13 ms·
Ask HN: Who is riding his weekend project straight to profitability?
Many of us are working on weekend projects. Some are being built just for fun, while others are being launched with the aim of generating some income.
I would like you to share the story of your revenue-generating weekend project, which would be a great inspiration for the rest of us.
- freddy 15y agoI created an app called Scan4Points which uses your barcode scanner to get nutritional information and calculate the WeightWatchers points. Actually my wife had "forced" me to make it. She said it was finally something I made that she could actually use. http://confered.com/apps/Ryb70 http://confered.com/apps/Ryb70
- asymptotic 15y agoAsk HN: Who is riding _their_ weekend project straight to profitability? FTFY.
- amock 15y agoThe correct pronoun is "his" since "their" is plural. While there is some debate about this "his" is still acceptable as a neuter pronoun.
- silencio 15y ago"their" may technically be plural, but in everyday English usage can be and often is used as a singular pronoun. It's a lot shorter than "his or her" and much more common than the likes of "zir". "Their" also has the benefit of being gender neutral where even "his or her" fails, especially for genderqueer people that do not identify with either pronoun. It is also far less offensive than using "his" to reference all hackers on HN, among which I fall into the female minority.
- amock 15y agoMy point was more that "his" is grammatically correct and didn't need fixing than that "their" is wrong, but why is using "his" offensive? I see "her" used often as neuter pronoun and I have never found it offensive even though I'm not female.
- asymptotic 15y agodictionary.com "their [thair; unstressed ther] 2. (used after an indefinite singular antecedent in place of the definite masculine form his or the definite feminine form her ): Someone left their book on the table. Did everyone bring their lunch?" Wikipedia: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Singular_they https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Singular_they "Singular they is the use of the pronoun they (or its inflected forms) when plurality is not required by the context. Singular they indicates indeterminacy: either in regard to number — "Anyone who thinks they have been affected should contact their doctor"; or, controversially, regarding gender — "One student failed their exam." I accept the usage of their as singular is a bit odd. But I'm unwilling to accept that anyone considers the usage of "his" to be gender-neutral. Maybe "her", but most certainly not "his".
- bromley 15y agoI struggle to see how "her" could be considered gender-neutral. In my opinion that's just making the same mistake all over again. Not meaning to dismiss the underlying issue though. I just think that, short of inventing a new word, singular "their" makes a lot more sense.
- eru 15y ago"she/her" is no more gender-neutral than "he/his". While I prefer "they", the only real solution is for everybody to learn Turkish, a language that doesn't even have gender in its grammar.
- paul9290 15y agoUsing his is not PC, there are female hackers. In my experience I thought only other guys coded and then I went for an interview that went awful. I was interviewed by two people separately. First was a guy, who was the Director of Development. Before he left the room, he said Janice will be interviewing you next. I thought she must be the office manager or HR person and during interview I said "Oh so you do the HR stuff around here?" She said, "No, I code," to which I replied "You code - huh?" Needless to say I didnt get that job, yet I learned something.
- Peroni 15y agoMy little genius friend & I are working on a side project currently but it is starting to look quite viable. In a nutshell it takes any word or PDF document, strips all the formatting and repopulates a new word document with predefined fonts, layout etc. Sounds simple & basic? That's the point. We're near completion and once we launch it will be a simple service that can have a significant impact on the industry I currently work in.
- olavk 15y agoThat is a great idea.
- Peroni 15y agoThanks! We think so too. Always keen to hear other applications for the service though. I haven't had sufficient time to investigate how relevant it may be to other industries but I know there will be more significant applications other than our current focus.
- semanticist 15y agoThis is a common feature in CRM software for the recruitment industry, where they want to rewrite people's CVs into the agency's 'house standard' (and remove the candidate's contact details, too). If your version performs better than what some of the existing players are using, you might be able to OEM/white label it for them.
- Peroni 15y agoThe current CRM features available are terrible. The other issue is that they generally come bundled with a CRM that companies are paying in excess of 7 figures for. We have a stand alone product that is efficient and affordable. A lot of recruitment companies, at least here in the UK, pay significant annual salaries to an 'admin' person to sit and format CV's all day long. Why pay them £25k a year to execute a task that takes them about 20 minutes when you could pay us about 70-80% less (pricing point yet to be determined) for a product that executes the task instantly?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- asymptotic 15y agoI'm part of a project that's an art piece management solution for galleries to use for exhibitions. Right now galleries use paper reports to track art pieces between exhibitions, and we want them to use tablets. We currently have a gallery interested in the project. I'm the sole technical force behind the project. Front-end is on Android Honeycomb tablets, back-end uses Erlang for the web server and middle-ware and PostgreSQL for the database. I also work full-time so progress is a bit slow.
- ZaneClaes 15y agoWell I just started on a 28 day experiment... a bit more than a weekend, but fun nonetheless. Myself and some other travelers are building a travel moabile app for a contest. We're documenting the whole process and our steps so we can publish our methods at the end... I'll post the whole thing at http://LifeByExperimentation.com http://LifeByExperimentation.com when we're done in about 3 weeks.
