29 ms·
Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell
Previously asked on:
2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152
2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jurgenwerk 4y agoI sell handmade sculptures of influential people and famous monuments on Etsy - https://www.etsy.com/shop/jurgenstudio https://www.etsy.com/shop/jurgenstudio. Revenue is 2-6k USD depending on the season. I hired someone part time who took over production and shipping. it's mostly passive revenue for me apart from growing the business by developing new products when I feel like it. The profit margin is around 50% after all material and labor costs are paid.
- mattl 4y agoHow much do you spend on likeness rights for the people or the similar thing for famous monuments?
- noah_buddy 4y agoI think it depends on how the work is produced for celebrities. If it’s a mass produced product and not one off artisan creations, OP might run into problems
- mattl 4y agoThey look to be making several of each person.
- Aeolun 4y agoI imagine nobody is going to bother with them until it reaches a certain scale.
- noah_buddy 4y agoMaking several is not the issue, I believe. You could make several slightly different hand crafted statuettes, it’s the mass production of one likeness that’s the issue as I understand it.
- ryandeebs11 4y agoCould it be that he does not use the name under the likes of Elon and Jordan, so it could be left for interpretation?
- worthless-trash 4y agoSeneca going to be real mad.
- jurgenwerk 4y agoI get that question a lot. I do not worry about it. There's plenty of similar fan art selling around and I haven't noticed any actions taken to shut them down. I wouldn't reproduce anything under a trademark (for example, Baby Yoda), and as far as I know, human faces are not trademarkable.
- guywithahat 4y agoOut of curiosity when you say you hired someone to take over production and shipping, do you mean you outsourced it? Or like that from craigslist is producing them now?
- jurgenwerk 4y agoIt's a an artistic person I found who is happy to produce copies of sculptures for me to get some side income. I teached her how to do it and gave her all my molds so she can do it from her home.
- fm2606 4y agoIs it a safe assumption to say she is relatively local to you?
- kylecazar 4y agoThis is super cool. Admittedly, I know nothing about creating concrete figures -- I imagine the real artistic work is in creating the mold? Can you share how that is done -- is a sculpture created and then surrounded by the mold material?
- jurgenwerk 4y ago1. I hire a 3d designer to create the 3d model I want. For example, I send him a couple of photos of Alan Turing 2. After I am happy with the likeness, I 3d print it. In this phase the 3d model comes to life and it's usually quite different from what we see on the computer as a 3d model. It has something to do with the difference in perspectives in which the designer designs shapes and in which we observe the item when it's produced as a real physical shape. This is very hard to get it right. Then we repeat the steps from 1 until I am happy with the likeness and the facial expression (this can be many iterations) 3. When I have the 3d printed positive, I create a mold using silicone rubber 4. The 2-part mold is then ready to be used for hundreds of castings (I use concrete)
- xcambar 4y agoI was expecting Rihanna or Gizeh, not Zizek ans the Berghain, and I love every bit of the surprise! Congratulations!
- omnimus 4y agoExactly! Spomenik! The choices are great. Probably people who like raw concrete are not exactly Rihanna fans.
- julienmarie 4y agoI love the selection and I'm thinking of buying a couple! Is it possible to have special requests made? Wittgenstein would be a great addition (the tryptic Nietzsche / Freud / Wittgenstein has been what forged my weltanschauung )
- jurgenwerk 4y agoThank you for your kind words. I have Wittgenstein on my TODO! Should be in the shop within a year.
- AdityaSanthosh 4y agoAn Year?
- jspash 4y agoThe description says these are made from "concrete & cement". Is that to help out with Etsy SEO? I'm curious because I have an Etsy shop and love to talk all things about optimising the shop front. The competition is steep nowadays over there!
- jurgenwerk 4y agoIt's intended to immediately differentiate from shops who sell cheap plastic sculptures. My customers appreciate heavy brutalist material I use. I spend zero time optimizing SEO, my product images and descriptions are pretty crappy, so I currently don't have much advice to give in that area! What's your shop?
- topicseed 4y agoDo you accept commissions? For example, if I want an F1 driver sculpted?
- jurgenwerk 4y agoWhich one? I am planning on doing Ayrton Senna.
- topicseed 4y agoM Schumacher for example :) (the father!)
- dbancajas 4y agoAre you doing this automatically? or labor is doing the sculpture?
- joshmn 4y agoDuring COVID I was in Mexico. At some point I wanted to go horseback riding. I was researching places to go horseback riding and I was not at all surprised to see I would have to make some calls to book. Fast-forward a few weeks, I become pretty good friends with the owner at the ranch I went to. We grab tacos one night and he shares his concerns: They're not doing so well financially and are worried about whether or not they'll be able to afford feed in a month. I got involved and we solved that problem and a few more: revamped the website (it looked and felt like it was from 2006), I whipped up a booking/reservation system to get more customers through the door, and exit surveys to make sure everything was perfect (and figure out what went wrong if it wasn't). Bookings this month are up 490% from 2018 (according to the paper waivers they had) and that's without a single dollar spent in paid marketing. I answer a few emails every day from prospective riders and make sure everyone's happy. I get a percentage of each reservation which is cool, but the coolest part is that I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranch.
- kilroy123 4y agoAwesome work! Would you mind sharing? I live in Mexico City and would love to try horse back riding.
- joshmn 4y agoSure. We're in Vallarta if you ever make it out this way. :) https://ranchoelcharro.com https://ranchoelcharro.com Obligatory disclosure: some semblance of ownership.
- dimaor 4y agoThe team page made me laugh out loud :D
- joshmn 4y agoThanks! We get a lot of compliments on the copy. I wanted to reflect that we are indeed a Mexican horse ranch without the site being incredibly boring. There's only so many cool things you can show/say before you realize that horses aren't really all that interesting on the internet.
- rogual 4y agoA long time ago, I made some Flash games. I recently converted some of them away from Flash and released them together as a desktop game for modern computers. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458090/Hapland_Trilogy/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458090/Hapland_Trilogy/ I am currently making more than $500 a month from this, although I don't necessarily expect that to continue. Games are a crowded market. It was a fun project, though.
- POiNTx 4y agoWhat's the programming language and environment to run it for the non-flash version?
- nmstoker 4y agoDetails in this wonderful little article (which i think i read via HN but it came up in a search easily just now) https://foon.uk/how-flash-2022/ https://foon.uk/how-flash-2022/
- kristianp 4y agoDiscussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34079543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34079543 He says in the discussion that porting the games from flash took 3 years. I'm aware that sometimes a single bog post can be the result of a lot of work, but that's next level!
- eps 4y agoHoly smokes! What a massive time sink it was :) Brilliant little gems, absolutely brilliant.
- amcraig 4y agoOh my god, you made the Hapland games? I spent hours of through high school playing them. Wanted to say thanks for the great times!
- lsferreira42 4y agoMan i love your games, definitely buying a copy!
- itake 4y agoI had 3 sources of side income last year. 1/ Started a niche dating app in 2017. Revenue ranges form 700-1,100/mo. Hosting is about $50/mo. 2/ Bought a house and rent our spare rooms for $3,100/mo. 3/ Contracting projects for a small dev shop earned $3-10k/mo (depending on how many hours I worked).
- unsupp0rted 4y agoI'm considering buying a niche dating site right now (it's in my own niche, so I understand it fairly well). If I buy it, I'm wondering how to grow it though. How do you solve the chicken-egg problem?
- itake 4y agoAll the mainstream 'successful' apps uses advertising on other social media networks + Apple and Google Ads. They quickly ask / require money to be paid when you join to cover the acquisition costs as part of the on-boarding flow.
- xutopia 4y agoWhat is your niche dating app?
- pc86 4y agoNearly $100k/yr in side income at the low end is very impressive. Do you work full-time as a developer in addition to this?
- outcoldman 4y agomacOS applications https://loshadki.app https://loshadki.app $1,500-3,000 USD /month
- trympet 4y agoI made a simple app for tracking stock prices on your desktop: www.stockdesktopwidget.com
- kedmi 4y agoOpenSay - Responsible anonymity in Slack, moderated by AI and team effort. https://OpenSay.co https://OpenSay.co
- bosch_mind 4y agoNeat. What lib implemented that radar graph on the landing page?
- kedmi 4y agoThanks! Heavily edited ChartJS Radar Chart
- bobleeswagger 4y agoVery cool, I don't think most folks realize how much this would help reduce favoritism and nepotism in the workplace.
- kedmi 4y agoThank you! Precisely. Anonymity levels the playing field. We aim to capture the upside of anonymity by moderating with AI and team effort.
- windowshopping 4y agoOne bit of small feedback - I would say your landing page is very busy, it could use some more space separating content once you start scrolling down past the top part.
- kedmi 4y agoThanks! Will look into it.
- connectsnk 4y agoHow do you market this
- sphuff 4y agoI got pretty into Stable Diffusion soon after it came out. Like a lot of users, I tinkered around with different ways to run it, going the usual route of running on my weak local machine, then going on to runpod, then implementing my own custom solution. What I came up with worked pretty well for me, so I created a site that allows users to upload custom models and run Stable Diffusion “in the cloud”. I launched in early December and it ended up being more successful than I expected. I just got to $700 MRR, which I’m definitely happy about after years of side projects making exactly $0. The site in question: https://stadio.ai https://stadio.ai
- harel 4y agoWhen previewing models and your email is no validated, the link comes up in glorious html on the screen: <a class="font-semibold hover:text-red-700" href="/verify-email">Click here to verify your email.</a>
- sphuff 4y agoThanks for the heads up! I’ll take a look - last I checked that link was rendering correctly, so I’ll see what’s going on there
- harel 4y agoWhile we're both here, it's not exactly clear to me what that whole thing means and does. Arguably i'm not too clued up in SD models and what they are and why would I want them. Might be a good idea to explain this or if explanation exists make it more prominent to hook ignorant people like me. :-)
- sphuff 4y agoGreat point. I might need an entirely separate landing page for the artist/general audience vs the prosumer type landing page that currently exists. (If you’re interested, the gist is that custom models allow for completely distinct “styles” as well as unique characters. For example, if you wanted to generate art in the style of Monet, you could train a custom model in that style)
- kureikain 4y agohttps://mailwip.com https://mailwip.com email forwarding with extra stuff like webhook, full inbox log, SMTP support, and "email to blog" I made this because every time when I start a project and bough a domain and setup email. first thing. So I scratch my own itch :).
- lillecarl 4y agoThere are multiple typos/spelling mistakes on the front page, I'd look into grammarly :)
- porsager 4y agoI wanted to give swift a try when it came out in 2014. I created the keyboard I know you all miss on the iPhone, and it's been doing quite great since. https://typenineapp.com https://typenineapp.com
- eps 4y agoThis has gotta be a massive patent minefield.
