14 ms·

Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?

310 points by laksmanv 10y ago

niftylettuce 10y ago
Here's a brief list! * Wakeup.io - Simple Phone Wake-up Calls @ https://wakeup.io https://wakeup.io and it is fully automated and runs itself with actually really good profits. It was built in 2-3 days. * GetProve, Simple Phone Verification @ https://getprove.com https://getprove.com and it is fully automated and runs itself with again, really good profits. It was built in a week or so. * Teelaunch, Kickstarter/Indiegogo Fulfillment Service (exited/sold) http://teelaunch.com http://teelaunch.com (the site is different now than it used to be here https://web.archive.org/web/20140110204830/https://teelaunch.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140110204830/https://teelaunch...). As you can see from Wayback Machine, the site was just a landing page when I had it... took me day to put it up! * Standard Signature, Email Signature Automation for Gmail Business @ https://standardsignature.com/ https://standardsignature.com/ (built in 48 hours) * Glazed, a Rapid MVP boilerplate for NodeJS @ http://glazed.io http://glazed.io (built in a week or so, but this was work/thoughts accumulated over like 5+ years of hacking - this landed me paying clients, so I still consider it a side project) * Asynchrosend, a MailChimp competitor (site is down now, but I did have paying clients and successful startups like Notehall.com had used it), built in a week in college! * I have a bunch, at least 20 more on my list TODO still, if you want to build one with me let me know! I really would love to find super talented people, or people that are motivated. It's really hard to find good people if you know what I mean. I am not working on these right now though as I'm solely focused on one big project. I have a bunch more projects I've built, that are also profitable that I can share. Email me and I can share more! Update #1 - I really wanted to mention the most important thing about this. I read a Max Klein blog post that flipped the switch on me before to get into this hack and ship fast mode; it was something like build small little projects, but build a dozen of them. Once you build and release one quickly, it's addictive. You soon start to release more and more, and you get so creative and confident. You can literally build ANYTHING you want in a matter of days if you truly focus and WANT to. Update #2 - I added a few more side projects since this topic is fun!
- tmat 10y ago
  i've been trying to come up w/ these really simple ideas like this which turn small profits. Death by a thousand paper cuts I guess. Having trouble coming up w/ one :(
  - niftylettuce 10y ago
    just clone what someone else did and make it simpler to use and easier to understand, haha
- soulbadguy 10y ago
  I am really curious about which software stack (especially the backend) you are using to iterate this fast
  - niftylettuce 10y ago
    I just released Glazed, my latest boilerplate that I use for this stuff. You can find it here https://github.com/glazedio/glazed https://github.com/glazedio/glazed. However I have a HUGE absolutely STELLAR update coming probably in the next week for Glazed. I basically dog fed this on my own startup/project and have a ton of little but important updates to the project.
    - bduerst 10y ago
      What's the benefits of using Nunjucks, in your opinion?
      - niftylettuce 10y ago
        It's incredibly fast, I still may try using https://github.com/marko-js/marko https://github.com/marko-js/marko on v2 though since it seems to be much faster. Haven't really tried their plugin/system yet. I came from using Jade for like five years straight and when performance time came around with it, it hurt. Nunjucks is really nice!
rsoto 10y ago
I've worked over a year on https://www.boxfactura.com/ https://www.boxfactura.com/ which is a special email service for invoices in Mexico. It has been profitable since January after quite some legwork, on the technical side as well as the sales and persuation side.
- nanoojaboo 10y ago
  muy bonita!
- emilioolivares 10y ago
  Hey man, I'm also from Mexico but currently live in NY. This is pretty awesome. How did you manage to get traction with small businesses? Would love to chat if you have time, my email is emilioolivares, I use Google email.
  - rsoto 10y ago
    Hey, Emilio! Sure, I'll send you an email, however, I'd like to keep the answer to your question on the public side, if you don't mind. It has been quite a ride to get traction, mostly the first clients signed up after talking to them about their issues with their invoices and expenses--once they're interested, we begin the education process. The other sources are a mix of everything. One of our services is a platform in which our client's vendors can upload invoices so they can manage them. We get some information on several businesses, both small and big so we can begin to offer our solution. This particular product might be the best source for viral growth, as one client can introduce 10 or 20 new users on our platform. We also have a relatively successful side project on a related field [1], which has several hundred hits daily. There's an ad there, there might be some optimization on both the ad and the landing, but we're still trying to figure that out. Finally, our focus has been towards explaining the product, as there's nothing like it on the market (actually there are, but they're small and having the same difficulties we have). Once they sign up, our onboarding process is focused on one point: send your first invoice. As we saw many of the new signups not completing this step (or the previous 2), we set up an email communication strategy for each one of the steps, with our contact information in each email. I've blogged a bit [2] about it. Now that we're sure our product is helpful for the businesses, we just started promoting heavily with a sales force. I hope that answered your question! 1: http://isrmatic.com/ http://isrmatic.com/ 2: http://www.therror.com/weblog/2016/mar/como_el_email_marketing_propulso_las_ventas_de_un_startup http://www.therror.com/weblog/2016/mar/como_el_email_marketi...
ruffrey 10y ago
I run mailsac.com and skim a profit. I failed to properly sell to a couple of customers that would have made it fairly profitable (at least two very large companies use it for email testing). It has a decent number of users and signups but I haven't spent the time to figure out if there is more they'd pay a lot for. It took about two years of literally doing nothing to make a profit.
hoodoof 10y ago
I know this goes against accepted wisdom and I cannot yet prove that it works, but I no longer believe I am capable of the "build something small, fast and succeed". Niftylettuce in this thread has shown it an be done, but I have not succeeded in doing so. I am now working on big, highly functional, fully working on launch utilities for DevOps people. Hopefully this will result in building something people want. It seems the startup world is made up primarily of people pumping out easy to build shit.
- niftylettuce 10y ago
  I don't consider these really startups haha. No way. I think you have not succeeded YET because you need to find something fun to work on that you want to build for yourself. I honestly built the wake-up call service for MYSELF and nobody else. I couldn't wake up for classes in college even with an alarm clock (didn't sleep much since I was hacking all the time). I thought having someone call me made the world of difference in signaling my brain to move. So I built the wakeup thing for myself, then maybe a year or two later I added international support after I realized people were paying like $2 a week with it. People actually paid for it? That blew my mind. The other services and things I built were again just because I wanted them for myself. Just have fun with it. True, these are easy to build projects, but the real skill comes in when you can pump one out in a day! * I mean pump one out in the sense that you build it, both front-end and back-end, and then release it on the internet. A lot of these projects I didn't do any fancy deployment stuff with, I popped open `screen -DR`, did a GitHub deploy key to the server, cloned repo, installed deps, and ran `node app`.
- warewolf 10y ago
  Sometimes it's better to have smaller self running projects to help fund the big ones.
hugs 10y ago
5 years. (2011-2016) While working on my first startup (Sauce Labs), I made a robot that plays Angry Birds as a side/art project in the autumn of 2011. The serious part of the project is that you can use the robot for testing mobile apps and devices. I started to sell the robots (still as a side project) on Tindie when that first launched in the summer of 2012. I made a couple of thousand dollars the first few years, but basically broke even profit-wise. I got my first "big" enterprise order of robots in late 2014 and that made me start wondering if I should ramp things up. I formally incorporated (http://www.tapster.io http://www.tapster.io) in May 2015 and took some seed funding (Indie.vc) to sell the robots full-time. Since incorporating, it's now veeeery close (this summer) to ramen profitable while paying a few salaries.
- brianpgordon 10y ago
  It's interesting to me that your approach to automated testing includes a real, physical device. How well do you think your robot offering is positioned versus fast and free virtual automated testing within an Android/iOS simulator? I assume there must be some material advantage to testing on a real device, but I don't know a lot about the domain. What happens if the layout of the app changes slightly- are your testing programs purely based on physical coordinates?
  - hugs 10y ago
    Example #1: How do you automate a test for what happens to your streaming music app when a phone call comes in? (This was a real scenario a client couldn't figure out how to automate any other way.) Example #2: You're a car company and have a mobile app that controls parking your car. You have a business (and possibly legal) requirement to test the app with the same unmodified hardware your users will use. (So you can't only use simulators.) Example #3: You make wearables that measures steps taken. How do you test the wearable to make sure it's logging steps properly? (You shake it with a robot.) Every company that makes a device (phone, car, wearable, anything with a touch screen, etc) has a secret robot testing lab. I didn't know all of these examples were real business problems (with the associated big enterprise budgets) when I started the project. But after enough of these conversations, I realized there's something there.
boyter 10y ago
https://searchcode.com/ https://searchcode.com/ is my serious side project. It has been profitable (If you ignore my time) for several months now. However it took 5 years to get there. I am planning on making it unprofitable again soon to allow it to scale up to the load requirements it needs. Most of the profit is though ads and the fact I run it on a shoestring budget (less than $100 a month). If the downloadable version takes off that would really help as well.
cookiecaper 10y ago
I did until it was shut down by a legal threat from a Fortune 100. It took about 1 year to go from 0 to profitable.
- earlyriser 10y ago
  Could you explain more about this?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- brezelgoring 10y ago
  Could you go deeper into this? The fact that you got bullied by a F100 company means you had the potential to go big, what was your project about?
