During COVID I was in Mexico. At some point I wanted to go horseback riding. I was researching places to go horseback riding and I was not at all surprised to see I would have to make some calls to book.
Fast-forward a few weeks, I become pretty good friends with the owner at the ranch I went to. We grab tacos one night and he shares his concerns: They're not doing so well financially and are worried about whether or not they'll be able to afford feed in a month.
I got involved and we solved that problem and a few more: revamped the website (it looked and felt like it was from 2006), I whipped up a booking/reservation system to get more customers through the door, and exit surveys to make sure everything was perfect (and figure out what went wrong if it wasn't).
Bookings this month are up 490% from 2018 (according to the paper waivers they had) and that's without a single dollar spent in paid marketing. I answer a few emails every day from prospective riders and make sure everyone's happy. I get a percentage of each reservation which is cool, but the coolest part is that I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranch.
Mexicos overall internet presence is literally stuck in the early 2000s.
Most business' official website are a Facebook page.
In a country of 150M people and growing expat presence, there is a TON of opportunities for software businesses to enter the market.
For example: Riviera Maya has no MLS style real estate tracker/listing platform. The entire real estate industry operates on word of mouth, WhatsApp and Facebook messages.
I keep running into this in the US in large cities. Really well regarded restaurants or music venues do everything through FB and insta. I don't have either of those apps, and I don't remember my passwords from a decade ago. Isn't there a service somewhere, where you give someone some pictures of your food, and restaurant, and you get a container and credentials for a webpage that handles reservations, takes pickup or delivery orders, and lets you update the menu? Why do people do this?
Because Facebook is simple. Any one can update it, and it doesn't go down, and it doesn't cost anything.
I've many times seen web presences fail for small organizations, when the only person that understands the web set up leaves. With Facebook, that doesn't happen.
I'm sure there are services such as you describe, and probably many restaurants use them, and it's not obvious. But Facebook is the default.
No, because facebook is free and they are cozy with the mexican government and this allows them to operate in a country without net neutrality. Therefore facebook, whatsapp and instagram are included for free in most if not all cellphone plans and pay per month options.
I've seen that too. Or when the framework chosen goes away. If the person at a small restaurant or non profit who understood the page goes away you can at least find someone to come up to speed. But sometimes it relies on stuff that just isn't there anymore and you have to start over. I'm not in web dev, or whatever its called, but is there some technology in the space that is the equivalent ofba T-shirt and blue jeans, or a charcoal suit, that will be fine for a couple decades with only informational updates?
You have to constantly install updates for it to stay secure, then every second update your theme breaks, you find out it's not updated for the new version and have to redesign the whole page.
I’ve wondered this too. I don’t know any young people (at least nobody my kids’ ages between 17 and 26) who use Facebook. It seems like they might be missing a large part of their target audience.
Others have pointed out the simplicity of it. Just use an existing platform, doesn't take much IT skill at all.
The other answer is that this is where the people are. Why waste time building your own website when only those searching you will visit it? Interacting with the various social media platforms instead gives you far more options on discoverability.
If you must maintain a presence on those platforms anyways, it becomes even less compelling for a small non-tech company to maintain their own infrastructure.
As a Mexican who travels plenty to the US and works for an American company and has worked for another top-tier software company from the US, I believe this statement is false.
E-commerce platforms, “sharing economy” apps, neo-banks, dating apps, real estate platforms, etc. are all used every single day by millions of people.
Mexican living in México, ~95% of the population use Facebook, word of mouth or driving around where you want to find a place to rent. Of course there are many sites that you can use to find a place to rent, but the best deals and more options are available on Facebook.
Facebook doesn't act as the central trust authority. So as an expat, most realtor is telling me to avoid FB and use them because scams. But as a user it's inefficient to talk to 20 Realtors for 20 listings.
I just want something in between that doesn't inflate the actual price by 40%
Facebook marketplace is as trustless as you can get. It's 2010 version of Kijiji/Craigslist with built-in picture upload.
Right now depending on how much effort you want to spend, you can get a place for $2000 usd a month or $600 a month, for relatively similar unit maybe 20min of walk distance apart. Simply because information does not flow freely.
Airbnb fixed the trust issue and dominated rental market in the last few years. But hefty fees + taxes are making them less and less viable for travelers.
I honestly see a big opportunity to just improve the overall experience. Especially considering Riviera Maya is the fasted growing realestate market in Mexico.
If you're serious about working on something like this, email me (check my profile), let's connect.
> I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranc
You must get business cards made and start distributing them to friends and family whenever you get the chance. Not for marketing - to brag and to be able to be mildly annoying.
It's definitely my favorite fun fact. I'm grow up in the city but I spent a few summer days on a horse growing up. One of my earliest memories was horseback riding with my mom. I must have been no older than 18 months.
Note that you can also use the ranch business cards as 'get out of jail cards' to avoid social chatter when you need to change the subject: You note that the in-law starts taking the discussion towards some uncomfortable topic during thanksgiving dinner. You immediately use the card: "Say, have I given you my business card?" - and then you move on to talk about the ranch. Even if they interrupt you and try to get back to the topic, the topic will be derailed for good. Usable every 6 months by pretending that you forgot that you already gave them your business card...
My 16-year-old remembers a pediatrician's office she hasn't seen since she was 18 months old (we moved across the country). She described it well enough that her dad and I were both convinced. I was shocked.
We must work with the same people. I work with a guy who would devote dozens/hundreds of hours to this project just for the business card opportunities.
My wife runs a riding academy and she's been resistant to any kind of online or off-farm marketing, relying instead on word of mouth. She thinks we get a better quality of customer that way and we have little trouble keeping our herd busy.
Of course our business is centered around repeat riders, it would be a very different business to organize trail rides for strangers.
Our barn is much smaller than most (7 horses at the high water) but it has been consistently profitable. A barn with more horses and a large staff could bring in more revenue but costs will be higher too. There is a barn down the road that has nice facilities but has had several managers and has only been viable with the last one. We know another troubled barn with an alcoholic owner who has a large off-farm income that has struggled economically and has a legendarily bad safety culture. (I took 10 rides there before we were in full swing and had 3 'near miss' accidents)
I swear I read the FAQ and the last question was "Are you real? Sometimes. I mean, yes.". I chuckled at that one and it was the end of the page!? Or ir wasn't? OP if you just added it please tell me :) (nah, just partly joking, I'm sincerely confused though)
This is awesome. Only one minor thing about the website. On mobile when i click on "Meet Pam", the logo in the header is white and the background beige, making it unreadable.
Thanks! We get a lot of compliments on the copy. I wanted to reflect that we are indeed a Mexican horse ranch without the site being incredibly boring. There's only so many cool things you can show/say before you realize that horses aren't really all that interesting on the internet.
Not sure if the website is broken, but attempting to book 2 people and clicking a time does nothing on iOS Safari. It might be worth looking at the analytics for device distribution but I presume iOS is the bulk of your traffic, si probably worth optimising it.
I noticed this too. I think it’s because those time slots are not available (if you choose a date a couple months away, you’ll be able to click there time slot). The solution would be to print “No availability” instead of disabled time slot buttons.
Thanks for sharing this! i feel this is a cautionary tale for us HN-minded folks since i see a rather unusual love for the look and feel of the "old internet", and what i like to call the Craigslist style of design. As someone who remembers the internet of the 90s and early 2000s before it was taken over by ads and SEO spam,
i understand the nostalgia, but as a web developer, also know that i need to do right by my clients and build things for them that make their businesses successful. An old outdated website turns away many customers.
Ironically, a badly designed modern website turns me away. (sometimes because the thing literally doesn't work)
I remember trying to book a place and there was some issue with the z-index and I couldn't click to confirm the dates on the pop-up calendar. Made me wonder how much $$$ they could be losing because the % of people willing/know how to delete the offending element must be pretty small.
I agree 100% with what you're saying though. Older websites appear more "complex" to a lot of people. There's good middle grounds though. The new netflix for iOS is really nice, imo. Leans more towards form but still functions very well.
This is one the examples where the exception proves the rule. After introducing my friends and family to a CLI-based booking tool I wrote for them, they have swore off website UI's since. Every other week I get an excited e-mail stating how great the tool is, and how they have also convinced their own friends to give up JavaScript and turn towards Rust.
I did something very similar for Surfing schools. Not yet making any money off it, but I am trying to. Reaching out to other surfing schools, improving the product adding new features.
It's mostly CRUD, and the stack is very boring: Rails/Hotwire/Bootstrap, about 10k lines (we have apps for the staff on the ground, agents and agencies that we partner with, and some other stuff in there). The tricky part of handling the bookings is that on any given day we have a limited number of horses and multiple types of rides: 3 trails at 10AM, 1 trail at 3PM. A few times a month we'll max out the horses and not have availability for a given time. We can burst horsepower if we need to and accommodate bigger groups if we're hitting capacity and suspect load will maintain its current HPH. (that was a stretch; I tried)
We also track what horses have been used and how much so that we're not riding them into the ground — the people on the ground have an app I built in Framework7 to manage everything; they love it and Framework7 is very fun once you get rolling.
We ask for a 20% deposit to "hold [your] horses" and to prevent no-shows; the rest is transacted at the ranch (though we make the option to pay in full available if you email us). Our cancellation policy extremely flexible and though we say 24 hours on the site, we've never not refunded someone.
An absolutely amazing story. I’ve wondered for a while how powerful bringing skilled software engineers (let’s be honest, people don’t give us credit for the amount of actual business skill is required to effectively do this job) into small businesses would work. Most people who don’t work in tech or advertising don’t think so much about tracking everything. It presents a pretty big opportunity for both small business owners and software people.
