SPY until I had a year's worth of salary invested. From there, I had more "personal" personal finance questions (How do I treat these company stock options? How do I deal with obscure SPAC IPO while I live abroad in Asia?), so I got a real-life financial advisor person.
Honestly, was definitely worth it. Even though his fee is 1%, which all the personal finance YouTubers say is high, he's saved me over 100k with a few very key financial decisions where I almost shot myself in the face by accident.
I've been writing an email newsletter on backend dev for the past few years - https://quastor.org/
Basically, I look through all the Big Tech engineering blog posts and look for interesting posts. Then I'll write up an article talking about the tech stack and the main takeaways.
I've been learning Adobe Illustrator + After Effects recently and am now starting to add some visualizations + graphics to accompany the articles.
I make more than $500 per month but this is more of a passion project and the income is honestly not competitive (at all) with what I earn as a dev.
It also gives me a way to learn about marketing/growth + monetization. Hard to learn that stuff w/o doing.
It started as just a content site, with google Adsense. Making about $1200 per month from ~30k visits.
It kept growing in popularity over about 2 years and I finally decided it might be worth some more effort.
So I turned it into a web app that took an employee through the process of gathering/generating all the paperwork they require to provide their employer with their superfund details. Effectively just digitising the paper form process with some smart automations.
(Superannuation is the 401k of Australia, but probably more widespread as it’s mandatory)
That was 2x MVP’s ago. Last year I got two trust partners / co-founders involved and we’ve turned it into an embedded service that can drop into any payroll/hr provider.
Raised $1M and now we’re making a lot more than $1200
All because I was nervous about getting Adsense banned for no reason. So thanks google!!
Correct. We dropped adsense as soon as we could. We now work with, and integrate directly with, the super funds themselves. Often it was those super funds that were advertising on the site via google adsense. We've effectively cut out google as the middle man. But we also now offer a lot more than advertising for the funds.
I’ve been running Bear Blog for a few years. It’s a privacy focused, super fast blogging platform, and is making well over $500/mo. It’s also a really fun tool to build and use, with a tight community.
There's a cost to adding a custom domain and media storage at ~$5/mo depending on your country's purchasing power. I'll make a note to add it to the homepage somewhere :)
Thanks! That was exactly what I was trying to escape from when I built it. The platform is free to use, but if you want to connect a custom domain (and a few other neat features) there's a ~$5/mo subscription. I'll make a note to add pricing to the homepage somewhere.
We do popups once a week alongside our day jobs. It's been a long journey and we would like to open a storefront at some point. The bakery makes well over $500/month, but not quite enough to sustain ourselves full time yet.
It's a great way for me to learn about design and marketing as well.
Speaking of design, your website asks me to sign up for a newsletter before I can see the page. It's missing an X button where I'd typically look for it.
It has crossed $500/month but since it's a one time purchase it is too early to tell whether it will sustain since I launched it only in December 2023.
These threads, along with the related recurring Show HN solo-founder success stories often seem to either be some form of newsletter/social publication, or analytics platform. I wonder if that's just the natural limit of what teams of 1 can feasibly accomplish, but I do wish there was some more variety in what people were successful with.
I started working on an open-source API mocking tool six years ago.
It's called Mockoon and has recently crossed 500k downloads.
Two years ago, I quit my job to focus nearly full-time on it. I'm still freelancing on the side, but it's slowly bringing more money through sponsoring and the SaaS platform I'm building (a bit less than 1000$/month).
Hopefully, 2024 is the year I can stop freelancing and live the dream! Work on an open-source project I love while not feeling guilty about not bringing enough money home :D
It all started because I needed a weekly report for my contracting clients to prove their web host sucked to the point where it was costing them significant money. They were paying for cheapest tier WordPress hosting at the time, and didn't believe me when I said random 5 min blocks of downtime throughout the day were adding up.
I built a dirt-simple form that takes a URL and sends a notification when the site goes down/up, with a weekly summary email. Then, I kept adding features every day, responding to customer requests and fixing bugs 2 hours at a time, even after I stopped being a contractor.
Since then I also added status pages (example: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/) and cron job monitoring, to ensure database backups and whatnot run when I expect.
This is really nice. The front page tells me everything I need to know.
For your consideration, I'm really struggling to find a tool like yours that expect a regular ping ("the daily build has not failed") and that support pushing a status ("the last build was green").
I have two matching use cases: one to detect when my static site generator fails to build in production, and the other to detect when my appointment finder does not find appointments for a longer period of time. I'd really like my uptime monitor to handle that, so that I don't have to implement something myself.
Another brilliant feature is allestörungen, which lets people report troubles with common services. It fulfils the similar niche of "is this down for anyone else?"
Are you looking for something that accepts a metric from your end (number of appointments found) and alerts on a rule (Zero appointments found in the past 24 hours)?
It would be nice but not absolutely necessary. Something that allows gathering all alerts in one place is all I need. Gathering data in one place would be cool but not absolutely essential
On the side, as a technical consultant, I help teams to ship products with ML under the hood.
I live in Vienna, so that makes it convenient for evening calls with USA/Canada, where my three clients operate.
Usually this involves weekly 30min calls with the teams to show them shortcuts, working recipes and save time by avoiding pitfalls. Mostly around ChatGPT/Local LLMs and RAG/Business automation type of things.