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    My product was not a competitive threat. It operated within their ecosystem and was only used to help people give them money faster. A lot of people were pretty confused when they decided to shut it down. The project's operation depended on accessing factual information published on the F100's web site (things like event times, maintenance status, etc). Since this is data that originates with the F100, there is no reasonable alternative source. Someone else in the community started abusing this data in a way that led to bad press and the F100 unleashed their $1k/hr law firm on everyone they could find that was reading data off their site. We were sent a cease and desist alleging infringement of the CFAA and copyright/trademark infringement for accessing their web site in a manner disallowed by their Terms of Use (which state the site cannot be accessed by any spider, crawler, bot, or any other automated or manual method). We were able to pay for a few hours with a lawyer who had experience in the CFAA and he tried to get them to agree to a licensing deal, but they refused to do so. Since I could afford to buy 4 hours of his time, the EFF (of which I have been a supporting member off and on for the last 10+ years) decided I didn't need their charity and lost interest since I had shown "ability" to pay for my own attorney. Barring the materialization of $1 mil+ that I can send to my lawyer, this is where the matter lies. To be frankly honest, I can understand how, from the perspective of the F100, it's easier if my side project simply doesn't exist. The problem is that their company shouldn't have the right to decide that. We aren't supposed to allow companies to decide who gets to exist. For example, car companies can't say "Oh, you know, I really don't like 7-Eleven putting gas in our cars, I'm going to send them a C&D telling them to stop." If 7-Eleven is capable of providing a functional gas pump, it is the consumer's choice whether or not they wish to input gas there or at a competitor, and the big car companies have no say in the matter. The same should be true in the digital world, but it's not.
simple1 10y ago
I wrote an online multiplayer game called Aberoth: http://aberoth.com http://aberoth.com. I released the first version to the world in January 2010, but the game did not have many features initially, and there was no way to buy anything. Toward the end of 2012 I felt good enough about the product to start selling memberships. I continued to work on the game on the side over the years, and I released the game on Steam in July 2015: http://store.steampowered.com/app/354200/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/354200/. It does not make near as much a normal software engineer's full time salary, but it is profitable.
- flashman 10y ago
  Huh, this looks cool. Good job.
- meir_yanovich 10y ago
  Hey looks good , mind telling us which server stack you are using and how much money it cost ?
AtticusTheGreat 10y ago
I built http://serpentinegame.com http://serpentinegame.com in 2008, an online multiplayer boggle game, and it makes a modest amount of money for me from ads and premium memberships. The only costs have been my time, a server on linode, and the domain name. I've had a couple other attempts but nothing has really taken off in the same way.
nevster 10y ago
A year. I was spending way too much time on eBay, so I wrote something for myself that would scrape the web pages and use a kill list to filter out the junk. I wanted a better UI to add words to the kill list and realised I could make money via the eBay affiliate program. So I took two months off between contracts and wrote the first version of AuctionSieve - http://auctionsieve.com http://auctionsieve.com There was a D&D forum, the Acaeum where a bunch of people started using it and giving feedback. It was making me money from day 1 but it probably took about a year to repay that 2 months of time investment. It's now been 13 years(!) and it still makes me money - not enough to live off (the payout calculations from eBay have changed several times) but a nice chunk of change. And I only have to occasionally prod it. And add the occasional new feature.
- nevster 10y ago
  For those curious, it makes about $500 or so per month. At one point it was making $2000 per month but eBay changed the payout strategy - one thing to be aware of when dealing with affiliate programs.
- shaunpud 10y ago
  Are you still scraping or did you migrate to their API?
  - nevster 10y ago
    Still scraping. If you use their API, you need to submit your app for evaluation and there are a bunch of restrictions and other things you need to comply with. I'd need to do a whole lot of work and remove some of the features. The level of effort has never felt worth it. It means there are occasional breakages every 6 months or so but it's usually the work of half an hour to fix it and push out an update. My users very quickly tell me if it's broken. ;)
    - laaph 10y ago
      Can I ask you what you are using to scrape with? I am finding that Amazon's anti-bot strategies change every so often, so unless I use phantom.js or Selenium, I have to change odd things like headers and various things every so often. I finally reworked my code to just download the html files using phantom.js and parse it with perl so that I can run this on a headless server, and this method hasn't broken lately. I find trying to use phantom.js is kind of crazy (mainly I have a hard time with the documentation) and javascript is not my native language. I was using curl, LWP, and wget in the past.
geerlingguy 10y ago
I made Server Check.in 3.5 years ago (HN announcement thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901350 ), and it's been earning around $2k/year with almost no maintenance. Just a few updates to the Drupal front-end/UI, and the Node.js backend every year (maybe 20 hours total). Costs are incredibly low, as I have ~15 low end box-type servers running as check servers interacting with Drupal via a private API, and one DigitalOcean droplet running prod, with a hot backup droplet. Everything was automated via Ansible early on, and I don't have to touch anything except for patching/updating from time to time. I also have run Hosted Apache Solr for almost double the time, and it actually earns a decent secondary income. Up to about 25 DigitalOcean droplets now, also all managed via Ansible/Jenkins, and it has a few hundred clients (a couple who have been stable clients for over 5 years, and a few very large names that made me realize even a side project can be stable/good enough for 'big companies' to trust them). I haven't advertised either except for mentions here and there and having them in some of my social media profiles, but I've learned so much from running both—and even turned some of that knowledge into a book that gives decent passive income on top!
- matt_wulfeck 10y ago
  I'm happy for your success, but I'm not sure I'd consider running a hosted distributed database as a side project. You're on-call 100% of the time for a single point of failure. Also, a bad/inexperienced tenant can serious performance issues.
  - geerlingguy 10y ago
    I learned early on, it's all about proactive monitoring, 'self healing' (e.g. restart on fail) services, and simplicity in everything. I've been running between 300-500 Apache Solr search cores continuously for almost 5 years, starting with 1.4, migrating up to now 4.10.4 (5 and 6 are in the works), all with around 99.98% uptime (averaged on all the servers over time). I have detailed logs and per-search-core stat tracking (queries, index size, query time) for the past 3 months and archives back further, and I have only had to remove noisy neighbors a few times (and did so quickly, by first isolating them on their own VM, then helping them move off to dedicated resources if needed). Also, I explicitly state I offer no SLA in the support docs—some people are okay with that. But yes, I'm always on call, technically. I've only had to fix 'emergency' scenarios about 3 times in the past 5 years though. Even security updates are automated via Ansible/Jenkins. I just need to log in and click a button and things are updated, or a new server is built. I highly recommend Google's new book on SREs; whether a one man shop or a multi billion corp, the learnings are exactly the same!
tempestn 10y ago
I created searchtempest.com as a hobby project in 2006, starting with zero web knowledge, although a bit of programming experience from electrical engineering. Within about a year and a half it was earning enough to pay my (very modest) rent. By 2009 I quit my day job to focus on it full time. Added autotempest.com around the same time and now have several employees working on the two. (The first hired around 2010 iirc.)
- RhodesianHunter 10y ago
  Did all of the "No affiliation with craigslist." warnings come after some legal action?
  - tempestn 10y ago
    No, craigslist hasn't taken any legal action against us, perhaps because we go to significant effort through legal reviews and measures like those disclaimers to ensure that we don't infringe on their rights. (We also don't scrape their results, or indeed visit their site at all; we get everything from public search API's like Google Custom Search and the Bing search API.)
- shanecleveland 10y ago
  Nice. I've jumped on searchtempest a few times to avoid flipping through results on CL and to get results from multiple regions at once. It works!
danschuller 10y ago
I wrote a digital book, plus art, engine and example code about how to make a JRPG style RPG. (http://howtomakeanrpg.com/ http://howtomakeanrpg.com/ <- the current copy is pretty terrible!). I'm still in pre-release but early-access has been available for mailing list subscribers since January. Release should happen "soon". Profit-wise: ~$500 a month (apart from the first month which was ~$5000). If I include my own time, I've roughly covered my costs. It's taken about 3 years (!) to write the book in my spare time, usually an hour each morning. In a lot of ways it wasn't a great side project: - Hard to make - Small market - Complex But it's the first commercial side project I've attempted and I've really enjoyed the experience. Rather than jump straight on to a new project, I'll probably spend time after release experimenting with marketing (google adwords, content marketing etc). (Previously I've written a programming book published via a traditional publisher and my day job is as a game developer.)
dtjohnnymonkey 10y ago
Textdropapp.com - web-based plain text editor for Dropbox. It started off as a scratch to my own itch, and I listed it in the Dropbox app directory. I started collecting feature requests and after a year or so I completely rewrote it as a paid app. The rewrite took 3-4 months of nights and weekends. I haven't touched it in 2.5 years but it still generates maybe $30-50 per month, net.
- aerovistae 10y ago
  Oh man, I would love to have this functionality. Unfortunately I value the security of the contents of my Dropbox too much to open it to 3rd party services. Frustrating. Great idea making this.
matthewmueller 10y ago
4 months. I built a Slack bot called Standup Jack (https://standupjack.com https://standupjack.com). It's a ton of work upfront but if you launch early, keep an open dialog with your users, iterate on their feedback and keep your costs low, it's a nice way to earn some side income each month. Udemy is a pretty easy way to start since they do the marketing for you (for a pretty big cut).
- primitivesuave 10y ago
  A fantastic tool built around a great idea. When people ask me the timeless question of "why Slack", I actually point to Standup Jack as an example of how a simple and useful integration can save time and increase transparency through Slack's API. I actually had no idea it was a one-man show until just now. Seriously awesome execution!
  - matthewmueller 10y ago
    I really appreciate the kind words and thanks for spreading Jack!
- travisby 10y ago
  How does Udemy market for you? All I knew was they were a course-learning company. Would love to hear!
  - martin_a 10y ago
    You can pay them a small amount to promote your course, but they will do so for free if they find it a useful project, I think.
  - matthewmueller 10y ago
    There are 3 ways for people to buy your course: 1) Direct marketing - Udemy drives a ton of traffic to their website, so people just naturally see your course(s) and buy it. 2) Affiliate marketing - Udemy advertises your course(s) via things like Google Adwords. You make a very measly cut on these sales. 3) Personal marketing - You can promote your course through your own channels / reputation. You make like 98% of the sale when people purchase it this way. Without doing your own marketing, you can easily earn decent side income though.
SaijoGeorge 10y ago
for me it has been http://allthefreestock.com http://allthefreestock.com , it's not a serious side project and the only revenue has been ads.
dalacv 10y ago