One of the things I wanted to do was understand who our customer was. They had really no idea. Waivers are all digitalized and ask for the basics: name, date of birth, where you're from, emergency contact. I use a "gender API" to get the gender of the rider the best we can, and from there we have learned a lot about who our typical customer is.
Some fun factoids:
* typical rider is 35-44. Less than 10% of riders are under the age of 24,
* about half of people book when they're in Mexico
* average lead time is 7 days
* about 66% of riders have riding exp; about 33% consider themselves "novice" or "expert" riders
Question is how sustainable is that. If you get bored at some point, who will be able to take it over. RoR is a reasonably safe and stable stack from the PoV of software devs, but the discussion above about facebook makes me wonder if they'll end up in 10 years with a website 'stuck in 2020'.
A long time ago, I made some Flash games. I recently converted some of them away from Flash and released them together as a desktop game for modern computers.
I am currently making more than $500 a month from this, although I don't necessarily expect that to continue. Games are a crowded market. It was a fun project, though.
He says in the discussion that porting the games from flash took 3 years. I'm aware that sometimes a single bog post can be the result of a lot of work, but that's next level!
Wanted to join the chorus of nostalgic thank yous! I played the original for hours with my buddies on library computers in grade school. Definitely some core memories. Thanks!
What is the tech stack for this? I really want to build small apps like this and have a diversified portfolio but don't know where to start. Are you still earning 3K/month from this and what kind of on-going marketing are you doing?
You might want to play around with the encoding on your videos. On a Windows machine with a i7-8770k (and dedicated GPU) with Firefox latest, the page was spiking up to 100% GPU usage, causing the browsing experience to slow to a crawl. It may be related due to me having a Twitch stream up on a second display.
Probably a Firefox bug, but it's preventing me from looking at this landing page that every one else seems to like :P
Wow this is interesting, you write "read like snapper" on the homepage. I made a screenshot tool for iOS which is actually called Snapper. I have been working on/maintaining it since 2014!
Yes definitely, over the years I've seen a few names with 'snap' as a base. It makes sense. I also tried to get snapper.com some times (although in my niche audience a website is not required at all). For the name, I think read it as ex-napper.
It began in 2016 out of some frustration I was having with consulting clients who would modify their DNS records incorrectly, breaking their email and/or website until I was able to get them back online. It was frustrating digging through emails or old technical documents to find the original values before they had made their changes. I wanted a tool that could automatically backup those records to make reverting easy while at the same time notifying me of any changes so issues could be proactively fixed before their business was impacted.
So with that, ZoneWatcher was born. Depending on your plan, we check multiple times per hour and take a snapshot of each zone's records. When a change happens, we record the change and send you a notification so you can review and have the necessary data to revert if it was in error.
Making close to $500/mo now since a major relaunch / feature update back in December with a decent stream of new users every month. No major marketing done yet other than just word of mouth and the occasional reddit post on /r/msp's vendor threads.
I set up an account with the public DNS provider and it doesn't appear to support multiple entries per record type. For example, time.cloudflare.com has two A records but the UI only shows the one.
Shortly after stable diffusion was released, I realized that an enormous number of non-ML people were suddenly interested in using an ML model.
However, APIs are insanely expensive and not very developer friendly, and running it yourself required pretty fancy hardware. The goal was to make the technology absolutely as accessible as possible.
So I launched https://computerender.com with the simplest API possible - just a URL that points to an image like:
https://api.computerender.com/generate/cupcake-of-the-sky.jp...
I monitor the prices on vast.ai and runpod to find the cheapest GPUs and run the service nearly at cost (as little as $0.0001 per image). No subscriptions, only pay for what you use.
Recently hit 700k images generated, and am excited to continue expanding the service.
> Feels like one of those "feature of a bigger product" things. But I wonder if there'd be a market for a service where you can get ai generated images just via url. "thingy.com/?prompt=weird picture of a cat with frog ears" or whatever and it returns the image.
Rad to see it validated in the wild & a clever approach to optimising your costs.
Yeah! For demo and testing purposes. Feel free to play around/build toy apps with it. There is a small global rate limit for all unauthenticated users though so don't rely on it :)
Out of curiosity, how do you handle traffic surges? Do you just have to manually add more servers? Or did you write a script to auto purchases more servers on vast.ai since there isn't any autoscaling feature there (that I am aware of)
https://extensionpay.com — A really simple way for browser extension developers to take payments in their extensions. I made it to use in my own extensions since it's a pain in the butt to take payments in browser extensions.
It has an open source library that works across all browsers and allows for one-time or subscription payments. Since 2021 developers have made over $125k with ExtensionPay which makes me happy :)
Great way to solve a problem! For those that may be curious. Author said devs using Extension Pay have made $125k in 2021. They charge 5% on transactions which translates to $6250, roughly $520 per month. Perfect candidate for this thread.
i've def thought of using this before, but couldn't quite figure out if i trusted it.
so far, nope!
i appreciate that the site looks clean/barebones, but the logo is _so_ barebones -- just text -- that i thought... oh, this is just unsupported, someone thought of doing it, good idea, but then it didn't make any money, so they bailed, no harm no foul, wonder if someone else will do it b/c it's really needed.
i've had various extensions over the years that i wanted to build out, or pay someone else to build out, but there was no way to recoup my investment.
I sell handmade sculptures of influential people and famous monuments on Etsy - https://www.etsy.com/shop/jurgenstudio. Revenue is 2-6k USD depending on the season. I hired someone part time who took over production and shipping. it's mostly passive revenue for me apart from growing the business by developing new products when I feel like it. The profit margin is around 50% after all material and labor costs are paid.
This is super cool. Admittedly, I know nothing about creating concrete figures -- I imagine the real artistic work is in creating the mold? Can you share how that is done -- is a sculpture created and then surrounded by the mold material?
1. I hire a 3d designer to create the 3d model I want. For example, I send him a couple of photos of Alan Turing
2. After I am happy with the likeness, I 3d print it. In this phase the 3d model comes to life and it's usually quite different from what we see on the computer as a 3d model. It has something to do with the difference in perspectives in which the designer designs shapes and in which we observe the item when it's produced as a real physical shape. This is very hard to get it right. Then we repeat the steps from 1 until I am happy with the likeness and the facial expression (this can be many iterations)
3. When I have the 3d printed positive, I create a mold using silicone rubber
4. The 2-part mold is then ready to be used for hundreds of castings (I use concrete)
Out of curiosity when you say you hired someone to take over production and shipping, do you mean you outsourced it? Or like that from craigslist is producing them now?
It's a an artistic person I found who is happy to produce copies of sculptures for me to get some side income. I teached her how to do it and gave her all my molds so she can do it from her home.
I love the selection and I'm thinking of buying a couple! Is it possible to have special requests made? Wittgenstein would be a great addition (the tryptic Nietzsche / Freud / Wittgenstein has been what forged my weltanschauung )
I get that question a lot. I do not worry about it. There's plenty of similar fan art selling around and I haven't noticed any actions taken to shut them down. I wouldn't reproduce anything under a trademark (for example, Baby Yoda), and as far as I know, human faces are not trademarkable.
I think it depends on how the work is produced for celebrities. If it’s a mass produced product and not one off artisan creations, OP might run into problems
Making several is not the issue, I believe. You could make several slightly different hand crafted statuettes, it’s the mass production of one likeness that’s the issue as I understand it.
It's intended to immediately differentiate from shops who sell cheap plastic sculptures. My customers appreciate heavy brutalist material I use. I spend zero time optimizing SEO, my product images and descriptions are pretty crappy, so I currently don't have much advice to give in that area! What's your shop?
https://fider.io - an open source alternative to UserVoice. I started this one 6 years ago to learn Go and React. I’ve seen thousands of instances out there being self hosted, so I started a cloud hosting to those who don’t want to manage it themselves.
https://aptakube.com - Desktop Client for Kubernetes. This is very recent, launch was 2 weeks ago, so it’s only starting to get some traction now.
I’m leaving my job to go full time indie hacker now, wish me luck!
Good luck!
How do you make money from an Open Source alternative to UserVoice? Is it only through cloud hosting, or you get paid when they self-host as well?
The DX is a thousand times better than Electron. The ecosystem is not as rich yet, but it’s getting there. The Discord community is very active and passionate about the project as well.
Honestly no game plan, I just enjoy working on both and plan on iterating for a long long time (10+ years) and just slowly growing. I am literally addicted to working on these apps.
I tweet about these projects extensively on Twitter btw if anyone is curious to see what work went into both of these (https://twitter.com/raroque)
I read about Mogul. It solves some of my problems related to keeping in touch with friends. During Covid, I got into more VC calls with friends to stay in touch. Once Covid lockdowns ended, I wanted a system that would remind me of touch basing with XYZ friend, based on last sync up date.
Over several years, my image as a good friend has tarnished since I didn't keep my side of bargain in enforcing good relationships. With older age, it's bit harder to make new friends. The least I can do is, reinforce older ones.
This comment is so so so relatable. I’ve lost a number of great friendships/relationships in my life because of how much I suck at keeping in touch with folks. I can’t even blame those folks for considering me a bad friend because of this. What does make me sad though is when some of them think I do this on purpose or that I don’t care about them. While I excel at many things, frankly, keeping in touch with family and friends is one of those social skills I’m not so great at. I constantly feel misunderstood on this point, but I get it, no one owes me understanding, especially if they perceive me to be a bad friend. On the bright side, this has made me much slower to judge others when they don’t behave the way I’d prefer. Anyway, I digress . . .
I just wanted to let you know I understand your perspective here.
Although Mogul was originally built for professional networking, I personally use it to maintain personal relationships (it’s amazing to see how impactful it is when you can recall super small details about someone/a convo with a friend).