I run a newsletter [1] to try extending my client base. Not very efficient yet, since all clients came through the LinkedIn [2] and personal contacts.
i find it surprising that you can't find people who can do what you suggest at the bottom. it doesn't look like it should take more than a few weeks to learn that.
What about AI/ML attracted you more? I’m at a point in my studies, and I can either go down the big data route (more backend focused) or AI (frontend focused, i.e. how the computer interprets data), and I just can’t decide. Any insights would be much appreciated! :)
Generally I'd suggest to pick the route the excites you the most. Because you'll naturally spend more time and energy there, allowing you to advance the most.
Personally I've always been fascinated with AI/ML, because of reading too much SciFi as a kid :) Plus modern LLMs are a bit like magic - you can make computer do amazing things if you just manage to say the correct incantation :)
I've also spent a large chunk of my career around big data (worked in a couple of startups). Data is interesting and important, but it was boring for me.
Long story short. If you like learning a lot of things - AI/ML would be a wonderful field. But you'll need to keep on learning. If you like messy code - also AI/LLM.
If you like working with data, predictability and stability. Then big data might be your thing. Also if you like digging into different business domains and connecting numbers to processes and people.
During the pandemic, I made an online version of the game Mexican Train ( mexicantrain.online ). It became popular in retirement communities during lockdown. Gameplay has dropped off significantly since, but I still have several regular players. It averages about 50 games/day and between $500 and $1000/month, all from donations.
I am building https://dreamgen.com : platform for story-writing and role-play based on my own open-weight models [1][2]. Sort of alternative to NovelAI and CharacterAI. Launched November last year.
Why? I think building on top of (and using products built on top of) closed models in this space is not sustainable.
Currently the largest limiting factor, and why I am not spending on marketing just yet, is the model quality at longer contexts. This is my main focus right now, and I am in the middle of data collection for opus-v1 (which will also be released in various sizes). I also hope GPU prices will go down soon :D
It's a lot of fun, being able to work on data, models, backend and frontend all within the scope of 1 project.
1500$ MRR (or ~1000$ after taxes and operating costs) with a (native) Plex audiobook player for iOS and Android.
Android accounts for 85% of the userbase and has been the focus last year with a 2.0 release so it's in much better shape than the iOS version, which is still in 1.0 today. MRR is growing 5-10% per month, not sure how big the niche is yet. It's a lot of efforts to maintain both platforms as native apps with a high level of quality, but trully convinced crossplatform solution are not worth it either.
Not enough for us to pay the bills, so I started 2 other projects: BoltAI[1] & PDF Pals[2]
I sell traditional licenses for these app and so it's not "recurring revenue", but it's well over $500/mo and help me going full-time on these products.
You make great products, good job (I’d love to connect offline to discuss things in more detail, let me know)
With pdf pals, can your app support time sequenced docs like sec filings? I’d love to easily drop in the last few quarters of a company’s filings and get coherent answers on its performance while not accidentally smashing all the filings together and hallucinating false stuff.
Thanks. Not sure if we could connect offline but sure.
PDF Pals allows you to highlight a section and ask only about that content. I’m not entirely sure but for some advanced questions, it might require a code interpreter similar to ChatGPT and that feature is not available in PDF Pals yet.
It's like google but all the results are from different ai models. Some ai models are better at reasoning, others at coding, or have bigger context.
Makes money from a tier where more advanced models can be used like gpt4, claude2, mixtral. But a very permissive free-tier has led to a lot of fraud/spam with the associated costs but most users like to see the benefits right off the bat without signing up for an account.
Got a few defenses coming up for fraud detection and hopefully cross the $500 barrier soon.
There's a lot of sentiment on HN about SEO ruining the internet but the SEO tips I promote are ones that make content more readable for humans (e.g. setting image ALT tags, avoiding broken links, giving each page a unique title, using valid HTML) rather than tricks for gaming Google:
Tried running my site through Checkbot, it's lightweight and helpful. "Indexable" pages has been a pain, can't seem to find clarity there on why our stuff is discoverable yet not indexed.
You mean Checkbot is confirming your pages should be indexable as you expect but the pages aren't turning up in Google?
Some general suggestions: add a site map, submit your sitemap and pages via Google Search console, see if changing the internal linking of pages helps (e.g. pages that have links in the header/footer will seem important to crawl/index, maybe hubs for or "related pages" links for related pages would help), get more (and better quality) backlinks, and make sure pages don't look like duplicates (as Google will group together repetitive pages).
Yes that's correct. Regarding your suggestions - thank you! I've done three of the four but still missing back links. We do have 1000s of pages that have a very similar structure, so I would understand why Google would mark them as duplicates, but the content on each differs, so I'm hoping that's not the case.
Getting around $1-$2k/mo building self-hosted web analytics: UXWizz[0] since 2013 and WPLytic[1] since 2022.
I am trying to market it more, tried a partnership, unfortunately it didn't work out, so this year the plan is to do the marketing myself or continue building and improving the product and hoping the quality of the product will lead to word-of-mouth marketing.
My MMR was on 538 EUR at the end of 2023. I am building not that visually pleasing, but hopefully a useful dividend portfolio tracker - digrin.com. I wrote a small summary here - https://lucas03.com/digrin-com-in-2023/
I built a Chrome extension that integrates with Gmail (and other sites) to write emails, messages, etc using ChatGPT. This is my full time work and I'm living comfortably from it (for now).