I made a course on Udemy on how to make complete web applications without writing code using APEX. Link and free coupons: https://www.udemy.com/create-web-apps-with-apex-5/?couponCode=FREE_FOR_HN https://www.udemy.com/create-web-apps-with-apex-5/?couponCod... Expenses: $100 for a nice microphone (not necessary) but didn't want to record a bunch and have it be garbage $100 for Screenflow (to do video editing). 20 hours time (split across a couple of weekends Profit: I've made $1405 on it so far. It is almost completely passive income. Proof: http://i.imgur.com/sexsrzK.png?1 http://i.imgur.com/sexsrzK.png?1 If you know any of the topics in the Hot Topics list and can do desktop recording, maybe you should think about teaching others and making some side money while doing it. Best of all, the Udemy community is awesome. They are very supportive of each other. https://teach.udemy.com/course-creation/hot-topic-courses/ https://teach.udemy.com/course-creation/hot-topic-courses/
- golergka 10y ago
  How much time did it take you to create the course and how much to promote it?
daeken 10y ago
A day. Okay, it isn't quite that simple. My sideproject is Breaker 101, an online class for web security. (https://breaker101.com https://breaker101.com) I launched on HN and sold out (75 seats or so, $1500 each IIRC) that same day. I had designed the syllabus over the previous couple days, but there was no product -- because I honestly thought that only a few people would buy it, and I'd just have to refund them. I built the class over the next few months and that went really well (not perfectly, but definitely well), but subsequent runs never got anywhere near the same success in terms of sales -- just couldn't get it in front of enough people. I recently relaunched it at $150 in more of a self-driven form. It's profitable by all means, but it needs marketing behind it. I've been thinking a lot about selling it to someone that can give it the love it needs, but I'm still on the fence there.
- Ramiuz 10y ago
  Hey, maybe a little off-topic. This course seems very interesting (I'm currently studying https://secureyournodejs.com/?p=setup https://secureyournodejs.com/?p=setup), is there a demo of a course or a sample to see the flow of the class?.
- caseysoftware 10y ago
  If you want to pursue the marketing support angle, drop me a note. I have something that might help. :)
msencenb 10y ago
If you define 'profitable' as $100 a month, that's where one of my iOS apps (http://postcardpanda.com http://postcardpanda.com) is at after 2+ years. I've only recently started putting actual time into it though. If you want the full income report, here is May's: http://mattsencenbaugh.com/postcard-panda-may-2016-income-report/ http://mattsencenbaugh.com/postcard-panda-may-2016-income-re...
edoceo 10y ago
18 months
conqrr 10y ago
Man i always post such questions but never get responses at all. Sigh.
phacops 10y ago
5 years of bootstrapping a nutrition & fitness tracking web/mobile app for me. After the first few months it was only making enough income to cover basic hosting costs and not much else, so I ended up getting a job (well, co-founded a different startup with good funding). In the next two years, I was just doing the bare minimum to keep it running, and it grew 80% each year. Start of year 3, other startup failed and I had spare time to invest in the site and it was making maybe 8000/month in revenues, and the decent yearly growth has continued so that now in year 5 I can comfortably live on the business, and have a few employees / contractors to help with support and development.
mhowland 10y ago
3 Months. I made https://www.myothernumber.com https://www.myothernumber.com (online temporary sms/mms/voice numbers) about a 1.5 years ago, was making ramen money within 3 months. Now tracking in the 5-figure/year range. It's a very, very crowded market so primary cost is user acquisition, but then again that's exactly why I built it, to better learn (consumer facing UA) and have a platform to experiment with. About to officially launch http://artistic.af http://artistic.af (neural artistic transfer meets instagram + canvas printing). I expect this one to take a bit longer to scale, but it was just an excuse to learn DNNs.
- lasfter 10y ago
  Just wanted to let you know that there is a typo on the first page of artistic.af: "...a lot of historic genuius..." Site looks great!
  - mhowland 10y ago
    Awesome, much appreciated!!
    - strm 10y ago
      And another one: ...and the inspriation of you...
- tixocloud 10y ago
  For these ideas, did you do any customer interviews or did you just decide to launch and iterate?
- tixocloud 10y ago
  For these ideas, did you do any customer interviews or did you just decide to launch and iterate?
mburst 10y ago
I've been working on https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teamtol.livedota https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teamtol.li... for the past 2 years. About 2 years ago Valve released an API to get data for Dota and other games in their portfolio. It was a good excuse for me to learn Android development which is something I had wanted to do for awhile. About a year in to the project I added some ads which in turn made the app almost instantly profitable. I built the API to be super performant from the start and the whole thing runs on the equivalent of a micro-instance despite needing to serve up a few hundred thousand requests per day. My main goal with the project right now isn't to generate profit though. If you were to account for the cost of my time I'm sure the project would be deeply in debt. I just enjoy working on it and it gives me a good excuse to travel to different Dota events throughout the world and meet awesome people.
- poushkar 10y ago
  What are the figures you earn a month if not a secret? I am also a dota player and have a tool in mind (not competitive to yours) I want to build and wonder how profitable is the niche.
lostmsu 10y ago
No, but I am trying.
skraelingjar 10y ago
I open sourced all of my (two) side projects. Has anyone turned their open source project into something profitable?
matheweis 10y ago
I build iConvert Icons [see http://iconverticons.com/online/ http://iconverticons.com/online/] six years ago without any intention of making money off of it. Unfortunately about three years into it, it became a full sink (negative time + negative money). I was actually going to sell it off for a couple of grand about that point, at which my wife encouraged me to have a go at making something out of it. It was profitable within a month, and has been ever since. Not enough to pay [my] bills, but it pays for itself and enough left over for some other hobbies.
shireboy 10y ago
I wrote https://leanpub.com/trellodojo https://leanpub.com/trellodojo in about 4 months to start, and periodically spend several hours a month updating it. It earns ~100 to ~300 a month. I do have some ideas for software and other digital content that I can't seem to get traction on. Reading the rest of this is motivating though. Keep up the good work everybody!
- louisharwood 10y ago
  I'm currently writing something to be published on leanpub. How do you take care of marketing/promotion? Do you just leave it to sell or do something more proactive?
  - shireboy 10y ago
    To market, I make comments on HackerNews mentioning it as an aside ;) Seriously, marketing is the hardest part for me. I feel like I have something worthwhile that has helped 1500+ people learn Trello, but marketing and self-promotion is not something that comes natural to me. I will say, my first sale happened by accident via the platform. I accidentally hit publish, and was surprised when I got my first sale before I even knew I was selling anything ;) Since then, I've put on Google Analytics so I can see my traffic sources. The top referral sources are: - Direct and Organic Search. I wish I could figure out how to understand those a bit more... - A card on the official Trello Resources Board. I got up the nerve to "just ask" and they put me there. - Some comments/articles on Lifehacker. I commented and link to the site, and they've referenced a few of my template boards (which link to the site). - Reddit/HackerNews. I don't want to be spammy, but if it's relevant I will link to the site like what I did here. - My own blog and trellodojo.info. I've had a longtime personal nerd-blog and am trying out trellodojo.info as a dedicated "niche site". I plan to do some other products out of there. So, yes, their promotion does help, but I do see spikes when I actively market.
tylerdavis 10y ago
https://www.soundviz.com https://www.soundviz.com Two and a half years ago I started working on the idea. It took me about a year to get the initial offering done and launched. The first calendar year in business was technically profitable. We ended up reinvesting the profits into new computers as well as paying all of the operational expenses upfront for the following year. This year, it's tracking at roughly 5x of last year's revenue and we've also improved our margins by about 2x. All said and done, we both put about an hour a day into it, five days a week, and one full weekend day a month.
- kejaed 10y ago
  This is really cool. Got a share to my friends out there. If you don't mind me asking, what kind of printing service do you hook into?
taphangum 10y ago
Don't have it anymore (sold it in 2013) but http://myapptemplates.com http://myapptemplates.com. Took it from $0 to $3,000 a month in about 1 year
- xcubic 10y ago
  Why sell?
  - taphangum 10y ago
    Stupidity. Did it to raise money for the 'big idea'. Went nowhere. Next time, I'll hold.
altitudinous 10y ago
I have several apps on the iOS app store. I make between $4000AUD - $9000AUD per month. I quit my job 3 years ago to do it, so I guess it isn't really a side project any more. That said, it is a lonely way to make money and I am over it. My career was computers, and I'm pleased I've done the apps, I can achieve anything technical so it isn't a challenge any more and am looking at something more physical, hands on. When I quit my job I was making approx $3 a day from apps, I learned a lot. The great thing is that I can quit and the apps keep making money. It is trivial to keep them updated to the latest iOS version, design standard, or advertising API - I've just put Firebase Analytics and the latest Admob API in them all. Pleased with the iOS10 announcement today, it will not add burden to my apps, nor are they sherlocked like my first app was. My most recent app took me 10 days to make, it is fairly professional, I have one more I want to make it will take a similar amount of time. Every time I get asked a support question I answer it and also post the answer on a support website, this has cut down support enquiries to one every week or two. On to the next thing!
- andyjdavis 10y ago
  Nice work :) No matter what you do next that is certainly a very handy chunk of change to have coming in each month.
  - altitudinous 10y ago
    Thank you :)
- NKCSS 10y ago
  Care to post some links? Always nice to see some context.
  - altitudinous 10y ago
    Thanks for asking, but I'd like to retain my anonymity for now :) I also have enough competitors at the moment!
- gcheong 10y ago
someotheridiot 10y ago
https://rebrickable.com https://rebrickable.com - A LEGO database that shows you which sets you can build from your existing collection, also includes thousands of fan-submitted designs. I built the original site in a few months, but have been steadily expanding it for 5 years now.
- joshvm 10y ago
  That's cool, I think there are probably several fields that you can apply this approach to - the obvious one which has been done is cooking. I.e. if you have so many ingredients, what can you make that also maximises your use of leftovers etc. I wonder if electronics would work the same way. I have a lot of random crap in my component bin, odd sensors and things that need projects. I guess a curated list of e.g. projects you can do with a BMP180 would be nice, rather than having to google. On the other hand a pressure sensor is a pressure sensor, so there wouldn't be much variety.
  - someotheridiot 10y ago
    Yes, I've had lots of suggestions for applying the tech to other things but the problem is I have no interest in those other things :)
radicalachraf 10y ago
