just one line of code.

$500+/m in a first month

Demo page: https://linkz-ai.webflow.io


Super interesting, I added this (albeit way less pretty) to my personal site and generally got poor reviews. That being said, I'm really enthusiastic about the idea.

Example here: https://blog-545pd1vjp-sambroner.vercel.app/


Try adding Linkz.ai previews on your blog posts, and get another round of feedback :)


This has some neat use cases but I dearly hope it doesn't become the norm...


Can you elaborate a bit?

Technically rich link previews save visitors from the tab-overload.


I have nothing against the previews. However when a website hijacks the link to serve a stripped down version of the content locally, it goes against the expectations of the user, and it can really f*k up accessibility tools. This is a bad use of javascript imo. A really bad use. And unfortunately it is being pushed as a way to retain users, meaning that it prioritises profits over everything else.

I don't want to be served a fullscreen auto playing video in a pop-up window when I click on a YouTube link. I want to go to YouTube and view it there, where I can like, subscribe, comment, and so on. It breaks my expectations in a bad way, and I can see why people are growing increasingly frustrated with javascript on websites due to this.

Sorry for being so negative about this. It's a cool concept, but I also really hope that this never becomes the norm. And that's coming from a web developer, someone that's usually cheering on all advancements in the web.


I do sometimes get similar first impressions, though when you look closer at the implementation - the very opposite of your comments is true.

Accessibility of the previews has been thought through & tested. The previews are clearly marked when they open in a lightbox. When you are using a screen reader, the experience improves(!) significantly; on click you get the content right away, not a website in a tab where you need to find the content, and remember that some websites were not tested for accessibility by their devs.

Separately, you can always do, CMD+Click and get the same auto-playing video on Youtube.com in a new tab to like, subscribe & comment. Or click a direct link within a preview to go to YouTube website when you feel that you need to like, subscribe & comment.

And for what it worth, Linkz.ai makes a planet a bit greener with less traffic going back & forth and less CPU & energy used to render a preview vs. a full-featured website :)


> The previews are clearly marked when they open in a lightbox.

Oh, I didn't realize that because I was on mobile.

> on click you get the content right away, not a website in a tab where you need to find the content

This is quite nifty for sites like Soundcloud and YouTube that offer an embeddable version of their content

> Separately, you can always do, CMD+Click

This isn't working for me (Firefox, MacOS)


The rich previews on hover are great. I was referring to the "Immersive Previews", and for the things demoed on your landing page like short forms and Youtube videos, they're a nice experience. I worry about a world where every "sticky" web platform gets caught in an iterated prisoner's dilemma and all decide it's in their best interest to do this. In this world, whenever I want to click a link off of Instagram or Twitter or NYT I end up in an "Immersive Preview" iframe of the site I expected to navigate to. Google AMP everywhere.

I would _love_ a world where this kind of thing is closer to a first-class feature of the web -- thinking of Xanadu-style transclusions or even Google's abandoned(?) <portal> element. I would love deep-linking from Github->Jira->Github in the same tab, and this points the way towards that. But if there are a dozen implementations of it floating around, and users have no control or warning over when a link behaves this way, it's just another way to wrest control of the browsing experience away from them.

Please be mindful about how you advertise this, is what I'm saying.


this is really good idea, how comes not many sites/companies/people use it?


I've just started this product late last year; the response has exceeded my expectations.. give it a few more months for sites/companies/people to adopt :)


how do you get your users?


A few channels right now:

- Participating in the web dev communities

- "Powered by Linkz.ai" footer in the Link preview popups

- Campaigns on Product Hunt, Reddit & similar

- Soon: Affiliate, LTD, targeted ads for Webflow/Squarespace ecosystems


I really like the logo and web design.


What a great idea ! Why .ai though ?


Hyperlinks with artificial intelligence ;)


I make about $50k/mo on https://www.closingcredits.com

I found that most teaching platforms for voice actors out there are run by a bunch of celebrities who are pushing edutainment, not education.

So I wanted to make something specific for voice actors. I will try to branch it out to other creators later.


Dug a little into your background, read some of your posts. Appreciate the different perspective with "Choose Money First." I think a piece of that will stick with me forever now, just because it hit a little different. So I guess just.. thanks for the thoughts.


Thank you! In person I'm a bag of laughs, but on text I really come off as aloof, so it feels good to read that someone was impacted by something I wrote.

I've got so much more that I'm afraid to publish. Might have to reconsider.


Your writing style is entertaining and inspiring.

i'd love to read more of your work so i say do it! if not, rhoades.lorenzo@gmail.com and i promise not to share them ;)


Write more. It's great. Have you seen Sam Simmons tv series Problems? You might like it. Its not related, just you might like it.


I really loved this article. Why I have choosen CS? when people ask I give same answer as written in this.

"Make decisions that will give you more choices, not fewer."


Link?


Here's the specific article: https://siliconvict.com/choose-money-first



The discussion around this thread got my attention, and you've gotten a fan. Looking forward to reading through your blog posts.


Thank you. :)


You make $600k a year from a side project?


Technically I don't work currently, so I'm not sure if this is a side project.

I was the founding engineer and Head of Eng at Reforge the past 4+ years while I was building Closing Credits. I left in August 2021. So, it was a side project for nearly 5 years.

If I have 3 side projects and no full time job at this exact moment, where do I stand? I'll delete my post if I'm violating the side project rule.


Did you not sign away the IP while you were there? If so by this comment you implicate yourself.


+1 That's a great point to make for people who are building side projects. Make sure you list your side projects in an exception in the IP clauses of your employment contract, like I did.


Out of curiousity, what does that typically look like? Named project + brief description + market it's in?

Have you ever had any pushback from legal? Presumably to the effect of "What if you take our IP and put it into that project?"


I think you're being accurate but maybe also quote the numbers from August when you still had a full-time gig.


Very cool, how long did it take from idea to working v1? Anything you'd do differently in terms of getting it to PMF faster, tech choices, or lessons learned?


I already had a different side project with 300k users so it was incredibly easy to find PMF fast because I just emailed them.

Tech choices: I never reinvent the wheel. I just take working pieces from other work that I've done and glue it together. Anything custom, I'll read how others do it.

Lessons: I probably should've chosen a different market. If I had targeted companies and taught their employees professional education rather than poor amateur voice acting hobbyist, I'd probably be making $20M ARR. But I don't mind, this is still fun.


> But I don't mind, this is still fun.

Read your blog, hopefully you aren't telling yourself that right before you fire yourself! In seriousness thanks for the insightful reply. I agree w/tech choices, I'm always thinking about reusability as I piece together my own projects.


What was the original side project that had 300k users?


Wow, congrats on the success! Is this a solo project for you, or are you working with a team?


Just me, but I do revshare with the instructors and I have a support staff on contract to handle tickets.


On your website you say you were pardoned out of a felony conviction. What was it for?


Assault w/Deadly Weapon - took 15 years to get it pardoned and expunged. The hardest battle I've fought in my life. It makes startups look easy. I'll write more about it one day, but I don't want to screw it up.


Cool to see another jailbird here turning things around. I just did 8 inside. How long were you locked up for?

p.s. I would love to fix the audio on your intro video - the hum and echo is killing me. I used to be married to a voice actor and I set up her studio and recording pipeline. [Audacity and Audition both have a quick filter to remove background noise]


Looking forward to it. Subscribed to your newsletter because I thought your essay about money being the most important thing in life was right.

It really can solve or at least, begin to solve, every problem in an individual's life.


As an ESL person I wanted to sign up for this to improve enunciation but price was bit too much


How did you land your first 5 customers and validate your idea?


Twitter Archive Eraser https://delete.tweets.app/, allows users to reliably delete old tweets.

Makes around $5k/month now (down from $7k/mo previously), fully passive income as I haven't worked on any new features in the app for the past 1.5 years or so.


Wow, this is kind of the ultimate side project for passive income.

It does one thing, that people need, and does it well, for a fair price. I assume it requires minimal maintenance, except to keep up with Twitter's API (honestly I don't know if this requires much work, I guess it depends on how much the API fluctuates).


Where does your traffic come from? Is it SEO from domain match of “delete tweets app”?


Nice work, this looks like something I need.


In the EU don't they have an obligation to let you remove all posts due to GDPR?


No, you are entitled to request to "have your data deleted" but the interpretation is basically left to the data controller. In practice this means that the controller as many options to make your life as miserable as it can/wants when you try removing your data from its systems, and more particularly when you want to remove specific portions of your data.

Twitter is a perfect example: removing "some" of your tweets is purposefully made cumbersome for users so that they get discouraged to manage their tweets. Searching through your tweets by date range or by keyword, and a button to delete all results? "Nah, too complicated for us silicon valleyers" :)

One thing to remember with GDPR is that it is not a law that protects customers. It is a legal framework that specifies a set of requirements, which companies must abide to in order to do whatever they need/want with your data. Once you understand this, GDPR becomes much clearer :)


I start tons of projects, and it's always a bother naming them. I didn't find existing domain generators at all useful, and since my background is in AI, I made my own.

https://www.namy.ai

It currently has a modest but pretty consistent 200-300 users daily, almost all of it direct traffic (my SEO skills are very lacking). I'm assuming people recommend it to their friends, and that's where the traffic is coming from.

It's not yet at $500/mo, but it's getting close. Server costs are significant though, since running an AI model is a bit expensive.

Ideas and feedback are welcome.


"Only show available" doesn't seem to work except on the homepage... but I think it's because the homepage is the only place where any domains are actually marked as already being registered. (when most of the suggested domains on search results seem to be registered already, based on a quick sampling.)

On the same line of thought, it would be awesome (but probably difficult/expensive) if you could show the price of each domain directly in the results.

Otherwise, it seems like a neat tool!


You guys are overloading the domain checking API :(

Good problem to have I suppose ^^


That is fantastic, I wish I knew about it earlier. I used another popular name-finding site (can't remember what it was) but it wasn't nearly as intelligent and the results were not that good. It also would be great to check for the availability of the name in Twitter/YouTube/etc.


Looks really cool. The first two results I clicked on where registered a long time ago, though.

https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results/?doma...

https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results/?doma...


Thanks! Yeah, I did NOT expect HN's traffic. It's overloading the domain checking API and making it fail


which is the domain checking API you use? looking for a cheap but reliable domain checking api :)


I think GoDaddy's one is used by a lot of sites?


This is fantastic! If I may be crass, how does this make money? Just through referral links?


Not crass, I like sharing! We're all here to learn from each other.

The monetization model is just referral links to Namecheap, where I get a 10% commission. I want to make that a bit more elegant (especially for people with uBlock Origin, which it doesn't track), and also add a few other referrals (logo makers and maybe hosting).

Couldn't think of other ways to monetize this without making it obnoxious (I hate ads, and making it pay-to-use also seems restrictive to me). If you have any ideas, I'd be open to hear them!


Thanks! I was impressed to see the revenue figures without any ads on the site (I have similar feelings to you regarding ads and monetisation).


you could try being your own nameserver...through namesilo or something...it's like pretty cheap there already per domain, I think if you used their api as a reseller, and upcharged like 15% on each domain's price you could make more than the namecheap commission...


Buy a server with a good graphics card, your server costs will equal out in 3-6 months and then you will actually have revenue.


Cool, I made one called https://mixmatchdomains.com but it never really got much traffic (single digits per day). Maybe the AI thing makes it more marketable, or just being able to type in an open textbox for pure simplicity.


Works surprisingly well.


Thanks! Was a fun project to do. I have a bunch of ideas to make it better, but I decided to let it rest for a bit and focus on other stuff. Might put in a bit more effort if it keeps getting the interest it's getting now!


This is great! I tried "chicken burgers for aliens"* and it came up with some fantastic options.

* not currently a real business plan


Wait until we make first contact (I'm sure this is scheduled later in 2022)


Why are the server cost high ? Can you not run inference on CPU ? Perhaps on an hertzner auctioned machine ?


I’m getting a lot of false positives but this has already generated some great ideas!


I'm sorry! I didn't expect the HN hug of death. About 200 concurrent people right now, so the domain check API is failing :(


Love it. Explainability would be a nice feature. I.e word definitions, origins, etc.


great site, well made. congrats


Have you thought about deploying the ML model on the edge, using something like TensorflowJS or ONNX-runtime?

Haven't done it myself (looking into it right now!), but my impression is that model quantization (and possibly prunning) can give you a palatable model size that doesn't affect performance too much.


I made a background noise website and app

https://asoftmurmur.com

There are a lot of improvements I want to make, but due to life commitments it has been stuck in maintenance mode for far longer than I'm comfortable with


This is a pleasant surprise. I remember using your app ages ago. I want to say at least 7 years ago when I believe you launched your website first on reddit. My memory is a bit hazy.

