8 ms·

Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

• saradhi 4y ago
  Checkvisaslots.com - recently picked as one of 12 Google's favourite chrome extension for 2022. It got the attention more than I expected, been a big hit. I've expanded the service to visaholics.com (yet to generate revenue) where visa applicants can share their experiences.
  • csense 4y ago
    What about Mastercard?
• dglass 4y ago
  Not your typical side project but my book, Junior to Senior, has been averaging over $500/month in sales since it was published back in October of this year. I've also been growing my newsletter, Beginner.dev, to help reach my target audience for the book and teach them the importance of soft-skills for software engineers. I also have a job board for junior software engineering roles in the works to add even more value for the book's target audience. book: https://www.holloway.com/b/junior-to-senior https://www.holloway.com/b/junior-to-senior newsletter: https://newsletter.beginner.dev/ https://newsletter.beginner.dev/
  • 147 4y ago
    How did you grow your newsletter/market your book? My goal for 2023 is to focus on growing my audience for my newsletter on devopsy topics.
    • dglass 4y ago
      Mostly through posting valuable content on the newsletter and sharing it across various channels, as well as comments like this where I can plug the book and newsletter in the right context. It also helped that the book was published on Holloway.com, and they had their own audience that they have been able to promote their titles.
  • lifeplusplus 4y ago
    How were you able to write a book, I mean it's a lot of writing. How long did it take you to write the whole thing. Did you use some special program? How did you publish it? How did you plan your lessons or chapters?
    • yellow_lead 4y ago
      > How were you able to write a book, I mean it's a lot of writing Although I'm not the OP, it can be less daunting if you split your topic into an outline i.e chapters. Then outline each individual chapter. Before you know it you've got a book ;)
• ruffrey 4y ago
  Mailsac.com Disposable email for quality assurance and dev teams. A long term side project (10+ years). Started with Node.js and mongodb. Grew to golang and Postgres, with several custom micro services.
  • motoxpro 4y ago
    Nice. Perfect for QA. Will give it a go!
  • jeremycarter 4y ago
    Massive fan of Mailsac! Great offering.
  • mathverse 4y ago
    How much does mailsac make?
• codegeek 4y ago
  I think lately there has been this concern from many folks that copycats are taking away some market share from indiehackers. A post was made on indiehackers as well recently related to this. So I feel that people would be hesitant to share. I personally have come across couple of indie hackers who stopped "building in public".
  • ehnto 4y ago
    It can be an antagonistic environment for online businesses, a surprise for the starry eyed hacker or entrepreneur who just wants to build cool stuff. We regularly had competitors running negative SEO campaigns back when that was easier, we had review bombs, DDOS attacks, network incursions, you name it. Building out of the public's eye doesn't really stop that once you are actually operating, your competitors will find you.
  • rozenmd 4y ago
    I love threads like this - while I've stopped sharing my numbers in public, I've watched folks blindly copy my uptime monitor's landing pages and then close up shop 2-3 months later when they haven't gotten rich fast. At this point, being comfortably full-time employed and using that income to let me play all-in-one Founder/Designer/Engineer/Customer Support over the past few years is the moat. OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com https://onlineornot.com), for what it's worth.
    • josevalerio 4y ago
      I see you in a lot of threads and really appreciate sharing your experience in the comments / blog :)
    • jollofricepeas 4y ago
      Exactly. 1. Being comfortably full-time employed is a fantastic mental, social and financial moat for bootstrappers. 2. Copycats assume that they can just throw up anything without focusing on sales, quality customer service, operations and financial discipline.
  • hakanderyal 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• gregohumber 4y ago
  Breeze Order Manager: Batch print your PayPal orders. Been running this for over 7 years. http://breeze.humbersoft.ca http://breeze.humbersoft.ca
• lockdown22 4y ago
  MesoSim: Advanced Options Backtester - https://portal.deltaray.io https://portal.deltaray.io Put it together while I was learning about Options Trading and manual backtesting was very tedious. It made me better understand options, develop and validate strategies and now also enables users to iterate quickly on trading system development on SPX, BTCUSD and ETHUSD options. For example trades see these posts: - https://blog.deltaray.io/boxcar-trade https://blog.deltaray.io/boxcar-trade - https://blog.deltaray.io/boxcar-ng-an-optimized-boxcar https://blog.deltaray.io/boxcar-ng-an-optimized-boxcar
• ATHF-Rabbot 4y ago
  Nice try, taxman! Nyahaha!
  • PostOnce 4y ago
    Taxes pave roads, build hospitals and schools, keep shipping lanes free of pirates, and provide weather-monitoring radar and satellite systems. Taxes keep famine, war, and pestilence at bay. Also, not paying your taxes is an easy way to ruin your life, and paying your taxes is an easy way to improve it, assuming you live in a country with a competent government. I can't tell you how much I love not having to hike down to the river for water, or not having to smell heaps of garbage at neighbors houses because we have trucks pick it up roadside. No one ever tries to hijack my car either, mostly due to tax-funded stable, secure society. Taxes make life great, even if we don't spend them optimally. edit: you only need open a history book to find out how miserable life was before
    • MonkeyClub 4y ago
      I agree with you that taxes are a necessary and in one way a good thing as well. Just a note, though, that there was taxation even before we had social contracts that funneled taxes to public interest projects.