I recently started doing some competitive programming and going trough advanced algorithms...not really a side project but i'm looking forward to make a Network Monitoring service something that runs in your computer and acts passively to monitor system changes... to protect against malware mostly . -My current side project isn't even 10% complete but it's on my scope I'm working on a micro virtual file system for important documents...due to the rise of Ransomware and people being lazy I think that making a secure,encrypted virtual filesystem could be a great idea . Those are my thoughts only
NKCSS 10y ago
I created a WPA(2) password lookup web-based service in April of 2008: https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/Thomson-SpeedTouch https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/Thomson-SpeedTouch I just added ads and it's made 50-300 a month (had ~1000 unique visitors a day for the last 8 years). Added https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/UPC https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/UPC last year for a different brand model And https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/DownloadFundaImages https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/DownloadFundaImages for the Dutch real-estate market And a few years ago, I reverse enginered the encryption of the Wordz game and post the new game 20-30 seconds before the new roud starts, and more: https://www.nickkusters.com/nl/Diensten/WoordJacht/ https://www.nickkusters.com/nl/Diensten/WoordJacht/ This combined is my hobby/fun website. It used to cost €300 a month in server fees; it's now down to €80. Over the lifetime of the site, I probably broke even :) But it's still used daily, generating ad revenue, and if I had put in time to cut down cost, I could have made some money.
- UVB-76 10y ago
  Those ads (in the first link) are almost certainly a breach of the AdSense placement policies.
  - NKCSS 10y ago
    Not sure I agree; the button in question is 240px high in size to make sure it's a huge click target; the ads are adjacent, true, but I tried to make all actions huge to make sure it's usable without fat-fingering it.
ricw 10y ago
Built www.sum-reviews.com over the course of a year (14 months), probably 2-3 man months of full time effort. It's now pretty automated though not enjoying the marketing part as much, that a more mature project requires. Having said that, it's kind of self entertainment / joy.
leviathan 10y ago
2 years. I built ( https://itunes.apple.com/app/id714882169?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/app/id714882169?mt=8 ) three years ago as an idea to test shooting videos at 60fps on the iPhone. At the time there was no iPhone 6 and you couldn't shoot 60fps videos with the default camera app. I did zero advertising of the app, and it's currently bringing in around $100/month. I have a major update that I've been working on for the last 2 months, but other than that it seems to be running all by itself.
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docsapp_io 10y ago
https://www.docsapp.io/ https://www.docsapp.io/ I built DocsApp in 1 year and now is ramen profitable. Tech stack: * Play Framework (Scala) * PostgreSQL (RDS) * S3 * Docker (cloud.docker.com) * Scaleway * HAProxy
- workingspaceacc 10y ago
  May I ask which S3 plugin do you use ? Haven't found anything useful for Play!.
  - docsapp_io 10y ago
    Use AWS Java SDK since my S3 usage just simple upload file.
    - workingspaceacc 10y ago
      Alright cool, why did you decide to go with Scala instead of Java ?
gtheme_io 10y ago
http://www.gtheme.io/ http://www.gtheme.io/ I run GTheme.io for 2 years and now ramen profitable. Current site running with minimal management. The site selling premium ghost.org theme.
khuknows 10y ago
I started a Product Hunt style newsletter that curates the best UI designs every day (http://uimovement.com http://uimovement.com). It was profitable from sponsorships about 6 months after launch (slightly over $1,000 a month in revenue, costs $300ish a month). I spend about 10 minutes a day on it. I need to spend more time marketing it and updating some of the tech - but I'm too lazy. Also, I'm not sure the 6 months to profit counts, because I worked on 3-4 similar side-projects before launching it for about a year before.
- cerbasict12 10y ago
  Is the money from advertising on the website or the newsletter, or the cost for people to get the newsletter?
  - khuknows 10y ago
    99% of the money comes from the newsletter sponsorships. Newsletter sponsorships generally can earn wayyyy more than website ads. Incase you're interested in more details, the newsletter has ~10,000 subscribers (~50% daily, ~50% weekly) and the site gets about 30k uniques a month.
    - khuknows 10y ago
      Also if anyone is wondering why the costs are so high, the main expenses are CloudFront (huge HUGE gifs) and Mailchimp. I'm sure I could reduce the costs to $50-100ish a month, but laziness.
      - cerbasict12 10y ago
        Great work! I was wondering if you earn more by charing a buck for the daily post. I wonder how it would work?
ZenSwordArts 10y ago
About 9 months ago i created https://namesmith.io https://namesmith.io , a business and domain name generator. I practically did nothing to boost the search engine ranking but the volume of visitors is growing (very slowly). So far the site can barely cover my vserver cost but that's ok since I can use the server for more than just namesmith. Most of the time some few dollar amounts tickle in but I had some sales of premium domains which gave > 50$ each. I still plan to add some more features, such as URL shortening, but at the time it is not worth it.
- myth_drannon 10y ago
  That's very nice tool! You can add accounts so a user can persist the starred ones.
  - ZenSwordArts 10y ago
    Thanks! I considered accounts in the beginning but didn't go through with it because most users don't want to create yet another account. Also the favorites should persist via cookies at least for some time.
- Namrog84 10y ago
  I just tried it, list of X was generated, clicked Register on 1 I liked, took me to register, said 'is taken' :( Is this common or did I do something wrong?
- gldev 10y ago
  this is pretty good! haha i am gonna use it (:
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splatsearch 10y ago
3 years. Took 6 months of earning 100 a month and then in my 7th month it did 20kgbp. It currently does about 100k per year
- penetrarthur 10y ago
  Go on...
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Not currently. Lack of ideas/inspiration/perspiration. It'd be nice to have a few on the side making enough to support hobbies though.
adzeds 10y ago
1 year. Built up a hobby site slowly over the past two years, at the end of the first year it was making £7,700 a month.. It is still active and earning around £2-3k per month with only about 1 hours work a week. Currently looking to sell it on as I have just started on a new project.
- martin_a 10y ago
  What do you mean by "hobby site"? A site covering a specific hobby or something else? Can you tell more about how you earn money (memberships, advertisements, something else)?
  - devopsproject 10y ago
    Things that people do outside of work like mountain biking, yoga, paintball, cooking, whatever. There is lots of opportunity for ad revenue and affiliate links
    - adzeds 10y ago
      Yeah. You can get affiliate links for pretty much everything these days.
      - adzeds 10y ago
        I have also just started work on this project: http://cupomterra.com.br/ http://cupomterra.com.br/
  - adzeds 10y ago
    Basically I started built a website and my hobby is to work on it and improve it.. The main goal was not to make revenue. The revenue it makes now is through memberships and affiliate revenue.
tmaly 10y ago
I have been working on a side project about food dishes, but it does not even have a revenue stream. It is more a labor of love. I have been at it for over a year now.
atsaloli 10y ago
After six years of doing it on the side, I'm now doing it full-time (for a year and a half) and have one employee/apprentice (for the last half year). I provide IT training and consulting. Started out with CFEngine, now offering Git training as well. Companies fly me in for 1-5 days to train their staff. I love getting to see different parts of the US.
- vijayr 10y ago
  This is a cool gig, at least for a while :) Especially if one is young and childless, as travel becomes easy.
  - atsaloli 10y ago
    Exactly. My employee is going to do the travel from now on as much as possible. He's younger. :)
drwl 10y ago
This isn't me. I found this on reddit and it's a pretty good AMA about Gleam.io. https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/3hpt9z/iama_cofounder_of_gleamio_this_was_our_7th/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/3hpt9z/iama_c...
sparkling 10y ago
YouTube video tutorials on niche tech topics. Upfront investments: $50 for a decent microphone. Spent about 40 hours creating and editing the videos. They have been online now for nearly 11 months and i have a total of ~300k views. That made me nearly $400 from video ads.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  I don't know anything about YouTube ads, but I figured it would be more $ for that many views. (Not trying to be insulting, so I hope I don't come off that way.)
  - Namrog84 10y ago
    Between $1-$4 per 1k view is quite typical. I think certain demographics will influence it (depending upon how much they click links and I'd imagine tech people are less inclined to click on links and more likely to adblock)
logicb 10y ago
I had done couple of projects before and one of them was somewhat successful. I made around $1.5k from that. Giftcardzilla an aggregator for discounted gift cards. I had to shut it down after Google Penguin update. Currently building AppsUlagam.com (apps world) as a mobile app discovery site for apps with Tamil language content.
- logicb 10y ago
  Clickable link http://www.appsulagam.com http://www.appsulagam.com
checkavailable 10y ago
I'm surprised very few people here (no one?) is selling physical stuff. I have a profitable side project selling stuff online. I found a manufacturer through Alibaba, set up a website and now most of the work is dealing with shipping items.
- martin_a 10y ago
  I can just speak for Germany, but selling physical stuff is not that easy here. There are lots of regulations, for example on taking back and recycling used batteries, if you shipped them with the product, and stuff like that. Lots of things to take care about and have in mind, so selling physical stuff is not that popular as a side project, I think.
parterburn 10y ago
I built a journal-over-email app that has been a profitable side business since day one. Defining "profitable" is necessary, I think - in this case it's covering it's own costs + more. This isn't my full-time gig, so I'm not counting any sort of hourly rate for my own time. The MVP is something I built over a long weekend, and I occasionally work on it while my wife and I watch TV/movies (so the time investment hasn't been too drastic, and the alternative is $0/hr). The app is called Dabble Me (https://dabble.me https://dabble.me) and you can read about the inspiration and costs to run here: https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/increase-your-happiness-with-daily-journaling-8109b0700506#.bbzx2grd9 https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/increase-your-happ... Today (18mos since launch) it's generating around $500/mo in passive income. I played around with a few different pricing models. The first was a "donate whatever you can" for a few pro options (did not generate what I expected), the next was a pretty lenient freemium model (lacked the upgrades), and what seems to be working best is a very stringent freemium model. A big part of Dabble Me and my passion for the project arises from this being a "scratch your own itch" build. I want this service to exist more than anyone else...so I built it and charged others to use it. That seems to be a theme that has a higher success rate than others.
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snehesht 10y ago
I made an app to generate .gitignore files, It's as simple as a brick. https://gitignore.xyz/ https://gitignore.xyz/ but it doesn't make any money though.