Do (or did) you struggle with two products in very different areas? I think like most folks here I have ideas for products in very different niches and part of the analysis paralysis for me is deciding which one is "best" to start with.
I got over both the starting paralysis (and then the subsequent doubt paralysis that I picked the wrong one to work on) by doing 2 major things:
1. Making the definition of "project success" being that I learned a ton.
Once I did this (like consciously did it, for example my decision to work on E2EE was a terrible biz decision because nobody asked for it, but I wanted to learn more about cryptography) the decision became easier. I picked the one that had something I wanted to learn in the immediate term. Mogul had more interesting things at the time that I wanted to learn (E2EE, push notifications, CSV uploading, etc...)
2. Choosing to work on these projects over a very long period of time. Once I had the mindset that these were 10+ year projects for me, the approach really stopped mattering to me. As long as I pushed forward, I felt like I was going in the right direction.
Working on 1 feature per app each week vs focusing 1 year on each app stopped mattering because the end result over a 10+ year period would be the same. Both apps would be there, probably have similar features and I would have learned the same things. Just in a different order.
Second one is definitely more specific to me, but I think some of it can be applied when you think about a project/product as a small part of someone's life journey.
Hope that helps!
(edit: I also wanted to say that I have 2 more apps on my roadmap. No idea when I'll start them but I know the I'll do it when the time is right)
I built https://team-today.com in a lock down as a way for my remote team to see when people are on holiday, going to site, or wfh.
Since then it’s grown to include other features like desk booking and PTO approvals. But at it’s all been built around the core concept of seeing when your colleagues are working and where they’re planning on working from.
Great job!
How did you convince users to trust an unknown site to store their personal data?
This is one the things holding me back from implementing my side project ideas. I personally know that I won’t misuse users data but how do I really convince users.
We integrate into MS and Google which holds personal information such as names but we do make an effort to reduce the amount of personal information we hold.
The real difficulty is getting government or financial institutions to buy in, they have LONG approvals processes and require proof that certain security practices are being adhered to (ISO27001 helps but is costly).
Ding, ding, ding! This is correct. I was just ranting to my wife about this. Haha.
I always wonder, “How are these random companies able to convince folks to just give them personal data like that?” And of course, I already know the answer: Practically speaking, most folks don’t give a damn about their data! That’s unfortunate. (Well, not so unfortunate for the companies collecting all of it and their data brokers!)
React, Java, AWS. Took us about 6 weeks to build the initial MVP, each feature we add took a similar amount of time to implement, we typically iterate over things three times. We build something, make it better, then make it perfect. So far so good.
I built KTool (https://ktool.io) — it allows you to forward web articles, newsletters and RSS feeds to your Kindle.
---
I did a Show HN 4 months ago[1].
The reason I started KTool was to spend less time on computer screens, and more on e-ink Kindle. I was afraid of going blind.
After 4 months improving KTool, it now becomes a tool to help you combat doom-scrolling. Instead of mindlessly scrolling the web, I deliberately send interesting articles to my Kindle.
Created Video Hub App (that will be 5 years old next month). I sell it for $5 and $3.50 of each purchase goes to the cost-effective charity Against Malaria Foundation (See GiveWell.org for details).
It was averaging around 100 purchases per month, though it's lower over the last year as I've not had time to release new updates (moving to another state is challenging).
Thanks to the sale of this software I've donated an additional $16,000 to my favorite charity (I give 10% of my income there regularly - see Giving What We Can).
https://videohubapp.com/ - Think of it like YouTube for videos on your computer. Browse, search, and organize your videos
https://getblast.io/ - it is an end-to-end data platform: data ingestion + dbt-like transformations + data quality checks + data catalog, all through a single interface. It is making ~$4k/month currently.
Around the beginning of 2022, I was having a conversation with a few friends that are working at small mobile gaming companies, and they were having a lot of trouble building their data pipelines, especially because of the infrastructure part. I took on the challenge to start hosting some Airflow instances for them to get a bit more familiar with their problems, and over time some patterns started to emerge:
- they were writing custom scripts for mundane tasks.
- they had to write Python code, even though all they needed was scheduling a few SQL tasks.
- they needed some basic transformation abilities, but didn't have the budget to pay dbt-cloud $50/month (the minimum plan is $100 these days, I believe).
- they were losing track of where their data is going through and where it is coming from.
A friend of mine and I have started building some abstractions on top of Airflow to help these businesses: no need to write any Python, automatically deploying their changes to their instances after a git push, building data quality checks, materializing their assets based on their SQL "SELECT" queries, etc. Over time, we have gathered these features into a shared UI, and moved some of these companies piece by piece.
We keep improving the platform, and we are onboarding new companies for the past 2 months throughout our closed beta period. There are still many rough edges that we are trying to cover, but in the end, it was a great feeling when people were actually using the prouct quite often in spite of all these problems. We are pretty excited about where this can go.
If anyone is interested in taking part in the beta program, the first 6 months is free during the beta period. Feel free to fill out the form on the website and I'll reach out personally.
Not sure if this is a snarky comment or not, but we are not building Snowflake, instead we are building the layer that goes on top of it. There are many businesses out there that have their data scattered across different platforms / tools / technologies, and our goal is to provide them visibility into their data, and let them get to the insights as quickly as possible without focusing on the infra.
Our vision here is to bring the same set of abilities to the business even if some of their data lives in Snowflake, some in BigQuery, some in S3 and some in an Excel sheet somewhere. We are working to get to a point where working with all of these will become an easy task, without sacrificing governance, quality, speed or cost.
I don't do any active work on it any longer for the past 2 years or so, other than the small bug fixes/when Twitter changes the archive format. Bracing for a shutdown to the API soon anyway.
Back in college (2016-2020), I used to work part-time for my university’s IT department. Most of my time was spent doing software development, but when I wasn’t busy working on a project, I helped work the help desk ticket queue.
Believe it or not, our ticket queue did not have an auto refresh feature - and manually refreshing my dashboard webpage drove me crazy. As a die-hard macOS user, I’ve always used Safari as my primary browser, but unfortunately no auto-refresh web extensions were available on the App Store at the time. So I learned how to package web extensions for Safari and sell them on the App Store.
Fast-forward to today, and I now have a collection of Web Extensions that net me ~$750 a month. Feel free to check out Simple Refresh for Safari here:
I never did any paid advertising. At this point it's roughly 80% organic algorithmic platform trafic and 20% word-of-mouth. The latter includes outside user-driven platforms, like MiniReview and TapTap.
I used to do guerilla marketting a bunch, mostly on Reddit, certainly a lot before and around release. I got some ok youtuber and streamer coverage around this time. Ended up releasing on Steam with 10k wishlists, which was enough to provide an initial visibility boost.
Soon before releasing on mobile, I participated in the Humble Stand with Ukraine Bundle, where I distributed 200k+ free keys for charity. Marketing value wasn't what was on my mind at the time, but I know quite a lot of people who picked up the bundle tried out the game, thought "neat but I'd prefer to play this on mobile", and then helped to drive a lot of initial traffic and get picked up by the algo.
I also got featured a bunch in both Google's an Apple's curated game collections.
I got pretty into Stable Diffusion soon after it came out. Like a lot of users, I tinkered around with different ways to run it, going the usual route of running on my weak local machine, then going on to runpod, then implementing my own custom solution.
What I came up with worked pretty well for me, so I created a site that allows users to upload custom models and run Stable Diffusion “in the cloud”.
I launched in early December and it ended up being more successful than I expected. I just got to $700 MRR, which I’m definitely happy about after years of side projects making exactly $0.
Unless you're wanting people to save the images on the landing page, please optimize the images. WebP and only as big as they need to be rendered.
If I go to a service designed around images and it's taking 5 seconds on a SOLID fiber connection to fully download, it doesn't give me confidence that I'm going to get a fast experience in the rest of your site (even if it's not directly related).
It’s a great point. I had been using BunnyCDN to optimize the images/serve as webp, but there are a few on the model preview page that I definitely need to shrink further.
While we're both here, it's not exactly clear to me what that whole thing means and does. Arguably i'm not too clued up in SD models and what they are and why would I want them. Might be a good idea to explain this or if explanation exists make it more prominent to hook ignorant people like me. :-)
Great point. I might need an entirely separate landing page for the artist/general audience vs the prosumer type landing page that currently exists.
(If you’re interested, the gist is that custom models allow for completely distinct “styles” as well as unique characters. For example, if you wanted to generate art in the style of Monet, you could train a custom model in that style)
I sell cheap but high-quality Anki decks for language learning: https://deckmill.com
Created using a mix of automation (TTS, machine translation, etc.) and human reviews.
Built it with a friend, making around $500 a month, very stable over the last couple of years. Spend 1 or 2 hours a month on it, mostly customer support.
I just downloaded your sample deck for Spanish. One of the sentences is:
Front: I'm not happy.
Back: No soy feliz.
This doesn't seem correct to me.
I'm not happy (right now) => No estoy feliz.
No soy feliz means something like "I'm not a happy person".
EDIT: I should have mentioned that I'm not a native Spanish speaker. It turns out I'm wrong here, and that either estoy or soy would work in this case.
Native Spanish speaker here (ES-MX, specifically, if it matters). I think this is one of the cases where a solid general rule breaks down in the specifics.
You are correct about the difference between "ser" (to be, permanently/over an indeterminate time) and "estar" (to be in a particular state right now). But "No soy feliz" sounds perfectly idiomatic to me, even for a relatively transient state of sadness. ("No estoy feliz" doesn't sound wrong to me either, but feels just slightly less natural than "No soy feliz" even in a context like "No soy feliz ahorita", with an explicit "right now").