    • pakwa 4y ago
      Excellent post imo. Wish more people would be ready to pay more than always wanting to pay less. Especially the 0.1%.
      • drstewart 4y ago
        [flagged]
    • unixbotnuke 4y ago
      Taxes buy stealth bombers, M1 tanks, drones to bomb people that the United States does not like, and also the overthrow of many different governments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r.... Taxes also pay rich politicans like Rick Scott to defraud medicare. Taxes pay for different political parties to push their agendas both left and right. This is government not by the consent of the governed, the governemnt does not represent me at all, but I pay my taxes becuse men with guns will ultimately come and put me in jail by force if I do not.
• rozenmd 4y ago
  I built OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com https://onlineornot.com) - it's a hosted Status Page, with built-in Uptime Monitoring. ---- As the 200th uptime monitoring service, folks often ask me what makes OnlineOrNot different - and they often find the answer disappointing: me. I've worked on the web for Atlassian and Cloudflare, I've seen what works and doesn't work for self-serve web apps. So OnlineOrNot has: - docs written in clear English that aren't out of date, and load fast - a modern, responsive web UI with errors that don't make you feel dumb - uptime monitoring for websites, web apps, and APIs that Just Works
  • 2143 4y ago
    Even I — and I imagine most people — have thought of similar ideas, but never acted in it. What I use for a similar purpose is something I hand-rolled myself that does what I want. It isn't as feature rich as yours, and I could never have come up with a polished UI. Excellent work!
• eerikkivistik 4y ago
  A few years ago we set up https://pepchecker.com https://pepchecker.com. It's a relatively simple API/Dashboard to search for politically exposed people and monitor sanctions. We rolled it out a separate product, because we kept rebuilding it for various financial systems.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• longnguyen 4y ago
  I built KTool (https://ktool.io https://ktool.io) — it allows you to forward web articles, newsletters and RSS feeds to your Kindle. --- I did a Show HN 4 months ago[1]. The reason I started KTool was to spend less time on computer screens, and more on e-ink Kindle. I was afraid of going blind. After 4 months improving KTool, it now becomes a tool to help you combat doom-scrolling. Instead of mindlessly scrolling the web, I deliberately send interesting articles to my Kindle. Recently, I added newsletter & RSS support, it's 100% automated now. My favorite source of content is Hacker News RSS[2], Stratechery[3], Indie Hacker Newsletters[4] and a few other Substack newsletters. I can enjoy reading HN latest stories or my fav authors' latest pieces on my Kindle without spending hours browsing on my computer. I just reached $580 MRR today (Dec 31st) [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32637996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32637996 [2]: https://hnrss.github.io https://hnrss.github.io [3]: https://stratechery.com https://stratechery.com [4]: https://www.indiehackers.com/newsletter https://www.indiehackers.com/newsletter
  • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    I have been conditioned to automatically assume KTool must be a KDE app. I was wrong.
    • longnguyen 4y ago
      Ah ha. Because of the prefix `K`? :D
  • yellow_lead 4y ago
    Why are you afraid of going blind? I haven't heard of anyone going blind from spending too much time on screens, but I have heard of issues like eye strain or headaches developing. (I still think your product is a good one, but just curious!)
    • longnguyen 4y ago
      Yeah. My fear was irrational like people discussed in my Show HN. I did get eye strain and felt dizzy though.
• caspg 4y ago
  I'm running a https://velomapa.pl https://velomapa.pl - website with cycling related stuff (routes, races, photos, and other stuff) in Poland. It's a super seasonal niche. During the season it brings around $1000/month through various types of ads and donations. Now, I'm building and growing https://travelermap.net https://travelermap.net, which hopefully will work nicely all year around. It's also a content site that I'm planning to monetize using ads.
  • o2sth 4y ago
    Cool website, will be using it for sure!
    • caspg 4y ago
      Glad you liked it. Let me know if you have any feedback.
  • ms7892 4y ago
    [dead]
• nhoughto 4y ago
  We built a tool that does $5k/month which we are _shutting_ down today (end of 2022) after 8 years. Kind of the opposite but thought I’d share. Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8669122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8669122
  • Jugurtha 4y ago
    Why are you shutting it down? From this page: https://getsandbox.com/shutting-down https://getsandbox.com/shutting-down >it has been running mostly on autopilot for the last few years and increasingly we don't have the time to dedicate to the maintenance or improvement of it I don't understand how it was on autopilot yet, at the same time, represented too big of a time sink maintenance wise. >and the process of selling it off too high friction for the reward. Have you tried some services that get shared here to sell/buy SaaS companies/products?
    • nhoughto 4y ago
      Hit its effort vs scale limit and we’ve got more pressing things to spend time on. We could grow it but the result isn’t worth the effort compared to cost benefit of other endeavors we’ve got on the go (big tech jobs) and more recent time needs (young families). Learnt a bunch across so many dimensions and set us up for ongoing success with that knowledge, but this specific thing has no future and selling it appeared too hard. It was on autopilot for sure but that baked in an assumption that customers self solved, and had no new needs. We felt bad that we were delivering a decaying service to users in silence, users could use an alternative and get better service for their $ (in theory) and we would stop taking $ for what we see as delivering a subpar result.