I really liked your app. We had a construction project going on for the longest time and I would mix up your rain, storm, sea and the singing bowl sound everything together and blast it on my soundbox!!

Thank you.


Haha thank you for the nice memory! I've been running the site for 8 years, it's crazy that it's been that long


I use this constantly, oh my gods. Thank you so much for making it!! <3


Do you mind going into where your main revenue stream comes from and how it breaks down? Is it mostly apple users? Google play? Do you get any revenue from the website itself?


The basic model is people pay for access to more sounds. For the last few years this bas been separate transactions on the ios app, android app and for the web version. Ideally I'd move to a single subscription-based account that worked across all devices for extra sounds.

Revenue breakdown is roughly equal between android, ios and web, somewhat surprisingly. Android converts worse but has higher user numbers. Web converts much worse, but converts at a higher price (justified by the fact that hosting/maintaining the web stuff take a lot more time and money)


Thanks, that's pretty interesting to hear!

Can you talk about how you advertise and got traction enough to get to $500/month?


> Can you talk about how you advertise and got traction enough to get to $500/month?

Pure dumb luck. I made the site to scratch my own itch many years ago, and then it took off because there were few similar sites at the time (that let you mix together different sounds). Only promotion I did was mention the site on reddit a few times. Users were prepared to tolerate a lot of rough edges at first.

There has been zero advertising. The site gets a regular influx of new users because it's been featured on a number of discover-interesting-website portals (the modern versions of StumbleUpon). This happened with no input from me. I assume it's a good match for these kinds of portals because it's immediately usable without any kind of instruction, signup etc.

I only made the decision to monetize after a long period of the site getting lots and lots of organic traffic with no input from me.


> discover-interesting-website portals (the modern versions of StumbleUpon)

Such as? Besides HN, of course.


https://www.boredbutton.com/ is one pretty high-traffic example


boredhoard.com is a good option


That's awesome! I've had that part of my favourites for years now. Every clean browser install I put your site in my fav bar.


Just wanted to say how much I enjoy the site.


Amazing, didn't know this existed. This plus my NC headphones, bliss. Enjoying it while I type this. Thank you!!


I used your app constantly before I picked up Sonos speakers and had to restort to Spotify playlists!


I'm curious about how much work goes into recording high-quality, looping sounds like this?


> I'm curious about how much work goes into recording high-quality, looping sounds like this?

When I started the site, I mainly used CC0 licensed sounds others had recorded.

Then I started recording my own sounds. How much work it is is very situational - if you regularly find yourself in an environment which has the sound you want to record, and not many other sounds around, then it's pretty trivial. For example, you want to record rain in the forest, and you regularly walk in a forest where it rains and there aren't many other noise sources (e.g. other people, planes overhead, singing birds, etc). The actual recording itself doesn't take much work, because I shoot for a level of sound quality that will satisfy 80%-90% of people, rather than a real "audiophile" quality level.

On the other hand, if you want to record something that only happens occasionally and with lots of other noise sources nearby, it can be a ton of work. For example, you want to record the sound of thunder, but you only get occasional storms, you live in a city with lots of other background noise, and it usually rains when it storms and you want rain on the recording. In that scenario, you might have to travel far and burn a ton of time trying to get the right conditions for recording.


I've been using it for hours and hours for the past few years. Thank you!


I use this all the time, and I tell everyone else to as well.


I started making Power-Ups (add-ons/plugins) for Trello in July last year: https://www.tinypowerups.com

It just hit $500/month on Monday and it seems to be increasing by $100 in MRR per week.

I'm only charging $1 per user per month for unlimited access to all of my Power-Ups. I'm thinking about increasing this price to $2 or $3 next month (existing customers get to keep the $1 price tag).

Some of the Power-Ups I offer:

- File Manager: lets you search through and bulk download files on a board.

- Board Chat: adds a simple chatroom to your Trello board

- External Share: creates a link and snapshot of a Trello board that you can send to clients so they don't need to sign up for Trello to see the board.

- Office File Viewer: lets you preview .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files directly in Trello

- Card Approvals: adds a "approve" and "decline" section to a Trello card


Nice! :D


I launched www.rtljobs.com in October and had my first month of $500 in revenue in December.

It's a job board that caters to a very specific subset of electrical engineers - specifically, ones that work with FPGAs and logic design for chips.

Need help hiring FPGA or RTL engineers? Let's talk. fpga.rtl.jobs@gmail.com


Cool. I predict (hope) specialized jobs boards will become more the norm.


This is an interesting thesis. How would HR/People/Recruitment teams work effectively in a world where there are many specialized and actively used job boards?

Today, HR teams usually post jobs on LinkedIn and perhaps one or two more platforms. A world of fragmented job boards would be difficult to navigate for non-specialists.


How would HR/People/Recruitment teams work effectively in a world where there are many specialized and actively used job boards?

I don't care about People and Recruitment teams. I care about People and Recruitment teams for a very, very specific subset of electrical engineers.

My thesis is that HR and Recruiting for the sorts of roles I care about isn't very effective to begin with. The lack of specificity in existing platforms is a contributing factor to the problem I'm trying to solve. Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and whatever other generic job boards are just that - generic job boards. They have no reason to care about this niche any more than the other thousands of job categories out there. LinkedIn is becoming Facebook for wackjobs in work influencer clothing. Even StackOverflow Jobs tends to equate this type of work to general software engineering, when it requires very specific, critical knowledge you typically don't get until you're pretty deep into an EE curriculum.

Add value to the Users - the job seekers - and you start to build trust and aggregate supply. The savvy recruiters follow that. Our clickthru metrics already reflect this.

A world of fragmented job boards would be difficult to navigate for non-specialists.

That the crux of my point. I don't care about non-specialists. I care about recruiters who need to find people to write Verilog or VHDL. If I can become one of their "one or two more platforms" besides LinkedIn, I've made it.


Next up, Leetcode for VHDL/Verilog. Heck what's stopping LeetCode for LtSpice/Altium/Solidworks. Create artificial Supply crunch and You have the exact same scenario playing out in Software engineering field where candidates jostle for "highly competitive jobs" where they are put through a hazing routine called "white board interview". I visited the SAC Goldrush museum recently and came away from this fact embedded deep in my brain" When there is a goldrush, always sell Shovels". You seem to have trailblazed that path for me. So Thank You!


Create artificial Supply crunch

I don't need to do anything to create artificial supply crunch. The talent market has taken care of that for me.

What I'm doing is providing a cost effective means for specialist recruiters to directly speak to a highly relevant subset of engineers.

No idea what LeetCode has to do with that lol.


There used to be a similar site for compiler jobs. I think the niche exists. If you can prove you can attract that audience with high-quality postings, I think it can work.


Cross posting software for HR people to push jobs to multiple job boards is a whole product area in its own right.


It's a thesis I'm banking on myself.


Please add Huntsville, AL to your board. I'm an FPGA engineer currently working there, and there are a lot of us, at a lot of companies.


Rocket town, USA!

I see that name pop up on all sorts of queries and I'm shocked it's not in the db. Digging into that presently. Thanks for the suggestion.


Looks cool, I love this kind of niche projects. How do you / did you drive traffic and job postings to it?


Indexing hiring companies' job sites, and providing helpful comments to people who are seeking jobs in the sector (primarily on Reddit). More on that here:

https://cushychicken.github.io/grow-your-mailing-list-by-bei...

We're seeing a steady and growing trickle of organic traffic, too.


Thanks for sharing this... How did your paying customers became aware of you?


Almost entirely thru word of mouth from an engineer at their company, or thru posting on Reddit.


How do you generate revenue if you only aggregate jobs or post them for free?


By selling Featured Posts, which get prime real estate on the site for 30 days, and a blast out to our mailing list.


Whats an RTL job?


RTL is shorthand for "register transfer logic". It's a term of art for "digital design at the gate level".


We're making about $600/mo right now working on Oku, which we're building as a social book tracker (and more) and hoping to replace Goodreads with.

https://oku.club

Here's my profile for example: https://oku.club/user/joe


That is pretty landing page!

Just read that the meaning of oku [1] is 1) private, intimate, and deep; 2) exalted and sacred; and, 3) profound and recondite

anyway, your brazilian users will find this funny since oku has the same sound of "o cu" that literally means "the butt hole".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oku_(theory)#:~:text=3%20Bound....


Not really, because the O is only open when alone, or a longer word. This reads Óku, not Uku. At least that's how I read it being Portuguese.

The defunct social network Orkut is a good example of this. It's Órkut, not Urkut.

Of course, none of this matters :)


I like the design, but what's would you like to improve over Goodreads?


Looks neat. Why do you think oku will replace goodreads?


What is the source for book data? I was recently looking for a TMDB equivalent for books but couldn't find a good one. There is OpenLibrary but they don't have covers and only do dumps once a month.


Do you provide a way to export data in case the site closes down? I don't use any app/site to track what books I read, but I see that it could be interesting.


We do but it's not fully automated just yet, it'd involve sending us an email.

Similar story with csv imports, it's half supported but not in the UI yet.


I believe there is a turkish speaker involved when you are naming the product :)

"Oku" means read (in imperative form)


https://bruzu.com

API to generate images on the fly.

Sample https://img.bruzu.com/?a.text=HN3


> I am a developer, Do I need this API? No, if you can build your own rendering system with all these features and able to make it run this fast. You don't need this API.

Your FAQ is great hahaha!


Yes, every developer thinks the same about almost every API/service, that they could build it over weekend.


Building it is one thing. It's not even uncommon for people to be right about that part.

It's the maintenance, support, training, operations, and documentation that will kill you, if you think you can "just" write some service and then move on to other tasks.


I like how you addressed this in the FAQ, because this is such a classic take by some users of HN. It's fine if you don't want to use it, but a lot of people would love to. Nice product by the way.


And in some cases, they probably can. But reliability, scalability and most importantly quality is harder.


For the curious like me:

Q: I am a developer, Do I need this API?

A: No, if you can build your own rendering system with all these features and able to make it run this fast. You don't need this API.


I have done this before, a bare bones example can be done easily in Lambda with GraphicsMagick and ImageMagick for node https://www.npmjs.com/package/gm see "annotate an image" example.

I understand your service does more that this. I map the POST JSON to GM params to allow the caller to do nearly anything GM CLI can do.


Yes its very easy to build.


I wont use bruzu till you're one billion MRR. haha jus jokes. I've been following Bruzu since the start. Great product, great dev who is open minded for feedback, etc.


So small small world. Thanks


Can this be done in Pure JS solution within browser? Why need backend?


An API allows you to create images from things that are not browsers.


The product is an "API to generate images on the fly". How would you create an API with no backend?


Not the API, I meant this functionality of rendering text on image, can this be done in JS only?


One barrier is if you load an image from a source that doesn't allow CORS the canvas becomes "tainted" and exports are blocked (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/CORS_enabl...)


Yes, HTML5 Canvas. ctx.drawImage() ctx.fillText()


Yes but then you can't post it to social media as easily. Unless you export it as an image from JavaScript.

This is good for social media managers that want to automate a lot of account posts.


Yes its way easier in browser on front-end.

But you need API for the things that happens off browser. Like if you want to create images inside your code.


Sure it can, and I'd say it's much cheaper to do it in JS than using API (with quite small quota, even for paid plans)


It can be done, but this is already done, so you can just pay with money instead of dev time.


I've been thinking of building something similar in the past. Did you use Imagemagick or similar for the backend or is it AI based?


Its server side HTML5 canvas.


Very nice. Noticed a small typo - the footer link to Pinterest is misspelled.


Thanks, Fixed.


did you built the editor, it must have taken 2 months at least


Yes, using fabricjs for that, we are improving it everyday but yes, it took few days to make the MVP of the editor.


thanks didn't know about fabricjs


What's your revenue like?


Its $185 MRR currently, Hit hard by churn this month.


I make around $500 per month running a gaming VPN service - [link redacted]

I initially built it to route PUBG players in Australia (myself included!) onto the fastest links to overseas servers as the Australian servers did not have enough players. It was strung together with OpenVPN and a Discord bot as I never expected more than around 20 people would use it... mostly figured it would be me and my squad mates. Within three months I had around 350 users by word of mouth paying $5 per month. Most of my users came from established competitors as my service was a lot simpler to use. The user numbers died down over the following year mostly due to competitors offering an aggressive referral system and I was focused on other projects.

Last year I decided to expand to other games and regions. I rebuilt it as a standalone Electron based Windows app using a kernel network driver that can route individual Windows apps through my WireGuard VPN servers. I built everything except the network driver which was done by a Windows networking specialist - https://ntkernel.com

I currently support PUBG, DOTA 2, iRacing, Apex Legends, Rocket League, Final Fantasy XIV, Super People in Australia/New Zealand and PUBG and Rocket League in North America.