- ignifero 15y agoI was doing facebook games as side projects a while back. Now they're my main source of income.
- bemmu 15y agoThe year of the platform launch I made a small novelty app called Name Analyzer. While scaling it ended up involving some work, the initial version was made in a weekend. It no longer exists, but while it was still alive it spread to a big portion of Facebook users. I got enough savings from it to feel comfortable to fulfill my dream of moving to Japan and start working on my own apps full time. It got 9 million users and made quite a nice sum from ads.
- ignifero 15y agoI remember you from the devs forum :). Hope you get big in Japan
- ka010 15y agoI just recently realized how many great ideas and projects I've wasted over the years with not riding them to profitability or even releasing them. Now whenever I come up with something that doesn't leave me alone for a couple of days I just go for it, without any expectations. The last one I launched was a very simple iOS App (http://airlocationapp.com http://airlocationapp.com) which was actually done in less than a weekend, pitched to only a single blog and generated about $700 since launch, which was roughly one month ago. My best selling apps, a suite of remotes for iOS (http://reemoteapp.com http://reemoteapp.com) actually started off as weekend project just like that but initially hit a bigger niche and now turned into my main project/income.
- pokoleo 15y agoI like the idea of the reemote app. I can't read the text on your website though, and I'm sure that I'm not alone. (the captions under the logos)
- petercooper 15y agoI don't have a current one to share but back in 2005 I decided to do a 24 hour project in Rails and built a tagged source code site called Code Snippets (it wasn't the first code snippets site but the first with tagging to get any traction). I let it run in the background with just a couple of tweaks here and there for just over 2 years and it was making $1000ish per month from Adsense with zero effort by me. I then sold it for a healthy 5 figures. It's still running at a new URL: http://snippets.dzone.com/ http://snippets.dzone.com/
- nicksergeant 15y agoInteresting. I wrote http://snipt.net http://snipt.net not long ago, but have had no such luck with AdSense (only made about $30/mo on 30k monthly uniques). Would you mind sharing your traffic that got you up to $1k/month?
- petercooper 15y agoI think it was around 250k pageviews per month. I don't recall the uniques as I don't pay attention to them (unless the visit-pageview ratio is really weird). It looks like they have it up to around 600-700k per month now: http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=sm2snippets http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=sm2snippets The butt fell out of Adsense for many areas in 2008-2009ish though and I've never had any further success with it in the developer space (though I did very well in the mass market up till about 2009). I run some other reasonably successful sites in the developer space and Adsense is basically a no-go - results as bad as you've mentioned. If I were in your shoes, I'd dabble with some affiliate programs. I've already been doing this and having success on my developer focused sites. Only high quality stuff but latest books, e-books, courses, events, etc. I notice you have Carbon on there and if I recall correctly, they approached me and the CPM was laughably bad (though this may have changed..), I want/need to be making $5-10 CPM overall from display advertising.
- Jim_Neath 15y agoMy most recent project is £18 in the black :D
- spIrr 15y agoPurify, am i correct? Nice work, congrats on the positive income ;)
- wowfat 15y agoWe created one called http://www.creatorfinder.com/ http://www.creatorfinder.com/ which helps developers showcase their verified portfolio. It also adds a watermark for images created by designers. That helps designers to show verified websites that they have helped design. No plans on making money yet. But we do have a fair number of registrations every day!
- joeconway 15y agoI taught myself Objective-C for fun last summer, then one day decided to release an app. I spent about 3 hours coding then about a day sorting out code signing, artwork, submission etc. As a result of that weekend I've ended up getting a pretty nice side income from advertisements from the free version and straight revenue from the paid version. In fairness, since releasing it I've quite considerably improved the application but its still less than 800 lines of code. http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/tooloud-pro/id425137981?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/tooloud-pro/id425137981?mt=8
- scottyallen 15y agoClever idea. How much are you making from it?
- joeconway 15y agoabout $100 a month, more if i update it. 100K downloads and been featured a few times in whats hot and N & N, almost got featured on the front page of itunes too. Not bad given that I think the application is relatively pointless. I just wanted to submit _anything_ so I could learn the submission process
- scottyallen 15y agoWait, 100k downloads and you're making $100 a month? Those numbers don't seem right to me... Still, nicely done:)
- een1bhs 15y agoMade a little utility app for Mac that I needed, about 2 months ago, I was giving it away free with donations but after a lot of emails promising donations for this or that decided to flip the switch and start selling it. Been selling for a week now making $100+ a day! Im working on a few other projects in hope that combined they can become my main income.
- pbreit 15y agoI learned to program by creating an ecommerce service for my pet store ("Outlet" at http://cheekob.com http://cheekob.com) in my spare time. I am now broadening it to help other sellers with a new selling format: automatic markdowns (http://pricetack.com http://pricetack.com). What really helped me was the awesomely simple, yet powerful Python framework Web2py.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]