310 points by laksmanv 10y ago

Here's a brief list! * Wakeup.io - Simple Phone Wake-up Calls @ https://wakeup.io https://wakeup.io and it is fully automated and runs itself with actually really good profits. It was built in 2-3 days. * GetProve, Simple Phone Verification @ https://getprove.com https://getprove.com and it is fully automated and runs itself with again, really good profits. It was built in a week or so. * Teelaunch, Kickstarter/Indiegogo Fulfillment Service (exited/sold) http://teelaunch.com http://teelaunch.com (the site is different now than it used to be here https://web.archive.org/web/20140110204830/https://teelaunch.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140110204830/https://teelaunch...). As you can see from Wayback Machine, the site was just a landing page when I had it... took me day to put it up! * Standard Signature, Email Signature Automation for Gmail Business @ https://standardsignature.com/ https://standardsignature.com/ (built in 48 hours) * Glazed, a Rapid MVP boilerplate for NodeJS @ http://glazed.io http://glazed.io (built in a week or so, but this was work/thoughts accumulated over like 5+ years of hacking - this landed me paying clients, so I still consider it a side project) * Asynchrosend, a MailChimp competitor (site is down now, but I did have paying clients and successful startups like Notehall.com had used it), built in a week in college! * I have a bunch, at least 20 more on my list TODO still, if you want to build one with me let me know! I really would love to find super talented people, or people that are motivated. It's really hard to find good people if you know what I mean. I am not working on these right now though as I'm solely focused on one big project. I have a bunch more projects I've built, that are also profitable that I can share. Email me and I can share more! Update #1 - I really wanted to mention the most important thing about this. I read a Max Klein blog post that flipped the switch on me before to get into this hack and ship fast mode; it was something like build small little projects, but build a dozen of them. Once you build and release one quickly, it's addictive. You soon start to release more and more, and you get so creative and confident. You can literally build ANYTHING you want in a matter of days if you truly focus and WANT to. Update #2 - I added a few more side projects since this topic is fun!

tmat 10y ago
i've been trying to come up w/ these really simple ideas like this which turn small profits. Death by a thousand paper cuts I guess. Having trouble coming up w/ one :(
- niftylettuce 10y ago
  just clone what someone else did and make it simpler to use and easier to understand, haha
soulbadguy 10y ago
I am really curious about which software stack (especially the backend) you are using to iterate this fast
- niftylettuce 10y ago
  I just released Glazed, my latest boilerplate that I use for this stuff. You can find it here https://github.com/glazedio/glazed https://github.com/glazedio/glazed. However I have a HUGE absolutely STELLAR update coming probably in the next week for Glazed. I basically dog fed this on my own startup/project and have a ton of little but important updates to the project.
  - bduerst 10y ago
    What's the benefits of using Nunjucks, in your opinion?
    - niftylettuce 10y ago
      It's incredibly fast, I still may try using https://github.com/marko-js/marko https://github.com/marko-js/marko on v2 though since it seems to be much faster. Haven't really tried their plugin/system yet. I came from using Jade for like five years straight and when performance time came around with it, it hurt. Nunjucks is really nice!

rsoto 10y ago

I've worked over a year on https://www.boxfactura.com/ https://www.boxfactura.com/ which is a special email service for invoices in Mexico. It has been profitable since January after quite some legwork, on the technical side as well as the sales and persuation side.

nanoojaboo 10y ago
muy bonita!
emilioolivares 10y ago
Hey man, I'm also from Mexico but currently live in NY. This is pretty awesome. How did you manage to get traction with small businesses? Would love to chat if you have time, my email is emilioolivares, I use Google email.
- rsoto 10y ago
  Hey, Emilio! Sure, I'll send you an email, however, I'd like to keep the answer to your question on the public side, if you don't mind. It has been quite a ride to get traction, mostly the first clients signed up after talking to them about their issues with their invoices and expenses--once they're interested, we begin the education process. The other sources are a mix of everything. One of our services is a platform in which our client's vendors can upload invoices so they can manage them. We get some information on several businesses, both small and big so we can begin to offer our solution. This particular product might be the best source for viral growth, as one client can introduce 10 or 20 new users on our platform. We also have a relatively successful side project on a related field [1], which has several hundred hits daily. There's an ad there, there might be some optimization on both the ad and the landing, but we're still trying to figure that out. Finally, our focus has been towards explaining the product, as there's nothing like it on the market (actually there are, but they're small and having the same difficulties we have). Once they sign up, our onboarding process is focused on one point: send your first invoice. As we saw many of the new signups not completing this step (or the previous 2), we set up an email communication strategy for each one of the steps, with our contact information in each email. I've blogged a bit [2] about it. Now that we're sure our product is helpful for the businesses, we just started promoting heavily with a sales force. I hope that answered your question! 1: http://isrmatic.com/ http://isrmatic.com/ 2: http://www.therror.com/weblog/2016/mar/como_el_email_marketing_propulso_las_ventas_de_un_startup http://www.therror.com/weblog/2016/mar/como_el_email_marketi...

ruffrey 10y ago

I run mailsac.com and skim a profit. I failed to properly sell to a couple of customers that would have made it fairly profitable (at least two very large companies use it for email testing). It has a decent number of users and signups but I haven't spent the time to figure out if there is more they'd pay a lot for. It took about two years of literally doing nothing to make a profit.

hoodoof 10y ago

I know this goes against accepted wisdom and I cannot yet prove that it works, but I no longer believe I am capable of the "build something small, fast and succeed". Niftylettuce in this thread has shown it an be done, but I have not succeeded in doing so. I am now working on big, highly functional, fully working on launch utilities for DevOps people. Hopefully this will result in building something people want. It seems the startup world is made up primarily of people pumping out easy to build shit.

niftylettuce 10y ago
I don't consider these really startups haha. No way. I think you have not succeeded YET because you need to find something fun to work on that you want to build for yourself. I honestly built the wake-up call service for MYSELF and nobody else. I couldn't wake up for classes in college even with an alarm clock (didn't sleep much since I was hacking all the time). I thought having someone call me made the world of difference in signaling my brain to move. So I built the wakeup thing for myself, then maybe a year or two later I added international support after I realized people were paying like $2 a week with it. People actually paid for it? That blew my mind. The other services and things I built were again just because I wanted them for myself. Just have fun with it. True, these are easy to build projects, but the real skill comes in when you can pump one out in a day! * I mean pump one out in the sense that you build it, both front-end and back-end, and then release it on the internet. A lot of these projects I didn't do any fancy deployment stuff with, I popped open `screen -DR`, did a GitHub deploy key to the server, cloned repo, installed deps, and ran `node app`.
warewolf 10y ago
Sometimes it's better to have smaller self running projects to help fund the big ones.

hugs 10y ago

5 years. (2011-2016) While working on my first startup (Sauce Labs), I made a robot that plays Angry Birds as a side/art project in the autumn of 2011. The serious part of the project is that you can use the robot for testing mobile apps and devices. I started to sell the robots (still as a side project) on Tindie when that first launched in the summer of 2012. I made a couple of thousand dollars the first few years, but basically broke even profit-wise. I got my first "big" enterprise order of robots in late 2014 and that made me start wondering if I should ramp things up. I formally incorporated (http://www.tapster.io http://www.tapster.io) in May 2015 and took some seed funding (Indie.vc) to sell the robots full-time. Since incorporating, it's now veeeery close (this summer) to ramen profitable while paying a few salaries.

brianpgordon 10y ago
It's interesting to me that your approach to automated testing includes a real, physical device. How well do you think your robot offering is positioned versus fast and free virtual automated testing within an Android/iOS simulator? I assume there must be some material advantage to testing on a real device, but I don't know a lot about the domain. What happens if the layout of the app changes slightly- are your testing programs purely based on physical coordinates?
- hugs 10y ago
  Example #1: How do you automate a test for what happens to your streaming music app when a phone call comes in? (This was a real scenario a client couldn't figure out how to automate any other way.) Example #2: You're a car company and have a mobile app that controls parking your car. You have a business (and possibly legal) requirement to test the app with the same unmodified hardware your users will use. (So you can't only use simulators.) Example #3: You make wearables that measures steps taken. How do you test the wearable to make sure it's logging steps properly? (You shake it with a robot.) Every company that makes a device (phone, car, wearable, anything with a touch screen, etc) has a secret robot testing lab. I didn't know all of these examples were real business problems (with the associated big enterprise budgets) when I started the project. But after enough of these conversations, I realized there's something there.

boyter 10y ago

https://searchcode.com/ https://searchcode.com/ is my serious side project. It has been profitable (If you ignore my time) for several months now. However it took 5 years to get there. I am planning on making it unprofitable again soon to allow it to scale up to the load requirements it needs. Most of the profit is though ads and the fact I run it on a shoestring budget (less than $100 a month). If the downloadable version takes off that would really help as well.

cookiecaper 10y ago

I did until it was shut down by a legal threat from a Fortune 100. It took about 1 year to go from 0 to profitable.

earlyriser 10y ago
Could you explain more about this?
- deleted 10y ago
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brezelgoring 10y ago
Could you go deeper into this? The fact that you got bullied by a F100 company means you had the potential to go big, what was your project about?
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  My product was not a competitive threat. It operated within their ecosystem and was only used to help people give them money faster. A lot of people were pretty confused when they decided to shut it down. The project's operation depended on accessing factual information published on the F100's web site (things like event times, maintenance status, etc). Since this is data that originates with the F100, there is no reasonable alternative source. Someone else in the community started abusing this data in a way that led to bad press and the F100 unleashed their $1k/hr law firm on everyone they could find that was reading data off their site. We were sent a cease and desist alleging infringement of the CFAA and copyright/trademark infringement for accessing their web site in a manner disallowed by their Terms of Use (which state the site cannot be accessed by any spider, crawler, bot, or any other automated or manual method). We were able to pay for a few hours with a lawyer who had experience in the CFAA and he tried to get them to agree to a licensing deal, but they refused to do so. Since I could afford to buy 4 hours of his time, the EFF (of which I have been a supporting member off and on for the last 10+ years) decided I didn't need their charity and lost interest since I had shown "ability" to pay for my own attorney. Barring the materialization of $1 mil+ that I can send to my lawyer, this is where the matter lies. To be frankly honest, I can understand how, from the perspective of the F100, it's easier if my side project simply doesn't exist. The problem is that their company shouldn't have the right to decide that. We aren't supposed to allow companies to decide who gets to exist. For example, car companies can't say "Oh, you know, I really don't like 7-Eleven putting gas in our cars, I'm going to send them a C&D telling them to stop." If 7-Eleven is capable of providing a functional gas pump, it is the consumer's choice whether or not they wish to input gas there or at a competitor, and the big car companies have no say in the matter. The same should be true in the digital world, but it's not.

simple1 10y ago

I wrote an online multiplayer game called Aberoth: http://aberoth.com http://aberoth.com. I released the first version to the world in January 2010, but the game did not have many features initially, and there was no way to buy anything. Toward the end of 2012 I felt good enough about the product to start selling memberships. I continued to work on the game on the side over the years, and I released the game on Steam in July 2015: http://store.steampowered.com/app/354200/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/354200/. It does not make near as much a normal software engineer's full time salary, but it is profitable.

flashman 10y ago
Huh, this looks cool. Good job.
meir_yanovich 10y ago
Hey looks good , mind telling us which server stack you are using and how much money it cost ?