The service is stable and relatively scalable so this year I'm hoping to focus on the marketing in between other projects. Part of that will probably include a name change as I figure it doesn't make a lot of sense to people outside Australia


I am curious, how is a VPN solving a latency issue?


take the shortest path instead of cheapest-to-ISP path I am guessing?


Yes pretty much. Most ISP's just buy access to the cheapest routes which are not always the fastest. I rent servers that are connected to the fastest routes and send the customers game traffic through them. This often results in lowering the latency by a significant amount.

The other thing the VPN does is allows people to choose which region they want to play on. For example, in PUBG, when you launch the game it pings all of the different available regions and selects the one with the lowest latency. This is not always ideal as there may not be any players on the closest servers and you end up playing against a bunch of bots.


Can I ask how you find the fastest links between countries and the servers for them? (Background: during my vacation last month I was playing an MMO from the APAC region but with servers in Germany, and it was crazy high latency. It made the experience quite bad. I wanted to rent my own servers and build a faster link for myself.)


While I can't answer your question as asked (and am not OP), I can at least point out that that when I ping my Contabo VPS I see

- 308ms from my landline ADSL2+ (not on the NBN yet, hopefully soon),

- 350ms over 0-bar 4G (house in blind spot, yay),

- 300ms from EC2 running in ap-southeast-2, and

- 312ms from Oracle Cloud in ap-sydney-1 (okay the x86-64 one was 309, the ampere one was 314-317)

which sorta highlights the sore-thumb reality of transatlantic cables: I'm 16,267km/10,108mi away, and there's very very little I can do about it.

The only thing I do really wonder about is if Starlink does p2p backhaul between the satellites, or if they're just floating mirrors... but after just clarifying that radio waves can't go faster than light I'm now unsure whether that would actually make a difference. Hm.


Previously from 26 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095

That said, this seems to be the extent of my marketing desire.

I screen scrape campground registration websites and alert you when someone cancels on a date you want to go camping. Fabulously successful. Now back to my day-job.

https://wanderinglabs.com


This feels like a good balance to me--you're giving people a heads-up that there's an open block that they can book, without doing the "value add" of blocking it off and then scalping the slot. More power to you.


the UI is just so nice, it's functional and simple. it's not trying win design awards to point of bein completely insufferable like some sites i see today.


How much do you earn?


I made ~$1000 in earnings in a weekend selling algorithmically generated posters of my art: https://spacefiller.space/prints

This was a test run that went surprisingly well. I paused sales so that I can focus on reworking my process (it was very manual, hoping to make it completely automated) and design more posters.


Curious what the rough process is to generate art algorithmically... I've heard of ML that attempts to generate art based on its training pool. What concepts does this sort of art use?


Thanks for your question! I began writing a technical explanation of the art here: https://notes.spacefiller.space/living-wall/

It's a very early draft, but hopefully provides a glimpse into the techniques I use.

(tl;dr: it's way more low-tech than ML generated art.)


Curious who you use for printing. I've got an idea I'm working on with poster-sized output that I'd like to tie into a printing/shipping API if possible.


I used printful.com. Their matte prints are surprisingly high quality.


Thank you. I'll give them a look.


If you want to restart with someone to do the grunt work let me know :P


If you're serious, send me an email at alexmiller@spacefiller.space! I would honestly love to hire someone to do a bit of grunt work.


you should do courses, maybe for free w/ a sub-license agreement or franchising thing or create some marketplace to handle sales/marketing for people who maybe create their own auto-algorithmic designs, and then you're making $, and people who might be struggling --esp. artistic types might make some $.... win/win.

Maybe something where someone uploads some sort of 'manifest' or 'starter material', that determines how the artwork comes out, the system then handles creating, selling, delivering the artwork and takes like 20% cut...

I'd love to help on something like that if you'd want, I'm a laravel/php dev mostly but familiar w/ rust, go, python, javascript.


These are a amazing pieces of computational art!

Might I ask what you built it with?


Thank you! They're made with Java-based Processing (https://processing.org/), although I have a new JavaScript/WebGL version in the works.


I'm running a website for people learning Japanese and currently making ~$590/month from Patreon donations: https://jpdb.io/

This is an entirely spare-time project on which I've been working publicly for the past year.

Here's some info about the tech stack I'm using: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693959


Upon initial login I'm definitely impressed by the interface, the existing content, and the potential to finally brush up on my Japanese.

I ended up linking to my Google account, but I spent a long while trying to "sign up" with my email only to be given an message about failing to meet the password requirements (no mention of character limit and no special characters allowed). At first I thought I just needed to adjust my password generator to get a valid password (usually 64 chars with alpha-numerics and special characters), but even the simplest passwords failed with the same error message.


> I ended up linking to my Google account, but I spent a long while trying to "sign up" with my email only to be given an message about failing to meet the password requirements (no mention of character limit and no special characters allowed).

This is strange; I don't really have any special password requirements. What's the exact error message you were getting? The only requirements are that it's at least 6 characters long and different than your username, and in each case it should tell you exactly what's wrong.


Wow, that looks great!

My main complaint is that I haven't known about this until now. I frequently search for Japanese resources and specifically did searches to find pre-made decks of Japanese content from Japanese language media, but never encountered your site.

Thank you for the effort to revamp the Heisig kanji keywords - makes me wish I didn't already learn it the RTK way. The way to teach new kanji by introducing the enclosed primitives first is smart - it's a good compromise between "primitive first" and "usage first" approaches.


Thanks!

Yeah, it's still pretty much a very niche resource that many people do not know about. (:

Indeed, Heisig's keywords can be janky. Mine are not perfect, but in general they should be better than Heisig's. Well, at least for most of the really common kanji; I still need to change/improve the keywords for some of the more rare kanji and tweak a few more common ones. (As you can imagine doing that manually for a few thousand characters is a lot of work, so it has been slow going.)


Hi, if you're still around:

jpdb looks really cool, but will it work for somebody who is a complete beginner?

I want to learn Japanese, and intend to commit time to doing so sometime in the upcoming 2-3 months. However, right now, I'm literally at zero.

Is there somewhere else I should go to learn things like basic grammar and sentence structure first, or will jpdb help with that sort of thing too?


A complete beginner? Nope. Well, at least not yet!

Eventually I do want to make it a one-stop-shop which will teach you everything and take you from a complete beginner to someone who can immerse in native media as soon as possible. We're not there yet, and the site works best if you're at least an advanced beginner. The bare minimum requirement is that you know hiragana and katakana already.

Your best bet would be to start with a textbook of some kind and/or some actual lessons with real teachers to learn the basics. The more of a beginner you are the more the human touch helps; the more advanced you are the more you can depend on apps.


I'm creating a free Japanese course that ships as a flashcard deck for Anki. It completely starts from zero, maybe it helps you: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/911122782 I guess this format is similar to what jpdb offers, maybe you can even import it there. The deck currently covers most grammar and a little more than 800 words on ~1800 flashcards. It's mostly based on anime though, so at least some interest in this is beneficial ;).


This is quite cool. One suggestion would be to have the pronunciation listed in addition to the kanji and audio (at least when I searched I didn't see it, so the only way to learn to pronounce is to use audio). Do you know of something similar for Chinese by any chance?


> One suggestion would be to have the pronunciation listed in addition to the kanji and audio (at least when I searched I didn't see it, so the only way to learn to pronounce is to use audio).

Sorry, I'm a little confused? The pronunciation is listed for every word; that's the hiragana next/on top of the words. (:

> Do you know of something similar for Chinese by any chance?

Alas, I do not. Maybe I'll make something like that in, like, 20 years if I'll ever be able to make a living off of this. (:


Thumbs up for revising the keywords of remembering the kanji.

I don’t follow his book but I do refer to it when studying and sometimes his keywords really can be far out. If I remember correctly he never clarifies if the kanji for “can” is “can do” or “can of soup”.


Really neat! Business-wise, is it meant to compete with sites like Wanikani and Bunpro, or is it meant to be more complementary?


Eventually it's meant to have enough content/functionality to be a replacement for both.


Looks fantastic, and I especially love the simple tech stack. How do you handle updates out of curiosity? scp and rerun?


Yep. Copy the executable (plus another file which is a big blob containing the dictionary, examples, etc.), and then just do `systemctl restart`.

There's nothing extra running on the server; no reverse proxy (the app itself automatically fetches/renews the HTTPS cert), no database, nothing. Just the app, the SSH server and the default system services.


My side project, FormTester 365 https://www.formtester365.com has been doing a little over $700/mo now. Many customers are agencies who want to be alerted if a client's web forms stop working.

It tests website forms daily (currently as a Gravity Forms plugin add on) and confirms that they were successfully submitted. I'm working to add support for general web forms in the next few months. Feel free to send me an email if you're interested in being notified when that feature rolls out — jon (at) creativeculturemedia.com


This is offered as a service? How do you find customers?


I'm working on http://talevideo.com - The easiest way to create a video of your SaaS or website. It's not subscription, but got about 300$ in revenue from January.

Talevideo - is a desktop application where you can create video directly from website, without screen recording. And animate any element on page, like fadeIn and etc.

Example result of video/gif at my github: https://github.com/ssleptsov

Example_2 video directly from reddit website: https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/ra7inj/app_to_...


Great job! Any hints what technologies you are using?


Thanks! Yea, sure.

It's Electronjs with vue3/typescript, threejs, tailwind2 and konvajs for timeliner(because canvas render much faster then html update, so it's keep high FPS on edit mode). And vitejs for tooling.


Looks cool!


Thank you so much!


I created Video Hub App - browse, search, and organize your videos - "like YouTube for videos on your computer".

It's a commercial project / charityware that is turning 4 years old next month. I sell it for $5 per copy and give $3.50 to a cost-effective charity. If you go to the blog you'll see the history of sales. As of now I donated almost $13,000 to charity thanks to this project. It's averaging around 100 sales per month for over a year now.

https://videohubapp.com/en/

Also open source MIT: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App


Selling perpetual licenses for software that runs on your machine?! How quaint!


Offering perpetual licenses is a huge plus in my book, and often drives my purchasing decision. Thank you.


one customer segment that can reaaaally benefit from this is people who edit videos, they need to have repository of 1000s of sound effects, memes, and clips from general media. There really needs to be a tool to find gifs, images, videos and audios by typing general word and it even should match synonym tags.


I recently purchased VHA -- thank you so much for making this!


I built an iOS sex tracking app, Nice.

https://nicetracker.app/

There were no sex tracking apps on the App Store that weren't focused the menstrual cycle, so I built my own. It now includes cool features such as syncing across iCloud devices, location recording, STD/STI tests, and most importantly, stats!


Wait, people have enough sex with enough different people to make this worthwhile? Damn, I'm missing out.


you don't need the STI checker either, oh well ;)


I thought it was cute, then saw the number of reviews which blew my mind! Is monthly revenue as low (<$5k) as SensorTower suggests?


On average it brings in about 3k monthly, and then it always doubles for the month of January. I suspect people set new years goals/resolutions to have more sex.


The real question.... are you having more sex since it was released?


funny enough, yeah! My wife loves trying to keep up a high score and keep the 'longest streak' stat going.


Then this is the most successful side project on this page. Doesn't matter how much it brings in.


i wouldn't want want my wife to find out about this app


My JavaScript screencast, letscodejavascript.com, made over $10K net profit per month at its peak. It costs $25/month for unlimited access to over 600 videos.

I stopped producing videos in April 2018, but the site is still up, and still gets occasional new subscribers. (There's been an influx lately, in fact, and I have no idea why. Maybe because I have a new book out.) It's still netting more than $500/month, although not by a lot. But it requires nearly zero effort from me, so I'm happy with it.

Edit: To clarify, it wasn't a side project when I was producing the videos. But now it's passive income.


Do people ask for support? What I mean is like "x package isn't working" or "I'm having trouble setting this up on my machine", do you help them troubleshoot? Or is it just the videos.


Each video has a comments section, and some of the early videos did get the types of comments you're talking about. I put the answer on the comment page and (in some cases) updated the videos. But I updated the README in the repo and improved the videos, and it stopped being an issue pretty early on.

Now all I get in support requests is the occasional account management email, and those are pretty streamlined at this point. (I could eliminate nearly all of them by creating a proper account management page, rather than directing people to email me, but given the number of requests I get, the cost of doing that is way higher than just handling it by email.)

It helps that the screencast is aimed at more advanced developers. But that's also why it didn't end up being viable in the long term, I think. That and the "long play" format, I suspect.