      • Jugurtha 4y ago
        Understood. Have you looked at brokerage firms to sell your company? I haven't used them and I'm not affiliated with them, but: - https://microconf.com/quietlight https://microconf.com/quietlight they appear to be a brokerage partner for MicroConf, which is a conference for those who follow the self-funded/bootstrapped route such as yourself. - https://feinternational.com https://feinternational.com that one was recommended by Patrick McKenzie here https://youtu.be/-Tg48MVnBeQ?t=3021 https://youtu.be/-Tg48MVnBeQ?t=3021 and how it helped him especially as he had new family obligations and had started another business simultaneously. I don't know if it's all said and done, after all, we're 31 December, but putting this here just in case. I don't like to see a service that provided value go to the waste bin, though I don't want to overstep either.
• middleman90 4y ago
  I built Gaintrain (https://gaintrainapp.com/ https://gaintrainapp.com/), a meal planning app designed to help users optimize their muscle gain. --- Since its launch in July, we have focused on improving retention and making the app as useful as possible. Currently, we have not actively pursued marketing efforts, but have gained users through searches on app and play stores. Recently, we introduced a paid subscription option and have already surpassed $500 in monthly revenue.
• sgottit 4y ago
  I'm one of the creators of Sleeve, a "now playing" desktop accessory for the Mac https://replay.software/sleeve https://replay.software/sleeve. We charge a one time fee for the app, and average around $700/mo. We've been working on it entirely in our spare time for the last couple of years.
  • Version467 4y ago
    That’s pretty cool. It’s nice to see that people are willing to pay for simple but effective utility apps on MacOS. I feel like that type of paid app is almost completely gone from Linux and Windows. I’ve switched to MacOS last year and have been tinkering away on a few things to improve my own workflow as well as dip my toes into native Mac programming with swift. I would never have thought about polishing it up and trying to sell it had I developed it for Linux, but seeing stuff like this makes me want to give it a shot even if it’s just to see the whole process through.
• offsky 4y ago
  https://www.validbot.com https://www.validbot.com A website I made to test other websites for valid configurations. Sort of like chrome lighthouse on steroids with the ability to automatically monitor and alert if some configuration changes.
  • topicseed 4y ago
    Competition is fierce in that "monitoring" space. How do you market it effectively?
    • offsky 4y ago
      Marketing is not my strong suit and is one of my 2023 goals to improve on. I have not noticed the competition in this space to be fierce. Maybe when I become better at marketing I will notice. I have not found a direct competitor yet because ValidBot monitors more things and different things, that others don’t.
• tmms 4y ago
  I built https://www.inveester.com https://www.inveester.com , it's a stock portfolio tracker mobile app with some focus on dividends/passive income. Didn't reach 500$ yet but it's growing and crossed 100$ MRR already
  • lucas03 4y ago
    I also have similar site, with ~300 MMR. It seems like every second programmer is working on his own dividend tracker :D
• throw298340 4y ago
  https://deltaoutpost.io/ https://deltaoutpost.io/ Private ETH nodes, 2k MRR
  • downrightmike 4y ago
    How much MRR _not_ in funny money?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• deafpolygon 4y ago
  Nice try, IRS.
  • rat_melter 4y ago
    No, no, you're thinking of the $601/month thread.
  • punkbit 4y ago
    I started laughing! Is that really a thing? The IRS does this sort of stuff? Thought payments are KYC’d
    • unixbotnuke 4y ago
      1099K rule is delayed... https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-announces-delay-for-implementation-of-600-reporting-threshold-for-third-party-payment-platforms-forms-1099-k https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-announces-delay-for-impleme...
• vladstudio 4y ago
  And I still sell access to wallpapers I draw (for last 20+ years), and some people still seem to like them enough to buy an account, and the average income is still around 500$/month. https://vlad.studio/ https://vlad.studio/
  • putna 4y ago
    wow, i remember your work from like 15 years ago. i love it. you brought up the good memories of how the web was truly awesome place to discover art like yours. keep up amazing work.
• dmundhra 4y ago
  I built nitrohire.co, a reference checking tool for hiring managers and also did a Show HN recently [1]. The revenues are a few $100s currently though I have not been doing a lot of marketing for it yet since the beta launch resulted in a lot of feedback that I am trying to evaluate and address. Also, if someone is interested in hiring/recruitment/professional networking space, would love to connect! Email in profile 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34101264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34101264
• machilin 4y ago
  We have been reading these $500/month posts year after year and recently we have been holding back on launching our own as well. Recently we finally decide to just went in after months of working on it. It is called MessageDuck (https://www.messageduck.com https://www.messageduck.com) which was built while we were looking for a good solution for SMS data marketing. We built this after we noticed that there was not much good solution except one which is quite pricey called MailCharts SMS. We are still working on it and we also have a code YC that you can use for 10% off our Pro Plan. Hopefully, we can reach $500 by 2023 and we can Show and Tell as well.