Given the pace of inflation shouldn't we raise the bar to $1000/month side projects? I'm always in search of "I could pay my mortgage with that!" side projects...
But only because Oregon has a nice law that makes it so the assessed value for a house for property tax calculation purposes can't rise more than 3% per year. My house is estimated to be worth $550K, but I'm being taxed as if it's only $250K.
Which is nice for a homeowner as you're totally screwed by the rising housing market, but it makes new housing harder to sell since your tax will start where it needs to be, whereas buying an existing home keeps your tax low.
Also causes problems when areas gentrify, but the city isn't collecting enough tax to make improvements that are expected by the residents.
This isn't so much a side project as a project that I tried to bootstrap and then never turned off, but as of December/January, I have made a little more than $500/month selling cloud true random number generators. I have not touched the code in a very long time, and today it is pretty much just a website and a listing on the AWS store, but it somehow made a few cents.
I'm still nowhere near wanting to quit my "day job" for it.
My cofounder and I launched Kbee (https://kbee.app) in 2021 as a way to turn Google Drive Folders into hosted, searchable wikis. We're doing ~$2k/month and run it as a side project
I came upon KBee 'organically' last year. I came from a Notion org to a Google Doc org and I hate Docs and the siloed nature of it. General Drive search is a mess when you're searching for knowledge and not files. Suggested KBee to bring some of the discovery back in to the org.
Sounds very cool. I passed it on to a friendly organization.
This organization is in the Google Workspace ecosystem, but Google doesn't have documentation as accessible as Notion. We could try to implement Notion, but this will scatter the data storage and then there is the problem of archiving if the experiment fails. This looks like a plug-in solution to our problem of having Notion-like lightweight documentation and not scattering data.
Do I understand correctly that you charge a fee per organization regardless of the number of seats? This is important for this organization because it is a non-profit association, so there are many members, the board must provide access to information to all members, some members are minimally active, so per seat licenses seem to be often a blocker due to the large loss on inactive members.
I’m curious who your customers are; being tech savvy enough to use an api, but not enough to scrape the web confuses me. Mind explaining how you make money?
During my previous job, when we were migrating to Kubernetes I couldn’t really find a GUI app that I liked, and most importantly, that could connect to multiple clusters simultaneously. We had 6 clusters and having to switch context constantly was annoying
I ended up building one [1] to use myself, shared with a few people and they loved it. I asked if they’d pay for it and to my surprise, a lot of people said yes. I’ve put up a website and a “pre-order” button with a regressive monthly discount. Sales were going up month after month, and a few months later I decided to quit my job to go all in on it.
Today, I’m averaging on ~€5k/mo from this app, but I’m still doing some part time freelancing, as well as building other products that are not as successful, but are making >€1000/mo
The latest one is open source, privacy friendly analytics for apps [2] that I’m still very actively working on. This is my current “side project” as the previous side project became my main job :)
There’s also an open source upvote site [3] that I started 6 years ago, but haven’t had much time to work on it lately, still generating $$ monthly
I have a serious question to those making money and I am hoping to learn here. How did you acquire customers? We have a startup going on for 3.5 months but it is incredibly hard to acquire customers. People don't respond to email or LinkedIn. We have not tried SEO and Ads yet.
If you have an audience in mind, try meeting them in person to demo your solution. I've found people are most receptive when they see your passion and resolve.
If you're struggling to land your message, your value prop might be off or you might not be communicating it well in your pitch. Take a look at your outbound marketing and focus on the call to action, destination, content and "give a shit factor" ... then test various approaches. If nothing works, it's probably not your message, but the product's value proposition itself.
If they dont respond it just means they do not really care about what you provide. People will respond if they really need what you provide.
Best case you just write to the wrong people, worst case nobody needs your service.
Made 240 USD in December.
About 9k visitors and 27k page views tracked through plausible.
Spent maybe 5 hours working on the codebase in 2023, which makes a solid ((240 * 12) / 10) = 288 USD / hour.
All of the money are from the watermark removal sales (10 USD). A lot of people say I could be making much more with some subscription model, but so far I'm resisting. (And the codebase is a mess :D )
Personally I think you are making the right call avoiding subscriptions in a side hustle project like this.
Once subscriptions get involved you have to deal with a lot more complexity, churn metrics, refunds (more so than now because of people 'forgetting' to unsub), the stuff around do you pro-rata at subscription cancel or leave it running until date is reached, stripe makes that a little easier but its still a thing.
Can't say I personally believe that claim, but there are a fair number of people out there who do. One person even sent formal test results showing that the adapter drastically reduces EMFs coming off the case. Not sure what to make of it but I found it interesting.
Note grounding your MacBook is likely to result in you constantly zapping your MacBook with static electricity if you wear rubber sole shoes, which is likely to not be good for the MacBook and may randomly damage the electronics. This may be why they did not put a grounding pin the first place.