As a note: "No estoy contento" (Also "I am not happy", or maybe "I am not in a good mood") is definitely "estoy", rather than "soy". No clue why "No soy feliz" does feel idiomatic.
You are correct, but I'd say this one is fundamentally ambiguous (I'm Portuguese myself, where this also applies), as it is a one-to-two mapping here. Without further context you can't really choose one or the other, so we just left it as is :).
I've always found it most painful trying to figuring out when to use verbs that translate to other verbs depending on context. It's just personal experience of course, so not sure if it really matters that much between all languages or types of learning.
Maybe a hint which one is intended in this case would be useful/possible or a hint that it could be ambiguous/other translation possible? I've built a couple of tiny tools for myself to learn languages and I've always run into the same issue with ambiguous translations. I usually ended up with adding some personal reminder or sometimes just (1)/(2) to resolve it, but I never found a consistent resolution for it.
One feedback can you have tooltips/labels for the "Available Languages" section. Personally speaking my limited familiarity with flags makes it tough to find out how many languages are available.
Cool product. One bit of feedback: after downloading a deck, the page redirects away to "how to use our decks". This is confusing and not intuitive - my workflow was that I wanted to download the Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced deck for one language and I had to navigate back to that language 3 times.
I read through the entire site and was convinced there was no price, but when I came back to reply I found that there is an element at the top of the homepage (next to "No subscriptions. No frills.") that says "Get access to all our decks for just €15.99."
I completely missed it because the price was in the text in refular font and it wasn't on the Download page or anywhere else on the site. There's no Buy page, so the impression I was left with is that you have a sneaky onboarding that reveals the price after a sign-up... or something similarly shady. Not a very good initial impression.
All the mainstream 'successful' apps uses advertising on other social media networks + Apple and Google Ads. They quickly ask / require money to be paid when you join to cover the acquisition costs as part of the on-boarding flow.
Assuming it's a capital repayment mortgage, you're neglecting that you are erasing debt, only the interest payment is really a cost here.
But yeah I think it makes sense to exclude it anyway, needs/wants might change and you no longer have the room(s) available to let or whatever, and it wouldn't really be a useful comparison of your 'side project' earnings to compare a year as a landlord with one not, it's a different thing.
Insurance ($97/mo) + Mortgage ($3,400/mo) + Property taxes ($444/mo) + trash, water ($100/mo) = $4k/mo. My mortgage is new and is only paying down principle ~$120/mo. This means I pay about $900/mo for my room, except I have had an average of $1k/mo in home repairs since I bought the house.
The real value I am capturing is my personal housing _might_ be cheaper than if I rented myself.
I am sure in 10 years, I will be in a good spot, but not today.
I made collaborative painting apps, https://hellopaint.io and https://malmal.io (there might be some slight NSFW content). In the best months I made 800€+ in ad revenue from malmal but currently it's a lot less. I think there's potential to make a lot more though, although I'd like to stop showing ads and switch to some more predictable income model. I do have a patreon but it only brings in ~100€ per month. I could promote it more though.
Python concurrency has a super bad wrap (the gil) and I'm trying to help out even change opinions (e.g. work with it rather than throw it all out).
I write short focused how-to ebooks that on the different Python concurrency APIs in stdlib. Content marketing leads to email marketing to one-off sales. Doing about $2K/mo. Might expand into third party libs this year.
Congratulations for your side project! Probably quite similar to you, I'm also a PhD guy that uses Python for quite some time, and I've been lately interested in starting a side project like yours (courses, tutorials, books, etc.).
I see that you are mostly focused in processes/threads/etc., which is quite an interesting niche (for me, I teach those things in a Operating Systems class). It seems rather risky to pursue a niche as it may be too small! Do you have any tips, like why did you decide to focus on multiprocessing/multithreading? Also, any other Python niches that you think are valuable to focus (for courses, ebooks and tutorials like you do)?
I'm really interested in establishing myself an an online "educator", but I still do not know which kind of topics I should aim to. If I focus on introductory topics there's too much competition. If I focus on a too small niche, I may have no "spectators". Any tips would be greatly welcomed! :)
I chose the niche because 1) it was small, 2) underserved, and 3) because it was misunderstood.
It was a risk, sure, but it is a side project - a place for risks. No overthinking required. Plan, work, review.
I believe you could do the same thing for many modules in the python standard lib or most popular third party libraries. Python docs everywhere are not helpful and newer dev's think it's their fault. Help them. Serve.
Consider: "would o’reilly write a book on the module/lib?" If not, you can stake out a monopoly. If so, then there's probably already cashflow there and you can join them.
Hmm. I think of my self as a collaborator not an educator, if that helps. A peer that has a few more years (decades) in pointing some stuff out with working code examples.
Just wanted to say thanks for your work on SuperFastPython - it helped me out a bunch at work recently (new to Python concurrency) - and also for your previous work at MachineLearningMastery (helped me out with a university project a few years back).
You're very welcome, I'm happy to hear that! Thank you for the kind words and support. Message/email me any time if you ever have any questions, I'm eager to help.
Good SEO for the tutorials which rank well in the SERPs. Competition was mostly blog spam compared to my hand-crafted human (me) written stuff. Took ~6 months to escape the sandbox.
Then massive "complete guide" posts on major topics like "multiprocessing" "threading" and "asyncio" that rank well in the SERPs and did okay to well on /r/python.
I’ve mentioned before on HN how I make around ~$7k from my Lunar app nowadays [0] but controlling monitors is a larger niche and the app was developed and perfected over the course of 5 years.
This time I’d like to show you the progress of my last year’s project, https://lowtechguys.com.
You can see trends in red because December is a slow month for app sales, not sure why exactly.
But even with just 4 small macOS apps I manage to make ~1k/month with close to zero maintenance.
I have a lot more ideas for small non expensive apps that could add to the revenue but less and less time for them.
Right now I have to rebuild an old wooden house and finally move out of my rented apartment. I’m grateful to have a source of income on the side that can support me this year so I can pause tech while I do field work.
I have an idea for rcmd -- if possible, it would be great to be able to assign a right-cmd-key to <whatever Safari tab is running mail.google.com> -- or open one if none is. Likewise for calendar.google.com and probably others. I'd pay an extra few dollars for that feature, as I'm forever opening <yet another mail.google.com tab> because my tab hygiene is lacking.
I read your piece on window switching -- would AppleScript work? This works:
tell application "Safari"
tell item 4 of windows
set the current tab to item 3 of the tabs
set the index to 1
end tell
activate
end tell
Hey that’s a useful feature indeed, and it can already be added by the user with rcmd’s Window Actions which support AppleScript. I actually have done that myself already for Firefox.
I could maybe try to implement the main part of the “find and switch to the tab if it exists” so that users can simply assign the URL.
Okay, I've worked it out and it works perfectly with no requirement for window actions. I created an AppleScript:
tell application "Safari"
repeat with w in windows
set mt to (tabs of w whose URL contains "https://mail.google.com/")
if mt ≠ {} then exit repeat
end repeat
if mt = {} then
if not (exists window 1) then
make new document with properties {URL:"https://mail.google.com"}
else
set mt to make new tab in window 1 with properties {URL:"https://mail.google.com"}
set the current tab of window 1 to mt
end if
else
set mt to item 1 of mt
set the current tab of w to mt
set the index of w to 1
end if
activate -- needed if not activated otherwise
end tell
Then:
1. I export the script as an app. In the dialog I set it to stay open.
2. I run the app.
3. I use the standard rcmd method to assign M to that application.
4. I quit the app.
5. I export the script as an app again. In the dialog I *do not* set it to stay open.
And done! Now I rcmd-M and if there is a mail.google.com tab, Safari switches to it and jumps to the front. If there is not a mail.google.com tab, the frontmost window gets a new tab set to mail.google.com. I haven't tested yet what happens if there is no window. It should create one with mail.google.com. I'll test that in a minute and if it doesn't work I'll correct it and update here.
I have rcmd installed and working, and I wrote this AppleScript:
tell application "Safari"
repeat with w in windows
set mt to (tabs of w whose URL contains "https://mail.google.com/")
if mt ≠ {} then exit repeat
end repeat
if mt ≠ {} then
set mt to item 1 of mt
set the current tab of w to mt
set the index of w to 1
end if
-- activate -- needed if not activated otherwise
end tell
How do I set up window actions in rcmd? I don't see that in the page on your site.
Hammerspoon is needed because App Store apps are sandboxed and can't focus specific windows, can't run arbitrary scripts and AppleScripts.
What that gives you is the ability to map Right Option+letter to specific windows or tabs of the currently focused app.
So in your case you could dorcmd-s for Safari then ralt-m for mail tab, ralt-h for HN tab and so on, and it can also open those tabs/windows if they aren't already open.
And you also get a visual switcher to see what your options are in case you tend to forget these shortcuts.
Ah, okay. Did you know that AppleScripts can be saved as "apps"? I'm happily launching the mail tab in safari by pressing rcmd-m without Hammerspoon or anything other than stock RCMD. That gives me everything I was looking for. It would be nice to be able to assign ralt-<letter> to launch different apps -- e.g. rcmd-m does gmail in Safari, ralt-m opens Messages. and rcmd+ralt-m could do something else entirely.
I've used Windows at times, but I don't miss window switching beyond the above use cases.
The solution I posted works for most use cases, but apparently Safari can have zombie windows with no tabs. I quit and restarted, and updated the script to handle the situation where there are no windows, but I need to wait until there are zombie tabs again to double-check that my fix for that works. Once that's done I'll post again.
Oh, that's interesting. Okay, I'm pulling the trigger. I used to write AppleScript in a previous life, so I think I can handle that part. (we'll see if I'm right...)