AtticusTheGreat 10y ago

I built http://serpentinegame.com http://serpentinegame.com in 2008, an online multiplayer boggle game, and it makes a modest amount of money for me from ads and premium memberships. The only costs have been my time, a server on linode, and the domain name. I've had a couple other attempts but nothing has really taken off in the same way.

nevster 10y ago

A year. I was spending way too much time on eBay, so I wrote something for myself that would scrape the web pages and use a kill list to filter out the junk. I wanted a better UI to add words to the kill list and realised I could make money via the eBay affiliate program. So I took two months off between contracts and wrote the first version of AuctionSieve - http://auctionsieve.com http://auctionsieve.com There was a D&D forum, the Acaeum where a bunch of people started using it and giving feedback. It was making me money from day 1 but it probably took about a year to repay that 2 months of time investment. It's now been 13 years(!) and it still makes me money - not enough to live off (the payout calculations from eBay have changed several times) but a nice chunk of change. And I only have to occasionally prod it. And add the occasional new feature.

nevster 10y ago
For those curious, it makes about $500 or so per month. At one point it was making $2000 per month but eBay changed the payout strategy - one thing to be aware of when dealing with affiliate programs.
shaunpud 10y ago
Are you still scraping or did you migrate to their API?
- nevster 10y ago
  Still scraping. If you use their API, you need to submit your app for evaluation and there are a bunch of restrictions and other things you need to comply with. I'd need to do a whole lot of work and remove some of the features. The level of effort has never felt worth it. It means there are occasional breakages every 6 months or so but it's usually the work of half an hour to fix it and push out an update. My users very quickly tell me if it's broken. ;)
  - laaph 10y ago
    Can I ask you what you are using to scrape with? I am finding that Amazon's anti-bot strategies change every so often, so unless I use phantom.js or Selenium, I have to change odd things like headers and various things every so often. I finally reworked my code to just download the html files using phantom.js and parse it with perl so that I can run this on a headless server, and this method hasn't broken lately. I find trying to use phantom.js is kind of crazy (mainly I have a hard time with the documentation) and javascript is not my native language. I was using curl, LWP, and wget in the past.

geerlingguy 10y ago

I made Server Check.in 3.5 years ago (HN announcement thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901350 ), and it's been earning around $2k/year with almost no maintenance. Just a few updates to the Drupal front-end/UI, and the Node.js backend every year (maybe 20 hours total). Costs are incredibly low, as I have ~15 low end box-type servers running as check servers interacting with Drupal via a private API, and one DigitalOcean droplet running prod, with a hot backup droplet. Everything was automated via Ansible early on, and I don't have to touch anything except for patching/updating from time to time. I also have run Hosted Apache Solr for almost double the time, and it actually earns a decent secondary income. Up to about 25 DigitalOcean droplets now, also all managed via Ansible/Jenkins, and it has a few hundred clients (a couple who have been stable clients for over 5 years, and a few very large names that made me realize even a side project can be stable/good enough for 'big companies' to trust them). I haven't advertised either except for mentions here and there and having them in some of my social media profiles, but I've learned so much from running both—and even turned some of that knowledge into a book that gives decent passive income on top!

matt_wulfeck 10y ago
I'm happy for your success, but I'm not sure I'd consider running a hosted distributed database as a side project. You're on-call 100% of the time for a single point of failure. Also, a bad/inexperienced tenant can serious performance issues.
- geerlingguy 10y ago
  I learned early on, it's all about proactive monitoring, 'self healing' (e.g. restart on fail) services, and simplicity in everything. I've been running between 300-500 Apache Solr search cores continuously for almost 5 years, starting with 1.4, migrating up to now 4.10.4 (5 and 6 are in the works), all with around 99.98% uptime (averaged on all the servers over time). I have detailed logs and per-search-core stat tracking (queries, index size, query time) for the past 3 months and archives back further, and I have only had to remove noisy neighbors a few times (and did so quickly, by first isolating them on their own VM, then helping them move off to dedicated resources if needed). Also, I explicitly state I offer no SLA in the support docs—some people are okay with that. But yes, I'm always on call, technically. I've only had to fix 'emergency' scenarios about 3 times in the past 5 years though. Even security updates are automated via Ansible/Jenkins. I just need to log in and click a button and things are updated, or a new server is built. I highly recommend Google's new book on SREs; whether a one man shop or a multi billion corp, the learnings are exactly the same!

tempestn 10y ago

I created searchtempest.com as a hobby project in 2006, starting with zero web knowledge, although a bit of programming experience from electrical engineering. Within about a year and a half it was earning enough to pay my (very modest) rent. By 2009 I quit my day job to focus on it full time. Added autotempest.com around the same time and now have several employees working on the two. (The first hired around 2010 iirc.)

RhodesianHunter 10y ago
Did all of the "No affiliation with craigslist." warnings come after some legal action?
- tempestn 10y ago
  No, craigslist hasn't taken any legal action against us, perhaps because we go to significant effort through legal reviews and measures like those disclaimers to ensure that we don't infringe on their rights. (We also don't scrape their results, or indeed visit their site at all; we get everything from public search API's like Google Custom Search and the Bing search API.)
shanecleveland 10y ago
Nice. I've jumped on searchtempest a few times to avoid flipping through results on CL and to get results from multiple regions at once. It works!

danschuller 10y ago

I wrote a digital book, plus art, engine and example code about how to make a JRPG style RPG. (http://howtomakeanrpg.com/ http://howtomakeanrpg.com/ <- the current copy is pretty terrible!). I'm still in pre-release but early-access has been available for mailing list subscribers since January. Release should happen "soon". Profit-wise: ~$500 a month (apart from the first month which was ~$5000). If I include my own time, I've roughly covered my costs. It's taken about 3 years (!) to write the book in my spare time, usually an hour each morning. In a lot of ways it wasn't a great side project: - Hard to make - Small market - Complex But it's the first commercial side project I've attempted and I've really enjoyed the experience. Rather than jump straight on to a new project, I'll probably spend time after release experimenting with marketing (google adwords, content marketing etc). (Previously I've written a programming book published via a traditional publisher and my day job is as a game developer.)

dtjohnnymonkey 10y ago

Textdropapp.com - web-based plain text editor for Dropbox. It started off as a scratch to my own itch, and I listed it in the Dropbox app directory. I started collecting feature requests and after a year or so I completely rewrote it as a paid app. The rewrite took 3-4 months of nights and weekends. I haven't touched it in 2.5 years but it still generates maybe $30-50 per month, net.

aerovistae 10y ago
Oh man, I would love to have this functionality. Unfortunately I value the security of the contents of my Dropbox too much to open it to 3rd party services. Frustrating. Great idea making this.

matthewmueller 10y ago

4 months. I built a Slack bot called Standup Jack (https://standupjack.com https://standupjack.com). It's a ton of work upfront but if you launch early, keep an open dialog with your users, iterate on their feedback and keep your costs low, it's a nice way to earn some side income each month. Udemy is a pretty easy way to start since they do the marketing for you (for a pretty big cut).

primitivesuave 10y ago
A fantastic tool built around a great idea. When people ask me the timeless question of "why Slack", I actually point to Standup Jack as an example of how a simple and useful integration can save time and increase transparency through Slack's API. I actually had no idea it was a one-man show until just now. Seriously awesome execution!
- matthewmueller 10y ago
  I really appreciate the kind words and thanks for spreading Jack!
travisby 10y ago
How does Udemy market for you? All I knew was they were a course-learning company. Would love to hear!
- martin_a 10y ago
  You can pay them a small amount to promote your course, but they will do so for free if they find it a useful project, I think.
- matthewmueller 10y ago
  There are 3 ways for people to buy your course: 1) Direct marketing - Udemy drives a ton of traffic to their website, so people just naturally see your course(s) and buy it. 2) Affiliate marketing - Udemy advertises your course(s) via things like Google Adwords. You make a very measly cut on these sales. 3) Personal marketing - You can promote your course through your own channels / reputation. You make like 98% of the sale when people purchase it this way. Without doing your own marketing, you can easily earn decent side income though.