I usually discharge my static buildup in the office sink.
Apple supports grounding as a first-party offering by using their extension cables that plug between the wall and the power brick. So this product isn’t doing something untested and unsupported.
I had wondered about this, because my 2013 MBP was grounded (it came with this cable) and it used to zap me constantly. But I did not put 2+2 together.
Exactly. The Apple extension cord is grounded. They likely didn't include a grounding pin on the stock adapter because (1) it'd be really hard to make it fold down and (2) you lose the option of which direction to plug it in (potentially blocking a plug). So it's a design call.
Wonderful idea! I never considered that a grounded power adapter could solve the buzzing issue. But now that I think about it, that's the reason why I don't get the buzz when my MacBook is connected to my monitor.
I started and run https://pacsbin.com, a radiology teaching file/research platform. I’m a radiologist and started this as a resident while unsatisfied with all existing options. It has been really gratifying to work on a niche problem for which a lot of my colleagues need a solution, and has helped me learn a ton about the tech and standards that underpin my profession.
S3 is really cheap, and from the beginning I spent a lot of time optimizing for simplicity and efficiency, so I don’t have much overhead. Since this is targeted towards residents and academic radiologists, it’s important to me to keep the price as low as possible. What is your platform if you don’t mind sharing?
That's rad, lack of lock-in and sharing in a niche is a big green flag- Hope adding ultrasound to the list of modalities goes as planned, would gladly lend a hand at no cost if it's high on the priority list!
I'm coming up on three years of running OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com) in 3ish weeks.
In short, I wrote about React from my own perspective for a year (despite thousands out there doing the same thing), made money, and got inspired to do the same thing with an uptime monitoring tool (200th alternative to pingdom when I released it).
I turned a tool I used for convincing contracting clients to not cheap out on hosting into a proper product, 2 hours a day at a time, and kept adding features since.
Serious question but does anyone get any value out of these threads? Most of the time it just devolves into hundreds of comments with links to random projects hoping to get traffic.
I think to make it more worthwhile people posting here please write a little about your tech stack, why you made it, what are your struggles, and tips for other founders, etc.
This is the kind of content I come to HN for. If it makes you feel better, this kind of thread also serves as a lightning rod that contains the self-promoting of projects so you won’t see as many posts of this type.
Around these parts "ideas are cheap" is often repeated, but I've failed to come up with a marketable idea for the past ten or so years.
My hobbies & interests are too niche and the problems I have in life can't be solved by tech, so I have yet to run across an idea I'd be intrinsically-motivated enough to pursue.
With that being said, I'm hoping I'll run into someone else's idea which will help me see through the kind of blindness which prevented rsync users from seeing Dropbox as something worth building, so I find exposure to these "little" ideas useful since reading through threads like these is somewhat like speed-dating for startup ideas.
I'm relatively technically inclined so the "tech stack" used is not really all that interesting. I don't really care about what React widget was used to create a customizable overlay text on an animated gif meme, I care about how the person found an audience and managed to monetize it.
GitHub, Reddit, "Show HN" or other areas of the internet are much better at highlighting interesting projects. This thread is specifically about monetizing small to mid range projects, so the focus is on how to acquire a meager income stream both in targeting audience and monetization strategies.
The best responses in this thread, in my opinion, are the ones that talk about how they managed to get to $500/month by identifying what problem people would pay money for, how they found customers and the specific type of transaction (purchasing something physical, subscription, one-time removal of watermark, etc.).
Yes. These are the posts on HN that I enjoy most. Tech stack etc are also somewhat interesting, but not that relevant since for most people is best tech stack is the one they are familiar with.
Yes, I love that thread. It helps me with brainstorming on new ideas.
Also, it's pretty nice to share with the small team I'm part of. We're currently working on custom client projects and we'd like to build our product. Seeing how people do it is a nice morale boost, especially for a team that lacks experience in building.
FreeBSD on EC2: Last year between my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cperciva), private "consulting", and a GitHub Sponsors donation from AWS, I received $20k to support my open source work. It's not a lot compared to my day job (Tarsnap) but money helps to free up time to keep everything working.
We started https://scanrepeat.com to enable companies of any size to introduce continuous security scanning of their web apps with direct reporting to Slack, Trello, Teams, etc.
We also cover a few more misc cases like detection of potential GDPR/CCPA personal data leaks.
I have a load of side projects but I rarely market/promote them as I worry that if my 9-5 employer would be unimpressed if they saw me putting a load of effort into e.g. creating YouTube videos, running events, doing podcasts.
Over $500/mo but not entirely a livable income yet
Manabi Reader, iOS/macOS app for learning Japanese by reading. Tracks the words you read on the web and shows you what % of an article you're already familiar with (vocab or kanji). Tracks your JLPT level progress. Has Anki integration or its own companion flashcards app.