I generate amazing profile photos for users using dream booth and a custom stable diffusion model.
Our quality of output is the best that I’ve seen compared to competitors.
My secret to much higher quality: I rank images, and then only show the best images.
All other competitors that I’ve seen dump all the images to the user. Instead, my process means that the output images are consistently very high quality.
In 2018 I started making a browser interface you could put in an iframe to let you create web scraping scripts from any device. The web scraping part is still a WIP, but the remote browser interface became a product in its own right that pays for everything else. I fleshed it out during the pandemic and responded to customer requests to improve things like streaming and audio. I grew it well beyond Ramen possible without ever spending a dollar on advertising or marketing. Now that the feature set is pretty stable I want to focus on marketing for this year. Sales are up 224% since last year but I think I can do much better: I still never snagged those big government or huge enterprise customers that I really want. I just think that would be cool.
If you don’t know what remote browser isolation is, it’s basically a security product to keep browser. Content executing on a remote computer away from your local device and Netwerk but turns out people use it for a lot more than that: an embedded multiplayer browser for live streaming educational lessons; a human in the loop intervention console to investigate and unstick stalled web automation tasks; as well as the more traditional security or reverse proxy use cases. A large part of my nontraditional marketing came through my source available GitHub version, which is now languishing well behind the paid pro version in terms of features and quality: https://GitHub.com/dosyago/BrowserBox
https://toolwallhq.com - Digital organizer for your physical tools. I used to have a hard time keeping my shop organized, so I jumped in and came up with a solution that has worked for me so far and perhaps might help you.
The idea is you use the digital artboard to visualize your tools on the wall and then buy the holders to mount it on your workshop wall.
There seems to be a growing overlap between programming and woodworking for whatever reason. I could go on about the similarities, but after hours of staring at the screen, we sometimes want to make things with our hands and woodworking helps me do that. If you're looking to get started, I can't recommend visiting a local makerspace enough.
Very nice! I must admit that at first I thought it's a tool wall designer SAAS (and that $60 for ability to add a drill holder to a plan is pretty steep), it took me a bit of scrolling and reading to understand you are actually selling a physical tool wall elements :).
Also, the subtitle "Use the world's first and only digital artboard to organize your physical tools." - I'd probably put the physical tool wall elements first, and maybe only mention a digital planner next. Or maybe have an image on top?
Those are very good suggestions, thank you! I sell more of the physical holders than the digital ones anyway, so perhaps the artboard and digital files aren't as helpful as I thought they were.
Saved up, quit my job and went all in...on a todo app. Needless to say that idea didn't go far, but it taught me how to code.
When I was close to broke I pivoted to this product and finally gained traction and now it's doing well enough to be my main source of income.
I'm kind of following the "1000 true fans" ethos that pops up here occasionally. There's a dedicated group of customers who benefit from the ease and speed of the tool and they're like my product team.
I check in with them often, make sure they're happy and build features for them. Turns out, what they value other people value too, and so the product slowly but surely grows.
Learning to code was definitely one of the best decisions I've made. Felt like gaining wings.
I built Tax Loss Harvesting Tool for different kinds of portfolios. Despite still being in the early stages, I'm gaining some interesting traction so far! I was badly hit in the recent market downturn because I had invested in leveraged ETFs without a deep understanding of how they function. But I still have faith in securities in the ETFs so I decided to see if it was possible to swap securities in order to harvest losses without triggering the Wash Sale. And, Lo and Behold, for 2330 ETFs, I found 1.2+M possible combinations.
Mind speaking to the monetization component of your app? It's not readily visible from your links.
I ask as I've built a similar tool that supports portfolio rebalancing and helps generally understand portfolio health. I found the niche of "DIY" investors willing to pay for software somewhere between fully automated and hands-off is small and although I've never pushed towards aggressive monitization, it always seemed like most self-service investors are conditioned to only pay for data (which I suppose in part your application presents).
Monetization is predominantly through affiliate referrals to CPAs and Tax Advisors; I ran Facebook ads and I had a good number of people reach out to me via messaging. am also exploring possible monetization opportunities through integrating APIs with big brands and roboadvisors.
I'm one of the cofounders of PriceTable. [1] It has been a side project since 2018 or so.
About a year and a half ago I posted about it on HN [2] and back then our revenue was $2,500/mo. We recently passed the $6,000/mo.
At this point we have a few very happy customers who make up the bulk of our revenue. We have been trying to grow more, but our challenge is that we haven't been able to figure out a cost-effective way of reaching potential customers. We target the landscaping market, and most landscaping companies are either too small, or they don't have tech-savvy owners/staff who are motivated to learn and leverage a software solution effectively in order to grow their sales. Phone and email outreach haven't worked well.
If anyone has experience in this market or similar, please drop me a line! ege@pricetable.io
>We target the landscaping market, and most landscaping companies are either too small, or they don't have tech-savvy owners/staff who are motivated to learn and leverage a software solution effectively in order to grow their sales
This is interesting, I don't know anything about your business but I feel like it might be worth having a landing page that is focused on landscaping. I don't really understand what the business does or how it can be helpful to a landscaping company.
Your website does not scream out to me that you are targeting the landscaping market and is a micro-startup going for the same market that the big companies cover so it might be a big hurdle to get the next client.
the genericness of the first few sentences are kinda not idea because they don't capture the "clickbait" nature of your product. you want to enthrall them into checking you out more. "The Perfect Mix of Sales Automation and Operations Management." doesn't really tell me much. "Create quotes in 30 seconds from your phone" or "control your business from anywhere" or whatever does capture my attention more. the headline doesn't have to encompass everything your business does but the subheading should have something like "complete business automation on the go"
getting customers is a hard problem® if it wasn't one of the biggest companies in the world wouldn't be an ad selling company with a swath of ways to deliver ads to you.
There are some YouTube channels that specialize in landscaping. I could see digitally and entrepreneurially minded landscaping professionals being a good part of their audience. Might be worth sponsoring a video or two.
I wanted to give swift a try when it came out in 2014. I created the keyboard I know you all miss on the iPhone, and it's been doing quite great since. https://typenineapp.com
Hey man, I bought Steredenn on the PS4 like 5 years ago and it was one of the best shootemups I've ever played. I haven't beaten it yet but was considering picking it up again for the Switch. Thank you for making it. I am working on my own game and games like yours are an inspiration for me to keep going with it.
If I can ask a question, was there an initial design decision to build the game in Unity, or was that just your preferred tool out of experience?
(asking because I am fool-heartedly going in pure libsdl2 and C++)
Unity was chosen because I am a C# guy coming from XNA, and Monogame was super rough at that time.
Also it allowed us to really focus on the gameplay and not too much and the engine, while having access to all consoles.
We still had a lot of headaches with it…
Now I’m considering switching to something but I’m glad I had that experience on a mainstream and fully documented engine.
Best of luck with your game, if you need advices send me an email via the Steredenn or Flipon contact address.
Been chipping away at this as a side project for many years - Visual Project Planning and Scheduling. Draw on a whiteboard and it makes a levelled schedule for you. It has resources, equipment, and much easier to understand than MS Project.
I have had a blast building it and it is hard to market - but the people that do stumble across and use it, the visual way of planning really resonates with them.
Wow, that looks less like a side project with such enterprise customers. What's the background to this, may I ask? Typically such tools tend to get built when faced with problems on the ground and tend to be specific to some niche. But as a side project, how do you know who your customers are, what they want and how they run their business?
I guess it comes down to how one defines side project? I interpret it to mean side-hustle
And you just asked the big questions - we have only successfully managed to find customers by word of mouth. We get the occasional person who stumbled across GamePlan from a Google search, but that is becoming more and more rare
I built it with a old colleague part time. We were trying to solve our own frustrations with planning, and just kept adding more things. It’s been an enormous amount of fun to do.
I have a weird set of skills that I've grown from just doing things that are interesting and fun.
https://www.munkle.it
- Think Anki, but optimized for speed, and will be focused on content creators. First sale this month (>$500_ from manual outreach to a big content creator Individual purchases will be turned on eventually, but we're not focused on that right now. This is a labor of love as through college and 20+ professional certifications I wanted something faster and easier than what was available.
https://www.skullsplitterdice.com
- I spend around 4 hours a week on this, but I used to do this full time. Currently it runs high four to low five figures 100% organically, but can easily do more if I ran ads. It 100% wouldn't be worth my time if I weren't using it to teach my kids things like customer service, product design, how to make content valuable to people so you get search traffic, single piece flow, etc.
It's also cool because I can geek out on a new thing in the area and apply it to something to see if I make any money on it or just have fun making art. Things I've done in the past is includes making a book for the game these are used for, a "choose your own adventure" style Facebook messenger adventure linked from hidden inserts in products, and working with visual and voice over artists to make stories around different products. My latest was using midjourney to create a character that I animated to say a script talking about a product.
Did I make money from that? No, was I entertained? Heck yes.
I started making this PWA in 2016 and I’ve been slowly adding to it over time. I intend it to stay minimal & lightweight. No framework, etc.
Fun fact: because it is so lightweight, it was included in the Moya app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nu.bi.moya), a popular messaging app in South Africa that is “data-free” for users (it does reverse-billing). Now half the players are South Africans!
Yeah I don’t want the ads to be intrusive. I don’t get many donations, no. In my experience, people will donate for a tool deemed useful (for business, etc.) but not much to something recreative.
As for traffic: word of mouth, mainly. Posted it on Reddit back then, things like that. It grew organically from that.
Also, although it’s far from being on top results on SERP (search engine result pages), some people do find it that way.
I built https://chatgpt4google.com which is a browser extension that enhance search engines with ChatGPT. It got over 500k users in less than two months.
I started doing some monetization experiment recently, and already got $500+ now.