- Swizec 4y agohttps://seniormindset.com/ https://seniormindset.com/ – book and workshop helping people with the shift in mindset that goes into being a senior [software] engineer. You can tldr my philosophy as “business results trump technical excellence” No MRR but made about $40k in sales last year. Biggest challenge is figuring out how to turn that into stable revenue. Biggest opportunity is that unlike my previous (technical) infoproducts, this one doesn’t expire in 6 months.
- 414techie 4y agoHow long did it take you to develop your Senior Mindset infoproduct? Curious what the ROI on your time looked like for that.
- Swizec 4y agoDepends how you count. It's based on ~10 years of working on my own career. But it's also a collection of essays so a lot of writing happened live while the career was happening. My time tracker says I spent 139 hours last year on this project.
- 414techie 4y agoThanks for the reply. Your blog is great. I’ve enjoyed your content over the years.
- jspash 4y agoI might be alone in this thinking but the "price goes up every 100 purchases" really gives off the wrong vibe. I understand you are trying to convey scarcity and value, but it comes off like some sort of used car salesman pitch. Maybe I just too cynical these days, but when I hear certain phrases from salespeople, I immediately shut down the conversation and move on. Am I being too critical? Or is there an angle that I'm just not getting? I love the product by the way! And the price is very reasonable. So I'm just a little bewildered by the hard sales pitch.
- 4y ago
- dandigangi 4y agoNothing really to show visually but I make about that passively selling/trading high end watches. More a hobby than anything just to wear them but some easy cash.
- typeofhuman 4y agoReptime?
- dandigangi 4y agoAuthentic only.
- kennethologist 4y agoCan you share more on how you do this? Which sites you use to buy the high watches and where you sell them?
- dandigangi 4y agoPretty simple tbh. I hit just about all the major buy/sell sites, Facebook, marketplaces, etc. to buy/sell/trade. Your standard buy low, sell high type of situation. Or, have relationships with the dealers and get watches and retail that sell for more. Rolex for example is great if you can get it at retail or find a good deal but typically the margins aren't that great otherwise. Other brands have way better margins. Rare or hard to come by (but ones people would want) can bring in great returns. It's a higher cost business to get into but have plenty of friends in the low to mid market that make some decent money. Less barrier to entry. You can do it with just about anything. Some friends are in collectibles, cards, shoes, etc.
- mjaques 4y agoI sell cheap but high-quality Anki decks for language learning: https://deckmill.com https://deckmill.com Created using a mix of automation (TTS, machine translation, etc.) and human reviews. Built it with a friend, making around $500 a month, very stable over the last couple of years. Spend 1 or 2 hours a month on it, mostly customer support.
- eps 4y agoWhy is there no pricing info?
- Arainach 4y agoI read through the entire site and was convinced there was no price, but when I came back to reply I found that there is an element at the top of the homepage (next to "No subscriptions. No frills.") that says "Get access to all our decks for just €15.99."
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hifikuno 4y agoOn the front page it says €15.99 for access to all decks forever, including updates.
- mjaques 4y agoHmm, maybe we need to make the pricing pop more :D.
- eps 4y agoDefinetly do that. I completely missed it because the price was in the text in refular font and it wasn't on the Download page or anywhere else on the site. There's no Buy page, so the impression I was left with is that you have a sneaky onboarding that reveals the price after a sign-up... or something similarly shady. Not a very good initial impression.
- deleted 4y ago
- hemmert 4y agohttps://www.escape-team.com https://www.escape-team.com - a printable escape game. It currently makes about $600 on iOS and $400 on Google Play, all through the $1.99 IAPs. I do not do any advertising for it, but as it is played in groups, it nicely advertises itself.
- hemmert 4y agoA lot of traffic also comes from the mission editor: https://www.escape-team.com/create https://www.escape-team.com/create
- predmijat 4y agohttps://sre.rs https://sre.rs - DevOps course (Udemy) for smaller teams and individuals
- no_carrier 4y agoHow much does this make for you?
- predmijat 4y agoA little more than $500/mon at the moment. If you are to trust Udemy's "instructor marketplace insights", top courses with the keyword 'devops' are north of $10k/mon, but median is just $27/mon.
- no_carrier 4y agoInteresting stats, thanks!
- eande 4y agoNice and you have some interesting packages I have not touched. I just bought the course to help out :-) and lets see if I can run it on my Raspberry PI here cluster at home I recently built up.
- predmijat 4y agoThanks! GitLab will be a tough one for R-Pi :) There’s this one: https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/settings/rpi.html https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/settings/rpi.html but I was told it doesn’t help that much (haven’t tried it myself) Oh, and you will need a public IP.
- Glench 4y agohttps://extensionpay.com https://extensionpay.com — A really simple way for browser extension developers to take payments in their extensions. I made it to use in my own extensions since it's a pain in the butt to take payments in browser extensions. It has an open source library that works across all browsers and allows for one-time or subscription payments. Since 2021 developers have made over $125k with ExtensionPay which makes me happy :)
- bhargav 4y agoGreat way to solve a problem! For those that may be curious. Author said devs using Extension Pay have made $125k in 2021. They charge 5% on transactions which translates to $6250, roughly $520 per month. Perfect candidate for this thread.
- robofanatic 4y agoSo cool!
- readonthegoapp 4y agoi've def thought of using this before, but couldn't quite figure out if i trusted it. so far, nope! i appreciate that the site looks clean/barebones, but the logo is _so_ barebones -- just text -- that i thought... oh, this is just unsupported, someone thought of doing it, good idea, but then it didn't make any money, so they bailed, no harm no foul, wonder if someone else will do it b/c it's really needed. i've had various extensions over the years that i wanted to build out, or pay someone else to build out, but there was no way to recoup my investment. maybe i'll give it another look.
- jerrygoyal 4y agoI've been using extensionpay for one of my extensions and have no complaints so far. https://gourav.io/notion-boost https://gourav.io/notion-boost
- yoble 4y agoI've been loving that extension, thanks for the good work!
- mateuszbuda 4y agoScraping Fish - a web scraping API powered by custom-build, ethical, mobile proxy pool: https://scrapingfish.com/ https://scrapingfish.com/
- tomcam 4y agoLooks like great service. If I may ask, what do you mean by ethical?
- kyleee 4y agoMaybe not served by botnets/malware/adware?
- mateuszbuda 4y agoIt means that our IPs are ethically sourced. You can read more here: https://scrapingfish.com/how-ips-for-web-scraping-are-sourced https://scrapingfish.com/how-ips-for-web-scraping-are-source...
- tomcam 4y agoThank you! Fascinating. Love your thoughtfulness. Also more predictable.
- enraged_camel 4y agoI'm one of the cofounders of PriceTable. [1] It has been a side project since 2018 or so. About a year and a half ago I posted about it on HN [2] and back then our revenue was $2,500/mo. We recently passed the $6,000/mo. At this point we have a few very happy customers who make up the bulk of our revenue. We have been trying to grow more, but our challenge is that we haven't been able to figure out a cost-effective way of reaching potential customers. We target the landscaping market, and most landscaping companies are either too small, or they don't have tech-savvy owners/staff who are motivated to learn and leverage a software solution effectively in order to grow their sales. Phone and email outreach haven't worked well. If anyone has experience in this market or similar, please drop me a line! ege@pricetable.io [1] - https://pricetable.io https://pricetable.io [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26855726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26855726
- eps 4y agoThe question was about one's personal side projects.
- mattmanser 4y agoRead his show hn link, it is a side project.
- enraged_camel 4y agoThanks. Updated the post to be more clear. :)
- thomaslangston 4y agoThere are some YouTube channels that specialize in landscaping. I could see digitally and entrepreneurially minded landscaping professionals being a good part of their audience. Might be worth sponsoring a video or two.
- quadrature 4y ago>We target the landscaping market, and most landscaping companies are either too small, or they don't have tech-savvy owners/staff who are motivated to learn and leverage a software solution effectively in order to grow their sales This is interesting, I don't know anything about your business but I feel like it might be worth having a landing page that is focused on landscaping. I don't really understand what the business does or how it can be helpful to a landscaping company.
- valryon 4y agoI make videogames for a living: - Flipon (https://flipon.net https://flipon.net) an arcade puzzle/match-3 inspired by Tetris attack on PC mobiles and switch - Steredenn (https://Steredenn.pixelnest.io https://Steredenn.pixelnest.io) a roguelike shoot them up, pc, iOS, switch. I’ve been lucky to have an extra income with those two games for a few year.
- entelechy0 4y agoHey man, I bought Steredenn on the PS4 like 5 years ago and it was one of the best shootemups I've ever played. I haven't beaten it yet but was considering picking it up again for the Switch. Thank you for making it. I am working on my own game and games like yours are an inspiration for me to keep going with it. If I can ask a question, was there an initial design decision to build the game in Unity, or was that just your preferred tool out of experience? (asking because I am fool-heartedly going in pure libsdl2 and C++) Thanks again!
- valryon 4y agoThanks a lot <3 Unity was chosen because I am a C# guy coming from XNA, and Monogame was super rough at that time. Also it allowed us to really focus on the gameplay and not too much and the engine, while having access to all consoles. We still had a lot of headaches with it… Now I’m considering switching to something but I’m glad I had that experience on a mainstream and fully documented engine. Best of luck with your game, if you need advices send me an email via the Steredenn or Flipon contact address.
- nmfisher 4y agoThe second link seems to be down (when I googled, seems the HTTP version works fine, the HTTPS one is broken).
- jerryu 4y agoERD Lab - Database design tool built for developers https://www.erdlab.io https://www.erdlab.io Login as guest directly at https://app.erdlab.io https://app.erdlab.io No registration required to test. No email confirmation needed to register either if you choose to do so. Here is a 1 minute video of ERDLab in action. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VaBRPAtX08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VaBRPAtX08
- jerryu 4y agoWould love some feedback from HN community. Any thoughts?
- snake117 4y agoI didn't have enough time to dive into all the information or test out the editor. However, one bit of feedback that I have is just wondering what sets ERD Lab apart from other existing solutions? What motivated you to make your own DB design tool? If a prospective customer was either weighing the pros/cons between several DB design tools or already using another tool, what would compel them to decide on using ERD Lab? Maybe consider including a table highlighting the differences in features/pricing from other similar tools on the homepage (after the list of features) or a separate page entirely highlighting this information? For example, Render.com has a page specifically highlighting how their product is a better PaaS solution compared to Heroku [0]. This is just a thought. Personally, I'm not familiar enough with DB design editors to know what I should be looking for in such a tool. Moreover, about ~1 year ago, I was looking for a solution that solved this exact problem, so I am genuinely curious about this. Finally, just wanted to mention that while I don't need this at the moment, I did bookmark it to consider using in the future. Otherwise, great job, and I wish you the best! [0] - https://render.com/render-vs-heroku-comparison https://render.com/render-vs-heroku-comparison
- lucasmerlin 4y agoI made collaborative painting apps, https://hellopaint.io https://hellopaint.io and https://malmal.io https://malmal.io (there might be some slight NSFW content). In the best months I made 800€+ in ad revenue from malmal but currently it's a lot less. I think there's potential to make a lot more though, although I'd like to stop showing ads and switch to some more predictable income model. I do have a patreon but it only brings in ~100€ per month. I could promote it more though.
- pixelpoet 4y agoAwesome work! Saw some furry porn being drawn live on the front page, that was kind of funny :"D
- andyish 4y agoI built https://team-today.com https://team-today.com in a lock down as a way for my remote team to see when people are on holiday, going to site, or wfh. Since then it’s grown to include other features like desk booking and PTO approvals. But at it’s all been built around the core concept of seeing when your colleagues are working and where they’re planning on working from.
- mrichman 4y agoNice! What's your tech stack and how long did it take to build your MVP? Can you share your current revenue and expenses?
- andyish 4y agoReact, Java, AWS. Took us about 6 weeks to build the initial MVP, each feature we add took a similar amount of time to implement, we typically iterate over things three times. We build something, make it better, then make it perfect. So far so good.
- mrichman 4y agoCool. EC2, ECS, EKS, Serverless?
- robofanatic 4y agoGreat job! How did you convince users to trust an unknown site to store their personal data? This is one the things holding me back from implementing my side project ideas. I personally know that I won’t misuse users data but how do I really convince users.
- lofaszvanitt 4y agoPeople just don't care about their data...
- robofanatic 4y ago
- adithyasrin 4y agohttps://www.arbeitnow.com https://www.arbeitnow.com - a job board for Germany. It's been up for two years this January and it keeps me going! Revenue and traffic fluctuate a lot, does not really matter to me as long as people keep finding jobs through it so I'll keep working on it as long as I can.
- loyski 4y agoNice. Did you code it yourself?
- adithyasrin 4y agoyep!
- tedmcory77 4y agoI have a weird set of skills that I've grown from just doing things that are interesting and fun. https://www.munkle.it https://www.munkle.it - Think Anki, but optimized for speed, and will be focused on content creators. First sale this month (>$500_ from manual outreach to a big content creator Individual purchases will be turned on eventually, but we're not focused on that right now. This is a labor of love as through college and 20+ professional certifications I wanted something faster and easier than what was available. https://www.skullsplitterdice.com https://www.skullsplitterdice.com - I spend around 4 hours a week on this, but I used to do this full time. Currently it runs high four to low five figures 100% organically, but can easily do more if I ran ads. It 100% wouldn't be worth my time if I weren't using it to teach my kids things like customer service, product design, how to make content valuable to people so you get search traffic, single piece flow, etc. It's also cool because I can geek out on a new thing in the area and apply it to something to see if I make any money on it or just have fun making art. Things I've done in the past is includes making a book for the game these are used for, a "choose your own adventure" style Facebook messenger adventure linked from hidden inserts in products, and working with visual and voice over artists to make stories around different products. My latest was using midjourney to create a character that I animated to say a script talking about a product. Did I make money from that? No, was I entertained? Heck yes.
- holgersindbaek 4y agoI started a solitaire website 5+ years ago. When Covid hit, I ended up finally putting ads on it. Since then it's been growing steadily and about half a year back I made it my full-time gig. You can check out the game here: https://online-solitaire.com/ https://online-solitaire.com/. I wrote a post about my journey on Indie Hackers if someone is curious about it: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-a-simple-solitaire-game-to-10k-mrr-28e352c308 https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-a-simple-solita....
- jrvarela56 4y agoThe UX is very slick congrats! Love the hints, auto-play, click-to-move, everything is well thought-out.
- kennyalami 4y agoLooks super good indeed! Great story on IH. Did you start having only the game at first above the fold and then added more content below? How did it evolve over time? It looks like SEO drives most of your traffic.
- holgersindbaek 4y agoI improved the game and functionality over time. The game has always been above the fold, but the content was greatly revise this past year. I've been doing a lot of optimizations on the game, but nothing big. After all, it's limited how much innovation can be done a game like that .
- hamburglar 4y agoGood site. I just gave you at least an hour of ad views because I can't ever stop until I win one. :) Note that on chrome on linux, the ads get quite heavy and slow everything down after 5 or so games, and I have to reload the page or it's too unresponsive to play.
- holgersindbaek 4y agoThanks for the feedback. Optimizing the ads are on my todo-list.
- jerriep 4y agohttps://www.usecloudpress.com/ https://www.usecloudpress.com/ - Allows you to export content from Google Docs and Notion to Content Management Systems like WordPress, Webflow, Contentful, etc. I will export the content with the correct formatting, export images, and also handles other elements like tables, embeds, and more.
- willswire 4y agoBack in college (2016-2020), I used to work part-time for my university’s IT department. Most of my time was spent doing software development, but when I wasn’t busy working on a project, I helped work the help desk ticket queue. Believe it or not, our ticket queue did not have an auto refresh feature - and manually refreshing my dashboard webpage drove me crazy. As a die-hard macOS user, I’ve always used Safari as my primary browser, but unfortunately no auto-refresh web extensions were available on the App Store at the time. So I learned how to package web extensions for Safari and sell them on the App Store. Fast-forward to today, and I now have a collection of Web Extensions that net me ~$750 a month. Feel free to check out Simple Refresh for Safari here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simple-refresh-for-safari/id1492951704 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simple-refresh-for-safari/id14...
- eximius 4y agohttps://hoppy.network/ https://hoppy.network/ Basically WireGuard as a service but we give a dedicated IPv4 and IPv6 with Reverse DNS.
- jasonb05 4y agoPython concurrency has a super bad wrap (the gil) and I'm trying to help out even change opinions (e.g. work with it rather than throw it all out). I write short focused how-to ebooks that on the different Python concurrency APIs in stdlib. Content marketing leads to email marketing to one-off sales. Doing about $2K/mo. Might expand into third party libs this year. https://SuperFastPython.com https://SuperFastPython.com
- bhargav 4y agoGreat to hear. How did you "get the word out" about your content? Was it mostly inbound?
- jasonb05 4y agoGood SEO for the tutorials which rank well in the SERPs. Competition was mostly blog spam compared to my hand-crafted human (me) written stuff. Took ~6 months to escape the sandbox. Then massive "complete guide" posts on major topics like "multiprocessing" "threading" and "asyncio" that rank well in the SERPs and did okay to well on /r/python.
- scrlk 4y agoJust wanted to say thanks for your work on SuperFastPython - it helped me out a bunch at work recently (new to Python concurrency) - and also for your previous work at MachineLearningMastery (helped me out with a university project a few years back).
- jasonb05 4y agoYou're very welcome, I'm happy to hear that! Thank you for the kind words and support. Message/email me any time if you ever have any questions, I'm eager to help.
- jventura 4y agoCongratulations for your side project! Probably quite similar to you, I'm also a PhD guy that uses Python for quite some time, and I've been lately interested in starting a side project like yours (courses, tutorials, books, etc.). I see that you are mostly focused in processes/threads/etc., which is quite an interesting niche (for me, I teach those things in a Operating Systems class). It seems rather risky to pursue a niche as it may be too small! Do you have any tips, like why did you decide to focus on multiprocessing/multithreading? Also, any other Python niches that you think are valuable to focus (for courses, ebooks and tutorials like you do)? I'm really interested in establishing myself an an online "educator", but I still do not know which kind of topics I should aim to. If I focus on introductory topics there's too much competition. If I focus on a too small niche, I may have no "spectators". Any tips would be greatly welcomed! :)
- monero-xmr 4y agoI make far more than $500 per month in cryptocurrency staking and various types of lending pools. For the curious it’s like a hobby that can make you a lot of money.
- leonhard 4y agoCan you elaborate? Which currencies and how do the lending pools work?
- monero-xmr 4y agoFor example Synthetix SNX is paying like 30% right now https://staking.synthetix.io/ https://staking.synthetix.io/ Then take the minted SUSD and put into Curve for 8% https://optimism.curve.fi/factory/0 https://optimism.curve.fi/factory/0 Then take the OP minted and put into XTK pool for another 60% https://app.xtokenterminal.io/mining/pools/optimism/0xDa62d109064138c14D45085b6e49568E1C0B4e23 https://app.xtokenterminal.io/mining/pools/optimism/0xDa62d1... This in general is known as yield farming
- NotYourLawyer 4y agoAnd it's risk-free!!
- monero-xmr 4y agoThis is the land of software engineers, risk takers, and gray areas. Never put in what you can't lose, and diversify. You aren't getting these insane APYs risk-free - this is kooki stuff. But if you want to dabble, it's quite interesting.
- nanidin 4y agoHow does the $500 compare to your assets at risk in these schemes? I.e. are you picking up pennies in front of a steamroller?
- 4y ago
- alin23 4y agoI’ve mentioned before on HN how I make around ~$7k from my Lunar app nowadays [0] but controlling monitors is a larger niche and the app was developed and perfected over the course of 5 years. This time I’d like to show you the progress of my last year’s project, https://lowtechguys.com https://lowtechguys.com. It’s a small macOS app studio and here are my App Store sales for the last month: https://f.alinpanaitiu.com/gjxBpg/Image.png https://f.alinpanaitiu.com/gjxBpg/Image.png You can see trends in red because December is a slow month for app sales, not sure why exactly. But even with just 4 small macOS apps I manage to make ~1k/month with close to zero maintenance. I have a lot more ideas for small non expensive apps that could add to the revenue but less and less time for them. Right now I have to rebuild an old wooden house and finally move out of my rented apartment. I’m grateful to have a source of income on the side that can support me this year so I can pause tech while I do field work. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33620955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33620955
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gcanyon 4y agoI have an idea for rcmd -- if possible, it would be great to be able to assign a right-cmd-key to <whatever Safari tab is running mail.google.com> -- or open one if none is. Likewise for calendar.google.com and probably others. I'd pay an extra few dollars for that feature, as I'm forever opening <yet another mail.google.com tab> because my tab hygiene is lacking. I read your piece on window switching -- would AppleScript work? This works: tell application "Safari" tell item 4 of windows set the current tab to item 3 of the tabs set the index to 1 end tell activate end tell
- alin23 4y agoHey that’s a useful feature indeed, and it can already be added by the user with rcmd’s Window Actions which support AppleScript. I actually have done that myself already for Firefox. I could maybe try to implement the main part of the “find and switch to the tab if it exists” so that users can simply assign the URL. Thanks for reminding about this use case!
- sent-hil 4y agohttps://toolwallhq.com https://toolwallhq.com - Digital organizer for your physical tools. I used to have a hard time keeping my shop organized, so I jumped in and came up with a solution that has worked for me so far and perhaps might help you. The idea is you use the digital artboard to visualize your tools on the wall and then buy the holders to mount it on your workshop wall. There seems to be a growing overlap between programming and woodworking for whatever reason. I could go on about the similarities, but after hours of staring at the screen, we sometimes want to make things with our hands and woodworking helps me do that. If you're looking to get started, I can't recommend visiting a local makerspace enough. PS also on Etsy if that's your thing: https://www.etsy.com/shop/ToolWall https://www.etsy.com/shop/ToolWall
- bradly 4y agoToolWall looks really cool. Great job.
- bluSCALE4 4y agoThis is awesome. Had I not already invested in a system, I'd of totally gone all in on this.
- tomaskafka 4y agoVery nice! I must admit that at first I thought it's a tool wall designer SAAS (and that $60 for ability to add a drill holder to a plan is pretty steep), it took me a bit of scrolling and reading to understand you are actually selling a physical tool wall elements :). Also, the subtitle "Use the world's first and only digital artboard to organize your physical tools." - I'd probably put the physical tool wall elements first, and maybe only mention a digital planner next. Or maybe have an image on top?
- sent-hil 4y agoThose are very good suggestions, thank you! I sell more of the physical holders than the digital ones anyway, so perhaps the artboard and digital files aren't as helpful as I thought they were.
- palsecam 4y agohttps://FreeSolitaire.win https://FreeSolitaire.win brings around $500/mo (advertising revenue). I started making this PWA in 2016 and I’ve been slowly adding to it over time. I intend it to stay minimal & lightweight. No framework, etc. Fun fact: because it is so lightweight, it was included in the Moya app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nu.bi.moya https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nu.bi.moya), a popular messaging app in South Africa that is “data-free” for users (it does reverse-billing). Now half the players are South Africans! Feedback is welcome ;-)
- kennyalami 4y agoCool that the ads are at the end of the game. Do you get people to donate as well? How did you start getting traffic to your game and how is it getting traffic nowadays? Apart from the South African app.
- palsecam 4y agoYeah I don’t want the ads to be intrusive. I don’t get many donations, no. In my experience, people will donate for a tool deemed useful (for business, etc.) but not much to something recreative. As for traffic: word of mouth, mainly. Posted it on Reddit back then, things like that. It grew organically from that. Also, although it’s far from being on top results on SERP (search engine result pages), some people do find it that way.
- mysterydip 4y agoNice work. Is there a way to share games? Like "I just finished #3181 in 96 moves, can you do better?"
- palsecam 4y agoThanks :-) Well yes, the very feature you described does exist! Sharing your result is available on game over, assuming you didn’t “cheat” (use hints) too much. It looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/kMouvTL.png https://i.imgur.com/kMouvTL.png That uses the navigator.share() API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/share https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/s...
- karakanb 4y agohttps://getblast.io/ https://getblast.io/ - it is an end-to-end data platform: data ingestion + dbt-like transformations + data quality checks + data catalog, all through a single interface. It is making ~$4k/month currently. Around the beginning of 2022, I was having a conversation with a few friends that are working at small mobile gaming companies, and they were having a lot of trouble building their data pipelines, especially because of the infrastructure part. I took on the challenge to start hosting some Airflow instances for them to get a bit more familiar with their problems, and over time some patterns started to emerge: - they were writing custom scripts for mundane tasks. - they had to write Python code, even though all they needed was scheduling a few SQL tasks. - they needed some basic transformation abilities, but didn't have the budget to pay dbt-cloud $50/month (the minimum plan is $100 these days, I believe). - they were losing track of where their data is going through and where it is coming from. A friend of mine and I have started building some abstractions on top of Airflow to help these businesses: no need to write any Python, automatically deploying their changes to their instances after a git push, building data quality checks, materializing their assets based on their SQL "SELECT" queries, etc. Over time, we have gathered these features into a shared UI, and moved some of these companies piece by piece. We keep improving the platform, and we are onboarding new companies for the past 2 months throughout our closed beta period. There are still many rough edges that we are trying to cover, but in the end, it was a great feeling when people were actually using the prouct quite often in spite of all these problems. We are pretty excited about where this can go. If anyone is interested in taking part in the beta program, the first 6 months is free during the beta period. Feel free to fill out the form on the website and I'll reach out personally.
- anonu 4y agoSo you're building Snowflake. I love the idea... Lots of room to scale this to a unicorn.
- karakanb 4y agoNot sure if this is a snarky comment or not, but we are not building Snowflake, instead we are building the layer that goes on top of it. There are many businesses out there that have their data scattered across different platforms / tools / technologies, and our goal is to provide them visibility into their data, and let them get to the insights as quickly as possible without focusing on the infra. Our vision here is to bring the same set of abilities to the business even if some of their data lives in Snowflake, some in BigQuery, some in S3 and some in an Excel sheet somewhere. We are working to get to a point where working with all of these will become an easy task, without sacrificing governance, quality, speed or cost.
- antonhag 4y agoI have kept building on https://blunders.io https://blunders.io - a profiling tool for the JVM. Will soon no longer be a side project though, looking forward to spending more time on it!
- yboris 4y agoCreated Video Hub App (that will be 5 years old next month). I sell it for $5 and $3.50 of each purchase goes to the cost-effective charity Against Malaria Foundation (See GiveWell.org for details). It was averaging around 100 purchases per month, though it's lower over the last year as I've not had time to release new updates (moving to another state is challenging). Thanks to the sale of this software I've donated an additional $16,000 to my favorite charity (I give 10% of my income there regularly - see Giving What We Can). https://videohubapp.com/ https://videohubapp.com/ - Think of it like YouTube for videos on your computer. Browse, search, and organize your videos MIT Open Source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
- dang 4y agoAsk HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421 - Dec 2022 (70 comments) Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942558 - Dec 2022 (211 comments) Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32806068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32806068 - Sept 2022 (91 comments) Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31764696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31764696 - June 2022 (265 comments) Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152 - Jan 2022 (613 comments) Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095 - Dec 2021 (841 comments) Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2020 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167 - Oct 2020 (76 comments) Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438930 - June 2020 (461 comments) Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2019 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863 - Sept 2019 (61 comments) Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306 - Aug 2018 (151 comments) Ask HN: Sideprojects/passive income businesses with little or no own coding? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806208 - Nov 2017 (50 comments) Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804 - Sept 2017 (239 comments) Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14752196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14752196 - July 2017 (27 comments) Ask HN: How do you make money from your side projects? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13980274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13980274 - March 2017 (106 comments) Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514093 - Jan 2017 (130 comments) Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12670731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12670731 - Oct 2016 (245 comments) Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12145137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12145137 - July 2016 (58 comments) Ask HN: What revenue generating side projects do full-time employees here have? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12123055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12123055 - July 2016 (117 comments) Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11214497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11214497 - March 2016 (44 comments) Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9508528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9508528 - May 2015 (31 comments) Ask HN: How to get started with paying side projects? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867035 - Jan 2015 (39 comments) Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects - what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6884552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6884552 - Dec 2013 (163 comments) Ask HN: Are you working on any side projects that make "small/passive" income? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358111 - March 2011 (167 comments)
- cleverfoo 4y agohttps://www.scanii.com https://www.scanii.com a content arbitration/malware API service. It has been profitable for over 10+ years now with customers around the globe. Building it was one of the best decisions I made in my life since it enabled me to make hard decisions at work that were not skewed by the fear of losing my job and not being able to provide for my family - I'm in engineering/product leadership. But, do not be fooled, this also means I've had two jobs (albeit of unequal urgency) and that, obviously, equates to long work hours.
- tehsauce 4y agoShortly after stable diffusion was released, I realized that an enormous number of non-ML people were suddenly interested in using an ML model. However, APIs are insanely expensive and not very developer friendly, and running it yourself required pretty fancy hardware. The goal was to make the technology absolutely as accessible as possible. So I launched https://computerender.com https://computerender.com with the simplest API possible - just a URL that points to an image like: https://api.computerender.com/generate/cupcake-of-the-sky.jpg https://api.computerender.com/generate/cupcake-of-the-sky.jp... I monitor the prices on vast.ai and runpod to find the cheapest GPUs and run the service nearly at cost (as little as $0.0001 per image). No subscriptions, only pay for what you use. Recently hit 700k images generated, and am excited to continue expanding the service.
- Y_Y 4y agohttps://api.computerender.com/generate/fart-compiler.jpg https://api.computerender.com/generate/fart-compiler.jpg Is it supposed to work even without an API key?
- tehsauce 4y agoYeah! For demo and testing purposes. Feel free to play around/build toy apps with it. There is a small global rate limit for all unauthenticated users though so don't rely on it :)
- nimchimpsky 4y ago[dead]
- dopeboy 4y agoExcellent idea. Love the ease of use of your "API".
- Ephil012 4y agoOut of curiosity, how do you handle traffic surges? Do you just have to manually add more servers? Or did you write a script to auto purchases more servers on vast.ai since there isn't any autoscaling feature there (that I am aware of)
- guybedo 4y agohttps://routineshub.com https://routineshub.com - a place to create, schedule and share your everyday routines. I've been a long time self development enthusiast, regularly trying out new health/mediation/workout routines and wanted a tool to keep track of my routines, help me schedule everything automatically and where i could share my routines and explore other users routines too.
- tomdekan 4y agoI make >€1K / month with https://amazing.photos https://amazing.photos I generate amazing profile photos for users using dream booth and a custom stable diffusion model. Our quality of output is the best that I’ve seen compared to competitors. My secret to much higher quality: I rank images, and then only show the best images. All other competitors that I’ve seen dump all the images to the user. Instead, my process means that the output images are consistently very high quality.
- mogulchris 4y agoI have 2 projects right now, combined doing over $500+/mo :) They are pretty different target market wise/price point and that has been pretty cool to see the differences in marketing/churn/adoption/etc... 1. Mogul - Privacy focused Personal CRM (https://mogulnetworking.com/ https://mogulnetworking.com/) (~$650/mo, ~6 years old) 2. Ellie - A better day planner (https://ellieplanner.com/ https://ellieplanner.com/) (~$160/mo, ~1 year old) Honestly no game plan, I just enjoy working on both and plan on iterating for a long long time (10+ years) and just slowly growing. I am literally addicted to working on these apps. I tweet about these projects extensively on Twitter btw if anyone is curious to see what work went into both of these (https://twitter.com/raroque https://twitter.com/raroque)
- redtriumph 4y agoI read about Mogul. It solves some of my problems related to keeping in touch with friends. During Covid, I got into more VC calls with friends to stay in touch. Once Covid lockdowns ended, I wanted a system that would remind me of touch basing with XYZ friend, based on last sync up date. Over several years, my image as a good friend has tarnished since I didn't keep my side of bargain in enforcing good relationships. With older age, it's bit harder to make new friends. The least I can do is, reinforce older ones.
- mogulchris 4y agoI resonate a lot with what you are saying. Although Mogul was originally built for professional networking, I personally use it to maintain personal relationships (it’s amazing to see how impactful it is when you can recall super small details about someone/a convo with a friend). Thanks for sharing this.
- jay-barronville 4y agoThis comment is so so so relatable. I’ve lost a number of great friendships/relationships in my life because of how much I suck at keeping in touch with folks. I can’t even blame those folks for considering me a bad friend because of this. What does make me sad though is when some of them think I do this on purpose or that I don’t care about them. While I excel at many things, frankly, keeping in touch with family and friends is one of those social skills I’m not so great at. I constantly feel misunderstood on this point, but I get it, no one owes me understanding, especially if they perceive me to be a bad friend. On the bright side, this has made me much slower to judge others when they don’t behave the way I’d prefer. Anyway, I digress . . . I just wanted to let you know I understand your perspective here.
- nwienert 4y agoTamagui is now making 2,500 a month purely from GitHub Sponsors. Pretty amazing. It’s fully OSS, just developed by me. Somewhat non-replicable as it’s just been a passion project in some for or another for 7 years now, reborn several times. For the moment Sponsors don’t really get much, but there’s some in development features that will make that much more valuable. Goal is to double it at least this year!
- _bqdo 4y agoI run [link redacted] as a web based saas. It is a relatively lightweight web app that tracks food in your pantry. It gives you an estimate on how long you could survive on it. It is intended as a tool for preppers but also works for anyone with OCD about their pantry contents. Business has picked some this last year. I'm working on expanding the product data, general usability, and some actual marketing.
- giegs 4y agoCool idea. As someone who sees value in having a buffer of food for many reasons, I've signed up and will inventory the stuff in my basement. I hope you don't mind a few unsolicited thoughts. Expiration dates wasn't an obvious feature from the website. I was about to ask about it here until I watched the video. Maybe put some screenshots from the app onto the page with a more verbose feature list so it's more easily scannable? If the app could break down calories by food group or macronutrient it would help keep inventory balanced. Would you mind emailing me? I may have encountered a bug. giegs.hn@proton.me
- chown 4y agoI was pretty depressed at work a while ago and to take my mind off of the negative energy, I made a desktop app for provisioning bring your own servers, creating sites, and deploying web apps. It was free. Fast forward a few years and a coworker joined me and we made a cloud version of it. It is doing ok but yet pay for two of us full time. However, we looooove working on it and helping customers esp. with their deployment issues. It is seriously more fun than our jobs that pay handsomely. https://cleavr.io https://cleavr.io
- Xixi 4y agohttps://tomotcha.com/ https://tomotcha.com/ — a Japanese tea subscription service. Although we had to suspend our activities for the better part of 2022, we've been able to resume in January 2023. Logistic is brutal in what is starting to look like a post globalization world: shipping fees are through the roof, delays are long, regulation (especially in the EU) is ever more stringent. COVID-19 pretty much killed bemmu's Candy Japan (https://www.candyjapan.com https://www.candyjapan.com), and EU regulation just killed Candysan (https://candysan.com https://candysan.com): they threw in the towel one week ago. And yet we keep going... gross margin is around $800~$1000 per month.
- gverrilla 4y agoFunnily, "tomo chá" means "I drink tea" in portuguese.
- pks016 4y agoInteresting. I am curious about the tea (as a customer). I usually try different kinds of tea. The pricing looks steep. Is it always green tea every month?
- Xixi 4y agoIt is indeed mostly green tea, although different kind of green teas: "standard" green teas (from Sencha to Gyokuro), teas made of twigs (Karigane), roasted green teas (Hojichas), green tea with rice (Genmaicha), green tea flavored with yuzu (Yuzu Ryokucha), etc. Sometimes we throw in something completely different, like a Zaracha, a Sobacha, or even a Japanese black tea. This is the 2023 lineup so far: Sencha (January), Yuzu Ryokucha (February), Karigane (March), Genmaicha (April). But while there definitely is variety, yes, you need to really like green tea to fully enjoy the subscription...
- mlboss 4y agoI released https://aipaintr.com https://aipaintr.com based on the open source stable diffusion model. The webapp allows users to train custom dreambooth model and generate images using it. Dreambooth is a powerful algorithm which can generate images of any concept you train it on. Users use it to generate images of person, e-commerce products, different artistic styles etc. It has two main parts: 1. Webapp for individuals 2. API for other app developers https://app.aipaintr.com/api/v1/docs/ https://app.aipaintr.com/api/v1/docs/ Its been 4 months since launch and it has gotten low 10s of thousand in revenue. Competition is fierce. Lot of apps launched in this domain.
- nargella 4y agoI acquired a side hustle in late 2022. It’s doing $1k/month. I’ve been enjoying it so far. Basic queues using http as input and http output. https://zeplo.io https://zeplo.io
- yesthisiswes 4y agoI’d love to know more about what went into finding and acquiring this tool. Looks pretty cool.
- nargella 4y agoI used https://acquire.com/ https://acquire.com/ in this case. I looked at maybe 80 companies just from the surface. Then inquired about 15-20 of them for more details. After about a week of thinking, zeplo wouldn’t leave my mind. There was one other close contender but zeplo was more present in my mind and had better metrics. From there it was letter of intent, due diligence, asset agreement, escrow, and asset transfer. Hopefully this helps.
- yesthisiswes 4y agoThat is very helpful thanks. Did microacquire just rebrand to acquire? That helps a lot I acquired a small project on microns but with less structure around the buying process. Good luck with zeplo!
- OJFord 4y agoIt's a bit depressing to realise that that first $500 MRR is both very hard to achieve (well done everyone showing and telling!) and not enough to quit the day job. (In the countries most of us here live in, and without having savings and deciding that with the push of working on it full time for a few months it can be a lot more, at least.)
- j_4 4y agoMy tiny game has been bringing in at least $5k a month since I released on mobile, it's fully passive now. https://j4nw.com/pawnbarian https://j4nw.com/pawnbarian I feel doubly blessed that it worked out with no ads or micropayment sinks of any sort, just a demo and a single $5 purchase.
- spicyusername 4y agoWhat stack / engine did you use to develop it?
- j_4 4y agoUnity.
- sssilver 4y agoHow do people discover it?
- j_4 4y agoI never did any paid advertising. At this point it's roughly 80% organic algorithmic platform trafic and 20% word-of-mouth. The latter includes outside user-driven platforms, like MiniReview and TapTap. I used to do guerilla marketting a bunch, mostly on Reddit, certainly a lot before and around release. I got some ok youtuber and streamer coverage around this time. Ended up releasing on Steam with 10k wishlists, which was enough to provide an initial visibility boost. Soon before releasing on mobile, I participated in the Humble Stand with Ukraine Bundle, where I distributed 200k+ free keys for charity. Marketing value wasn't what was on my mind at the time, but I know quite a lot of people who picked up the bundle tried out the game, thought "neat but I'd prefer to play this on mobile", and then helped to drive a lot of initial traffic and get picked up by the algo. I also got featured a bunch in both Google's an Apple's curated game collections.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Fermat963 4y agoTwitter Archive Eraser (https://delete.tweets.app https://delete.tweets.app) makes ~3K USD per month. I don't do any active work on it any longer for the past 2 years or so, other than the small bug fixes/when Twitter changes the archive format. Bracing for a shutdown to the API soon anyway. Past submissions on how it used to bring in $7k per month and a few technical details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439606 (June 2020), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29998723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29998723 (Jan 2022).
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 4y agoConsider sentiment analysis in your Premium package? Sort by negative tweets, bad jokes, the things that woke mobs always get people fired for.
- anonu 4y agoAmazing. And your pricing appears not to be recurring. There's a lot of demand for this
- welanes 4y agoI'm making https://simplescraper.io https://simplescraper.io - a no-code web scraping tool. Saved up, quit my job and went all in...on a todo app. Needless to say that idea didn't go far, but it taught me how to code. When I was close to broke I pivoted to this product and finally gained traction and now it's doing well enough to be my main source of income. I'm kind of following the "1000 true fans" ethos that pops up here occasionally. There's a dedicated group of customers who benefit from the ease and speed of the tool and they're like my product team. I check in with them often, make sure they're happy and build features for them. Turns out, what they value other people value too, and so the product slowly but surely grows. Learning to code was definitely one of the best decisions I've made. Felt like gaining wings.
- sideproject 4y agoI'm continuing with my project Newsy https://newsy.co https://newsy.co A modern take on domain parking. I have ~50 un-used domains. I wanted to make some good use out of them instead of just parking them. So I built Newsy to convert them into automated content aggregators.
- Ecio78 4y agoFYI you have a couple of sites on your home page (Vodio and Previously Live) not working.
- rexreed 4y agoHow much does the typical parked domain make? What is the biggest revenue generator? Newsy seems interesting but is it really working well for your 50 domains? Is it anything more than RSS aggregator with autoposting? What else do you do to help with the passive income streams?
- loyski 4y agoI started a tech blog as a side project 5 years ago. Now it's making $3,000-5,000 a month. It currently has around 600 articles. Display ads make the bulk of the income. Affiliate links are a distant second.
- kennethologist 4y agoThat's great to hear. Link?
- Havoc 4y agoWhich ads provider are you using?
- loyski 4y agoEzoic
- samlu 4y agowould love to see the blog!
- swyx 4y agohttps://learninpublic.org https://learninpublic.org - i did a livestream with stripe about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-UxzCtpB74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-UxzCtpB74 its 3 years old and still making 2-3k a month but i've gone from happy to guilty - i havent had any time to make updates to the book but i really want to and every single month that goes by that I don't I lose credibility. I'll still do it but its so hard to go back to something when I have a day job and my interests keep shifting.
- sgc 4y agoCuriosity question for those answering here. How many unique visitors a month do you have to get your income? I am working on monetizing via a site that is growing in terms of visitors, and wonder what scale I will need to reach to start having things make sense.
- 88stacks 4y agoI have been working on getting stable diffusion and image generation working for non developers. It has been really awesome to help non technical people. I'm still trying to figure out how to grow it larger, but its slow and steady progress. This is the site: https://88stacks.com/ https://88stacks.com/
- pornel 4y agohttps://gif.ski https://gif.ski — a modern GIF encoder that beats everything else on quality. I'm dual-licensing it. It may be surprising that people would buy a codec for a 34-year-old format, but GIF is a popular medium, and I've created a solid implementation (in Rust, of course). I really like the licensing model. Unlike a SaaS, it doesn't require me to stay up all night worrying about uptime. The types of companies that buy the licenses know what they're doing.
- singhrac 4y agoSuper curious about this - would you be willing to share the order of magnitude of money this brings in? I like your website a lot, though the use of serif text is a bit jarring on the web in this context.
- eps 4y agoGood stuff. Ran into gifksi few times and even though I know how to do what it does, the demo gifs never fail to impress!
- soheilpro 4y agohttps://pikaso.me https://pikaso.me and https://volt.fm https://volt.fm
- graderjs 4y agoIn 2018 I started making a browser interface you could put in an iframe to let you create web scraping scripts from any device. The web scraping part is still a WIP, but the remote browser interface became a product in its own right that pays for everything else. I fleshed it out during the pandemic and responded to customer requests to improve things like streaming and audio. I grew it well beyond Ramen possible without ever spending a dollar on advertising or marketing. Now that the feature set is pretty stable I want to focus on marketing for this year. Sales are up 224% since last year but I think I can do much better: I still never snagged those big government or huge enterprise customers that I really want. I just think that would be cool. If you don’t know what remote browser isolation is, it’s basically a security product to keep browser. Content executing on a remote computer away from your local device and Netwerk but turns out people use it for a lot more than that: an embedded multiplayer browser for live streaming educational lessons; a human in the loop intervention console to investigate and unstick stalled web automation tasks; as well as the more traditional security or reverse proxy use cases. A large part of my nontraditional marketing came through my source available GitHub version, which is now languishing well behind the paid pro version in terms of features and quality: https://GitHub.com/dosyago/BrowserBox https://GitHub.com/dosyago/BrowserBox
- wonderfuly 4y agoI built https://chatgpt4google.com https://chatgpt4google.com which is a browser extension that enhance search engines with ChatGPT. It got over 500k users in less than two months. I started doing some monetization experiment recently, and already got $500+ now.
- smy20011 4y agoHow, could you elaborate?
- wonderfuly 4y agoDonation + Advertisement
- topicseed 4y agoOuch that domain is calling for a cease and desist due to trademark/copyright infringement
- wonderfuly 4y agoGood point!
- Ocha 4y agoI have 2 projects. One is already out in the wild getting used and abused by some. It is an SMTP server that can be used for testing and also simulating errors and delays. https://mailsnag.com https://mailsnag.com
- lethologica 4y agoI started selling NSFW stickers on Etsy. Originally it was a way for me to have a creative outlet but turns out a lot of people want this kind of product. Making just about $500 a month from it now. It’s great because all I have to do is draw the original art once and then I can just repeatedly print it and cut it out. It’s also a very relaxing hobby for me. I enjoy sending out envelopes with hand written notes. It’s refreshing from my usual 9-5 of spreadsheets.
- BonoboIO 4y agoGot a link for us?
- c7b 4y agoHow do you do the sticker printing? I recently helped make some stickers for marketing for a friend's business, and I was surprised how much they cost to order in small batches (which is annoying, because we wanted to make miniseries with different designs, but now we just ordered a larger batch of one design instead). Sounds like you use your own hardware, do you have any experience with different models?
- lethologica 4y agoI have the simplest set up you could imagine. I just use a Brother MFC-J4440DW printer, the same printer I’ve used for years to just print text documents and some glossy Kodak sticker paper. The printer was a couple hundred bucks and the paper is $10 for 10 sheets. I charge anywhere from $15 to $25 per sticker and usually get 4 stickers per sheet of paper. I then cut them out by hand using an xact-o knife. I’ve looked into automating the cutting process using something like. Brother Scan’n’Cut or a Cricut but I honestly enjoy the manual process of cutting stickers so I’m sticking to it (pun intended!) There was a little bit of trial and error to get the level of printing quality I finally ended up with but now that the settings are dialed in it’s a very easy process. Drawing the art is the hardest bit. I just use an iPad Pro with the pencil and Procreate for that
- boppo1 4y agoAre you printing & shipping them yourself? I considered selling stickers at one point but print costs under 500 was too high, plus the hourly requirements of doing my own pick& pack. I thought about hiring the neighbor kid, but casual hiring seems to get messy/illegal fast.
- dmundhra 4y agoLast year recruitment was a pain. This year, it's slightly better, still the process hasn't changed much. After spending an inordinate amount of time interviewing, I brainstormed and launched nitrohire.co last month after a few months of alpha usage. Nitrohire helps hiring managers get quick and useful information about candidates without any effort. Currently doing on and off in the vicinity of a grand a month.
- readonthegoapp 4y agoReferral automation saas? Makes sense.
- tech_jdc 4y agoDeveloped a few websites that I do monthly support and maintenance on. I’m averaging about $600.00 MRR which is down from the $1200.00 MRR I was making for a better part of last year. The beauty of it though is it only requires about 1-2 hours tops of my time each month though. Combining both some additional contract work with this MRR outside of my FT job I’m doing about $1500.00 to $2,000.00 month. Working on a few ways to increase this.
- tananaev 4y agoA niche open source project. It's a GPS tracking system. There are a lot of proprietary alternatives, but not a lot of open source ones. https://www.traccar.org/ https://www.traccar.org/ I'm making some money on SaaS and some on consultation and customization. In many cases people pay for something I can later include in the open source, which always feels nice.
- phil-martin 4y agoBeen chipping away at this as a side project for many years - Visual Project Planning and Scheduling. Draw on a whiteboard and it makes a levelled schedule for you. It has resources, equipment, and much easier to understand than MS Project. I have had a blast building it and it is hard to market - but the people that do stumble across and use it, the visual way of planning really resonates with them. https://www.gameplan.global/ https://www.gameplan.global/
- potamic 4y agoWow, that looks less like a side project with such enterprise customers. What's the background to this, may I ask? Typically such tools tend to get built when faced with problems on the ground and tend to be specific to some niche. But as a side project, how do you know who your customers are, what they want and how they run their business?
- phil-martin 4y agoI guess it comes down to how one defines side project? I interpret it to mean side-hustle And you just asked the big questions - we have only successfully managed to find customers by word of mouth. We get the occasional person who stumbled across GamePlan from a Google search, but that is becoming more and more rare I built it with a old colleague part time. We were trying to solve our own frustrations with planning, and just kept adding more things. It’s been an enormous amount of fun to do.
- ravivooda 4y agoI built Tax Loss Harvesting Tool for different kinds of portfolios. Despite still being in the early stages, I'm gaining some interesting traction so far! I was badly hit in the recent market downturn because I had invested in leveraged ETFs without a deep understanding of how they function. But I still have faith in securities in the ETFs so I decided to see if it was possible to swap securities in order to harvest losses without triggering the Wash Sale. And, Lo and Behold, for 2330 ETFs, I found 1.2+M possible combinations. Link: https://bit.ly/3H9Gkpb https://bit.ly/3H9Gkpb Follow on twitter for twice-a-day insights about High Overlap Beta ETFS: https://twitter.com/optimizetaxes https://twitter.com/optimizetaxes
- ravivooda 4y agoAnd HackerNews broke my Custom Portfolio Analyzer module! LOL :) Fixing it.
- bt3 4y agoMind speaking to the monetization component of your app? It's not readily visible from your links. I ask as I've built a similar tool that supports portfolio rebalancing and helps generally understand portfolio health. I found the niche of "DIY" investors willing to pay for software somewhere between fully automated and hands-off is small and although I've never pushed towards aggressive monitization, it always seemed like most self-service investors are conditioned to only pay for data (which I suppose in part your application presents).
- ravivooda 4y agoMonetization is predominantly through affiliate referrals to CPAs and Tax Advisors; I ran Facebook ads and I had a good number of people reach out to me via messaging. am also exploring possible monetization opportunities through integrating APIs with big brands and roboadvisors.
- bradly 4y agoAfter about a year of learning I made my first profit last month woodworking of $550. https://www.burnboxwoodworking.com https://www.burnboxwoodworking.com
- syngrog66 4y agoI'm amused when this is asked here. If you answer you're begging to get a surge in copycats, and by folks who might execute better and bigger, with more resources backing them.
- bithacker23 4y agoI created http://www.bithacker.io http://www.bithacker.io during the pandemic. It’s a live interviewing platform but for RTL design candidates. It supports Verilog simulation with an interactive waveform viewer as well. We’re also working on enabling synthesis soon. So far we’re getting some early traction and excited to grow it more in 2023 :)
- trungdq88 4y agoI built a screenshot app for macOS and made ~$3k/mo from it :) https://xnapper.com https://xnapper.com People like the app for its ability to turn a normal boring screenshot into a beautiful one that they can share on social media instantly.
- booi 4y agoBrilliant
- trungdq88 4y agothanks!
- nicbou 4y agoThis is an excellent landing page. They rarely explain what a product does this well and this fast. How to you keep those mini videos up to date?
- trungdq88 4y agoThank you! It's a pain in the ass, I have to re-record the videos every time. But I think it's worth it. Usually I only update the videos if the app UI get too much different than the current version, which happens once every few months.
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- tomschlick 4y agohttps://zonewatcher.com https://zonewatcher.com is an audit trail and changelog for your DNS records. It began in 2016 out of some frustration I was having with consulting clients who would modify their DNS records incorrectly, breaking their email and/or website until I was able to get them back online. It was frustrating digging through emails or old technical documents to find the original values before they had made their changes. I wanted a tool that could automatically backup those records to make reverting easy while at the same time notifying me of any changes so issues could be proactively fixed before their business was impacted. So with that, ZoneWatcher was born. Depending on your plan, we check multiple times per hour and take a snapshot of each zone's records. When a change happens, we record the change and send you a notification so you can review and have the necessary data to revert if it was in error. Making close to $500/mo now since a major relaunch / feature update back in December with a decent stream of new users every month. No major marketing done yet other than just word of mouth and the occasional reddit post on /r/msp's vendor threads.
- cyounkins 4y agoI set up an account with the public DNS provider and it doesn't appear to support multiple entries per record type. For example, time.cloudflare.com has two A records but the UI only shows the one.
- tomschlick 4y agoYeah that would definitely be a bug if that’s the case. Thanks for the report, I’ll put it on my todo list to look into over the next day or so.
- louisstow 4y agoI built SecAlerts https://secalerts.co https://secalerts.co a few years ago. Fairly straight forward SaaS product to send email alerts on new vulnerabilities matched to customer software.
- depomoty 4y agoI'm working part-time on my project https://chartbrew.com https://chartbrew.com It's an open-source data visualization and reporting platform that I started in 2018, I abandoned in 2019, then resumed working on it more seriously in 2020. Currently, the platform is doing $1,138 in MRR from then managed hosting service and has made over $11k in revenue so far. It's been growing steadily in the last few months but going through a rough Dec-Jan period at the moment. You can see the open page at https://chartbrew.com/open https://chartbrew.com/open Onwards and great job everyone at working to make side projects work for you!
- raphaelj 4y agoThat's awesome. I've been using similar product previously, but these were either prohibitively expensive, or self-hosted. Keeping the link for later, thanks :)
- depomoty 4y agoGreat to hear that :) Don't hesitate to get in touch if you need help with the setup. There will be links to get in touch all over the place when you sign up haha
- longnguyen 4y agoI 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 $620 MRR today (Jan 23) [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
- lurquer 4y agoI earn a bit north of $5@@ monthly writing and selling puzzle books on Amazon. (I suppose it’s relevant as, at its core, the books are made via one-off programs I write for each kind of puzzle. In addition to the LaTeX crap that turns the output of the program into a nicely formatted puzzle.)
- jasondigitized 4y agoWould love to check on of your books out!
- MrVandemar 4y agoHey that's so cool. I have a relative into puzzle books. Are the print or digital?
- lurquer 4y agoI do print. Just the self-published POD stuff via Amazon’s KDP. Cryptograms, wordsearch, fill-a-pix, nonograms, and the like. Sone types (like cryptograms) are simple generate using a program. Others, though, are pretty damn tricky… it’s a puzzle in and of itself figuring out how to make the puzzle. Currently working on some Logic Grid puzzles… the program I’m writing to make them is a real pain-in-the-ass. But, unlike most here, programming is a hobby so I throughly enjoy wasting time in the challenge.
- goenning 4y agoI have two projects, combined doing ~€1500/mo https://fider.io https://fider.io - an open source alternative to UserVoice. I started this one 6 years ago to learn Go and React. I’ve seen thousands of instances out there being self hosted, so I started a cloud hosting to those who don’t want to manage it themselves. https://aptakube.com https://aptakube.com - Desktop Client for Kubernetes. This is very recent, launch was 2 weeks ago, so it’s only starting to get some traction now. I’m leaving my job to go full time indie hacker now, wish me luck!
- piyush_soni 4y agoGood luck! How do you make money from an Open Source alternative to UserVoice? Is it only through cloud hosting, or you get paid when they self-host as well?
- goenning 4y agoIt's mostly through cloud hosting, but there's a bit of recurring donations as well https://opencollective.com/fider https://opencollective.com/fider I'm also thinking of introducing a "Support Package" for those who self-host and need a bit of help.
- akkad33 4y agoDo you use a cross platform desktop app development tool? Which one?
- goenning 4y agoYeah, I’m using https://tauri.app/ https://tauri.app/ The DX is a thousand times better than Electron. The ecosystem is not as rich yet, but it’s getting there. The Discord community is very active and passionate about the project as well. I’m also having a great time learning Rust!
- shahahmed 4y agodo you use twitter or share your progress/journey anywhere we can follow? would love to see how these grow and learn along the way
- rebeccaskinner 4y agoI wrote a book: https://www.pragprog.com/titles/rshaskell/effective-haskell/ https://www.pragprog.com/titles/rshaskell/effective-haskell/ I’ll admit that going in I talked to a few other authors and the common wisdom is that you don’t write a book for the money. I wrote the book because I thought there was room for a more practical industry focused Haskell book that didn’t assume any particular math or FP background, and showed readers how to apply the ideas in the context of real world problems. It’s been very well received so far as it’s been in beta and I made a decent amount on royalties in 2022. Going into 2023 I’m hopeful that I’ll see that continue as the book has its final release, and I’m planning to follow up with some additional materials like videos and interactive training that I hope will get more people excited about Haskell and will generate enough revenue to keep me motivated during the times when it all feels like a lot of extra work.
- stayallive 4y agoI had so many side projects I made a side project to centralize accounts and payments. It’s now called Chief Tools (https://chief.app https://chief.app) and contains a certificate monitoring tool (https://cert.chief.app https://cert.chief.app), a zero-downtime deployment tool for PHP (https://deploy.chief.app https://deploy.chief.app), a DigitalOcean billing monitor (https://bill.do https://bill.do; which I acquired) and a URL shortener (https://tny.app https://tny.app). All of these have no marketing and terrible landing pages since they are mostly built for me (although I like to think they are pretty ploished) but hit $500+ a few weeks ago. It took 5-10 years but interesting to see either way (payments were only available about a year ago though, before it was all free). The funny thing (to me) is that the URL shortener is doing the big bucks since apparently there is still a place for new ones in the market which I did not expect, I mostly built it to be able to easily redirect a hostname.
- magepsycho 4y agoThank you for starting this thread and providing us with the opportunity to share. I have developed several plugins for Magento 2, an e-commerce platform. Some of them can be found at https://www.magepsycho.com/extensions/magento-2.html https://www.magepsycho.com/extensions/magento-2.html.
- slavba 4y agoFew years back I built an RSS to email service, still making ~$600/mo from it. https://www.feed2mail.com https://www.feed2mail.com. Later added an option to follow social feeds (Twitter, mostly) and connected the service to a Telegram bot that brings additional $100/mo. https://t.me/Feed2Telegram_bot https://t.me/Feed2Telegram_bot
- thelifeofrishi 4y agobeing a designer, i share my experiments in UI and design on Twitter and some other sites. to present designs, i used to beautify them in Figma. this was a routine process where i would open Figma, create a gradient background for my design, add shadows, rounded corners etc. and export the image in correct size, so if i’m to share it on Dribbble I would export it in Dribbble size, for Twitter the size is different this whole process used to take like 20 to 30 minutes easily. so i built an app https://pika.style https://pika.style to do all of that for me quickly it started as a hobby, open-source and free to use project which i was building in public on my twitter(@thelifeofrishi). in a matter of time i started getting DMs on Twitter for feature requests i remember a founder of a company wanted to have a certain feature, we discussed that and in the end i asked whether he would be happy paying for that feature, to which he said yes. i added the requested feature in 2 days and got back to him, he instantly purchased annual subscription and started using Pika. that was in February, 2022 fast forward to today, almost an year later, Pika now has 150+ paid users and makes $1,500+ in revenue each month. i’ve turned it from just a screenshot beautifying tool to a tool to design very customisable mockups and images. you can use it to generate images for your website, app, code, tweet etc. and to keep it more accessible, it has a free tier which doesn’t even require registration to use i’ve also added a plan just for students and teachers so they can use Pika’s paid fearures at a very discounted subscription fee if you’re a programmer, marketer, designer, no coder or work in the tech industry, i think you’ll definitely find Pika useful :)
- rozenmd 4y agoIn early 2018, GraphQL was new and hot tech, and I worked for a startup that kept breaking their GraphQL API. One day a field might be a string, the next day it might be an object. I got mad, so I built a service that snapshot tested the API response every 60 seconds, and sent a Slack alert whenever it failed. I called it OnlineOrNot. I spent a year trying to sell that MVP to startups around Sydney, but there were maybe a handful of other companies using GraphQL at that time, and they weren't willing to take a chance on a part-time business solving this problem. Fast-forward 2 years, and several other failed projects, I decide to rebuild it from scratch, but this time as a general uptime monitoring service. The URL is https://onlineornot.com https://onlineornot.com, I've been iteratively working on it for around 2 hours per workday since early 2020 (I ruthlessly cut features down into 2 hour blocks, and use feature flags to deploy safely). These days it's more of a status page, with built-in uptime monitoring (and has integrations to other monitors). --- Folks tend to ask what makes OnlineOrNot special, trying to figure out what the moat is - it's 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: - a business model that won't suddenly fail (I'm full-time employed so that I can work on OnlineOrNot, I'm not going to shut it down for not making enough money) - docs written in clear English that load fast, and are up to date - 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
- kimchidude 4y agoCool idea for a thread. I’m still building https://www.ieltsielts.com/ https://www.ieltsielts.com/ which offers original resources and coaching for an English language proficiency exam called the IELTS. It makes over $500 USD per month.
- bwb 4y agoI am building a book discovery website. I want to introduce more serendipity into the book discovery and exploration process -> https://shepherd.com/ https://shepherd.com/ Working to add genres and age-groups now :) Been super fun! I've asked 7,000 authors to share 5 books around a topic, theme, and mood. :)
- kiru_io 4y agoI have a collection of side-projects, all combined are making in the ballpark of $500/month: https://mathlegame.com/ https://mathlegame.com/ mostly via ads) - made this one when wordle got popular ( https://reversle.net/ https://reversle.net/ (mostly via ads) - made a few weeks after mathle https://slashdreamer.com/ https://slashdreamer.com/ (subscription) - wanted to do something with stable diffusion - this was the most useful one for me (since I am using Notion a lot) Working on https://ogtester.com/ https://ogtester.com/ now.
- teeeeeegz 4y agoI'm working on a timer app, and is now up to ~$2k/mo! - https://focusedwork.app https://focusedwork.app It's taught me a lot about the non-technical side of building a product. Very fulfilling from a personal growth perspective.
- fm2606 4y agoFirst let me say congratulations on the side project that makes $$. You are doing something that some people, me :-( , can't seem to figure out (or have too much paralysis by analysis, me again) So my question is genuine and not meant to take away from what you have created or accomplished: How are products like this still making money when there are tons of alternatives and some of them free?
- teeeeeegz 4y agoThank you! Try and build something that scratches an itch of yours, and launch ASAP so you can begin gathering feedback. That way, you avoid overthinking! And that's a great question! There are heaps of great alternatives, but they didn't solve my needs. So I built my own take on a great timer, and it turns out other people were looking for the same thing! PS: Check out my last couple pieces here https://michaeltigas.substack.com https://michaeltigas.substack.com if interested! :)
- dSebastien 4y agoI've created the Obsidian Starter Kit [1] and make ~1K per month with it. I don't think it will last for a very long time, but I enjoy sharing my approach and helping others spare some time. [1]: https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-kit https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-kit
- centaar 4y agoI have one project running since two years, doing around $16k/mo - https://roshade.com/ https://roshade.com/ It started as an useful app for myself. Releasing it publicly was an afterthought, and it has been six months since I introduced a subscription model. I learned about marketing and working on this project contradicted my assumptions as a software engineer - making it educational.
- hydershykh 4y agoStarted trading back in 2020 and realized how bad I was it, and how much I needed a strict system to eliminate emotions! Had a degree in CS so spent a few months reading up on quant related stuff and realized how negligent I and other retail traders were, and how much data driven insights could help (ran over a million backtests the last 2 years)! Built a simple analytics tool to show dozens of correlations & analytics between a wide variety of financial data points, and bootstrapped it to $120k/month! We grew from 0 to 54k users in two years, all organic. Has completely changed my life. tradytics.com
- BMorearty 4y agoSo, 13 months ago [0] you said on HN that you were making $120k/month with 3000 users. How come you're still making the same amount but with 18x more users than you had more than a year ago? What's the disconnect? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29671480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29671480
- hydershykh 4y agoFair comment. Retention during downtrends is pretty hard, so although we've gained a good amount of new users, old ones have left too. 3000 were paid users at that time, the total users were about 35k. We now have 54k total and about 3500 paid!
- rrmdp 4y agoI built a curated list of job boards with multiple filters to help job seekers find jobs (listing around 1200 job offers) Also helps job boards founders to get traffic as the website last month got 48K unique sessions. https://JobBoardSearch.com https://JobBoardSearch.com On average since included paid options it made $1.3K/mo
- BenoitP 4y agohttp://explicable.ai/ http://explicable.ai/ Not 500+$/month by any means, but 100$/month. I got 2 subscribers who are older clients that I had to convince -hurray for hallway testing- and I hope to get more soon. Having an actual pricing page and payment funnel might help haha. It's a dead-simple data exploration and prediction micro-saas, but with a lot of nice pixels and state-of the art AI/ML explainability algorithms. Users come with their prepared excel files, upload them, and they get an 'explanation' as to the relations their data has within itself. It can also work as a prediction service. For example: It can help a marketer know which prospects are likely to buy (prediction), but when said marketer has too actually talk to these prospects we can help with tailoring the message with the right knowledge (this one will buy because he/she buys like clockwork, whereas this one will buy because we saw them several times on our webpages)
- dvno42 4y ago1). Started a small network automation product over Covid. The software brings AAA, secrets management (pki and passwords ontop of Vault), and config management under one platform. We let admins create programmatic runbooks to make changes to infrastructure using web forms. We have integrations to most major manufacturers to lookup warranty info for all devices. We are prototyping using NLP/OpenAI for users to create runbooks. "E.g.; I need a web form to deploy TLS certificates to all my Dell iDRACS" (but this is a ways off from being safe for anything but the lab). 2). We started another side project recently that manage large deployments of a popular OTDR manufacturer. System reports damage to dark fiber which alerts with with exact location info displayed on a map. Notifications are sent to staff via Slack/Email with photos and driving directions. We made a portal to manage all OTDRs from one interface. Both of these are side projects but we will likely go full time on these projects soon. 1). www.realmhelm.com 2). No name yet but we will probably brand it under the realmhelm product above.
- raphaelj 4y agoNot $500/month yet, but I'm already having a few paying customers: https://noisycamp.com/ https://noisycamp.com/ NoisyCamp is a platform for music studios to manage their reservations. It also helps musicians to find place to rehearse.
- Jemaclus 4y agoYou should sync up with this guy! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34490043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34490043
- dhruvkar 4y agohttps://www.fundedlist.com https://www.fundedlist.com Making about 1200/month right now. It's a weekly list of companies that were funded in the last 7 days with founder/ceo contact information. I use a mix of scraping and manual validation to make the list and currently doing cold emails to sell. I'm not truly a developer or a marketer, so learning a lot while attempting to make this work. It seems to be valuable to different types of agencies -- recruiting, design, web etc.
- coreymaass 4y agomexicantrain.online - My pandemic project continues to bop along nicely. Donations are generous. It makes people happy. Social Link Pages (sociallinkpages.com) - a WordPress plugin to add link-in-bio pages to a WordPress install.
- tonixx 4y ago[dead]
- raymondmoay 4y agoBuilt lifeofdiscipline.com, a habit tracker inspired by GitHub’s contribution calendar. Took me a year to break the 500/mo mark.
- ferat 4y agoTwo years ago I made https://vemto.app https://vemto.app, a GUI code generation tool for PHP/Laravel developers. At the time, my wife and I were going through a difficult process, in which we urgently needed to move out of an apartment. The tool sold well enough for us to put a down payment on a house, and has continued to sell for those two years, and now I'm working on a second, more powerful version that not only generates code, but can connect to existing projects to edit them. There is a video of the second version at this link: https://twitter.com/Tiago_Ferat/status/1591450807433826304 https://twitter.com/Tiago_Ferat/status/1591450807433826304
- Eatcats 4y agoI have 2 rehearsal rooms for musicians, with good acoustics and some basic music equipment. There are 10 bands sharing the rooms and paying monthly giving me 500$+ with ease. I will do more as the market for such places in my city is not saturated yet.
- Jemaclus 4y agoYou should sync up with this guy! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34487948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34487948
- jayra 4y agoI make $3k-$5k a month from my newsletter - https://www.startups.fyi https://www.startups.fyi - have just under 8K subscribers, mostly startup founders and indie hackers. Related - Startups.fyi has hundreds of examples of profitable online businesses and side-projects, how much $$$ they earn and more info.
- zukerpie 4y agoHow do you monetize it? Does the profit highly depend on the audience that this newsletter is for?
- calltrak 4y ago[dead]
- davidclark22 4y agoMy app, https://easyteegolf.com/ https://easyteegolf.com/ is a niche SaaS that I built in my free time during COVID. MRR varies because I don't charge customers during the winter, but it made about $6K last year.
- thedangler 4y agoI do payment processing on the side and help friends, family, and referrals with getting the best deal and use the best tech, kind of like a broker. I'm still blown away how many businesses in the US still make people tip on a receipt. It's ridiculous. I can do deals in Canada and USA. Shameless plug, but if you are brick and mortar store or restaurant / bar. Contact me. I'm launched closed beta for a very very niche product to help gateways get payments into quickbooks as sale receipts. No need to create invoice and mark it as paid. I'll be making a post about it when it works with most payment gateways. And I have basic pricing. I make roughly $2500 - $5000 a month.
- BMorearty 4y agoWhat's ridiculous about tipping on a receipt?
- pc86 4y agoThis guy doesn't make any money off of it ;)
- thedangler 4y agoFraud for one. If I print a 7 and you read it as an 8 or change it to what ever you want with that pen. I get charged more and there really isn't I can do about it. Why not just have tipping on the machine you are paying with anyways. The only country that has tipping on paper still is USA that has modern payment services. And please I make money on the transaction not the fact that you tip on paper. Also, why do your server have to take my card to go swipe it behind some counter still? Portable devices exist. Use them. I do not want to let you handle my card. Current situation. Server comes to your table and I ask for the bill. Go back to the POS, get the bill. Come back, I want to pay with card. Either they have a portable machine or they don't. If they don't They take my card then bring it back with a tip slip too. Now imaging a server comes to your table with a payment device that can handle everything from the above. No more going to POS system to cash out. Need bill split, done, need pay at the table done. Need to calculate change, done for you. Saves so much time and at the end of shifts you don't have to consolidate receipts. Just make sure cash float is correct and you're done. As a customer in the US recently. Restaurants and bars still didn't accept tap and pin. Tap speeds up lines and table turn over so much that you wouldn't understand until you implement it. Rant over.
- ru6xul6 4y ago2 years ago I made a code visualization tool called Codemap, https://codemap.app https://codemap.app, which visualizes function calls in any codebase as a graph, to give the software engineers a high-level understanding of their code. Last year I noticed its user sign-ups are ticking up quickly, acquiring hundreds of users in a few months, so I decided to redesign the app and add more language supports (now supporting Typescript, Javsacript, Python, Ruby, and Go. It's a combination of a desktop app (to parse your local codebase) and a web app (to visualize the graph). Users pay a small price to unlock the full graph, otherwise the graph is capped at 100 nodes, which allows users to fully try out the product before committing to pay for it.
- jbirer 4y agoI developed a meme token launchpad (reflections, taxes, anti rug pull measures and stuff) and had it purchased by another startup.
- ribtoks 4y agoI made a cross platform desktop app for people who upload their photos and videos to microstock agencies called Xpiks (https://xpiksapp.com https://xpiksapp.com). Initially I was selling one-off forever licenses but last year started moving them to subscription. So far progress is steady and I keep working on it. The app is made in C++/Qt and I’m looking for people who might be interested to join.
- ardalann 4y agoI started making Browse AI (https://browse.ai https://browse.ai) about 3 years ago. Quit my job soon after and focused on it full-time when I had savings enough for 2 years of my living expenses. The next 1.5 years were intense. I learned to have better and more conversations with users (we'd crash and burn if I hadn't come across a book called The Mom Test) and we went through several positioning pivots. As I was running out of money, I launched on ProductHunt and got decent initial traction and a group of angels who found us there and invested ~$300k. Then we started making revenue... Then, after almost 3 years of work, we reached $100k ARR... Then we went from $100k to $200k ARR in less than 3 months! We've signed up ~20,000 new users in January so far and I'm projecting $300k ARR in a month! We're growing ARR 30-50% month over month. I have a team now who are doing a ton of the hard work. I still have to spend time on every part of the business, but I've been trying to focus my energy on certain parts that I'm better at. The hardest challenge for me throughout these years has been figuring out if I should persist and work harder on the same path, or switch to something else or pivot. I went through a pre-accelerator program and an accelerator and I had some mentors through them. Some were super helpful and gave me the confidence I needed to keep going. In general, specially if you're a solo (technical) founder like me, I recommend having mentors that have been through what you're going through and talking to them at least once a month. It's too easy to focus on the wrong things and waste the precious early capital and time. I know I would be 2 years ahead if I had sought mentorship early on. I'd be happy to chat if you're working on a self-service SaaS. Message me on LinkedIn or Twitter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ardalann/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ardalann/ https://twitter.com/ardalanme https://twitter.com/ardalanme
- spiffytech 4y agoYou might enjoy Deploy Empathy, which is considered the customer interview 102 to The Mom Test's 101.
- siglave 4y agoOne and a half years ago, I started Rocket Crew a Space industry job board All other job sites in this industry were old and quite hard to use and most of the time there were not a lot of New space companies. So since I love Space I decided to build an alternative. To get started, I built a web scraper for more than 50 different space companies, including NASA, Space X, JPL etc. And the traffic grew month after month Now it has become one of the popular job boards in this niche and starts to rank first on google for keywords like "space jobs"! https://rocketcrew.space/ https://rocketcrew.space/
- mickel 4y agoI have a couple of projects live, each doing $500+/mo: - https://www.partly.ai https://www.partly.ai - AI profile picture/art generator. - https://tayl.app https://tayl.app - convert all text to audio and listen as a podcast. - https://www.podopi.com https://www.podopi.com - similar to the one above, but marketed towards website owners.
- vadimdne 4y agoI’m a big fan of quotes. Asked my wife (Swift dev) to create iOS app with my favorite quotes, so I can see them as notifications and widgets. The app makes ~$1000/mo. https://apps.apple.com/app/id1586101858 https://apps.apple.com/app/id1586101858
- joelrunyon 4y agoI've got a few Free blog setup service to help people star their own blog → https://startablog.com https://startablog.com Meal Planning web app & service → https://ultimatemealplans.com https://ultimatemealplans.com Mobility training and exercises → https://movewellapp.com https://movewellapp.com