Online casinos in the US will give you daily bonuses of $0.50-$1 just for logging in, and I built a Chrome extension that automatically collects the bonuses for users every day for a bunch of different casinos.
I charge $20/mo and users make roughly $200/mo in bonuses (trying to adhere to the software must provide 10x value philosophy).
Cool! It's been super useful personally and hard to describe without sounding scammy because people don't believe there's free money just sitting out there.
Need to put some more work into it, but there's so many sites that could be added and the bonuses really tally up if you collect from all of them (I have a running list and right now it's around $20/day in bonuses if you collect from every site on the list).
It sits in the online casino's site. Some sites require you to play through the bonus once, while others allow you to withdraw directly once you reach a certain balance. For the ones that require you to play through, I just play the bonus through low-volatility slots.
https://sre.rs - DevOps course for small companies and individuals/self-hosters.
I’ve posted this previously, but it’s been more than a year since I published the course and it’s still right about $500/mon.
When I was starting all this, I had higher hopes, but it’s been difficult competing with instructors who already have tens of thousands of students and thousands of reviews - they appear on the first page when you search for a particular subject and “no one” goes past the first page.
I love this because it combines my favourite things! Nice work. Can you share what your income is from the sites combined roughly? Is this your side job or is it your main income now?
Filestash [1] was born from the infamous top comment of the Dropbox launch [2] as it got me wondered if we could make a Dropbox like UI that is based on this interface:
Once I had it working with FTP, I made it work for every possible file transfer protocol: S3, SFTP, NFS, SMB, WebDAV, Dropbox, Google Drive, ..... As of today it is closer to a full time mac donald employee than 500$ per month with revenue coming from making customisation via plugins for people who need some extras like layering your SAML or OIDC authentication on top of a FTP server or any other storage, custom access / authorisation layer on top your FTP, etc...
I prefer not to calculate but in the range of 20 to 40h a week from 2017 but a big part of that time doesn't go in creating code but talking with people, supporting them, write stuff, improving other bits and bolt.
I've been living in Montreal now for the last couple of years and have struggled to find people to practice speaking French with, so I created a web app to talk with an AI to improve my conversational skills [1]. I launched a few months ago and am seeing a little bit under $500/month in revenue so far.
I initially started by offering the service for free, but it eventually became too expensive to handle by myself. I then decided to switch to a paid and free tier and by that point I had amassed enough of a user base that a decent handful signed up to the paid tier. I optimized for user growth > revenue in the beginning because I kept thinking, "if people are not going to use this for free then they surely are not going to pay for it".
Anyhow, it's called Proseable and it also supports English, Italian, German, and Spanish!
> proseable.com has not completed the Google verification process. The app is currently being tested, and can only be accessed by developer-approved testers. If you think you should have access, contact the developer.
If you are a developer of proseable.com, see error details.
Error 403: access_denied
Oh that's odd... are you accessing the web app through a regular browser like chrome, safari, mozilla, etc. ? I know the Google SSO does not work if you access the web app through something like Facebook's built in browser.
I built https://www.CheckYourList.app originally for myself for spontanous checklists that I go through regularly. Happy to say it just passed $500 a month recently :)
All SwiftUI, it is built within Apple's iCloud ecosystem using core data. It's a great way to get an app up and running with sync very quickly, but then you are stuck on Apple's platform.
I wouldn't consider this a startup.. but my co-founder and I built a model-based algorithm that uses maritime trade activity to predict inconsistencies in shipping company performance, and we use that information to buy/sell options in those companies. We make some money off of it, and we've sold a few "subscriptions" to our close friends and stuff to kinda help them out financially. It's nowhere near finished but it makes close to 500 a month including our gains (we don't have much money lol).
btw I had to make a new account for some reason so this is technically my first post but i've been using HN for a while now.
I built https://bankstatement2csv.com
It's a pdf bank statement to csv converter (which seems like an increasingly popular niche for solo devs), making $550/month as of today.
Marketing is challenging, and have only really had some minor success using ppc. Also, I have a fairly high churn rate (like 30%). From talking with users, it's mostly from individuals or small business owners that convert their statements from the year and then are done. Book keepers and CPAs tend to keep their subscriptions, which makes sense.
Since you are struggling with churn, maybe this solution is not suitable for subscriptions. Instead, it's better to charge a much higher one-time fee for occasional users who have no chance of converting to permanent subscriptions anyway? It enables you to focus on real ones.
Regarding selling it as an API. In Europe, PSD2 is the standard to provide third-party read-only access to banking data. I am using this to make my business bank account accessible to accounting SaaS. PSD2 requires renewal access every 3 months. At the same time, I have a summary of transactions in my e-mail every, so I would rather set forwarding once than keep to renew PSD2 (I set it, it expired and I do it manually).
