My side project is mainly just complaining about working for "the man" while not doing much about it. It's a crowded space, but it definitely makes less than $2k/mo!
Straddling paid SAAS and open source is a bit tricky and I still haven't figured it out completely yet. I have some sponsors as well as some paid saas clients but it's not quite paying the bills yet... I like working on it though, hopefully I can find the right balance or a different revenue model that works better.
My other problem is not only am I not good at marketing, I don't like doing it. But I also know it's the other half of the equation.
If you write about what it is that you're doing and keep a blog, that has been a very effective way for me to "market" the work that I'm doing without it sound scummy af. (I don't like feeling like a greasy used car salesman, and writing about developing stuff feels much more natural to me.)
Puzzle rush integrated with spaced repetitions to improve tactically at chess. I hacked a solution for myself during covid to combine those two, and achieved very good results reaching 2000 on lichess (from around 1800), which was my goal then.
In a recent break between jobs I decided to create an integrated, easy to use solution, and I've got lots of ideas about how to improve it - if it gets traction :)
Personally, I've been working on OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com/) for over two years - it's a set of uptime monitoring tools, with a hosted status page.
I'm working on https://base.report, a web app to help retail investors and (primarily swing) traders to research the stock market effectively.
As someone who got interested in the stock market a few years ago, I didn't find anything that suited my needs in terms of features and design. So I developed a solution tailored to my requirements and eventually opened it up for others as well.
The key features include a stock screener with technical indicators like 50-day range, and a report view for each stock including charts and key financials.
I still use the app almost daily to aid my own stock market research. We currently have a few dozen active users.
Thanks! Here’s the direct link to the pricing page: https://base.report/pricing There should be a link to it in the footer as well. On the desktop, there should also be a link in the navbar.
On the bright side, people here will spend 3 years creating the latest microservice + ai orchestrated infrastructure before launching.
Also it could be the other way around, you need a solution for a problem you have. Say that you built something profitable and wait 'til someone "copies" your idea.
They might be, but there is so much data on profitable ideas out there it wont make any difference. For example on indiehackers, various businesses for sale sites, and reddit/HN threads.
If that's the case it definitely works as creators look for every opportunity to mention their projects somewhere and what better place than this thread.
I assume they all are, but thankfully for the fisher(people), most hn users with products have large enough egos to not care about new competition, and thankfully for them most people fishing for ideas will probably have 10 new ones by next week and never implement any of them.. (I sure have done that a lot myself, haha).
Card Crusade - a roguelike deckbuilder (similar to Slay the Spire)
Barnard's Star - multiplayer tactical strategy game (like XCOM or Into the Breach)
Both games are on iOS and Android. Makes just over $100 per month. It's a ton of work. Doing it wayyy more for the enjoyment/satisfaction of the project than the money.
One for samurai puzzles and the others show different difficulty levels and different sets of puzzles. Extremesudoku.info shows the most difficult puzzles we have come up with. Easysudoku.org is the opposite. Sudokuhints.com and fiendishsudoku.com both show a range of difficulty but the puzzles are completely different. Sudokuhints.com was actually the first site and fiendishsudoku.com came up as a redesign. Sudokuprintables.org and sudukopuzzles.org are both designed to allow printing of 2, 4, or 6 puzzles per page and have different sets of puzzles.
During the LLM insanity of the last few weeks, I used GPT-4 to design a website that synthesizes unbiased news articles out of biased sources and it's producing some great output. Since it's more of a research project, I have zero intent to monetize it so it's definitely less than $2k/month: https://spinreactor.ai
Like the early days of the internet when you could open up port 80 on your home machine and connect via unencrypted http. In other words getting unbiased information from LLMs will be a challenge and LLM biases will become political, but right now, for a minute, we can have nice things.
My main side project is Pivotuner[0], a MIDI effect plugin for adaptive pure intonation
It enables some pretty cool things like fairly straightforward microtonal modulation! Right now I'm working on a paper to submit to a computer music conference about it. Happy to send the draft if anyone's interested (email on website in bio).
I released it last December. I've had a couple sales, not many, but still enough to cover the cost of Apple developer membership, so at least I'm sort of in the positive!
Should also mention that I've gotten feedback on it from some pretty major artists, including Grammy nominees and winners like Jacob Collier! which is very very exciting
Made as a hobby during the pandemic -- it scrapes eBay listings for laptops, and provides a parametric search (RAM, SSD etc) inspired by the likes of Digikey and Mouser, and sorts on total value. I like to buy used electronics, but this kind of search is still shockingly bad on typical marketplaces (Amazon etc)
pretty quickly finds for example an 11th gen Intel, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD laptop for ~$200. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me. The really good deals get swiped up within a day or two though.
Lunni is a dashboard for Docker Swarm. It helps you if you already use docker-compose to develop an app locally, and just want to deploy it with as little effort as possible. It also has a bunch of apps available for one-click install in the built-in Marketplace, like Vaultwarden, Chatwoot, or PocketBase.
I'm trying to get myself to start writing to potential customers, but haven't succeeded just yet. (If you're interested in a demo, let's chat! https://cal.com/notpushkin/lunni) As such, MRR right now is still exactly $0.
My most successful side-project so far is a small service for launching preview environment (https://codepreview.io).