I'd really would like to know how do you go from video idea to a finished video, especially audio part. I tried making tutorials and just ended mumbling 70% correct facts and rest wasn't actually correct.


The main channel was the “Recorded Live” series, which was basically livecoding with me thinking out loud. That didn’t require any real prep, as I had enough experience with a previous livecoding show that it came out pretty well. The main thing I did was edit out pauses and gaps while I was thinking so that it flowed nicely. I would also announce a pause when I needed to go research something (which was fairly common) and edit a “fade to black” into the video.

The “Lessons Learned” channel was more elaborate. The video at objectplayground.com [1] is my most popular example. For those, I would make slides and animations in Keynote, then record while playing the slides. I had an outline, but not a script, as I felt that made the narration less stilted. Sometimes that resulted in minor mistakes going into the video. For more serious ones, I would record a new line and edit it into the video.

In all cases, I would edit out pauses, and if I misspoke or stumbled over my words, I’d just repeat myself and edit out the mistake. I got pretty good at editing—because there was no video of my face, I could make cuts that were basically invisible. My livecoding videos each had hundreds of cuts, typically just half a second or so. It would take a 20 minute recording down to a 15 minute final video. It took about 4 minutes of editing per minute of final video.

[1] The video on objectplayground.com isn’t showing up on my phone for some reason. You can find it here instead:

http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/comments/lessons_learne...


thanks, as someone who just started out doing cuts leave feeling like im in the wrong place


$10K/month to $500/month seems like such a big drop. Why do you think that happened? Because you don't upload new videos anymore?


It happened very gradually over the course of the show’s 6-year run. (Started 2012, last video 2018.) As for why, I’m not entirely sure, but I think that part of it was that people are more interested in tutorial videos about the latest tools, and my show was almost exactly the opposite: it was about design, creating maintainable code, and avoiding fads. So as the initial audience dropped off, I didn’t have the word of mouth marketing juice to attract replacements.


do css and golang


I play music in bars. Or busk an accordion. Fun times. Definitely not passive income, but it's work I like.


Hey fellow accordion busker! I find my busking income has diminished vastly with age, despite my skill rising. Everyone wants to toss a coin at the 10 year old playing decent accordion. Not so much the 30 year old playing good accordion.


Well, I'm 43....

Not to say that this is your issue, but I find it helps if I dress up a lot.

I have nice, embroidered pearl snaps, custom cowboy boots, fancy hats, and a couple nice vests.

That is to say, it's pretty easy for folks to confuse me with panhandlers. I have no problem with folks panhandling, but my tips are way better if I look like a performer.


I realize you can't exactly do exit interviews but have you tried talking to "users"?


Are you using Venmo for tips? I used to have an itch for digital tip jars, but never figured out the right set of features to really drive adoption...

This was well before Patreon, and PayPal was pretty much the only API game in town. Since then, I've felt like Venmo handles 9/10ths of the live performance problem (unleash the appreciation (money) locked in digital form).


I never have cash on me and when I see a QR code I usually give 2-5x more than I would if I was carrying cash on me because it feels weird to "drop in" $1-4 on Venmo and I guilt myself into more.

Anyway, accordion OP you should get a QR code for tips :)


Yup ^ that was also the idea. Unlock so much more value for the performer


TBH, I am not super on point about that-- on some level I still rationalize busking as a mode of practice where I don't have to annoy the neighbors in my apartment.

I should probably look into that... it seems like a reasonable idea.

I will say, the one time that someone asked me directly about it, when I told them I didn't have venmo they gave me a $100 bill. Not to say that will ever be repeated.


Awesome


My wife always compained that there was no suitable time tracking app for breastfeeding our little baby. Within three weeks I developed a simple app with proposals from her which fits her needs. After a few weeks using it we were suddenly overwhelmed with inquiries from our friends searching for such an app as well.. Within another week, I made it ready for the AppStore and the PlayStore and now it does around 400 € a month :-)

https://www.stillapp.de - although the page is in german the app is translated into english as well.


Any reason you haven't translated the page into English? Sounds like you've got a popular app!


Just didn't find the time to do it :-) But you are right - I should do it!


Haha, I'm in the same boat. Have needed to set up a VAT number in the UK for almost a year, still haven't done it!


Your comment was a good reminder: I just translated the page into english as well :-) - Thank you for your comment!


Oh no. Now I need to get a VAT number! Thanks for the kick up the arse. :)


Monetizing the algotrading models I've built over the last 2+ years: https://grizzlybulls.com

I've traded them with my own capital successfully since April, 2020, and I've averaged 75%+ annual returns with much lower volatility than the overall market. My starting capital was small (500k) so in addition to growing with my own capital, I'm now providing the signals (3 free, 4 premium).

105 total members, MRR is currently $1397/month, just launched exactly 1 month ago today. Still in the google sandbox so I'm not seeing much organic traffic. We have a small community on reddit, rest of users from social media, Seeking Alpha and Stock Twits.


"Over the last few years we have built and refined seven algorithmic trading models. I did work on this full time for over 2 years before recently starting a new job. I've traded them with my own capital successfully since April, 2020, and I've averaged 75%+ annual return. Monetizing the algotrading models I've built over the last 2+ years."

Lot's of conflicts there. You need to polish up your story. Nobody, NOBODY is going to put 500k on a bot which is still in development. Also how come you had exactly 500k? Not 497K or 502K for example?

I've been developing cryptocurrency bots since 2013 and I don't see any reason to sell the signals to anyone ever if they turn out to be profitable. Last year, It seems, I finally made a few profitable bots but let's see how it goes. If they all turn out to be bad, I'm not going to start selling them like everyone else. I'm going to try again.

Beating the SPX500 on bull runs is easy. Just buy the index future with higher than 1x leverage. It will work until we get another market crash. Have you backtested your bots during 2000-2006? How does the P&L curve look?

Sorry, but I get pissed off at people who sell bots to people who doesn't understand how hard it actually is to make them profitable. Yeah, they may be your customers for a few months but then they are going to try another bot hoping it would be better.


My bot was in full time development for more than 3 months before I started trading live with it, I had traded manually previously for 15+ years, and I was highly confident the bot was better than me. Why not put money into it? The execution framework is extremely stable.

My models do not use any leverage, and they perform better in volatile markets than stable ones. In fact, the only way they can gain alpha is from avoiding drawdowns because during long signals they get exactly the same returns as SPX.

And yes, you are right, it is incredibly difficult to make a profitable bot. 2020 isn't the full story, that's when I decided to give it my full time effort of 80+ hour weeks.

As long as the bots continue to perform near the backtest, yes eventually I would become wealthy with them without other monetization, and as mentioned in other posts, a net worth in the high 8 figures, probably dwarfs what I can make with this website and service so I make no guarantees that it will always be around. That said, I'm enjoying running it and having real people use my product, and it does not hinder my own returns, at least not at our current scale.

Side note: FWIW I think it's probably harder to make a successful crypto bot than equity bot because crypto is far more speculative and doesn't have as much fundamental and macro backing it up--would have to be mostly TA, sentiment and there's bound to be more inherent randomness to the movements since it is so new and speculative.


So, let's assume you started on April 1st with $500k. That was 1.8045 years ago. At a compounded 75% returns, you now have $1,936,655 and you expect to make $124,904 this month alone on invested capital. And yet you bother to broadcast your secrets and (waste your time by selling subscriptions for $1397/month. If you did this for 5 years, you'd have $82mm, and you want to risk getting that edge traded away for $1397 a month. Huh.

Smells fishy.


Healthy skepticism is warranted and welcome of course! My account is currently at 1.4M. Taxes and living costs are taken out regularly. I'm not giving anyone access to the source of the models, only the output signals and trade history. I do give brief descriptions of some of the indicators that each take into account, but none of the details of how the complex system works which is the tricky part. You can find huge list of potential indicators for algotrading for free lots of places online.

Lastly, the 75% is a bit of an anomaly. As you can see, the top model is only expected to return about 60% pre-tax. It's unusual that in live trading we have exceded the back test--2020 was a bizarre year and we also started after a big bear market so we benefited for a huge bull that year + nailed the June and September crashes (check the trade history). 2021 was a below average year by contrast, and over the long term, any algotrader should expect the live results to be a bit under the backtest as despite our best efforts (and I consider my anti-overfitting engine to be the biggest accomplishment here), all systems are to some degree overfit to past data.

Lastly, as I mentioned in another comment, I make no guarantees of always publishing this site and signals. If I decide in the future (perhaps once my account is to that 50-100M range) that the site is more of a liability for me than an asset, I may close it, with or without grandfathering. However, obtaining 1% of Seeking Alpha's userbase would be 5M+ per year in revenue from the site which is a few multiples of my current net worth. Even with a hypothetical 50M net worth 10 years from now from 40% post-tax, post-living expense returns, 5M is still meaningful. If we fail to gain that much traction, or the bot does so well that I hit that kind of figure much earlier than expected, I may halt the publishing.

As of now, and for the forseeable future, the site makes financial sense to me, and it's been a lot of fun, so it also makes pleasure sense for me. Life is about more than money of course.


> If I decide in the future (perhaps once my account is to that 50-100M range) that the site is more of a liability for me than an asset, I may close it, with or without grandfathering.

I'd like to offer to take care of it and manage all aspects of it if you ever get annoyed by it. These algorithms are life-changing and the more (and especially lower income) people have access to them, the better.


What's the trickiest statistical method you employ that isn't embedded in this model?


Just curious, why sell your model if it's working so well for you?


I've thought about this a lot, and to answer 100% honestly, I'm not sure I always will, but for now:

1. These are not HFT models. They trade once every 2-4 weeks on average. They scale to billions in capital, so selling them does not inhibit my own returns. 2. There's a lot of demand. Part of the reason I decided to launch is I had some friends IRL begging me to let them use my models as well. Seeking Alpha has over 15M MAU and hundreds of thousands of premium subscribers, and in my opinion this service provides more direct value and wastes less of your time with noise. 3. All the money I make from this goes back into my own bot and compounds. Sure the $1400/month doesn't add up to much right now, but 1000+ premium subscribers one day would make a huge difference to me financially. 4. I believe we are at a precipice with passive investing, and the next bear market which could be right around the corner will dishearten a lot of folks. The more money investing smartly in the market at a reasonable fee makes the markets and overall economy less fragile. More automated smart investing saves society the drag of lots of suits on wall street mostly playing a big marketing game without producing much alpha or liquidity or any other measurable benefit in contrast.

Also, on a lighter note, running a business is just a lot of fun. I love seeing people use my product and get value from it.


Who would you describe as your target audience? For example, would someone with some software and mathematics skills but limited financial knowledge (but growing interest) be able to turn the signals into a trading system?


Definitely, that's why I have API access to signals as part of the Gold Plan. I think there are several ideal users:

1. Active investors who like to pick individual stocks and want to know when is a good time to hedge for beta for macro downturns.

2. Other algotraders who want to either set up their own fully automated system using my models (either in full or as part of the input to their own proprietary model).

3. Average folks who are mostly passive investors but want to be just active enough to avoid the biggest downturns that can take years or decades to recover from. They don't want their retirement savings to potentially stagnate for 13+ years like March 2000 to March 2013. Our models have low signal frequency compared to most competitor systems which make them easy to execute on almost passively by following our email notifications.

4. People who already have 6 figure+ investment accounts and want to grow it more aggressively than SPY or VTI, but don't want to 1. spend the time and energy managing their portfolio themselves and/or 2. pay very high hedge fund / PE / VC fund fees for dubious benefit


Thanks for the information. I’m going to check it out. This is a unique thing I haven’t seen before.

On another but related note, are you familiar with Robert Carver’s books? If so, any thoughts? I’ve been going through his Leveraged Trading book.


Thanks for checking it out :)

I've heard good things about Carver's work but I haven't read them myself. However, I got started reading similar books by Ernest Chan


The performances of the models are almost unbelievable. I only saw something similar with alphahub.us in the past (but higher max. drawdowns) - what do you think of them?

I'm interested in running the Gold Plan, are there any resources on how to set up a fully automatic trading system with it? I'd love to connect.


Alphahub looks interesting, but their algorithms are quite different from mine. Theirs are picking individual stocks and sending out a signal at a regular frequency, every day, telling you what they think will be the best performing for that day.

By contrast, our models only send out signals on average of once per 2-4 weeks depending on the model. Our signals are always macro signals--they have an opinion only on where they see the overall market (S&P 500) heading next. The signals are irregular. During extremely calm times like in 2013 or 2017, there can be months without a signal. On the other hand, during highly volatile times like the COVID crash in 2020, there can be multiple signals per day, but there will never be more than 1 per hour.