I am working on a PSD2 / Open Banking solution to aggregate bank statements into a single CSV / webhook response.
I think the target audience is business having multiple bank accounts and not only wants to have a CSV version, but also aggregating may be a large number of bank accounts their are using.
https://www.bankaccountchecker.com
I’ve been involved in the Jamstack, static site generator, template ecosystem for many years. Built At Lightspeed is a template marketplace focused on ssgs and “modern frameworks”
Sales have been entirely from Affiliate sales, mostly via the Lemon Squeezy affiliate program. Its doing about $400usd/month. I recently launched sponsors and the initial interest has been good.
Tailwind and Nextjs are the most popular categories and best sellers. Tailwind (like Bootstrap before it) has a vibrant commercial template ecosystem. I’m seeing a huge uptick in interest in “full stack” boilerplates that have hefty price tags of $100-$400 and I plan to focus on this area more. No code templates for Framer have also exploded.
The site itself relies on Algolia to drive the faceted search results and filters and overall I’ve been happy with it. It’s a bit expensive and the older release of its react hooks library had a lot of edge cases with nextjs, but it’s been improving.
This year I will continue to refine and curate the results, focusing more on content quality and classification the extending the inventory. I recently bumped it from 4000 results to 20000 as an experiment, and this was just by easing back some of the quality filters.
My quite niche open source project broke this threshold last year, via Github sponsorships. Of course, I put a lot of time into it, so it's not "passive income" or even "market rate income", but still, without these sponsorships I wouldn't be able to work on it so much.
The project is Laminar, a UI library for Scala.js https://laminar.dev
Yes, you can run Scala on the frontend. The language is nice, the implementation is rock solid, the community is relatively small, yet lively. On Scala.js, Laminar is more popular than even React.js, and is used in SaaS apps, financial services, hospitals, etc.
I opened Github sponsorships three years ago, but overall since the library's inception it took me 7 years of continued work to get to this point.
I have a niche in "make orders/invoices" for on-the-road sales in my country. The major selling point is that I synchronize the data ASAP from dozens of local ERPs/Accounting packages.
A business partner is the one that sells it, but now I am looking to do direct sales:
(The site is in Spanish, and the app is already localized in English but not yet an international customer):
Now I am turning it into a more fully-featured app with integrated eCommerce (still incomplete!) and an offline native iOS/Android app for order taking.
Over $500/mo but still nowhere near my goal ($5k/mo). Started as a tool I built for myself to brainstorm and convert ideas into diagrams. Still need to invest more time on SEO and writing. It's just hard to find time to do all that stuff :P
I'm building a Zillow for Europe (https://homestra.com) which is focused primarily on expats and remote workers. Growth is steady and revenue slowly going up (sales cycles on this are brutal).
My other side project (https://webtastic.ai) has become my main work now since it has grown quickly since the last time I posted on HN
We make about $1300/month (shared among three co-authors) from the ebook "Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS" and a companion online course: https://stratospheric.dev/
I train LoRAs for diffusion models using collab. I've automated a good portion of it so I only have to deal with the customer saying yay or nay to a commission. The notebook I run takes a shared drive folder of pictures, or if a public figure... runs a crawler that grabs images from instagram and X. Run a face-scoring script that tosses out pictures with no faces, multiple faces, or non-target faces. Run the images through segment anything to annotate caption files. Then start training on cloud resources. It stashes 5 checkpoints and zips them up, and it emails the customer when done.
Best month I've done so far is about 2k, at about 30 USD per commission.
I made a couple browser extensions that make over $500/month each. The key seems to be naming your extension after high-volume search terms and getting good reviews on the chrome store (and obviously having an extension that works well and solve a common problem on major websites).
I'm extremely biased (see below) so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I think browser extensions are a pretty neat way to break into indie hacking. They cost nothing to run because they're hosted by extension stores. They're often faster and easier to build than whole apps because you can just use them to fix or modify existing websites rather than create your own from scratch. They can get organic traffic from extension stores, especially if they're well-named.
The main piece that was a pain in the ass for me was adding payments, so I made a service to do it (https://extensionpay.com), and now I can just focus on making the extensions work well. Because of all my previous work I was able to build and submit my last extension (making over $500/month now) to the chrome store in four hours — no joke! It was a really cool moment. Plus, running an extension monetization API I'm able to see all the extension that make real money and learn from what works for them.
I made an Excel/Google Sheets course, hosted with smalltime Masterclass non-(competitor) called DAASS: https://learnwithyakir.com/daass. Does over $1k/month, for my commission portion.