I have a couple of customers involved, receiving great feedback so far, unfortunately, it doesn't generate enough revenue yet and it is progressing very slowly (chicken-egg problem).
I believe we can scale the number of customers but it is hard to find the right balance between doing sales and feature improvements. For obvious reasons, I prioritize consulting hours that pay our bills.
It's a small project in Flutter I showed on HN few days ago. It's basically an alternative to Android File Transfer, but with a better UI and without the limitation of 1.5 GB files because it uses adb under the hood. MRR: €0 and it will always be this amount of money :)
Do you pay for financial data? I remember searching for financial data APIs for commercial use few years ago, they were quite expensive. Don’t know if it has changed
I don't want to go into detail of all my APIs as most APIs are very expensive for commercial use and I see getting a really cheap one as a business secret.
I also created multiple libraries for fetching business data from official government sources (e.g.the SEC)
I try to get most of the data directly from the source and plan to launch a different product which will resell it.
I scraped ~100k recipes from across the internet, and made this site to focus on south asian recipes (~2k). I will soon add features to better sort and filter these recipes by various diets, ingredients, and regions in South Asia.
I just launched a few days ago, and no revenue yet.
WeCode NI (https://wecodeni.com) a job board for developer in Northern Ireland. It has paid me several thousand pounds over the last few years. This past few months have been quiet.
I’d be interested in a partner to help grow it and replicate for other cities.
https://SignalProcessingJobs.com - a niche job board for signal processing engineers, but trying to drive traffic with content, tutorials, and videos. Looking to grow both the content and the job board aspect of it.
Making an open source CMD epub reader in Rust. I don't want to share the code as I feel a bit self conscious about where it is ATM, but when its done I really hope it will be a solid reader for people using the terminal. Its non-profit because I just want to make a neat tool
A party game my friend and I built over peak COVID, still play with family & friends frequently. People stumble across it on the Apple TV App Store and occasionally purchase some content which is great!
Helping startup people in early stage to validate ideas before investing too much time and money in product development, just crossed $500MRR after launching it 3.5 months.
A desktop version of the “companion” apps floating around the space. Features emoting, expressions, eye contact, low latency voice synthesis, and a two way conversational model.
I work in robotics, so I always find clean front-end implementations pretty neat. Can you tell me how you got this to work? How do you host all of it? What is the back end you use? I apologize if this seems too basic, but I'd appreciate any details you have for me. My goal for this summer is to work a bit on front end tech, so that I can present better visualizations, and build simple CRUD apps to showcase my data.
Thanks!
The way it works is very simple. I'm copying from a comment I made earlier:
Everyday IMDb publishes bare bones datasets at https://www.imdb.com/interfaces/. I've a bash script to download them, format and load into MySQL from which I export two types of json files:
1) A file with all the TV shows names, id, ratings etc (shows.json) - this is what's used for search. It weighs < 700KB compressed (I could certainly optimize this file but I've stashed it for later).
2) A file for every tv show with all the ratings and votes for its episodes. Based on your search, the specific file will be fetched to display the ratings. (This one file per show could also be optimized but looks premature at this stage.)
Strictly speaking, a database is also not necessary but it serves 2 purposes: 1) I could easily query to satisfy some curious show related questions. 2) The datasets include a ton of stale data (like shows w/o episodes and vice versa), so I find it easier to cleanup through SQL.
The above architecture allows me to host the site as a static site. When I launched, I had a typical node backend that connected to a db to run searches etc. But thought it was way too much infrastructure for a simple site!
Glad to hear you have a concrete goal. Front-end is actually easy to pick up if you don't get carried away by the latest thing on the block. IMO, it's pretty mature nowadays and I prefer the tools available now over the ones I had when I started way back.
If you've no front-end experience, just pick framework like Vue or React and start building stuff. If you've the time, I'd even advice you to start with vanilla JS, HTML & CSS (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ should be your bible). It will not only set you up with a solid foundation but let you appreciate the conveniences & conventions when you pick up a framework. There's tons of tutorials available for pretty much anything web related. Good luck!
Electronic lead screw for metal lathe - https://kachurovskiy.com/ - started about a week ago and sold 4 kits so far. Unit cost today is 61€ so margin is rather slim too.
Have you thought about contacting littlemachineshop.com to see if they'd be interested in carrying it? I've used them in the past to put together similar upgrades for my lathe.
Options Backtesting Service focusing on income and hedging trading strategies.
Still under heavy development but have a handful of users who find it useful.
CSV upload to Buffer. Run it for many years, sent tens of millions of updates, only ever had a donation button that brings in enough to pay for the digital ocean box.
Here is one idea - if you can list the advertisers for podcasts/episodes, that might interest new podcasters/other advertisers. Kind of a search engine to search podcasts by advertisers (or vice versa)
What's the definition of a side project? If it's not "something that you like to do", then doing a 2nd job will earn you much more than $2k/month (I think at least $10k/month).
Eurotripr.com - a constant work in progress. The goal is as if NomadList and Indiehackers had a baby and that baby wanted to help others travel affordably around Europe.
The vast majority of Americans get at least some of their news from social media, even though they don't trust it.
Forth is a news feed for news; not quite social media. Everything comes from vetted journalists who adhere to our editorial policy, so you can trust what you read. No spam, no misinfo, no hate speech.
Have a little over 60 journalists in all sorts of beats/locations, and growing.