SaijoGeorge 10y ago

for me it has been http://allthefreestock.com http://allthefreestock.com , it's not a serious side project and the only revenue has been ads.

dalacv 10y ago

I made a course on Udemy on how to make complete web applications without writing code using APEX. Link and free coupons: https://www.udemy.com/create-web-apps-with-apex-5/?couponCode=FREE_FOR_HN https://www.udemy.com/create-web-apps-with-apex-5/?couponCod... Expenses: $100 for a nice microphone (not necessary) but didn't want to record a bunch and have it be garbage $100 for Screenflow (to do video editing). 20 hours time (split across a couple of weekends Profit: I've made $1405 on it so far. It is almost completely passive income. Proof: http://i.imgur.com/sexsrzK.png?1 http://i.imgur.com/sexsrzK.png?1 If you know any of the topics in the Hot Topics list and can do desktop recording, maybe you should think about teaching others and making some side money while doing it. Best of all, the Udemy community is awesome. They are very supportive of each other. https://teach.udemy.com/course-creation/hot-topic-courses/ https://teach.udemy.com/course-creation/hot-topic-courses/

golergka 10y ago
How much time did it take you to create the course and how much to promote it?

daeken 10y ago

A day. Okay, it isn't quite that simple. My sideproject is Breaker 101, an online class for web security. (https://breaker101.com https://breaker101.com) I launched on HN and sold out (75 seats or so, $1500 each IIRC) that same day. I had designed the syllabus over the previous couple days, but there was no product -- because I honestly thought that only a few people would buy it, and I'd just have to refund them. I built the class over the next few months and that went really well (not perfectly, but definitely well), but subsequent runs never got anywhere near the same success in terms of sales -- just couldn't get it in front of enough people. I recently relaunched it at $150 in more of a self-driven form. It's profitable by all means, but it needs marketing behind it. I've been thinking a lot about selling it to someone that can give it the love it needs, but I'm still on the fence there.

Ramiuz 10y ago
Hey, maybe a little off-topic. This course seems very interesting (I'm currently studying https://secureyournodejs.com/?p=setup https://secureyournodejs.com/?p=setup), is there a demo of a course or a sample to see the flow of the class?.
caseysoftware 10y ago
If you want to pursue the marketing support angle, drop me a note. I have something that might help. :)

msencenb 10y ago

If you define 'profitable' as $100 a month, that's where one of my iOS apps (http://postcardpanda.com http://postcardpanda.com) is at after 2+ years. I've only recently started putting actual time into it though. If you want the full income report, here is May's: http://mattsencenbaugh.com/postcard-panda-may-2016-income-report/ http://mattsencenbaugh.com/postcard-panda-may-2016-income-re...

edoceo 10y ago

18 months

conqrr 10y ago

Man i always post such questions but never get responses at all. Sigh.

phacops 10y ago

5 years of bootstrapping a nutrition & fitness tracking web/mobile app for me. After the first few months it was only making enough income to cover basic hosting costs and not much else, so I ended up getting a job (well, co-founded a different startup with good funding). In the next two years, I was just doing the bare minimum to keep it running, and it grew 80% each year. Start of year 3, other startup failed and I had spare time to invest in the site and it was making maybe 8000/month in revenues, and the decent yearly growth has continued so that now in year 5 I can comfortably live on the business, and have a few employees / contractors to help with support and development.

mhowland 10y ago

3 Months. I made https://www.myothernumber.com https://www.myothernumber.com (online temporary sms/mms/voice numbers) about a 1.5 years ago, was making ramen money within 3 months. Now tracking in the 5-figure/year range. It's a very, very crowded market so primary cost is user acquisition, but then again that's exactly why I built it, to better learn (consumer facing UA) and have a platform to experiment with. About to officially launch http://artistic.af http://artistic.af (neural artistic transfer meets instagram + canvas printing). I expect this one to take a bit longer to scale, but it was just an excuse to learn DNNs.

lasfter 10y ago
Just wanted to let you know that there is a typo on the first page of artistic.af: "...a lot of historic genuius..." Site looks great!
- mhowland 10y ago
  Awesome, much appreciated!!
  - strm 10y ago
    And another one: ...and the inspriation of you...
tixocloud 10y ago
For these ideas, did you do any customer interviews or did you just decide to launch and iterate?
tixocloud 10y ago
For these ideas, did you do any customer interviews or did you just decide to launch and iterate?

mburst 10y ago

I've been working on https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teamtol.livedota https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teamtol.li... for the past 2 years. About 2 years ago Valve released an API to get data for Dota and other games in their portfolio. It was a good excuse for me to learn Android development which is something I had wanted to do for awhile. About a year in to the project I added some ads which in turn made the app almost instantly profitable. I built the API to be super performant from the start and the whole thing runs on the equivalent of a micro-instance despite needing to serve up a few hundred thousand requests per day. My main goal with the project right now isn't to generate profit though. If you were to account for the cost of my time I'm sure the project would be deeply in debt. I just enjoy working on it and it gives me a good excuse to travel to different Dota events throughout the world and meet awesome people.

poushkar 10y ago
What are the figures you earn a month if not a secret? I am also a dota player and have a tool in mind (not competitive to yours) I want to build and wonder how profitable is the niche.

lostmsu 10y ago

No, but I am trying.

skraelingjar 10y ago

I open sourced all of my (two) side projects. Has anyone turned their open source project into something profitable?

matheweis 10y ago

I build iConvert Icons [see http://iconverticons.com/online/ http://iconverticons.com/online/] six years ago without any intention of making money off of it. Unfortunately about three years into it, it became a full sink (negative time + negative money). I was actually going to sell it off for a couple of grand about that point, at which my wife encouraged me to have a go at making something out of it. It was profitable within a month, and has been ever since. Not enough to pay [my] bills, but it pays for itself and enough left over for some other hobbies.

shireboy 10y ago

I wrote https://leanpub.com/trellodojo https://leanpub.com/trellodojo in about 4 months to start, and periodically spend several hours a month updating it. It earns ~100 to ~300 a month. I do have some ideas for software and other digital content that I can't seem to get traction on. Reading the rest of this is motivating though. Keep up the good work everybody!

louisharwood 10y ago
I'm currently writing something to be published on leanpub. How do you take care of marketing/promotion? Do you just leave it to sell or do something more proactive?
- shireboy 10y ago
  To market, I make comments on HackerNews mentioning it as an aside ;) Seriously, marketing is the hardest part for me. I feel like I have something worthwhile that has helped 1500+ people learn Trello, but marketing and self-promotion is not something that comes natural to me. I will say, my first sale happened by accident via the platform. I accidentally hit publish, and was surprised when I got my first sale before I even knew I was selling anything ;) Since then, I've put on Google Analytics so I can see my traffic sources. The top referral sources are: - Direct and Organic Search. I wish I could figure out how to understand those a bit more... - A card on the official Trello Resources Board. I got up the nerve to "just ask" and they put me there. - Some comments/articles on Lifehacker. I commented and link to the site, and they've referenced a few of my template boards (which link to the site). - Reddit/HackerNews. I don't want to be spammy, but if it's relevant I will link to the site like what I did here. - My own blog and trellodojo.info. I've had a longtime personal nerd-blog and am trying out trellodojo.info as a dedicated "niche site". I plan to do some other products out of there. So, yes, their promotion does help, but I do see spikes when I actively market.

tylerdavis 10y ago

https://www.soundviz.com https://www.soundviz.com Two and a half years ago I started working on the idea. It took me about a year to get the initial offering done and launched. The first calendar year in business was technically profitable. We ended up reinvesting the profits into new computers as well as paying all of the operational expenses upfront for the following year. This year, it's tracking at roughly 5x of last year's revenue and we've also improved our margins by about 2x. All said and done, we both put about an hour a day into it, five days a week, and one full weekend day a month.

kejaed 10y ago
This is really cool. Got a share to my friends out there. If you don't mind me asking, what kind of printing service do you hook into?

taphangum 10y ago

Don't have it anymore (sold it in 2013) but http://myapptemplates.com http://myapptemplates.com. Took it from $0 to $3,000 a month in about 1 year

xcubic 10y ago
Why sell?
- taphangum 10y ago
  Stupidity. Did it to raise money for the 'big idea'. Went nowhere. Next time, I'll hold.

altitudinous 10y ago

I have several apps on the iOS app store. I make between $4000AUD - $9000AUD per month. I quit my job 3 years ago to do it, so I guess it isn't really a side project any more. That said, it is a lonely way to make money and I am over it. My career was computers, and I'm pleased I've done the apps, I can achieve anything technical so it isn't a challenge any more and am looking at something more physical, hands on. When I quit my job I was making approx $3 a day from apps, I learned a lot. The great thing is that I can quit and the apps keep making money. It is trivial to keep them updated to the latest iOS version, design standard, or advertising API - I've just put Firebase Analytics and the latest Admob API in them all. Pleased with the iOS10 announcement today, it will not add burden to my apps, nor are they sherlocked like my first app was. My most recent app took me 10 days to make, it is fairly professional, I have one more I want to make it will take a similar amount of time. Every time I get asked a support question I answer it and also post the answer on a support website, this has cut down support enquiries to one every week or two. On to the next thing!

andyjdavis 10y ago
Nice work :) No matter what you do next that is certainly a very handy chunk of change to have coming in each month.
- altitudinous 10y ago
  Thank you :)
NKCSS 10y ago
Care to post some links? Always nice to see some context.
- altitudinous 10y ago
  Thanks for asking, but I'd like to retain my anonymity for now :) I also have enough competitors at the moment!
gcheong 10y ago

someotheridiot 10y ago

https://rebrickable.com https://rebrickable.com - A LEGO database that shows you which sets you can build from your existing collection, also includes thousands of fan-submitted designs. I built the original site in a few months, but have been steadily expanding it for 5 years now.

joshvm 10y ago
That's cool, I think there are probably several fields that you can apply this approach to - the obvious one which has been done is cooking. I.e. if you have so many ingredients, what can you make that also maximises your use of leftovers etc. I wonder if electronics would work the same way. I have a lot of random crap in my component bin, odd sensors and things that need projects. I guess a curated list of e.g. projects you can do with a BMP180 would be nice, rather than having to google. On the other hand a pressure sensor is a pressure sensor, so there wouldn't be much variety.
- someotheridiot 10y ago
  Yes, I've had lots of suggestions for applying the tech to other things but the problem is I have no interest in those other things :)

radicalachraf 10y ago

I recently started doing some competitive programming and going trough advanced algorithms...not really a side project but i'm looking forward to make a Network Monitoring service something that runs in your computer and acts passively to monitor system changes... to protect against malware mostly . -My current side project isn't even 10% complete but it's on my scope I'm working on a micro virtual file system for important documents...due to the rise of Ransomware and people being lazy I think that making a secure,encrypted virtual filesystem could be a great idea . Those are my thoughts only

NKCSS 10y ago

I created a WPA(2) password lookup web-based service in April of 2008: https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/Thomson-SpeedTouch https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/Thomson-SpeedTouch I just added ads and it's made 50-300 a month (had ~1000 unique visitors a day for the last 8 years). Added https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/UPC https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/UPC last year for a different brand model And https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/DownloadFundaImages https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/DownloadFundaImages for the Dutch real-estate market And a few years ago, I reverse enginered the encryption of the Wordz game and post the new game 20-30 seconds before the new roud starts, and more: https://www.nickkusters.com/nl/Diensten/WoordJacht/ https://www.nickkusters.com/nl/Diensten/WoordJacht/ This combined is my hobby/fun website. It used to cost €300 a month in server fees; it's now down to €80. Over the lifetime of the site, I probably broke even :) But it's still used daily, generating ad revenue, and if I had put in time to cut down cost, I could have made some money.