No frills, 6.5 hours of digestible videos, 30+ functions/formulas, enough theory to help you learn on your own. Writing complex formulas in Excel was my gateway to proper software development. It's a useful skill even now as a developer, working with data in CSVs, making small tools for quick automation, things like that. (Just don't make a CRM in Excel, lol.)
mikece | 1 year, 10 months ago
hawski | 1 year, 10 months ago
mikece | 1 year, 10 months ago
Sohcahtoa82 | 1 year, 10 months ago
But only because Oregon has a nice law that makes it so the assessed value for a house for property tax calculation purposes can't rise more than 3% per year. My house is estimated to be worth $550K, but I'm being taxed as if it's only $250K.
Which is nice for a homeowner as you're totally screwed by the rising housing market, but it makes new housing harder to sell since your tax will start where it needs to be, whereas buying an existing home keeps your tax low.
Also causes problems when areas gentrify, but the city isn't collecting enough tax to make improvements that are expected by the residents.
ijhuygft776 | 1 year, 10 months ago
[OP] program247365 | 1 year, 10 months ago
Let's say, $500 *or more*. The previous year's submissions definitely had ones that were more. :)
pclmulqdq | 1 year, 10 months ago
I'm still nowhere near wanting to quit my "day job" for it.
Shameless plug: https://arbitrand.com/
taylorfinley | 1 year, 10 months ago
Havoc | 1 year, 10 months ago
sarora27 | 1 year, 10 months ago
ganarajpr | 1 year, 10 months ago
gardenhedge | 1 year, 10 months ago
hsuduebc2 | 1 year, 10 months ago
lukebouch | 1 year, 10 months ago
TheCapeGreek | 1 year, 10 months ago
adobrawy | 1 year, 10 months ago
This organization is in the Google Workspace ecosystem, but Google doesn't have documentation as accessible as Notion. We could try to implement Notion, but this will scatter the data storage and then there is the problem of archiving if the experiment fails. This looks like a plug-in solution to our problem of having Notion-like lightweight documentation and not scattering data.
Do I understand correctly that you charge a fee per organization regardless of the number of seats? This is important for this organization because it is a non-profit association, so there are many members, the board must provide access to information to all members, some members are minimally active, so per seat licenses seem to be often a blocker due to the large loss on inactive members.
hackerbeat | 1 year, 10 months ago
alexanderhall | 1 year, 10 months ago
pestaa | 1 year, 10 months ago
whyleyc | 1 year, 10 months ago
2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482433
2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152
2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
matt3210 | 1 year, 10 months ago
mateuszbuda | 1 year, 10 months ago
pjot | 1 year, 10 months ago
fullspectrumdev | 1 year, 10 months ago
nomel | 1 year, 10 months ago
kube-system | 1 year, 10 months ago
goenning | 1 year, 10 months ago
I ended up building one [1] to use myself, shared with a few people and they loved it. I asked if they’d pay for it and to my surprise, a lot of people said yes. I’ve put up a website and a “pre-order” button with a regressive monthly discount. Sales were going up month after month, and a few months later I decided to quit my job to go all in on it.
Today, I’m averaging on ~€5k/mo from this app, but I’m still doing some part time freelancing, as well as building other products that are not as successful, but are making >€1000/mo
The latest one is open source, privacy friendly analytics for apps [2] that I’m still very actively working on. This is my current “side project” as the previous side project became my main job :)
There’s also an open source upvote site [3] that I started 6 years ago, but haven’t had much time to work on it lately, still generating $$ monthly
[1] https://aptakube.com [2] https://aptabase.com [3] https://fider.io
silisili | 1 year, 10 months ago
monroewalker | 1 year, 10 months ago
goenning | 1 year, 10 months ago
ilamparithi | 1 year, 10 months ago
goenning | 1 year, 10 months ago
isaackrasmussen | 1 year, 10 months ago
Coming from a very unreliable Lens, I'm looking forward to try out your app. Its already so speedy!!
codergautam | 1 year, 10 months ago
[OP] program247365 | 1 year, 10 months ago
jeremywho | 1 year, 10 months ago
PinkPigeon | 1 year, 10 months ago
Just about at $500 per month in recurring hosting fees.
It's a CMS which publishes static sites to Cloudflare workers sites.
I've not done any marketing, it's all word of mouth and took 3 years to get to this point.
Gonna keep growing it slowly on the side.
kLama | 1 year, 10 months ago
thekevan | 1 year, 10 months ago
bdominy | 1 year, 10 months ago
shinycode | 1 year, 10 months ago
taylorbuley | 1 year, 10 months ago
julianpye | 1 year, 10 months ago
Lionga | 1 year, 10 months ago
JohnCrickett | 1 year, 10 months ago
lgats | 1 year, 10 months ago
[OP] program247365 | 1 year, 10 months ago
kebsup | 1 year, 10 months ago
Made 240 USD in December. About 9k visitors and 27k page views tracked through plausible. Spent maybe 5 hours working on the codebase in 2023, which makes a solid ((240 * 12) / 10) = 288 USD / hour.