I’ll admit that going in I talked to a few other authors and the common wisdom is that you don’t write a book for the money. I wrote the book because I thought there was room for a more practical industry focused Haskell book that didn’t assume any particular math or FP background, and showed readers how to apply the ideas in the context of real world problems. It’s been very well received so far as it’s been in beta and I made a decent amount on royalties in 2022. Going into 2023 I’m hopeful that I’ll see that continue as the book has its final release, and I’m planning to follow up with some additional materials like videos and interactive training that I hope will get more people excited about Haskell and will generate enough revenue to keep me motivated during the times when it all feels like a lot of extra work.
It's a bit depressing to realise that that first $500 MRR is both very hard to achieve (well done everyone showing and telling!) and not enough to quit the day job. (In the countries most of us here live in, and without having savings and deciding that with the push of working on it full time for a few months it can be a lot more, at least.)
I'm making some money on SaaS and some on consultation and customization. In many cases people pay for something I can later include in the open source, which always feels nice.
being a designer, i share my experiments in UI and design on Twitter and some other sites. to present designs, i used to beautify them in Figma. this was a routine process where i would open Figma, create a gradient background for my design, add shadows, rounded corners etc. and export the image in correct size, so if i’m to share it on Dribbble I would export it in Dribbble size, for Twitter the size is different
this whole process used to take like 20 to 30 minutes easily. so i built an app https://pika.style to do all of that for me quickly
it started as a hobby, open-source and free to use project which i was building in public on my twitter(@thelifeofrishi). in a matter of time i started getting DMs on Twitter for feature requests
i remember a founder of a company wanted to have a certain feature, we discussed that and in the end i asked whether he would be happy paying for that feature, to which he said yes. i added the requested feature in 2 days and got back to him, he instantly purchased annual subscription and started using Pika. that was in February, 2022
fast forward to today, almost an year later, Pika now has 150+ paid users and makes $1,500+ in revenue each month. i’ve turned it from just a screenshot beautifying tool to a tool to design very customisable mockups and images. you can use it to generate images for your website, app, code, tweet etc. and to keep it more accessible, it has a free tier which doesn’t even require registration to use
i’ve also added a plan just for students and teachers so they can use Pika’s paid fearures at a very discounted subscription fee
if you’re a programmer, marketer, designer, no coder or work in the tech industry, i think you’ll definitely find Pika useful :)
It's an open-source data visualization and reporting platform that I started in 2018, I abandoned in 2019, then resumed working on it more seriously in 2020.
Currently, the platform is doing $1,138 in MRR from then managed hosting service and has made over $11k in revenue so far. It's been growing steadily in the last few months but going through a rough Dec-Jan period at the moment. You can see the open page at https://chartbrew.com/open
Onwards and great job everyone at working to make side projects work for you!
Great to hear that :) Don't hesitate to get in touch if you need help with the setup. There will be links to get in touch all over the place when you sign up haha
I started a solitaire website 5+ years ago. When Covid hit, I ended up finally putting ads on it. Since then it's been growing steadily and about half a year back I made it my full-time gig.
Good site. I just gave you at least an hour of ad views because I can't ever stop until I win one. :) Note that on chrome on linux, the ads get quite heavy and slow everything down after 5 or so games, and I have to reload the page or it's too unresponsive to play.
I improved the game and functionality over time. The game has always been above the fold, but the content was greatly revise this past year. I've been doing a lot of optimizations on the game, but nothing big. After all, it's limited how much innovation can be done a game like that .
Nice and you have some interesting packages I have not touched. I just bought the course to help out :-) and lets see if I can run it on my Raspberry PI here cluster at home I recently built up.
A little more than $500/mon at the moment. If you are to trust Udemy's "instructor marketplace insights", top courses with the keyword 'devops' are north of $10k/mon, but median is just $27/mon.
Making about 1200/month right now.
It's a weekly list of companies that were funded in the last 7 days with founder/ceo contact information.
I use a mix of scraping and manual validation to make the list and currently doing cold emails to sell. I'm not truly a developer or a marketer, so learning a lot while attempting to make this work.
It seems to be valuable to different types of agencies -- recruiting, design, web etc.
I started selling NSFW stickers on Etsy. Originally it was a way for me to have a creative outlet but turns out a lot of people want this kind of product. Making just about $500 a month from it now. It’s great because all I have to do is draw the original art once and then I can just repeatedly print it and cut it out. It’s also a very relaxing hobby for me. I enjoy sending out envelopes with hand written notes. It’s refreshing from my usual 9-5 of spreadsheets.
How do you do the sticker printing? I recently helped make some stickers for marketing for a friend's business, and I was surprised how much they cost to order in small batches (which is annoying, because we wanted to make miniseries with different designs, but now we just ordered a larger batch of one design instead). Sounds like you use your own hardware, do you have any experience with different models?
I have the simplest set up you could imagine. I just use a Brother MFC-J4440DW printer, the same printer I’ve used for years to just print text documents and some glossy Kodak sticker paper. The printer was a couple hundred bucks and the paper is $10 for 10 sheets. I charge anywhere from $15 to $25 per sticker and usually get 4 stickers per sheet of paper. I then cut them out by hand using an xact-o knife. I’ve looked into automating the cutting process using something like. Brother Scan’n’Cut or a Cricut but I honestly enjoy the manual process of cutting stickers so I’m sticking to it (pun intended!)
There was a little bit of trial and error to get the level of printing quality I finally ended up with but now that the settings are dialed in it’s a very easy process. Drawing the art is the hardest bit. I just use an iPad Pro with the pencil and Procreate for that
Are you printing & shipping them yourself? I considered selling stickers at one point but print costs under 500 was too high, plus the hourly requirements of doing my own pick& pack. I thought about hiring the neighbor kid, but casual hiring seems to get messy/illegal fast.
Yep, print and ship myself. The shipping can definitely be expensive for a single sticker depending on where it is being sent to but I charge anywhere from $15 to $25 per sticker (all original art and I think that’s why I can get away with the higher prices) so shipping doesn’t dent into that too much to not make it worth it.
There are many services that do the printing/shipping for you, they take a big cut on the price though but you don't have to worry about anything at all.
One bit of small feedback - I would say your landing page is very busy, it could use some more space separating content once you start scrolling down past the top part.
Tamagui is now making 2,500 a month purely from GitHub Sponsors.
Pretty amazing. It’s fully OSS, just developed by me. Somewhat non-replicable as it’s just been a passion project in some for or another for 7 years now, reborn several times.
For the moment Sponsors don’t really get much, but there’s some in development features that will make that much more valuable. Goal is to double it at least this year!
Not 500+$/month by any means, but 100$/month. I got 2 subscribers who are older clients that I had to convince -hurray for hallway testing- and I hope to get more soon. Having an actual pricing page and payment funnel might help haha.
It's a dead-simple data exploration and prediction micro-saas, but with a lot of nice pixels and state-of the art AI/ML explainability algorithms. Users come with their prepared excel files, upload them, and they get an 'explanation' as to the relations their data has within itself. It can also work as a prediction service.
For example: It can help a marketer know which prospects are likely to buy (prediction), but when said marketer has too actually talk to these prospects we can help with tailoring the message with the right knowledge (this one will buy because he/she buys like clockwork, whereas this one will buy because we saw them several times on our webpages)
Two years ago I made https://vemto.app, a GUI code generation tool for PHP/Laravel developers. At the time, my wife and I were going through a difficult process, in which we urgently needed to move out of an apartment. The tool sold well enough for us to put a down payment on a house, and has continued to sell for those two years, and now I'm working on a second, more powerful version that not only generates code, but can connect to existing projects to edit them. There is a video of the second version at this link: https://twitter.com/Tiago_Ferat/status/1591450807433826304
2 years ago I made a code visualization tool called Codemap, https://codemap.app, which visualizes function calls in any codebase as a graph, to give the software engineers a high-level understanding of their code.
Last year I noticed its user sign-ups are ticking up quickly, acquiring hundreds of users in a few months, so I decided to redesign the app and add more language supports (now supporting Typescript, Javsacript, Python, Ruby, and Go.
It's a combination of a desktop app (to parse your local codebase) and a web app (to visualize the graph). Users pay a small price to unlock the full graph, otherwise the graph is capped at 100 nodes, which allows users to fully try out the product before committing to pay for it.
I released https://aipaintr.com based on the open source stable diffusion model. The webapp allows users to train custom dreambooth model and generate images using it.
Dreambooth is a powerful algorithm which can generate images of any concept you train it on. Users use it to generate images of person, e-commerce products, different artistic styles etc.
First let me say congratulations on the side project that makes $$. You are doing something that some people, me :-( , can't seem to figure out (or have too much paralysis by analysis, me again)
So my question is genuine and not meant to take away from what you have created or accomplished:
How are products like this still making money when there are tons of alternatives and some of them free?
Thank you! Try and build something that scratches an itch of yours, and launch ASAP so you can begin gathering feedback. That way, you avoid overthinking!
And that's a great question! There are heaps of great alternatives, but they didn't solve my needs. So I built my own take on a great timer, and it turns out other people were looking for the same thing!
https://slashdreamer.com/ (subscription) - wanted to do something with stable diffusion - this was the most useful one for me (since I am using Notion a lot)
One and a half years ago, I started Rocket Crew a Space industry job board
All other job sites in this industry were old and quite hard to use and most of the time there were not a lot of New space companies.
So since I love Space I decided to build an alternative. To get started, I built a web scraper for more than 50 different space companies, including NASA, Space X, JPL etc. And the traffic grew month after month
Now it has become one of the popular job boards in this niche and starts to rank first on google for keywords like "space jobs"!
https://rocketcrew.space/
I built SecAlerts https://secalerts.co a few years ago. Fairly straight forward SaaS product to send email alerts on new vulnerabilities matched to customer software.