Naturally, their drawdowns will be worse because individual stocks are inherently more risky than the index. As far as which will be the best absolute performer over the long term? I guess we'll have to wait and see :)

One last note about ours that could make a difference depending on your account type and country of residence. Since our models are macro models, if you live in the USA and implement them exactly by trading the S&P 500 Futures, you'll save money in taxes as all gains are taxed at 60% long term and 40% short term regardless of holding period. Alphahub gains will be taxed always at 100% short term rates unless held for more than a year which is unlikely with their systems.

I'm glad to hear you are interested in setting up your own automatic trading system! I'm in the process of writing some docs on exactly how it works, but in essence, we'll give you an access token for the API and then you can call it from your bot locally or in the cloud to get the live signals for all the models you have access to.


You talk in plural form, but I can only find information about you on the page. With this kind of alpha, I'd expect a team of quant traders and physicists working on it (I actually talked with the creator of alphahub.us, he's a physicist). Are you intending to work full-time on it and what are the other plans (I saw you started a job at a new company)? Not trying to be skeptical, but this could be something life-changing if it works - already pretty hyped tbh.

The alphahub.us strategy has execution problems because some of the smaller companies in the NASDAQ have low trading volume, so it doesn't scale as easily as a macro strat. I've talked with people who run it and it runs into scalability issues even with limited amounts of capital. Still trying to find the catch with your offer because it looks amazing.


I do have the habit of talking in plural form. The site was built by my wife and I together, but I built 100% of the models myself. I did work on this full time for over 2 years before recently starting a new job. Now, I've got the models to a place where it becomes very difficult to improve them. I used to be able to make huge progress in a week, now I can spend 100 hours trying different theories and may not end up with any progress. That can be frustrating, so I decided, the models are fantastic right now, the execution framework is very stable, I'm happy with how they are performing, I'm going to let them run.

As mentioned, I'm not rich (1.4M in bot, ~2M total net worth), a SWE job paying 400-600k is quite meaningful to me even with 40-60% returns on my portfolio for the time being, just as potential profits from this website (also perhaps in that range within a year or two?) are also meaningful. If the website fails to generate significant revenue, I may shut it down. Also, I enjoy working on satisfying things, and now that the models are mature and the website is mostly finished except minor details, I'm happy to have a team and a project for now :)

That's also a good call out on the scaling problems--another reason our models trade the SPX futures, literally the most liquid financial instrument in the world. By my slippage calculations, the models don't need significant scaling updates until at least 1B+ is being traded.


I sell repackaged open source software on AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace and offer support as part of the monthly software cost.

It's the same software but the Azure offer sells a lot better. Monthly income is about $1000 from both.

Very few support requests come in, so it feels like mostly passive income. All I have to do is answer the occasional ticket and keep the images up to date.


What sort of open source software are you repackaging? Like odoo, or more like laravel stuff like invoice ninja?


Thats awesome! Do you just rebrand the opensource software?


I don't believe there is any rebranding.

Ultimately somebody needs to provide these images and if nobody else does it I guess you can make okay money from it!

It's probably automatable with some effort!


I’m making ~$4k a month, from a small macOS and iOS app portfolio:

- macOS apps: https://fadel.io/

- iOS apps: https://apple.co/3fqcWfO


I bought Batteries For Mac when my mouse died without warning. It's funny how much a simple little widget actually helps out.


Thank you for being a fan of Batteries! :)


This is what I aspire to do. Building small apps that is super specific to solving a problem.


I've made about 50 Amazon Alexa skills. The most popular 5 earn rewards: https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/gr...

At first it was around $2500 per month, but has slowly ramped down over the past 4 years to about $900 per month. Totally passive income at this point.


Do you mind sharing what some of them do?


Sure. Some of my most successful are:

Bark Like a Dog -- https://www.amazon.com/Iguana-ASD-Bark-Like-Dog/dp/B07C1BKWK...

Truth or Dare -- https://www.amazon.com/Mitchell-Harris-Truth-or-Dare/dp/B073...

The Song that Never Ends -- https://www.amazon.com/The-Song-That-Never-Ends

and my personal favorite, but doesn't make much is Rap Battle -- https://www.amazon.com/Mitchell-Harris-Rap-Battle/dp/B0742JQ...


Originally a side project two years ago, now I'm full time on it: https://www.interviewquery.com/

We help data scientists land jobs by being the Leetcode for data science.


I built an app to control what my kids watch on Youtube: https://kidstv.family Makes $1500/month


Interesting product. Do you play the videos from YouTube, if yes how do you embed them in your app. If no, do you host these videos on your end and how are they licensed from those content creators.


How long did it take you to build this? Do you do any advertising?


It is a hobby project for 3 or 4 years.

No advertising except for $20/month for Apple Search Ads… I guess I should advertise more.


Fyi - The image under your Aaron Francis quote is broken.


I currently teach computer science at a local high school. Topics range from algorithms and data structures to AI and societal impact.

I do it to encourage young people to use software to make a change in their and other’s lives.

Currently making $500 with 90min/week effort. I already got the syllabus material ready so I do not necessarily have to invest time here.

Right now they’re writing an exam.


https://hoppy.network Hosted WireGuard as a Service with static IP assignment.


What’s your server location?


Only Chicago right now. We'd like to expand when the economics makes sense (there is a bit of a chicken/egg problem there where we definitely lose some potential sales by not providing the region folks want - but we need sufficient saturation to pay for the new deployment).

My advice if you want to use our service but in a region besides Chicago: use our service and email us the region you'd prefer. In the mean time, the extra 20ms round trip latency probably won't bother you and we'll let you know when we expand in the future (and your voice will help decide where!).


Is this a VPN? How does it compare to, say, NordVPN?


Yes and no.

It is more like we provide you a network interface that, instead of being plugged into your modem for Comcast/AT&T/etc, it's plugged into a datacenter.

You get a public static IPv4/IPv6 connection with Reverse DNS - just located somewhere else.

Making your machine publicly routable is the primary use case (e.g., for email, web, whatever you want if you have trouble with NAT/CGNAT or simply don't want your home IP associated with the service), but it also encrypts your traffic between your PC and our datacenter such that your ISP can't snoop - which is not to say we're a good privacy solution - that is not what our product is designed to do.


Thanks! I’ll keep you in mind if I need such a service!


I have two such side projects that run almost passively, neither is an app though.

1- An extremely simple habit tracker spreadsheet template that I also use myself - https://www.preetamnath.com/habit-tracker-template

Makes ~$100/mo but this month it's on track to make $200, probably due to new year's enthusiasm?

2- Learn Programmatic SEO, a straightforward course to help people identify repeatable keyword patterns and use that to drive traffic to their business, website, projects etc. SEO beginner-friendly - https://www.preetamnath.com/programmatic-seo

The course makes between $300-$500/mo.

I don't have any costs other than website hosting and Gumroad fees. I do think these projects have scope to improve and grow. Would love feedback from anyone who finds them interesting!


These are both really unique and interesting! Curious to know how you've publicised it so far, and if you think spending more time/money on publicity can get them to grow a lot more


All sales comes via organic search traffic. I plan to try and drive more traffic this year through content.


It might be a good idea to make this a monthly thread? There is intense interest in the topic


I've run http://olodolo.com (it mostly runs itself) since 2018, which lets people buy things on AliExpress using crypto. I often describe it as the only non-scam crypto website :)

It's badly in need of fixes and updates, but I still do about $1500-2000 in sales and $300-400 in profit monthly.


What's the biggest cost? The disparity between the rev and net are pretty big


That sales number would likely be the value of goods bought through the platform, not total revenue


Back in the day(2014-2015) I regularly used a service that does the same thing but for steam games.

I try not to think about the exchange rate difference compared to now :^)


I made an Apple Watch app and complication a few years ago that averages $800 a month. I don't put any money into marketing or search ads, and it's been feature-complete since 2019:

https://www.betterday.app/

The app is built around two small, simple features: today's date with a customizable format, and a three-year calendar so you can see what weekday dates fall on outside of the current month. It also supports several alternative calendar systems including the Islamic and Hebrew religious calendars, which I think may be another use case that drives sales.

Anyway: it's a one-time, two-dollar purchase that lots of folks are still finding and finding useful.


I make Nodewood: https://nodewood.com/

It's a SaaS starter kit/boilerplate written in Node.js and Vue 3. Made almost _exactly_ $500/month last year. Would have/should have made more with proper marketing, but I've been doing probably too much engineering instead. The next release should be the one to take it out of "beta" (honestly, an arbitrarily-chosen label, especially compared to some competitors with fewer features/work put into them), and then it'll be a bit easier to work with some potential partners who would prefer to promote non-beta software.


That is very nice, maybe in future you can have a non-commercial use version for a lower free / fee?


A quarterly magazine — $2K/mo: pipewrenchmag.com

Two membership tiers, one paid, one barter: pipewrenchmag.com/backer-barter

We publish one longform nonfiction feature every quarter, surrounded by a constellation of reactions, asides, and art inspired by the core story. Our latest issue is about bringing in "outside food," and the art of smuggling snacks into movie theaters: https://pipewrenchmag.com/making-concessions-movies-and-popc...


My brother started Podcast Notes in 2015. I help out on the tech side. We now have a growing community of Premium Members, 35k Twitter Followers, 25k email subscribers.

https://podcastnotes.org


There is a typo in the URL :)


Thx, fixed!


I've been writing my own notes for various things including some podcasts. I'm curious who are the writers or note-takers for your website?


We built https://tadum.app, an online meeting agenda that rolls forward incomplete agenda items to the next agenda. This ends up creating a low effort paper trail, saves on meeting prep time, and keeps agendas consistently formatted/organized. It's intended for recurring weekly/monthly/quarterly meetings--we built it based on how we run meetings with our clients and are happy to see other teams jump in and have success with it.


https://cronhub.io (a project I just took over). Makes about 1k/month for now.


This is cool. What's the story behind taking the project over?


Not much. Original creator just wanted more help on growing it and is busy with a full time job. I on the other hand love the idea of buying SAAS businesses. This is my 2nd one. 1st one I bought has grown to low 7 figures in revenue. Not sure if I can replicate the same success but hopefully that's the idea.


I had a similar idea 2 years ago [1] but haven't been pushing it forward because I thought nobody would need something like this, since it's easy to implement a cronjob in a backend server. Maybe I should revisit this! :)

[1] https://cronbeats.com/


Hi @jventura, I tried to sign up on cronbeats.com but the verification email did not arrive – are your emails working?

About the logo – I'll take it as "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" ;-)


Saw your response just now, sorry! Yeah, something's not working with emails.. I'll check it out, thanks!


sure go for it :).


I use to follow the original creator of this app. Nice to see its still around.


I make between $500 and $2000 per month with UXWizz[0], a self-hosted analytics platform that I have been working on for around 9 years.

Hopefully I can grow it more this year as all the Google Analytics related news should make more people consider self-hosting their analytics. I stopped providing any cloud-hosted version and focus purely on self-hosting.

[0]: https://www.uxwizz.com


I'm trying to dispel the myth that all good dotcoms are already taken and/or unaffordable with https://zlipa.com

It's passive income in the sense that I add new brands in the weekend and mostly doing this for fun.


This looks really cool! Nice job.


https://jobs.braveclojure.com/ - a Clojure job board! Usually #1 search result for "clojure jobs"


I built Meta Meme, an iPhone meme making app. It nets approx $3-5k monthly. https://metameme.app/


A really good app and generally adding positivity to the world :)


wow thank you so much :)


https://anycasted.io/

A niche product, I gather data about anycasted IP addresses and sell the database. No idea how to market it but it makes more than $500/month


naice! curious about the customers/target audience though?


https://apps.shopify.com/quotify nearing $1k, earnings increase every month without doing any advertising.

I also launched https://unlock.sh/ earlier this month.


on the demo app/store... if you click "request quote" it gets a 401 error.


Thanks for letting me know. It works fine for me but will investigate. Would you mind sharing which browser and OS you are using? Thanks!


I do a lot of landscape astrophotography which involves a TON of signal processing to get rid of various sources of noise.

https://instagram.com/dheeranet

People ask to buy prints from time to time. Not quite $500/month just yet but getting there.

Then there's this web-based function plotter I made in 2007:

http://fooplot.com/

It once made upto $900/month but since then, mobile apps have gotten better, and today it makes about $100-150/month in ad revenue.


I have seen your astro work for awhile now and it is awesome - had no idea you could reliably make anything close to that money wise. Sounds like I need to actually take my processing a bit more seriously and actually create the new site I have been meaning to work on.

Personally I am going to probably focus less on getting the perfect processing (generally I just do a few stacks for noise and sometimes combine with a star tracker) and more on getting to unique locations most people do not have the skills to get to. That is more my personal preference though given I really enjoy backpacking and mountaineering already.

Have you ever messed around with the automated pano heads? I was recently looking at buying a used gigapan (one of the smallest ones) given that mirrorless cameras are so much lighter now. Shooting stacks + a manual pano head can get a bit tedious when you are already far out into the backcountry and tired and just want to relax. I believe Daniel Stein uses them and his work is pretty spectacular!

What I really want though is something that is both a star tracker AND can automate the panos themselves. As far as I know that does not exist and one basically has to put something like a gigapan on top of a star tracker and of course make sure that its all capable of controlling the camera itself.

edit: Now that I think about it you might even be able to make a decent side hustle providing a "processing as a service" type thing to other astrophotographers


I haven't played with automated pano heads, but I made a DIY scanning digital back for a 4x5:

https://dheera.net/projects/4x5/

My original intention for this is gigapixel images, but I ran into some issues cancelling the CRA correction that the Pi HQ cam does, and also, my newly bought Sony A7R4 can shoot 240 MP shots with pixel shift so it's suddenly less interesting again since it's already within an order of magnitude of a gigapixel, and if I got a shift adapter mount and shot with a medium format lens I could probably easily exceed a gigapixel with the A7R4. I might try to shoot 4x5 film some time though.


A tiny API for embedding weather forecasts as an image: https://weatherembed.com/

Makes around $500/month from various subscriptions through RapidAPI. Built on a whim during the pandemic. Uses Google Cloud Run + NodeJS.


FYI; The example image currently only shows its alt text.


subscribed to the (free) service through RapidAPI and tried testing it, getting { "message":"This endpoint is disabled for your subscription" }

for all the three endpoints.


Excellent idea!


I went super niche with an iOS vehicle counting board for civil engineers to conduct intersection studies, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/traffic-count-tmc/id1553635289

I never did any advertising and it was gaining traction, but lately plateaued at a handful of downloads / day. Not sure where would be a good place to spread the word haha.


I make $3-5k a month with my golf betting algorithm: https://www.golfforecast.co.uk

I'm a data scientist/software engineer and I started the project 5 years ago as part of my masters thesis. Never intended for it to be gambling-oriented but that's just the best way to monetise!

Questions/feedback appreciated - cheers


I'm always skeptical about these sorts of products. If the edge you have is real, why not just bet yourself? Theoretically each client you get lowers the edge of all other clients. If you have enough people following your tips, the lines will move. Sports betting is just another market after all.


I do bet myself. I think there will always be enough people who just bet for fun without any system to offset such effects, but it's a good point.


In the UK are you able to straight up create a gambling website/app? As an example, could I create a blackjack app and accept/payout money using, say, paypal or stripe? No other hoops to jump through?


You would need a gambling license for that which is quite expensive. My site doesn't facilitate gambling, I'm not a bookmaker, I just give tips.


As long as you don't have a UK company...


Looks cool! What kind of models are you using? I would have thought this is a very tight space. Did you develop the models yourself?


Thanks! Yea there's lots of competition for sure. It was originally just XGBoost and ARIMA, now it's an ensemble of several.


I run https://stickler-ci.com While it is not currently at 500/month but it has been there in the past.

I started this as a way to improve review speed at a previous position and it was well received, so I converted the prototype into a it's current form and have been running it for a few years now.


I'm building a journaling app for couples (iOS): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/twig-journal-for-couples/id145...

I originally made it for my long distance girlfriend (now wife) and myself. It averages $450 - $550 monthly.


Very nice, I think there is a great future betweeen social and private.


I built an email forwarding service - not for your own domains, a lot of those exist already - instead you can choose an email at any of our 150+ domains and we forward it to your existing account, no migration required. You can even send from this address with many providers.

https://www.mailbox.my


what do you need to learn to run your email servers, im assuming you run your email servers?


Yes I'm running my own servers.

You should know your way around Linux (if you already know Ubuntu, you can use it on the server as well).

You need some software: - For receiving and routing mails: I use postfix - For authenticating: Dovecot - For serving mails via IMAP: Dovecot is a popular choice

There are some good guides on the net how to set up these on Ubuntu or Debian (which is pretty similar), just google for e.g. "postfix ubuntu".

It's critical that the mail you route arrives at the other end, so you must prevent spammers from abusing your systems. Otherwise you get blacklisted. As a start you need to implement state-of-the-art things like: SPF, DKIM, DMARC. MTA-STS, TLS-RPT are also useful. None of these are hard and there are also good tutorials out there, it's just a bit of work.


Is there a site like MDN for these things? how did you learn this?


15 minute mobility routines - https://movewellapp.com

Basically - everyone has a foam roller. No one knows how to use it. Pick a routine based on what your goals are (working out, recovery, general low back pain) and we show you the movements to guide you through a routine in 15 minutes or less.


I like this, but I am reluctant to start paying for it without a trial. There are a few non-pro workouts, but could you consider a day pass or three day trial?


The app is free to download and you can try a bunch of the free workouts (?) no questions asked. Is that not enough of a trial?


No, because none of the free workouts are workouts I am interested in. Just my 2 cents.


You can try the free workouts and then pay for the ones you're interested in. It's $5/month. We've found this works well and lets us get everyone some routines at least.


Okay. Your app. I was just explaining to you why the conversion didn't work for me.


My team makes this https://kpopping.com

It's a platform for following what's happening in kpop that we've been building for five years. It makes about $1500 a month through advertisements and subscriptions these days, but we want to expand and experiment with other revenue sources.


Built Shopping Saga:

Real-time Online Shopping Deals by Product Category | Thoughtful Gifts for Every Occasion, Recipient, Category

Gifts:

1. Daily-updated gift products catalog 2. Direct Amazon and Etsy product links for gifts and deals 3. Browse and filter by price, category, recipient, occasion, popularity

Shopping Deals:

1. Grab online shopping deals as soon as they are available 2. Category-wise segregation of deals 3. Deals updated half-hourly

Initially, it was only web and android, but now I have released iOS app as well.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mysticpeak...

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1604578567#?platform=iphone

The web version was pretty basic, so I've taken it down currently. Learning Vue JS to enhance the frontend/UI.

The apps have pretty clean UI.


Working on https://folge.me - desktop app for creating step by step tutorials and guides. Unlike modern SaaS businesses I decided to charge one time price, which makes revenue very unpredictable, but usually keeping around 400-500 USD per month


Although I see the benefits of SaaS, I very much like this model.


I run Dictanote (https://dictanote.co) and Voice In (https://dictanote.co/voicein/)

Dictanote is a note-taking app with built-in voice-to-text integration. Writers use it to write their books, students use it to take notes, etc. Dictanote automatically syncs your notes to the cloud and makes them available on all your devices.

Voice In is a chrome extension that lets you use dictation to type on any website in Chrome. Use it to type emails in Gmail, enter data into Teladoc, write blogs in WordPress, etc. Think of it like budget Dragon Dictation.

Currently makes about $7000/m net - somewhere between a full-time job and a hobby project. Figuring out how to grow it.


What does your stack look like? Curious how you don’t go broke while offering a free plan.


I sell covered calls on Robinhood.


I do Put Credit Spreads. More riskier but rewarding


how much does that make you?


Getting rekt mostly?


I have unrealized losses on the collateral shares in the current market correction, but that makes my call options tank like rocks and helps me get them to a satisfactory level for buying to close much faster.


one of us :)


#thetagang


I've been working on Newsletterss, a newsletter reader for web, iOS and Android. I'm making about $2k/m with about 30% of that going to ads and infrastructure costs.

You can check it out at https://newsletterss.com


Is there a way to submit my newsletter to your database of newsletters? I run a curated gaming content newsletter(https://www.thegamingpub.com/) and being part of those databases it's what help people find my newsletter.

Let me know if that's possible, thanks!


I run a robotics newsletter: https://weeklyrobotics.com/


How do you promote a newsletter to become profitable? I have a newsletter, but it's not getting traction.


I’ve been rubbing it for over 3 years now and I’m approaching 3k e-mail subscribers. I feature it quite a lot on LinkedIn and Twitter and sometimes I would share some issues on /r/robotics or HN.

So far the best way I’ve found for growing subscribers is trading shoutouts with other newsletters but I didn’t experiment much with paid ads.


Which is a good read if anyone is interested in robotics/ros/drone stuff


It depends what you are interested in. My latest find from this week is the Introduction to Autonomous Robots open source book: https://github.com/Introduction-to-Autonomous-Robots/Introdu....

If you were looking for news then sUASnews is great for some catching up on drones. For robotics I often find articles on IEEE Spectrum and The Robot Report interesting.


Sorry I meant I'm a subscriber and it's a great newsletter!


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 [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/typenine-ultimate-t9-style-k... [2] https://medium.com/porsager/a-better-iphone-typing-experienc...


I went from 0->40k+ followers on TikTok this year with NO prior social media experience.

Most people see it as a teenage dance app type thing, but for techies wanting to build a personal brand or teach people it's a killer tool to rapidly grow.

I consistently make ~600/mo selling a 'newbie' TikTok course on appsumo. It's a no-frills recorded presentation and associated set of slides that I do very little marketing for with the goal of getting people to 1k followers on tiktok in 30 days or less.

https://appsumo.com/products/your-first-1000-tiktok-follower...


This year marks 3 years working on Label LIVE, an electron app for designing and printing labels. Think: import a spreadsheet and print barcodes to a zebra printer.

In 2021 the profit eclipsed my consulting income. My 2020 goal is to double revenue. Today it’s making mid 4-figure MRR but adding in one-time-license-sales the annual revenue is healthy 6-figure.

The last few months I’ve been focusing on marketing and integrations. Today you can trigger label print jobs via the command line, MQTT, and now HTTP.

If label printers are your jam you can read more here: https://label.live/features


I run a B2B lead generation SaaS for the UK market.

It provides up-to-date data from Companies House, but also allows you to sort and filter businesses by:

- where they are located

- when they registered

- what SIC (standard industrial classification) code they use

- their operational status

- their accounts category

Businesses typically use this to find new businesses to try and market/sell their services to.

It’s written in Haskell and Elm, and it’s been running for about five years now. Several businesses have been happily paying to use the service every month.

https://newbusinessmonitor.co.uk/

If you’d like to sell your services to UK businesses then do write to me; I’d love to hear from you :)


You know it’s illegal to use CH data for direct marketing right?


To the best of my understanding, that is not true. It is illegal to directly market to consumers without their prior consent. It is not illegal to market to businesses, though it is illegal to send marketing communication that is misleading, and it is not permitted to send direct mail to businesses who have indicated they wish to not receive marketing communication through the Mail Preference Service.

Do you have a source to support your perspective?


I wonder if it is possible to do this in other countries? I am not aware of any API or data downloads for the U.S that is available on a daily basis.


That's really interesting - Do you do all the letter-sending yourself or outsource that?


Thank you, I'm glad you think so!

I don't handle the fulfilment myself. I wrote a software integration that connects NewBusinessMonitor with a direct mail company in the UK. They have special machines that can print, envelope, and send all the letters automatically, at large scale. The letters are printed in colour (on rather nice quality paper), trimmed by guillotine (for full-bleed printing), folded in half and inserted into a windowed envelope, before being dispatched 2nd class, usually the following business day.

I typically don't need to manually intervene in any part of the process; I just try and do hand-holding with people when I onboard them, because I think good business is about building relationships with people, and many (most?) of my users specialise in areas outside of computing.


Very handy! I had visions of you sitting licking envelopes shut every night lol

Are you making $500/month, or I'm guessing a little more than that?


I love to travel, and I spent the last couple of years permanently on the road in Europe and Asia, so it was a personal goal for me to design the business in such a way that I'm not physically tied to any particular location.

Incidentally, NBM does pretty close to $500 MRR baseline with spikes appearing when a client decides to go on a sending spree. Payments are handled by a combination of Stripe and GoCardless. I initially added the GoCardless integration because some businesses in the UK really prefer Direct Debit payments. It looks to me like the Direct Debit accounts pay their subscription fees much more reliably than those paying by credit card. At some point, I might consolidate on just Stripe because they also support Direct Debit now.


A friend and I made a repository for high-quality, affordable language learning flashcards around a year ago.

https://deckmill.com

Made using a mix of ML (translation and TTS) and human translators.


Cool, but I can't seem to find the pricing anywhere? Edit: there it is, I must have gone blind.


FWIW, I also couldn't find it at first. Took me like a minute to find it.


Get access to all our decks for just €14.99. All our content for one low price - buy it and it's yours forever. Forget trivial badges, locked levels and guilt-tripping owls, and say hello to actual language skills.


My side business, Freelancer's Handbook, currently does about $10,700 ARR.

I've documented many of the stats here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QrN9ya-t7Vr42T-wL9q1-HX6...

It's a blog, community, and newsletter focused on useful and practical content for remote freelancers.

I'm looking to pass over the mantle to someone passionate about the freelance space and have been passively searching for a buyer. Contact information in the Google Doc above.


Just launched https://umbrellatoday.app, which is inspired from my personal frustration with umbrellas. The tool allows you to create alerts for rainy days, warning you to bring an umbrella.

The assumption is that we want to minimize our interaction with umbrellas; if you buy a big umbrella, it is a hassle to drag along and you will most likely loose it after a few afterwork drinks. Other way around, a small and cheap umbrella does not cover you enough, and breaks easily.

As said, just launched, lets see how it goes. Happy to hear your feedback.


Made around $1500 in a month from https://hyperpaper.me/

It's a customized dayplanner pdf for large eInk devices like the reMarkable 2. I built it for myself initially but realized I could provide a customized build for other folks. There's still a small amount of manual work to generate them, but I should be able to automate it end-to-end soon.

I don't expect it to make much at all over the next 10 months, but I'm already excited about other things I'm planning to add for the 2023 version


Web comic newsletter: https://funnies.page

Full disclosure - $500+/month in revenue, but not profit. The majority (95%) goes to the creators I work with.


Oh man, you gotta charge more! This is insanely cheap. The average substack charges $5 a month, and you usually get an email a week at best.


Ha I appreciate the thought, but it's hard to compare novel writing from thought leaders to funny images. I wish I could charge more, but I don't think the value is quite there yet. Maybe if I was strict about exclusive content (which I don't want to be; I like giving artists flexibility on where/how they distribute their work), I could get away with charging higher as well.


Wow, you only take about 2%? (assuming 3% for processing?)


Yup that's about right. I don't mind though; I view this project as a labor of love.


I've been making $500-1000/month on an iOS app for work time tracking – https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flexishift-work-hours-pay/id11...

When I started the project, the category seemed quite crowded already, but I couldn't find anything good for tracking my hours in a flextime arrangement. I had no iOS experience at that time (I was a C++ developer) and now I do iOS development as my full-time job too.


How long ago did you start this project?


I've been making a pretty consistent amount off my open-source side-project Pterodactyl through company sponsorships.

https://pterodactyl.io


I recently got Pterodactyl setup on my home server and I just wanted to say that it's an incredible project and it works great. I run various game servers on a whim and it's been easy to spin them up. Many thanks for your hard work.


Offtopic: funny to see the first five or so links I followed were all marketing websites made with TailwindUI. It’s a bit like a decade ago when all websites looked like a Bootstrap website.


Forward Email - Email Forwarding Service

We're the only service that respects your privacy and never stores your emails.

https://forwardemail.net


i <3 forwardemail. thank you for building this!


I started a wholesale bakery.

It does about 20k/mo in revenue (we are not profitable).

It's been super fun and rewarding. It's much more like building a software / tech startup than I expected it to be.


Amazing. I am at the stage of thinking/dreaming about a weekend-bakery .. but I am completely lost when trying to work out the economics of this.

How did you tackle this at the beginning? What were your demand/cost projections when you started out?


How much did you invest?


I build products to help improve my main e-commerce businesses so I think this counts as a side-hustle. The latest (earliest stage one is):

https://www.zigpoll.com

"Bite sized" polling software as a service that I use for post purchase surveys, contact us forms, and email campaigns when I want feedback on what to do next. Most customers are currently through our Shopify App but have a few SaaS businesses that integrated it independently.


I previously posted about PriceTable (https://pricetable.io), where I’m the cofounder:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26855726

Since then we’ve gotten up to $3,500/mo. and will be hiring our first salesperson soon. Exciting and nerve-racking at the same time! (If you know anyone, please have them reach out to me at ege@pricetable.io)


I'm not an engineer outside of the occasional WP site, but that's enough. Cold email is my bag and I'm a good (and proficient) writer. In October I started cold emailing internet, marketing, and SW companies asking if they needed any help with their blogs. In the intervening months I've added 7 clients that pay, on average, $700/month for various help with content. MOst of it is blog posts but I also do press releases, eBooks, etc.


Make between $500-$1000 per month from http://www.auctionsieve.com/ - old school desktop app I started in 2003. It's a front-end for eBay to quickly filter search results.

I have all sorts of interesting collectors using it - some guy who buys old porsche parts, a famous comic book artist who collects comics, etc etc


I made an incredibly simple Safari content blocking app for iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/liberate-website-blocker/id121...

~$750/month lately. $32.5k lifetime and have spent <40 hours conceiving, implementing, and updating it.


https://www.goodbooks.io

Books recommended by successful and inspirational people.


Always curious about book recommendation sites. If you don't mind sharing, how much revenue and traffic does your site generate?


Does it count as a side project if I have been in grad school full time while I proposed and developed this application?: Environmental flow monitoring application: https://dkhydrotech.com/entry/11/. I wish I could share more info / visuals but alas.


I run a nerdy product discovery website: https://devandgear.com


My side project https://playtoearn.one/ is not making $500/month yet, but it's getting there: a tiny bit more than $400 for this month

It's getting around 250-300 visitors a day, and in a high paying niche

I started using "classic" ads - which were/are making next to nothing - but just signed a deal with a direct client for 400$ for 3 weeks of displaying his game on the site, on the top banner

There are so many play-to-earn games popping up at the same time that projects are fighting for visibility, which playtoearn.one can bring

So now, I've hired a designer to make a great looking UI and I'm getting motivated to turn this side project into something more than this

EDIT: Traffic for the past month:

https://simpleanalytics.com/playtoearn.one?period=month&coun...


How are you getting visitors, are you putting up google ads?


No it's mostly organic google traffic


AI that explains code, at a high business logic level. I originally designed it while working on a complex physics system for a game engine, and needed to understand it myself and also explain it to non-technical people. Try it on your own code: https://denigma.app


I am currently at around $300/mo so still a bit off the $500 unfortunately. My side project, ErgStudio[0], allows people to use their rowing machine to do remote workouts together. I had the idea already a while before the pandemic started but when it hit I finally pushed myself to implement a MVP. My wife helped a lot doing the admin and as a photographer (we took all the promotion pictures ourselves to save money). This was also the first project for me which I took from greenfield to people-can-pay-for-this, which I am pretty thrilled about. At the moment, a bunch of university clubs in the US and smaller rowing clubs in Europe are using it. As a gimmick, when you see the meters rowed counter changing on the website, someone is actually working out somewhere in the world, using our app.

[0] https://erg.studio/


Working on a few projects, but the ones that actually took off and make money are:

Commotion (https://commotion.page), Forms + Mail Merge for Notion

Reslant (https://reslant.com), Discussion Boards for Customer Feedback


Recently launched a website where users can design their own Desktop Garden. Only a few sales so far but hoping to slowly scale for some decent side income :) Please check it out http://gardensofkyoto.design and open to any feedback!


Beautiful yet heavy on my iOS device. Couldn’t get through process of purchase.


https://jumpshare.com

Visual communication tool with screen recording, screenshots and GIFs for macOS and Windows. Fully native apps without using Electron. I started Jumpshare as a side project many years ago and turned it into a full-time job.


I make this video to printed flipbook online shop. flpbk.io: https://flpbk.io I've done nothing to promote it (except posting this comment) for more than a year. It's around $500/m revenue


I run a design asset generator based on my open source library, Trianglify:

https://trianglify.io/

It currently does about $500/mo from a combination of asset purchases and ethical (Carbon Ads) non-tracking advertising.


I launched Vilke (https://vilke.co/) back in 2018. It's an anonymous, adult-oriented, NSFW website where people can post teasing pictures or videos of themselves, and engage with others. Think Jodel or Yik Yak with an adult twist.

Originally I wanted to learn PWAs. At the same time, people were posting teasers on Jodel but suggestive material is banned according to Jodel's community guidelines. Hence, I decided to smash two flies at the same time by building something that people wanted.

Currently it's Finnish-only but it's making around ~200 $ / month. Have wanted to internationalize it for a while now but my day job is taking too much time.


I'm working on an event based stock portfolio/investment tracker. Currently at 10k MRR.

https://stockevents.app

Edit: Just noticed this thread was merged/resubmerged? Now I have a duplicate answer here. :-/


How do you monetize? Ads? Subscriptions?


Yearly subscription. Some users asked me to make it free and serve ads, but I refused. I wanted to make it ad free with regards to privacy.


IAP


How do you get the data?


I have a fondness of writing summary articles on to cap off a big work project (for instance, completing a database migration). A few of them get 'traction', but mainly I like the challenge of eloquently describing my problem/solution and giving myself a zitgeist of work I've done. It's satisfying.

Recently, I had an old colleague of mine reach out and ask if I had the time to be a part-time contractor/advisor for his tech consulting start-up, since their client needed to do a database migration. He had remembered me because of the articles I wrote. It's a nice bit of money on the side ($500-$2.5k a month depending on how much I work) and I'm always learning something new.



I retrofit old phone-based intercoms with software-only solution: https://www.DropBy.io

a bit above $500/month ARR, stable and sticky. Started a few years ago, now have 2 other partners.


Wow... this is so validating. I worked on a project I called "Buzz Me Up Scotty" (Or something like that) to do a very similar thing. Just glad someone proved the vision.


Your pricing page seems to have no prices on it and your sign up page doesn't load for me.


We removed pricing, one reseller wanted that out. But good point, I think we should add it again and be transparent since his business is good but not good enough to do so.

What happened when you git Sign up?

Thanks a bunch for the feedback!


Your signup page still loads to a blank gray page for me in Chrome and Firefox.

uBlock Origin, which is installed by my IT department, seems to be blocking the load of a JavaScript file from fast.appcues.com, not sure if that's the cause or not.


Added pricing back, thanks again for the feedback!


im an embedded software developer, and would love to get a side hustle going. does anyone on here do embedded development freelance? are there any embedded developers that have a side hustle going, that wouldnt mind sharing what they do?


I know the guy (well know online) who made these altimeters for the rocketry hobby.

https://flightsketch.com/store/catalog/flightsketch-mini_1/

he went from idea to prototype in 6 months i think. Pretty amazing if you ask me.

Edit: oh i was just looking at the images scroll by and saw a screenshot. I did a rework of the mobile app for him, i totally forgot about that. (i used ionic)


Really common to do it in spare time as an intro to doing it as a consultant. Esp. if you have electronics skills it's not hard to find work. As a "side hustle" though, it's generally about selling a hardware product, a tool, or your skills (SkillaaS).

Embedded is a broad term though, say a bit more about your experience and interests and maybe someone will pop up with pointers.


if you can build a small watch circle like thing that vibrates every 30 mins if you haven't moved it'd be great


I wrote and maintain Lacona, a Mac productivity App (https://lacona.app). The majority of my revenue comes from being a part of the Setapp subscription service.


We're doing an newsletter dedicated for Android developers:

https://androidweekly.net/

- it was four years without making any money

- with ~100k subs it's generating money

- everything grew organically


How much is the revenue with 100k subs?


I build a secure tunneling service called Packetriot ($2k/mo) https://packetriot.com.

Similar to ngrok with our own differences and approach. I also publish another product called Spokes Gateway which builds on the tunneling server and includes support for service meshes, high-availability, clusters and some other features.

I'm building a separate website for Spokes and its related software, hoping to publish it soon. It's eventual home will be https://spokes.network.


We launched this last year: https://kbee.app

Kbee turns a Google Drive folder into a searchable wiki for you and your team. We're currently doing ~$1500/month in MRR


What is MRR?


Monthly recurring revenue.


I got something better. Trade crypto derivatives after learning elliot wave. Turn 500 into 50,000 in 3 months. Quit day job. Do it full time now. High 6 figures 10 months later.


I'm building a crypto-trading bot right now. Care to share any details?


What is elliot wave?


I run getrhys.com

I productized myself and made myself on-demand (easily available) to struggling SaaS businesses.

Currently doing $5K+ per month for working one day a week doing short 30 min calls with clients.


I made a platform for publishing and purchasing photoshop files/effects, music, high res images etc. https://crate.as/

The main gimmick is that it’s a native Mac (and very soon Windows) app, so once you buy a file, you can drag it directly out of the app and into other programs as if it were file explorer.

I’m not at $500/month yet, but the project is well over 1k a month and I have a percentage of the income.


If anyone has a devops/Kubernetes related project that isn't making money but has decent traffic/users, please consider messaging me!

We (http://robusta.dev) are interested in sponsoring open source projects and popular Kubernetes bloggers to raise awareness about what we do. It's a rare win-win. We're mostly open source and extremely flexible if you have any special requirements.


Not really a side project, but I haven't quit my job for it so..

I'm building a Search as a Service like Algolia. Currently earning $700 a month from an early customer. Anvere.net


CORS apparently breaks the site for me


I run getrhys.com

I productized myself and operate as an on-demand marketing consultant for SaaS businesses.

Currently do $5K+ per month working one day a week taking short 30 minute calls with my clients.


I made two LinkedIn courses. One has paid off its royalties; the other is on its way there. Should be >$500/month combined soon!

I'm also working on an app that allows you to set a universal status across multiple platforms. I use it to automate my Slack statuses from my TripIt trips, but I want to add integrations for Google Calendar and WhatsApp. It's really rough right now but my future intent is to find a way to monetize it when it's cleaner.


What does it mean that one has "paid off its royalties"? Do you have any description or advice for the general process for teaching a LinkedIn course?


I meant “paid off its advance through royalties”. Sorry!

Everyone’s path is different, but generally speaking, if you publish enough blog posts (especially on LinkedIn), someone from a content shop will notice and ask you to write a book or create a course. Both flows are similar, but I’ve only done courses and can speak to that in detail.

You propose a course. The content manager you work with decides if it fits their learning plan or whether there is demand for that kind of material. If they think people will view the course, you’ll be asked to come up with a course summary. DevOps and Kubernetes are super hot right now, so these were easy for me to think up.

Here, you’ll pitch the course. What is it? Who’s meant to view it? What will you cover? This gets reviewed. If it looks good, you’ll be given a producer, and they will ask you to write scripts.

Sometimes the content manager will ask for a demo of how you’d present a course. Here, they want to see whether you have enough “presence” to instruct. Sometimes they’ll provide feedback for you to fix, but this didn’t happen in my case.

You’ll also get an advance, with the first half being paid out around this time. These advances aren’t like the music industry where you use the money to pay for production and marketing. It’s literally money in your pocket.

Script writing can take FOREVER. especially the first time. It took me three months to write enough scripts for a two hour course. There’s a lot of back and forth. Since my courses are very hands-on, I also write lots of code and test everything while putting the scripts together. Very difficult to do all of this with a full-time job, doubly so when that job is demanding!

Once the scripts are cleared, you’ll be asked to record. There are lots of different ways this can go. Mine are audio-only with a terminal walkthrough, so I just recorded and screen capped everything. Some courses have live-action and acting. These require studios. I haven’t done one of these yet, so I can’t speak to it.

Beta testing happens after recording. People internally go through your course and make sure that everything gels. Sometimes you’ll need to fix stuff after this.

Once beta tests complete, your course goes live and starts racking views! You also get the other half of your advance.

You get paid royalties for every learner who views your course. I don’t know the specifics of this, but it’s kind of like YouTube’s ad platform. However, you don’t earn anything until the grand sum of your royalties exceeds the advance you were given. Depending on how your course performs, this can either never happen or it can happen very quickly.


Thanks so much for all of this detail and information! Sounds like LinkedIn takes their courses pretty seriously. I'll have to look into this more.


Indeed; they do! I have loved working with LinkedIn Learning. (They used to be lynda.com before LinkedIn acquired them.)


RemedyBG, a from-scratch Windows debugger. https://remedybg.itch.io/remedybg


I have a $200 in MRR side project.

It coded that website 8 years ago as a master's degree thesis. I am an investor myself, trying to achieve financial independence before retirement, so I kept using the site myself and hopefully will never stop. Stripe is there for the past year, I try to keep costs as low as possible. Only pay for a domain, hosting, and an affiliate program. It's a dividend growth investing tracker - digrin.com


Time is money and https://reactivedoc.com/ saves me ~500 minutes/month and I also have a paying user. I made it because I needed a simple, self-hosted tool to create documentation with "parameters". The output is a self-contained html file. Coupled with an external runner, it's a great automation tool for simple tasks.


I wrote an ebook on web application deployment. It does over $1000/month, but obviously it's not recurring revenue.

https://deploymentfromscratch.com/

I did a SHOW HN awhile ago which sold 100+ copies in a single day:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29540808



I have 2:

BenkoBot is like wayscript but with a focus on making Trello automations (although you can use it for generic HTTP API interaction):

https://app.benkobot.com/

And BenkoPhone is the only virtual mobile number outside of North America that does voice, TXT and pictures:

https://www.benkophone.com/


I wrote a tool for replacing text in multiple files with regular expressions under Windows. Currently, it's making less than $500/month, but there were months when it made more. It's one of the first regex tools that displays the search results immediately, without pressing a Search button.

https://www.abareplace.com/


We have built a remote job search https://app.careersaas.com/portal that scrapes and indexes more than 2 million jobs. Currently offering sponsored listings - lets a user define a location for their job and whomever is searching near that geocode will see the result, according to their job experience, etc.


I make about $1,000 - $1,500 a month passive income with https://www.menutail.com

It is a website to make US nutrition facts label which had a huge pivot from a website on learning how to cook. Website is only updated when new government regulations come out which is pretty rare considering how long it takes (in the years really)


I sell random generators for Dungeons & Dragons games.

https://www.herebetaverns.com

To be fair - I did spend full time on this when it launched but it’s been a side project for the last 6 months.

The sales fluctuate a ton but usually above $500 a month, almost pure profit and almost 0 hours work.

I have a plan to increase revenue this year by going all in on SEO


Getting close with https://www.onward.ly/. A course + journal for getting clearer on yourself. Helps form mental models and habits around being present, leaning into what you want, and saying no to the rest. Basically show up as yourself not what other people expect you to be.


Things have tapered off quite a bit since 2021, but it's still over the threshold: https://virtualpostersession.org

It's a platform for virtual scientific and research-oriented poster session hosting. Pretty simple but desperately needed when all the conferences were cancelled!


Not a product or something exciting, it is a service. I run a VA firm (tbh I work as the VA) and I kinda almost make $500/month. https://www.ITNAdigital.com

Trying to scale up the business to cater to data and software businesses. But working in real estate industry for a while now.


I am currently making >$1,000 per month with sponsorships for my twice-weekly newsletter https://www.workspaces.xyz/

Workspaces brings you inside the workspaces of entrepreneurs, designers, developers, etc.

Currently a mix of inbound and outbound work to gather the sponsors for each edition.


May I ask how you get sponsors? I have a newsletter/blog with reasonable traffic (>100k page views per month) but can’t seem to find any direct advertisers..


Definitely!

I recently added a "call for sponsors" blurb in the intro of one of my newsletters once I felt I hit a level of subscribers where it made sense. I immediately had a few readers reply with interest that ultimately led to my first few sponsors.

From there, I did some cold outreach via Twitter DMs and email. My newsletter is very workspace item/tools centered so I put thought into what sort of sponsors made sense there and it led to the next batch. Think: companies who would organically be featured by a guest anyway... show them the value.

I'm pretty transparent with the growth/numbers on Twitter as well so I think that helps when doing the Twitter outreach for sponsors. They are easily able to look back at the Twitter engagement if they don't already know what Workspaces is.


I made a p2p NFT trading webapp that's totally free & open-source over the course of a month or so of evenings and weekends, and I've received a couple thousand $ in various cryptos as donations from my in-site donation link.

https://vaportrade.net/


I am working on a multiplayer adult metaverse game that's running on two blockchains, and so far it has earned me over 1000$. https://coomiverse.xyz

I guess it will leave the side project status once it gains even more traction but for now I consider it a side job.


I design and sell ultra-high end mechanical keyboards https://instagram.com/handengineering, https://hand.engineering


I have a side business that does payment processing. I clear an extra $2k-$3k a month. Currently looking for outside sales reps while I develop open source payment options that aren't available yet. If you are a developer, good at sales, or want to try it, let me know.


Isn't payment processing highly complex?


Do you have a link?


link please


Helps students find the best-fit Graduate programs. Guaranteed to find the right college, else money back. Net revenue around $400 a month https://www.collegehippo.com/


Made an WordPress based affiliate site couple of years ago (took couple of evenings) with no additional upkeep. The affiliate deal brings in money as long the customers who registered through me use it. Thanks to one big customer made avg $720 last year.


I make https://www.savio.io.

We help SaaS CS and Product teams use product feedback from Intercom, Zendesk, Hubspot, Help Scout, etc to understand and build what customers are asking for.


Made this Amazon product ideas search engine: https://amalytics.com

Not sure where to take it next as there’s well funded competition and conversions/revenue have plateaued…


I wrote a book about adult ADHD last year & make ~$500/mo from it between Amazon, Audible, & Gumroad: https://adhdpro.xyz/

Recorded the audiobook myself too.


Nice idea. How did you go about marketing the book/getting reviews?


The site looks very polished! What did you use to build it?

Also, what did you use to write your book? And how long did it take to write?


Thanks! I built it with Gatsby + TailwindCSS. Sent a lot of time tinkering & editing copy over and over.

I wrote it with Microsoft Word. I initially tried a few different apps but all of the organizational tools they provided got in the way. I broke most conventions and just wrote the book straight from start to finish, and re-read it countless times until I felt satisfied. Then I sent it to a ton of friends who helped me edit. A professional editor would've been a better idea, but I didn't really have the money for that at the time.


Do you by chance sell the audiobook outside of the Audible pro subscription?


https://loshadki.app, between $800 to $2000 a month. Year ago decided to learn macos development. Made 4 apps, two of them make the most OpenIn and ShellHistory.


I have been running a Gematria website in Hebrew called https://gimatria.co.il - reaching just a bit more that $500 USD per month from Google Ads.


I make visualization tools for bicycle wheelbuilding and I'm making >$500 profit but not enough to live on. My site is https://www.islandix.com


I built https://blunders.io, a profiling tool for JVM applications. I think that I have a decent product but I'm not a great salesman :)


I make a little under $500 selling sunglasses for Dogs and Cats.


I sell an game development tool on the Unity Asset store. Since the peak died down, it's now somewhat under $500/mo, but still does well in occasional sales.


Personalized kid's e-books http://www.littleheroes.com

Web + app store purchases

Up for sale if anyone's interested


Stock market and crypto currency bot for Slack and Discord https://beeper.fyi/


How does this make money? I don't see any pricing info on the site.


How are you earning revenue on this? Don't see any pricing or signup requirements


Https://htwins.net/sotu2

I ported the flash app Scale of the Universe to WebGL. I asked for payment as a portion of ad revenue and make about $500 a month.


I used to have a decent side hustle making this much money but the tax changes this year have de-incentivized my work ethic


What tax changes?


Previously companies like eBay, Venmo, Paypal, etc were not required to officially report transfers to the IRS. A few years ago they changed that rule where if you appear to be making more than $20,000 dollars in a year period then they send forms to the IRS directly. If it is only for personal use (like say you are sending money via Venmo to a roomate) there is no tax to pay. But for actual sales you would be.

This year they lowered that $20,000 to $600. So anyone who receives more than $600 in one calendar year will trigger Venmo/Paypal or whoever to send the IRS the proper tax forms. If it is for personal use of course you are still not required to pay any tax.

As far as I know none of the loopholes for taxing the uber rich have been changed so this is really just going along with the IRS' current policy of increasing revenue from small time outfits vs going after the bigger fish (who can often afford to hire expensive accountants and lawyers to fight the IRS)

I am not against paying taxes but having to wrangle the info from a bunch of different sources and then also deal with manually adjusting for other factors just makes this whole thing a huge pain.


I agree with your point of it being a hassle, but I never understood the huge outcry about this. If I work part-time at Burger King and make $10,000/year, I would pay taxes on that. Why should the IRS not be taxing side-hustles that make 10k/year?

The argument of them not taxing the rich is sad, but also irrelevant; they didn't add a new tax on side-hustles, just re-inforced an existing one. You technically should've been paying this anyway.


$10,000 would still be reasonable - the point is $600 really is not.


Again - why? I pay taxes on my Savings Account where I earn less than a hundred dollars a year. It basically comes out to nothing.

They're just reinforcing an existing tax that you should be paying anyway. If going though your orders to figure out your tax is too much of a hassle, then maybe your side hustle wasn't worth it in the first place.


beware of copycats, folks. this post can be a trap for the gullible


That's pretty cool and love to see more information on it.


sshreach.me - a Zero-Configuration, remote-controlled, secure tunnels to your computers.

https://sshreach.me/


This is literally gold


www.bini.vision made us a few hundred quid before we went fulltime on it


[snip]


Be honest, were you inspired by Drawful?


This feeling when only I make zero profit projects without success :-)


you are not alone


I made two webapp: https://www.alovez.com and https://www.snapfeel.com about $300~600/month




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