All of the money are from the watermark removal sales (10 USD). A lot of people say I could be making much more with some subscription model, but so far I'm resisting. (And the codebase is a mess :D )
chocoboaus2 | 1 year, 10 months ago
Once subscriptions get involved you have to deal with a lot more complexity, churn metrics, refunds (more so than now because of people 'forgetting' to unsub), the stuff around do you pro-rata at subscription cancel or leave it running until date is reached, stripe makes that a little easier but its still a thing.
so yeah, good move imo.
koolba | 1 year, 10 months ago
For bandwidth cost reasons I’m guessing you don’t support live linking right?
kebsup | 1 year, 10 months ago
The reason I did not implement my own was that Gfycat was integrated with reddit, so that posting the link would automatically show the gif.
jasondigitized | 1 year, 10 months ago
kebsup | 1 year, 10 months ago
The similarity function is a sum of squared differences of the pixel values.
FriedPickles | 1 year, 10 months ago
They've been selling consistently to others annoyed by the problem or who want to ground their MacBook for other reasons.
kube-system | 1 year, 10 months ago
You're really hitting all of the applicable target markets there. Love it.
FriedPickles | 1 year, 10 months ago
kube-system | 1 year, 10 months ago
It's a stretch, maybe an oversimplification, but I don't think it's a lie.
aetherspawn | 1 year, 10 months ago
I usually discharge my static buildup in the office sink.
callalex | 1 year, 10 months ago
aetherspawn | 1 year, 10 months ago
kube-system | 1 year, 10 months ago
FriedPickles | 1 year, 10 months ago
aetherspawn | 1 year, 10 months ago
tharkun__ | 1 year, 10 months ago
https://www.adapterelaptop.com/images/Apple-61W-USB-C.jpg
cbluth | 1 year, 10 months ago
deepsummer | 1 year, 10 months ago
candiodari | 1 year, 10 months ago
deepsummer | 1 year, 10 months ago
neurostimulant | 1 year, 10 months ago
gadders | 1 year, 10 months ago
jmhmd | 1 year, 10 months ago
domlebo70 | 1 year, 10 months ago
jmhmd | 1 year, 10 months ago
shipwright | 1 year, 10 months ago
rozenmd | 1 year, 10 months ago
In short, I wrote about React from my own perspective for a year (despite thousands out there doing the same thing), made money, and got inspired to do the same thing with an uptime monitoring tool (200th alternative to pingdom when I released it).
I turned a tool I used for convincing contracting clients to not cheap out on hosting into a proper product, 2 hours a day at a time, and kept adding features since.
Here's how I got my first 10 customers: https://onlineornot.com/how-to-get-your-first-ten-customers
thyrox | 1 year, 10 months ago
I think to make it more worthwhile people posting here please write a little about your tech stack, why you made it, what are your struggles, and tips for other founders, etc.
taylorfinley | 1 year, 10 months ago
hsuduebc2 | 1 year, 10 months ago
hackan | 1 year, 10 months ago
You may either be a potential client, or an entrepreneur looking towards tips or inspiration on things to do/how to do them.
givemeethekeys | 1 year, 10 months ago
Threads like this give us a window into a world of ideas and possibilities.
callalex | 1 year, 10 months ago
acuozzo | 1 year, 10 months ago
My hobbies & interests are too niche and the problems I have in life can't be solved by tech, so I have yet to run across an idea I'd be intrinsically-motivated enough to pursue.
With that being said, I'm hoping I'll run into someone else's idea which will help me see through the kind of blindness which prevented rsync users from seeing Dropbox as something worth building, so I find exposure to these "little" ideas useful since reading through threads like these is somewhat like speed-dating for startup ideas.
rozenmd | 1 year, 10 months ago
Both as a seller and a buyer, I've found customers and products I wouldn't have found organically.
jasondigitized | 1 year, 10 months ago
abetusk | 1 year, 10 months ago
I'm relatively technically inclined so the "tech stack" used is not really all that interesting. I don't really care about what React widget was used to create a customizable overlay text on an animated gif meme, I care about how the person found an audience and managed to monetize it.
GitHub, Reddit, "Show HN" or other areas of the internet are much better at highlighting interesting projects. This thread is specifically about monetizing small to mid range projects, so the focus is on how to acquire a meager income stream both in targeting audience and monetization strategies.
The best responses in this thread, in my opinion, are the ones that talk about how they managed to get to $500/month by identifying what problem people would pay money for, how they found customers and the specific type of transaction (purchasing something physical, subscription, one-time removal of watermark, etc.).
deepsummer | 1 year, 10 months ago
a_petrov | 1 year, 10 months ago
Also, it's pretty nice to share with the small team I'm part of. We're currently working on custom client projects and we'd like to build our product. Seeing how people do it is a nice morale boost, especially for a team that lacks experience in building.