I started making Browse AI (https://browse.ai) about 3 years ago. Quit my job soon after and focused on it full-time when I had savings enough for 2 years of my living expenses.
The next 1.5 years were intense. I learned to have better and more conversations with users (we'd crash and burn if I hadn't come across a book called The Mom Test) and we went through several positioning pivots.
As I was running out of money, I launched on ProductHunt and got decent initial traction and a group of angels who found us there and invested ~$300k.
Then we started making revenue...
Then, after almost 3 years of work, we reached $100k ARR...
Then we went from $100k to $200k ARR in less than 3 months!
We've signed up ~20,000 new users in January so far and I'm projecting $300k ARR in a month! We're growing ARR 30-50% month over month.
I have a team now who are doing a ton of the hard work. I still have to spend time on every part of the business, but I've been trying to focus my energy on certain parts that I'm better at.
The hardest challenge for me throughout these years has been figuring out if I should persist and work harder on the same path, or switch to something else or pivot. I went through a pre-accelerator program and an accelerator and I had some mentors through them. Some were super helpful and gave me the confidence I needed to keep going.
In general, specially if you're a solo (technical) founder like me, I recommend having mentors that have been through what you're going through and talking to them at least once a month. It's too easy to focus on the wrong things and waste the precious early capital and time. I know I would be 2 years ahead if I had sought mentorship early on.
https://www.scanii.com a content arbitration/malware API service. It has been profitable for over 10+ years now with customers around the globe.
Building it was one of the best decisions I made in my life since it enabled me to make hard decisions at work that were not skewed by the fear of losing my job and not being able to provide for my family - I'm in engineering/product leadership.
But, do not be fooled, this also means I've had two jobs (albeit of unequal urgency) and that, obviously, equates to long work hours.
I was pretty depressed at work a while ago and to take my mind off of the negative energy, I made a desktop app for provisioning bring your own servers, creating sites, and deploying web apps. It was free.
Fast forward a few years and a coworker joined me and we made a cloud version of it. It is doing ok but yet pay for two of us full time. However, we looooove working on it and helping customers esp. with their deployment issues. It is seriously more fun than our jobs that pay handsomely.
Really cool. I'll check this out for my next project. Also, I chuckled at the giant button that says "Click this gigantic button to experience how Cleavr..." :)
Login as guest directly at https://app.erdlab.io No registration required to test. No email confirmation needed to register either if you choose to do so.
I didn't have enough time to dive into all the information or test out the editor. However, one bit of feedback that I have is just wondering what sets ERD Lab apart from other existing solutions? What motivated you to make your own DB design tool? If a prospective customer was either weighing the pros/cons between several DB design tools or already using another tool, what would compel them to decide on using ERD Lab?
Maybe consider including a table highlighting the differences in features/pricing from other similar tools on the homepage (after the list of features) or a separate page entirely highlighting this information? For example, Render.com has a page specifically highlighting how their product is a better PaaS solution compared to Heroku [0]. This is just a thought.
Personally, I'm not familiar enough with DB design editors to know what I should be looking for in such a tool. Moreover, about ~1 year ago, I was looking for a solution that solved this exact problem, so I am genuinely curious about this.
Finally, just wanted to mention that while I don't need this at the moment, I did bookmark it to consider using in the future.
https://gif.ski — a modern GIF encoder that beats everything else on quality.
I'm dual-licensing it. It may be surprising that people would buy a codec for a 34-year-old format, but GIF is a popular medium, and I've created a solid implementation (in Rust, of course).
I really like the licensing model. Unlike a SaaS, it doesn't require me to stay up all night worrying about uptime. The types of companies that buy the licenses know what they're doing.
I had so many side projects I made a side project to centralize accounts and payments. It’s now called Chief Tools (https://chief.app) and contains a certificate monitoring tool (https://cert.chief.app), a zero-downtime deployment tool for PHP (https://deploy.chief.app), a DigitalOcean billing monitor (https://bill.do; which I acquired) and a URL shortener (https://tny.app).
All of these have no marketing and terrible landing pages since they are mostly built for me (although I like to think they are pretty ploished) but hit $500+ a few weeks ago. It took 5-10 years but interesting to see either way (payments were only available about a year ago though, before it was all free).
The funny thing (to me) is that the URL shortener is doing the big bucks since apparently there is still a place for new ones in the market which I did not expect, I mostly built it to be able to easily redirect a hostname.
Few years back I built an RSS to email service, still making ~$600/mo from it. https://www.feed2mail.com.
Later added an option to follow social feeds (Twitter, mostly) and connected the service to a Telegram bot that brings additional $100/mo.
https://t.me/Feed2Telegram_bot
I've been a long time self development enthusiast, regularly trying out new health/mediation/workout routines and wanted a tool to keep track of my routines, help me schedule everything automatically and where i could share my routines and explore other users routines too.
1). Started a small network automation product over Covid. The software brings AAA, secrets management (pki and passwords ontop of Vault), and config management under one platform. We let admins create programmatic runbooks to make changes to infrastructure using web forms. We have integrations to most major manufacturers to lookup warranty info for all devices. We are prototyping using NLP/OpenAI for users to create runbooks. "E.g.; I need a web form to deploy TLS certificates to all my Dell iDRACS" (but this is a ways off from being safe for anything but the lab).
2). We started another side project recently that manage large deployments of a popular OTDR manufacturer. System reports damage to dark fiber which alerts with with exact location info displayed on a map. Notifications are sent to staff via Slack/Email with photos and driving directions. We made a portal to manage all OTDRs from one interface.
Both of these are side projects but we will likely go full time on these projects soon.
1). www.realmhelm.com
2). No name yet but we will probably brand it under the realmhelm product above.
https://www.usecloudpress.com/ - Allows you to export content from Google Docs and Notion to Content Management Systems like WordPress, Webflow, Contentful, etc. I will export the content with the correct formatting, export images, and also handles other elements like tables, embeds, and more.
It is a relatively lightweight web app that tracks food in your pantry. It gives you an estimate on how long you could survive on it. It is intended as a tool for preppers but also works for anyone with OCD about their pantry contents.
Business has picked some this last year. I'm working on expanding the product data, general usability, and some actual marketing.
Cool idea. As someone who sees value in having a buffer of food for many reasons, I've signed up and will inventory the stuff in my basement.
I hope you don't mind a few unsolicited thoughts.
Expiration dates wasn't an obvious feature from the website. I was about to ask about it here until I watched the video. Maybe put some screenshots from the app onto the page with a more verbose feature list so it's more easily scannable?
If the app could break down calories by food group or macronutrient it would help keep inventory balanced.
Would you mind emailing me? I may have encountered a bug. giegs.hn@proton.me
I've created the Obsidian Starter Kit [1] and make ~1K per month with it. I don't think it will last for a very long time, but I enjoy sharing my approach and helping others spare some time.
Thank you for starting this thread and providing us with the opportunity to share. I have developed several plugins for Magento 2, an e-commerce platform. Some of them can be found at https://www.magepsycho.com/extensions/magento-2.html.
https://www.arbeitnow.com - a job board for Germany. It's been up for two years this January and it keeps me going! Revenue and traffic fluctuate a lot, does not really matter to me as long as people keep finding jobs through it so I'll keep working on it as long as I can.
In early 2018, GraphQL was new and hot tech, and I worked for a startup that kept breaking their GraphQL API. One day a field might be a string, the next day it might be an object.
I got mad, so I built a service that snapshot tested the API response every 60 seconds, and sent a Slack alert whenever it failed. I called it OnlineOrNot.
I spent a year trying to sell that MVP to startups around Sydney, but there were maybe a handful of other companies using GraphQL at that time, and they weren't willing to take a chance on a part-time business solving this problem.
Fast-forward 2 years, and several other failed projects, I decide to rebuild it from scratch, but this time as a general uptime monitoring service.
The URL is https://onlineornot.com, I've been iteratively working on it for around 2 hours per workday since early 2020 (I ruthlessly cut features down into 2 hour blocks, and use feature flags to deploy safely).
These days it's more of a status page, with built-in uptime monitoring (and has integrations to other monitors).
---
Folks tend to ask what makes OnlineOrNot special, trying to figure out what the moat is - it's me.
I've worked on the web for Atlassian and Cloudflare, I've seen what works and doesn't work for self-serve web apps. So OnlineOrNot has:
- a business model that won't suddenly fail (I'm full-time employed so that I can work on OnlineOrNot, I'm not going to shut it down for not making enough money)
- docs written in clear English that load fast, and are up to date
- a modern, responsive web UI with errors that don't make you feel dumb
- uptime monitoring for websites, web apps, and APIs that Just Works
https://tomotcha.com/ — a Japanese tea subscription service. Although we had to suspend our activities for the better part of 2022, we've been able to resume in January 2023.
Logistic is brutal in what is starting to look like a post globalization world: shipping fees are through the roof, delays are long, regulation (especially in the EU) is ever more stringent. COVID-19 pretty much killed bemmu's Candy Japan (https://www.candyjapan.com), and EU regulation just killed Candysan (https://candysan.com): they threw in the towel one week ago.
And yet we keep going... gross margin is around $800~$1000 per month.
Interesting. I am curious about the tea (as a customer). I usually try different kinds of tea. The pricing looks steep. Is it always green tea every month?
It is indeed mostly green tea, although different kind of green teas: "standard" green teas (from Sencha to Gyokuro), teas made of twigs (Karigane), roasted green teas (Hojichas), green tea with rice (Genmaicha), green tea flavored with yuzu (Yuzu Ryokucha), etc. Sometimes we throw in something completely different, like a Zaracha, a Sobacha, or even a Japanese black tea.