UVB-76 10y ago
Those ads (in the first link) are almost certainly a breach of the AdSense placement policies.
- NKCSS 10y ago
  Not sure I agree; the button in question is 240px high in size to make sure it's a huge click target; the ads are adjacent, true, but I tried to make all actions huge to make sure it's usable without fat-fingering it.

ricw 10y ago

Built www.sum-reviews.com over the course of a year (14 months), probably 2-3 man months of full time effort. It's now pretty automated though not enjoying the marketing part as much, that a more mature project requires. Having said that, it's kind of self entertainment / joy.

leviathan 10y ago

2 years. I built ( https://itunes.apple.com/app/id714882169?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/app/id714882169?mt=8 ) three years ago as an idea to test shooting videos at 60fps on the iPhone. At the time there was no iPhone 6 and you couldn't shoot 60fps videos with the default camera app. I did zero advertising of the app, and it's currently bringing in around $100/month. I have a major update that I've been working on for the last 2 months, but other than that it seems to be running all by itself.

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docsapp_io 10y ago

https://www.docsapp.io/ https://www.docsapp.io/ I built DocsApp in 1 year and now is ramen profitable. Tech stack: * Play Framework (Scala) * PostgreSQL (RDS) * S3 * Docker (cloud.docker.com) * Scaleway * HAProxy

workingspaceacc 10y ago
May I ask which S3 plugin do you use ? Haven't found anything useful for Play!.
- docsapp_io 10y ago
  Use AWS Java SDK since my S3 usage just simple upload file.
  - workingspaceacc 10y ago
    Alright cool, why did you decide to go with Scala instead of Java ?

gtheme_io 10y ago

http://www.gtheme.io/ http://www.gtheme.io/ I run GTheme.io for 2 years and now ramen profitable. Current site running with minimal management. The site selling premium ghost.org theme.

khuknows 10y ago

I started a Product Hunt style newsletter that curates the best UI designs every day (http://uimovement.com http://uimovement.com). It was profitable from sponsorships about 6 months after launch (slightly over $1,000 a month in revenue, costs $300ish a month). I spend about 10 minutes a day on it. I need to spend more time marketing it and updating some of the tech - but I'm too lazy. Also, I'm not sure the 6 months to profit counts, because I worked on 3-4 similar side-projects before launching it for about a year before.

cerbasict12 10y ago
Is the money from advertising on the website or the newsletter, or the cost for people to get the newsletter?
- khuknows 10y ago
  99% of the money comes from the newsletter sponsorships. Newsletter sponsorships generally can earn wayyyy more than website ads. Incase you're interested in more details, the newsletter has ~10,000 subscribers (~50% daily, ~50% weekly) and the site gets about 30k uniques a month.
  - khuknows 10y ago
    Also if anyone is wondering why the costs are so high, the main expenses are CloudFront (huge HUGE gifs) and Mailchimp. I'm sure I could reduce the costs to $50-100ish a month, but laziness.
    - cerbasict12 10y ago
      Great work! I was wondering if you earn more by charing a buck for the daily post. I wonder how it would work?

ZenSwordArts 10y ago

About 9 months ago i created https://namesmith.io https://namesmith.io , a business and domain name generator. I practically did nothing to boost the search engine ranking but the volume of visitors is growing (very slowly). So far the site can barely cover my vserver cost but that's ok since I can use the server for more than just namesmith. Most of the time some few dollar amounts tickle in but I had some sales of premium domains which gave > 50$ each. I still plan to add some more features, such as URL shortening, but at the time it is not worth it.

myth_drannon 10y ago
That's very nice tool! You can add accounts so a user can persist the starred ones.
- ZenSwordArts 10y ago
  Thanks! I considered accounts in the beginning but didn't go through with it because most users don't want to create yet another account. Also the favorites should persist via cookies at least for some time.
Namrog84 10y ago
I just tried it, list of X was generated, clicked Register on 1 I liked, took me to register, said 'is taken' :( Is this common or did I do something wrong?
gldev 10y ago
this is pretty good! haha i am gonna use it (:

deleted 10y ago

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splatsearch 10y ago

3 years. Took 6 months of earning 100 a month and then in my 7th month it did 20kgbp. It currently does about 100k per year

penetrarthur 10y ago
Go on...

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

Not currently. Lack of ideas/inspiration/perspiration. It'd be nice to have a few on the side making enough to support hobbies though.

adzeds 10y ago

1 year. Built up a hobby site slowly over the past two years, at the end of the first year it was making £7,700 a month.. It is still active and earning around £2-3k per month with only about 1 hours work a week. Currently looking to sell it on as I have just started on a new project.

martin_a 10y ago
What do you mean by "hobby site"? A site covering a specific hobby or something else? Can you tell more about how you earn money (memberships, advertisements, something else)?
- devopsproject 10y ago
  Things that people do outside of work like mountain biking, yoga, paintball, cooking, whatever. There is lots of opportunity for ad revenue and affiliate links
  - adzeds 10y ago
    Yeah. You can get affiliate links for pretty much everything these days.
    - adzeds 10y ago
      I have also just started work on this project: http://cupomterra.com.br/ http://cupomterra.com.br/
- adzeds 10y ago
  Basically I started built a website and my hobby is to work on it and improve it.. The main goal was not to make revenue. The revenue it makes now is through memberships and affiliate revenue.

tmaly 10y ago

I have been working on a side project about food dishes, but it does not even have a revenue stream. It is more a labor of love. I have been at it for over a year now.

atsaloli 10y ago

After six years of doing it on the side, I'm now doing it full-time (for a year and a half) and have one employee/apprentice (for the last half year). I provide IT training and consulting. Started out with CFEngine, now offering Git training as well. Companies fly me in for 1-5 days to train their staff. I love getting to see different parts of the US.

vijayr 10y ago
This is a cool gig, at least for a while :) Especially if one is young and childless, as travel becomes easy.
- atsaloli 10y ago
  Exactly. My employee is going to do the travel from now on as much as possible. He's younger. :)

drwl 10y ago

This isn't me. I found this on reddit and it's a pretty good AMA about Gleam.io. https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/3hpt9z/iama_cofounder_of_gleamio_this_was_our_7th/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/3hpt9z/iama_c...

sparkling 10y ago

YouTube video tutorials on niche tech topics. Upfront investments: $50 for a decent microphone. Spent about 40 hours creating and editing the videos. They have been online now for nearly 11 months and i have a total of ~300k views. That made me nearly $400 from video ads.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago
I don't know anything about YouTube ads, but I figured it would be more $ for that many views. (Not trying to be insulting, so I hope I don't come off that way.)
- Namrog84 10y ago
  Between $1-$4 per 1k view is quite typical. I think certain demographics will influence it (depending upon how much they click links and I'd imagine tech people are less inclined to click on links and more likely to adblock)

logicb 10y ago

I had done couple of projects before and one of them was somewhat successful. I made around $1.5k from that. Giftcardzilla an aggregator for discounted gift cards. I had to shut it down after Google Penguin update. Currently building AppsUlagam.com (apps world) as a mobile app discovery site for apps with Tamil language content.

logicb 10y ago
Clickable link http://www.appsulagam.com http://www.appsulagam.com

checkavailable 10y ago

I'm surprised very few people here (no one?) is selling physical stuff. I have a profitable side project selling stuff online. I found a manufacturer through Alibaba, set up a website and now most of the work is dealing with shipping items.

martin_a 10y ago
I can just speak for Germany, but selling physical stuff is not that easy here. There are lots of regulations, for example on taking back and recycling used batteries, if you shipped them with the product, and stuff like that. Lots of things to take care about and have in mind, so selling physical stuff is not that popular as a side project, I think.

parterburn 10y ago

I built a journal-over-email app that has been a profitable side business since day one. Defining "profitable" is necessary, I think - in this case it's covering it's own costs + more. This isn't my full-time gig, so I'm not counting any sort of hourly rate for my own time. The MVP is something I built over a long weekend, and I occasionally work on it while my wife and I watch TV/movies (so the time investment hasn't been too drastic, and the alternative is $0/hr). The app is called Dabble Me (https://dabble.me https://dabble.me) and you can read about the inspiration and costs to run here: https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/increase-your-happiness-with-daily-journaling-8109b0700506#.bbzx2grd9 https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/increase-your-happ... Today (18mos since launch) it's generating around $500/mo in passive income. I played around with a few different pricing models. The first was a "donate whatever you can" for a few pro options (did not generate what I expected), the next was a pretty lenient freemium model (lacked the upgrades), and what seems to be working best is a very stringent freemium model. A big part of Dabble Me and my passion for the project arises from this being a "scratch your own itch" build. I want this service to exist more than anyone else...so I built it and charged others to use it. That seems to be a theme that has a higher success rate than others.

deleted 10y ago

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snehesht 10y ago

I made an app to generate .gitignore files, It's as simple as a brick. https://gitignore.xyz/ https://gitignore.xyz/ but it doesn't make any money though.