WhackyIdeas | 1 year, 10 months ago
curtisblaine | 1 year, 10 months ago
acuozzo | 1 year, 10 months ago
WhackyIdeas | 1 year, 10 months ago
acuozzo | 1 year, 10 months ago
crs_gentleman | 1 year, 10 months ago
WhackyIdeas | 1 year, 10 months ago
cperciva | 1 year, 10 months ago
johnwheeler | 1 year, 10 months ago
mgl | 1 year, 10 months ago
We also cover a few more misc cases like detection of potential GDPR/CCPA personal data leaks.
jonwinstanley | 1 year, 10 months ago
Is this something anyone else thinks about?
j0hnyl | 1 year, 10 months ago
wahnfrieden | 1 year, 10 months ago
Manabi Reader, iOS/macOS app for learning Japanese by reading. Tracks the words you read on the web and shows you what % of an article you're already familiar with (vocab or kanji). Tracks your JLPT level progress. Has Anki integration or its own companion flashcards app.
https://reader.manabi.io
mixedsignals | 1 year, 10 months ago
Online casinos in the US will give you daily bonuses of $0.50-$1 just for logging in, and I built a Chrome extension that automatically collects the bonuses for users every day for a bunch of different casinos.
I charge $20/mo and users make roughly $200/mo in bonuses (trying to adhere to the software must provide 10x value philosophy).
j0hnyl | 1 year, 10 months ago
mixedsignals | 1 year, 10 months ago
Need to put some more work into it, but there's so many sites that could be added and the bonuses really tally up if you collect from all of them (I have a running list and right now it's around $20/day in bonuses if you collect from every site on the list).
zurtri | 1 year, 10 months ago
mixedsignals | 1 year, 10 months ago
j0hnyl | 1 year, 10 months ago
ssz | 1 year, 10 months ago
[OP] program247365 | 1 year, 10 months ago
predmijat | 1 year, 10 months ago
I’ve posted this previously, but it’s been more than a year since I published the course and it’s still right about $500/mon.
When I was starting all this, I had higher hopes, but it’s been difficult competing with instructors who already have tens of thousands of students and thousands of reviews - they appear on the first page when you search for a particular subject and “no one” goes past the first page.
cbluth | 1 year, 10 months ago
predmijat | 1 year, 10 months ago
dave333 | 1 year, 10 months ago
https://www.samurai-sudoku.com
https://www.fiendishsudoku.com
https://www.extremesudoku.info
https://www.sudokuhints.com
https://www.sudokuprintables.org
jasondigitized | 1 year, 10 months ago
dave333 | 1 year, 10 months ago
kzisme | 1 year, 10 months ago
dave333 | 1 year, 10 months ago
techmiker | 1 year, 10 months ago
mickael-kerjean | 1 year, 10 months ago
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Share6323 | 1 year, 10 months ago
mickael-kerjean | 1 year, 10 months ago
zurtri | 1 year, 10 months ago
I have coded it to be as flexible as possible, so it works for all breeds and all disciplines.
I have collaborations with Racing Associations within Australia to provide the software to new owners of retired racehorses.
I am trying to expand to the USA via Texas and to the UK this year.
https://horserecords.info
jondwillis | 1 year, 10 months ago
jbird11 | 1 year, 10 months ago
I initially started by offering the service for free, but it eventually became too expensive to handle by myself. I then decided to switch to a paid and free tier and by that point I had amassed enough of a user base that a decent handful signed up to the paid tier. I optimized for user growth > revenue in the beginning because I kept thinking, "if people are not going to use this for free then they surely are not going to pay for it".
Anyhow, it's called Proseable and it also supports English, Italian, German, and Spanish!
[1] https://www.proseable.com/
adobrawy | 1 year, 10 months ago
> proseable.com has not completed the Google verification process. The app is currently being tested, and can only be accessed by developer-approved testers. If you think you should have access, contact the developer. If you are a developer of proseable.com, see error details. Error 403: access_denied
jbird11 | 1 year, 10 months ago
Swalden123 | 1 year, 10 months ago
[OP] program247365 | 1 year, 10 months ago
I've been thinking about doing an iOS app for awhile now.
Does this have a backend of some kind? What's your tech stack? All SwiftUI, or Expo/React Native?
Swalden123 | 1 year, 10 months ago
McLarenF1 | 1 year, 10 months ago
btw I had to make a new account for some reason so this is technically my first post but i've been using HN for a while now.
takkatakka | 1 year, 10 months ago
Marketing is challenging, and have only really had some minor success using ppc. Also, I have a fairly high churn rate (like 30%). From talking with users, it's mostly from individuals or small business owners that convert their statements from the year and then are done. Book keepers and CPAs tend to keep their subscriptions, which makes sense.
Tech stack: Java, Javalin, Jooq, PdfBox, JavaScript, React, Tailwind
Hosted on DO
[OP] program247365 | 1 year, 10 months ago
I wonder if you could make this an API you could sell to devs/businesses? It's a different customer, but maybe something you could expand into.
Thanks for sharing the details!
adobrawy | 1 year, 10 months ago
Regarding selling it as an API. In Europe, PSD2 is the standard to provide third-party read-only access to banking data. I am using this to make my business bank account accessible to accounting SaaS. PSD2 requires renewal access every 3 months. At the same time, I have a summary of transactions in my e-mail every, so I would rather set forwarding once than keep to renew PSD2 (I set it, it expired and I do it manually).
alain34 | 1 year, 10 months ago
ninefoxgambit | 1 year, 10 months ago
I’ve been involved in the Jamstack, static site generator, template ecosystem for many years. Built At Lightspeed is a template marketplace focused on ssgs and “modern frameworks”
Sales have been entirely from Affiliate sales, mostly via the Lemon Squeezy affiliate program. Its doing about $400usd/month. I recently launched sponsors and the initial interest has been good.
Tailwind and Nextjs are the most popular categories and best sellers. Tailwind (like Bootstrap before it) has a vibrant commercial template ecosystem. I’m seeing a huge uptick in interest in “full stack” boilerplates that have hefty price tags of $100-$400 and I plan to focus on this area more. No code templates for Framer have also exploded.
The site itself relies on Algolia to drive the faceted search results and filters and overall I’ve been happy with it. It’s a bit expensive and the older release of its react hooks library had a lot of edge cases with nextjs, but it’s been improving.
This year I will continue to refine and curate the results, focusing more on content quality and classification the extending the inventory. I recently bumped it from 4000 results to 20000 as an experiment, and this was just by easing back some of the quality filters.
wooque | 1 year, 10 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38935714
[OP] program247365 | 1 year, 10 months ago
So I missed it. And I don't read so good.
Sigh.
Buuuut, it seems like we're getting different people sharing their side projects, so that's a win!!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
nikitaga | 1 year, 10 months ago
The project is Laminar, a UI library for Scala.js https://laminar.dev Yes, you can run Scala on the frontend. The language is nice, the implementation is rock solid, the community is relatively small, yet lively. On Scala.js, Laminar is more popular than even React.js, and is used in SaaS apps, financial services, hospitals, etc.
I opened Github sponsorships three years ago, but overall since the library's inception it took me 7 years of continued work to get to this point.
mamcx | 1 year, 10 months ago
A business partner is the one that sells it, but now I am looking to do direct sales:
(The site is in Spanish, and the app is already localized in English but not yet an international customer):
https://www.bestsellerapp.net
Now I am turning it into a more fully-featured app with integrated eCommerce (still incomplete!) and an offline native iOS/Android app for order taking.
syngrog66 | 1 year, 10 months ago
huydotnet | 1 year, 10 months ago
https://chatuml.com
dSebastien | 1 year, 10 months ago
It's solid and scales well. I've sold 700+ copies and most customers are happy with it.
https://ObsidianStarterKit.com
klaaz0r | 1 year, 10 months ago
My other side project (https://webtastic.ai) has become my main work now since it has grown quickly since the last time I posted on HN
tsingy | 1 year, 10 months ago
klaaz0r | 1 year, 10 months ago
JohnCrickett | 1 year, 10 months ago
It's evolved from then and now has 40+ real-world projects you can build to level up as a software engineer.
You can find the coding challenges here: https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/intro
After many requests I built a few paid courses, which I'm slowly adding to around the day job.
alexmitelman | 1 year, 10 months ago
BjoernKW | 1 year, 10 months ago
hmsp | 1 year, 10 months ago
stories from two artists.
bunnyhop | 1 year, 10 months ago
Best month I've done so far is about 2k, at about 30 USD per commission.
Glench | 1 year, 10 months ago
I'm extremely biased (see below) so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I think browser extensions are a pretty neat way to break into indie hacking. They cost nothing to run because they're hosted by extension stores. They're often faster and easier to build than whole apps because you can just use them to fix or modify existing websites rather than create your own from scratch. They can get organic traffic from extension stores, especially if they're well-named.
The main piece that was a pain in the ass for me was adding payments, so I made a service to do it (https://extensionpay.com), and now I can just focus on making the extensions work well. Because of all my previous work I was able to build and submit my last extension (making over $500/month now) to the chrome store in four hours — no joke! It was a really cool moment. Plus, running an extension monetization API I'm able to see all the extension that make real money and learn from what works for them.
yhavin | 1 year, 10 months ago
No frills, 6.5 hours of digestible videos, 30+ functions/formulas, enough theory to help you learn on your own. Writing complex formulas in Excel was my gateway to proper software development. It's a useful skill even now as a developer, working with data in CSVs, making small tools for quick automation, things like that. (Just don't make a CRM in Excel, lol.)
alexmitelman | 1 year, 10 months ago