This is the 2023 lineup so far: Sencha (January), Yuzu Ryokucha (February), Karigane (March), Genmaicha (April). But while there definitely is variety, yes, you need to really like green tea to fully enjoy the subscription...
My app, https://easyteegolf.com/ is a niche SaaS that I built in my free time during COVID. MRR varies because I don't charge customers during the winter, but it made about $6K last year.
I earn a bit north of $5@@ monthly writing and selling puzzle books on Amazon.
(I suppose it’s relevant as, at its core, the books are made via one-off programs I write for each kind of puzzle. In addition to the LaTeX crap that turns the output of the program into a nicely formatted puzzle.)
I do print. Just the self-published POD stuff via Amazon’s KDP.
Cryptograms, wordsearch, fill-a-pix, nonograms, and the like. Sone types (like cryptograms) are simple generate using a program. Others, though, are pretty damn tricky… it’s a puzzle in and of itself figuring out how to make the puzzle. Currently working on some Logic Grid puzzles… the program I’m writing to make them is a real pain-in-the-ass. But, unlike most here, programming is a hobby so I throughly enjoy wasting time in the challenge.
Curiosity question for those answering here. How many unique visitors a month do you have to get your income? I am working on monetizing via a site that is growing in terms of visitors, and wonder what scale I will need to reach to start having things make sense.
I have 2 rehearsal rooms for musicians, with good acoustics and some basic music equipment. There are 10 bands sharing the rooms and paying monthly giving me 500$+ with ease.
I will do more as the market for such places in my city is not saturated yet.
I have kept building on https://blunders.io - a profiling tool for the JVM. Will soon no longer be a side project though, looking forward to spending more time on it!
I do payment processing on the side and help friends, family, and referrals with getting the best deal and use the best tech, kind of like a broker. I'm still blown away how many businesses in the US still make people tip on a receipt. It's ridiculous. I can do deals in Canada and USA.
Shameless plug, but if you are brick and mortar store or restaurant / bar. Contact me.
I'm launched closed beta for a very very niche product to help gateways get payments into quickbooks as sale receipts. No need to create invoice and mark it as paid.
I'll be making a post about it when it works with most payment gateways. And I have basic pricing.
Fraud for one.
If I print a 7 and you read it as an 8 or change it to what ever you want with that pen. I get charged more and there really isn't I can do about it. Why not just have tipping on the machine you are paying with anyways. The only country that has tipping on paper still is USA that has modern payment services.
And please I make money on the transaction not the fact that you tip on paper.
Also, why do your server have to take my card to go swipe it behind some counter still? Portable devices exist. Use them. I do not want to let you handle my card.
Current situation.
Server comes to your table and I ask for the bill.
Go back to the POS, get the bill.
Come back, I want to pay with card. Either they have a portable machine or they don't. If they don't They take my card then bring it back with a tip slip too.
Now imaging a server comes to your table with a payment device that can handle everything from the above. No more going to POS system to cash out. Need bill split, done, need pay at the table done. Need to calculate change, done for you.
Saves so much time and at the end of shifts you don't have to consolidate receipts. Just make sure cash float is correct and you're done.
As a customer in the US recently. Restaurants and bars still didn't accept tap and pin.
Tap speeds up lines and table turn over so much that you wouldn't understand until you implement it.
its 3 years old and still making 2-3k a month but i've gone from happy to guilty - i havent had any time to make updates to the book but i really want to and every single month that goes by that I don't I lose credibility. I'll still do it but its so hard to go back to something when I have a day job and my interests keep shifting.
I used https://acquire.com/ in this case. I looked at maybe 80 companies just from the surface. Then inquired about 15-20 of them for more details. After about a week of thinking, zeplo wouldn’t leave my mind. There was one other close contender but zeplo was more present in my mind and had better metrics.
From there it was letter of intent, due diligence, asset agreement, escrow, and asset transfer. Hopefully this helps.
I made a cross platform desktop app for people who upload their photos and videos to microstock agencies called Xpiks (https://xpiksapp.com). Initially I was selling one-off forever licenses but last year started moving them to subscription. So far progress is steady and I keep working on it. The app is made in C++/Qt and I’m looking for people who might be interested to join.
Nothing really to show visually but I make about that passively selling/trading high end watches. More a hobby than anything just to wear them but some easy cash.
Pretty simple tbh. I hit just about all the major buy/sell sites, Facebook, marketplaces, etc. to buy/sell/trade. Your standard buy low, sell high type of situation. Or, have relationships with the dealers and get watches and retail that sell for more.
Rolex for example is great if you can get it at retail or find a good deal but typically the margins aren't that great otherwise. Other brands have way better margins. Rare or hard to come by (but ones people would want) can bring in great returns.
It's a higher cost business to get into but have plenty of friends in the low to mid market that make some decent money. Less barrier to entry. You can do it with just about anything. Some friends are in collectibles, cards, shoes, etc.
Last year recruitment was a pain. This year, it's slightly better, still the process hasn't changed much. After spending an inordinate amount of time interviewing, I brainstormed and launched nitrohire.co last month after a few months of alpha usage. Nitrohire helps hiring managers get quick and useful information about candidates without any effort.
Currently doing on and off in the vicinity of a grand a month.
I created http://www.bithacker.io during the pandemic. It’s a live interviewing platform but for RTL design candidates. It supports Verilog simulation with an interactive waveform viewer as well. We’re also working on enabling synthesis soon. So far we’re getting some early traction and excited to grow it more in 2023 :)
I have been working on getting stable diffusion and image generation working for non developers. It has been really awesome to help non technical people. I'm still trying to figure out how to grow it larger, but its slow and steady progress. This is the site: https://88stacks.com/
A modern take on domain parking. I have ~50 un-used domains. I wanted to make some good use out of them instead of just parking them. So I built Newsy to convert them into automated content aggregators.
How much does the typical parked domain make? What is the biggest revenue generator? Newsy seems interesting but is it really working well for your 50 domains? Is it anything more than RSS aggregator with autoposting? What else do you do to help with the passive income streams?
I’m still building https://www.ieltsielts.com/ which offers original resources and coaching for an English language proficiency exam called the IELTS. It makes over $500 USD per month.
https://seniormindset.com/ – book and workshop helping people with the shift in mindset that goes into being a senior [software] engineer.
You can tldr my philosophy as “business results trump technical excellence”
No MRR but made about $40k in sales last year. Biggest challenge is figuring out how to turn that into stable revenue. Biggest opportunity is that unlike my previous (technical) infoproducts, this one doesn’t expire in 6 months.
I might be alone in this thinking but the "price goes up every 100 purchases" really gives off the wrong vibe. I understand you are trying to convey scarcity and value, but it comes off like some sort of used car salesman pitch.
Maybe I just too cynical these days, but when I hear certain phrases from salespeople, I immediately shut down the conversation and move on. Am I being too critical? Or is there an angle that I'm just not getting?
I love the product by the way! And the price is very reasonable. So I'm just a little bewildered by the hard sales pitch.
That's there to help bump people over the "Eh I'll buy this eventually" hump, which is common with nice-to-have infoproducts. Because I don't want to do the open/closed cohort based approach at this time.
I don't have the traffic volume or brand strength to go with the "You'll remember to come back when you're ready" approach ... yet?
Depends how you count. It's based on ~10 years of working on my own career. But it's also a collection of essays so a lot of writing happened live while the career was happening.
My time tracker says I spent 139 hours last year on this project.
I have 2 projects. One is already out in the wild getting used and abused by some. It is an SMTP server that can be used for testing and also simulating errors and delays. https://mailsnag.com
I make far more than $500 per month in cryptocurrency staking and various types of lending pools. For the curious it’s like a hobby that can make you a lot of money.
It's quite possible for 100% loss, has happened to me before. But I'm in a lot of different projects and I don't keep all my assets in one place. I've had farms yield 1000% before so it's a crazy game.
I'm very deep in this space and been doing it a long time, it's not something you are going to just pick up overnight. It's like running a business.
This is the land of software engineers, risk takers, and gray areas. Never put in what you can't lose, and diversify. You aren't getting these insane APYs risk-free - this is kooki stuff. But if you want to dabble, it's quite interesting.
Started trading back in 2020 and realized how bad I was it, and how much I needed a strict system to eliminate emotions! Had a degree in CS so spent a few months reading up on quant related stuff and realized how negligent I and other retail traders were, and how much data driven insights could help (ran over a million backtests the last 2 years)!
Built a simple analytics tool to show dozens of correlations & analytics between a wide variety of financial data points, and bootstrapped it to $120k/month! We grew from 0 to 54k users in two years, all organic. Has completely changed my life.
So, 13 months ago [0] you said on HN that you were making $120k/month with 3000 users. How come you're still making the same amount but with 18x more users than you had more than a year ago? What's the disconnect?
I'm amused when this is asked here. If you answer you're begging to get a surge in copycats, and by folks who might execute better and bigger, with more resources backing them.
Fast-forward a few weeks, I become pretty good friends with the owner at the ranch I went to. We grab tacos one night and he shares his concerns: They're not doing so well financially and are worried about whether or not they'll be able to afford feed in a month.
I got involved and we solved that problem and a few more: revamped the website (it looked and felt like it was from 2006), I whipped up a booking/reservation system to get more customers through the door, and exit surveys to make sure everything was perfect (and figure out what went wrong if it wasn't).
Bookings this month are up 490% from 2018 (according to the paper waivers they had) and that's without a single dollar spent in paid marketing. I answer a few emails every day from prospective riders and make sure everyone's happy. I get a percentage of each reservation which is cool, but the coolest part is that I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranch.