32 ms·

Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

• jmduke 4y ago
  I run Buttondown (buttondown.email) full-time now, but until this past year it was a side project for me alongside my day job as an IC (later EM). It took...around two and a half years, I think, to hit $2k/mo MRR. It was definitely not the stereotypical "launch → iterate a bit → boom, PMF" story that you often hear, which was fine because it was 'just' a side project and I didn't have to worry about running out of money or time.
  • dstick 4y ago
    Looks nice! Congrats :)
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    I never hear that story. But I hear the 2 year one alot. The advantage of getting older is time is at warp speed so 2 years is nothing ha ha!
    • martin_a 4y ago
      > The advantage of getting older is time is at warp speed so 2 years is nothing ha ha! To be honest: Realising that time is going by so fast really scared me this week. Being mid-30s I really need to get my shit together, soon... :-D
      • hammyhavoc 4y ago
        Spoiler: nobody ever gets their shit together
        • jmduke 4y ago
          There's a quote from Sarah Manguso's _300 Arguments_ that I love: > With great and solemn portent, my teacher announced she would tell us something that her teacher had told her, and that her teacher’s teacher had told him, and so on, back to Yeats: The thing to remember is that no one ever finds out that you don’t know what you’re doing.
          • sharemywin 4y ago
            That's was the most profound lesson I've heard in a long time. it touches on some many things.
          • sammyo 4y ago
            Well unless you tell them, don't do that;-) ..sigh and don't ask me how I know.
        • gorjusborg 4y ago
          but try anyway
        • martin_a 4y ago
          Not sure that really helps. :-D
          • hammyhavoc 4y ago
            I'll give you a small anecdote. A few months ago, my uncle died. To the outside world, he was very well put together, eloquent, and admired by all who knew him. Worked on physics books as a proofreader for a major publisher his whole life and was celebrated for his work. He was a recluse, but very sociable and an excellent go-between for any socially difficult situation, a real keeper of the peace. When I went to clear his home, I discovered that his personal space was the opposite of all the above. Dirty, messy, not well organized. Of all the people I ever expected that from, it wasn't him, but he did an excellent job of appearing to have his shit together. I shared this with a few others who had late family members that had done very well in their respective field, and the sentiment was the same: nobody ever really seems to get their shit together, they just get better at presenting the parts of themselves that matter. He was a very happy soul.
      • yamtaddle 4y ago
        Coming up on 40. A quarter feels about as long as two weeks did when I was 10, I reckon. If this keeps going, each year will feel like a day by the time I'm 60 or so. [EDIT] Incidentally, I reject the "routine & boredom are what do it" thing. High school felt like it took forever and was far more regimented and regular and boring than my life is now.
        • quickthrower2 4y ago
          I think it is the brain’s compression algorithm that does it.
  • shreedx 4y ago
    Looks amazing, good job man :) I'm actually way more motivated by seeing a post like this where you specifically say it took effort and time to build something meaningful, than seeing "10k$ MRR in a week, no-code" crap that we get bombarded with lately. Keep up the good work!
  • tmountain 4y ago
    Really nice!
  • paulgb 4y ago
    Buttondown is great! It seems that being indie allows you to just ship a good product that does what it says on the box, instead of trying to squeeze every last bit of juice out by building a bloated product that is a jack of all trades but master of none.
• rubymamis 4y ago
  I'm the founder of the open-source and cross-platform note-taking app https://www.get-notes.com https://www.get-notes.com (written in Qt C++). I earn about $2000 a month from ads on the landing page (organic SEO), but very soon plan to add a subscription for pro features (while people could still compile it from source and get the full experience without paying, if they wish). I started the project 8 years ago to create a slick looking note-taking app for myself on Linux. Then I open-sourced and published it, and it just took off and got popular (more than 1.2 Million downloads). Took around 2 years to get a high rank on Google. Then it was just a matter of putting ads (which I don't like but my income relies on) and ever since it's been quite stable.
  • DaanDL 4y ago
    Wuut.. Never heard of this! It looks very slick, I searched and searched for a nice note taking app on Linux and eventually landed with NoteKit, but this looks better.
    • rubymamis 4y ago
      Thanks! Even more awesome features and improvements are coming soon (: We're on Github here btw: https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes
      • mkl 4y ago
        Do you plan to add syncing of notes between devices?
        • rubymamis 4y ago
          The main goal is to support working with arbitrary folder (currently, we store notes in a local databse), so it will be easier to sync using your existing cloud provider (eg, Dropbox, etc..) But maybe in the future will create our own paid syncing service, is that something you'll want?
• monsecchris 4y ago
  https://www.monoclesecurity.com https://www.monoclesecurity.com High performance AI video streaming server and clients for a variety of platforms. Took several years before the product was in an acceptable state to begin selling, it's been about 10 years since I began.
  • dicroce 4y ago
    Cool. I made one of these too. Open source though... github.com/dicroce/revere
• richrichardsson 4y ago
  If I got my side project to generate $2k/month it would no longer be my side project!
  • jb1991 4y ago
    In many places (most places), it would be hard for 2k/month be your full income.
    • lm28469 4y ago
      (?) That's higher than min wage (post taxes) in most western countries, for most small saas/web projects/apps with small operating costs that's plenty
      • hereonout2 4y ago
        Not many people would be able to give up their day job for a saas that has a revenue of slightly more than minimum wage.
    • OJFord 4y ago
      I think the point is it would probably be well worth spending more time on. Either tapering off employed work, or being underpaid/using savings for a little bit while you push to increase it. At least, that was my reaction too, and it seems echoed by many of the people sharing their ('no longer a side') projects.
    • tomxor 4y ago
      > In many places (most places) You might benefit from looking more broadly (friendly suggestion).
      • Name_Chawps 4y ago
        Your "friendly suggestion" is extremely rude.
        • 4y ago
• mateuszbuda 4y ago
  For https://scrapingfish.com/ https://scrapingfish.com/ it took us about 5-6 months from idea to $2k/month. It’s still not our main source of income. It was fun to build especially that it involved working with hardware.
  • danstewart_ 4y ago
    I've got no use for it now but damn this used to be such a pain point in an old job. Looks great!
  • kouteiheika 4y ago
    Just curious, so how exactly do you source your IPs? I clicked on the "How IPs for web scraping are sourced" page expecting an answer on how you do it, but it doesn't actually tell me that; it just tells me how they're not sourced. You said that "it involved working with hardware", so did you source your own mobile SIM cards in various countries, hook up your own phones to that and use those as proxies?
    • mateuszbuda 4y ago
      Good question. Here we explain, with a few simplifications, how we source our IPs: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scraping https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scrap...
      • uptown 4y ago
        Wouldn't this mean that you're bandwidth constrained by the data plan associated with the SIM from the mobile carrier?
        • mateuszbuda 4y ago
          Yes, but we have so many plans and actually many of them are unlimited. We also track data usage and can either add extra data package or a SIM card gets excluded from our proxy pool.
• pards 4y ago
  We AirBnB the spare bedroom in our basement and it brings in about $2k/month.
  • sec400 4y ago
    If in the US, major metro?
    • pards 4y ago
      That's a relevant question. We're in Toronto, Canada, so the revenue is also in CAD and is net of expenses and AirBnB fees. Even in USD, $2k/month has vastly different buying power depending on location. It doesn't go far in SF or NYC but would get you a lot more in rural locations or smaller cities. $2k/month CAD in Toronto is decent but still a long way from "ramen profitable".
  • HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
    I've thought about doing this from time to time. We have a horse farm and a "tiny home" type building out in the back, with a port-a-potty and views of horses and the sunrise could probably make a few thousand a month on AirBnB and pay for itself pretty quickly. But then we'd have to deal with people :-(
• pimterry 4y ago
  I run HTTP Toolkit (https://httptoolkit.com https://httptoolkit.com) which passed $2k a couple of years back. No longer a side project, as it's made enough money for me to work on it full time for a fair while now, but it certainly started that way, and it's still a one-man show (plus many wonderful open-source contributors). I suspect that'll be a common theme in answers here though: if you have a side project making $2k a month, in most of the world that's enough for you to go full-time and try to take it further. If you can make $2k/month on something working only part-time, you can definitely make a lot more if you focus on it. On your questions: HTTP Toolkit is a desktop app (plus a mobile app and other components for integrations) but it's an Electron app that effectively functions as a SaaS (with a freemium subscription model) that just happens to have a component that runs on your computer. And actually getting to $2k wasn't overnight at all - it took a couple of years of slow steady slog. A few inflection points that made a notable difference (releasing rewriting support & Android support particularly) but mostly it was a matter of "just keep pushing", trusting the trajectory would keep going, and steadily grinding upwards. It's great where it is now, but it's hard work - a solo business is not for the faint of heart!
  • nigma1337 4y ago
    I absolutely love how easy it was to capture requests through ADB with your tool, only solution i could find which just worked out of the box.
    • seri4l 4y ago
      Does it work for apps with pinned certs?
      • pimterry 4y ago
        Depends on the setup, but for the proper certificate pinning cases where it doesn't work automatically, I have a Frida walkthrough & script you can use to easily do this at https://httptoolkit.com/blog/frida-certificate-pinning/ https://httptoolkit.com/blog/frida-certificate-pinning/ and I'm working on fully automating that part within HTTP Toolkit too (more details: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/frida-mobile-interception-funding/ https://httptoolkit.com/blog/frida-mobile-interception-fundi...).
• vapidness_is 4y ago
  I run Afterplay (https://afterplay.io https://afterplay.io). It's a game emulation platform where you bring your own games. It took 18 months from first line of code to 2K. It's now my full time job :)
  • mysterydip 4y ago
    Clever way to offer gaming without copyright issues. Congrats!
    • vapidness_is 4y ago
      Thank you :)
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    I read that as afterpay at first. Was thinking why is a billionaire posting in this thread :-)
    • vapidness_is 4y ago
      This made laugh :) Thank you.
  • vyper91 4y ago
    this is such an awesome idea, i can't wait to check this out!
    • vapidness_is 4y ago
      Thank you. It's still very much a work in progress :)
  • Davertron 4y ago
    This looks super awesome! I just tried it in Chrome however, and after a minute of playing the game it just drops me back to the game library screen. Love the idea though!
• hugoroussel 4y ago
  GPT Gmail and GPT Workspace, using GPT in the google docs, slides, sheets and auto responder for Gmail. https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/gpt_for_gmail/802100925247 https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/gpt_for_gma... https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/gpt_for_docs_sheets_slides/451400884190 https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/gpt_for_doc... https://gpt.space https://gpt.space The best part is not even about the money but about having a lot of users, democratising GPT and saving a lot of human hours everyday!
  • capableweb 4y ago
    When did you launch? Seems like very good revenue if you launched recently and already reached 2000/month considering the low price and high cost of the OpenAI API. Edit: Your T&C says it was written in 2019, you can't possibly been running the project since then right? https://gpt.space/terms-of-service https://gpt.space/terms-of-service
    • asdffdsa 4y ago
      Don't trust any numbers here blindly sir. Without verification you don't know if any of them are marking $2k+
      • capableweb 4y ago
        Hence the additional questions :) Making $2k+ in just a month (GPT4 API access opened for invite-only) would mean a ton of users quickly, which is hard to believe.
        • cloudking 4y ago
          The apps have over 250k installs you can see on the Marketplace listings
• kouteiheika 4y ago
  I run a site for people learning Japanese (https://jpdb.io https://jpdb.io) as a side project. I'm currently at exactly ~$1996/month from Patreon donations. (It's not an aggressively monetized project.) I've been doing this for over 2 years now. You can take a look at my changelog to see most of the updates (at the beginning I did not maintain a changelog so it doesn't start exactly when I started the site): https://jpdb.io/changelog https://jpdb.io/changelog
  • kiru_io 4y ago
    Wow, this is great! Love the simplicity of the website (focused on the essentials, no fancy design). Do you share the number of visitors / regular users?
    • kouteiheika 4y ago
      A few thousand daily. Not everyone uses every feature though; some people only use the dictionary, some people use the SRS, some people look at my difficulty lists, some people look at my vocabulary lists, some people only upload their Anki decks to see which shows/books/etc. have the most known vocabulary, etc.
  • thangngoc89 4y ago
    Do you have any plans providing a Mandarin version of this?
    • kouteiheika 4y ago
      Maybe someday, but not at this point. I'd love to support other languages too, but at this point it isn't very feasible. I'm just a single man, and this is just a side project, so I simply don't have the resources to even do everything that I want to do with Japanese (and there's still so much more I want to add/improve!), never mind branching out into other languages.
      • thangngoc89 4y ago
• agotterer 4y ago
  A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business. So far we’ve hosted 12 dinners over the past year. Growing from out first meal with 13 friends to as many as 80 guests for this months meal. Our mailing list has over 400 people on it and we’ve sold out every event since our 4th. Sometimes we end up hosting multiple nights. It’s not a very scalable business as it exists today. For now is just a passion project that makes a few bucks, allows us meet interesting people, and provides the opportunity to discover new foods and restaurants.
  • StephenSmith 4y ago
    Very cool! Any advice for someone who would want to replicate this endeavor?
    • keiferski 4y ago
      Not the poster but I used to host potlucks on a semi-regular basis. No money involved but I imagine the skills are basically the same; inviting people, managing the incoming food, etc. I would probably start by hosting a potluck for 5-10 people and then scale up from there.
    • agotterer 4y ago
      I'm happy to share my experience and lessons, but its a bit too much to type. If you are serious about starting one feel free to shot me an email (address in my profile). What I will say is that I think the timing was right. My co-host and I lived in Manhattan pre-pandemic and regularly took advantage of the restaurant variety there. Our dinners are hosted on Long Island and our theory is that people who move from Manhattan to Long Island over the last 20 years started to expect higher quality food and a larger variety of ethnic options. Over the past decade or so the variety and quality of Long Island restaurants has greatly improved from what was here 25 years ago when I was growing up. Post pandemic we saw an appetite (pun intended) for people to just get out of the house, be around other people, and have an experience. Quite a few people who come to the dinners say that they keep coming back because their partner/family aren't adventurous eaters so they never get to try new foods or typically wouldn't order some of the things we put on the menu. We aren't going for a fear factor vibe, but we do try to get people out of their comfort zone. We have a large number of solo guests who enjoy meeting new people and sharing a like-minded experience. Initially the group skewed heavily towards males in their 30's, which was our friends. Today its a very diverse group of people.
• iambateman 4y ago
  Depending on your goals, have you considered freelancing? If your purpose is cash flow, freelancing can quickly generate $2000++ with much less risk than starting a SaaS. That’s not to say starting a SaaS is a bad idea…but if pure short-term cash production is your goal, I’d consider finding clients who trust you to pay you hourly on the side. FWIW, I’ve started 2 SaaS companies with a collective revenue of $0, and my side freelancing currently makes more than $2k/mo. Lastly…it’s very possible that you have lots of other goals other than cash, and if so, good luck with your SaaS! I started MoneyHabitsHQ.com and it was one of the most fun learning activities of my career, despite not producing revenue.
  • jameshush 4y ago
    I’ve tried freelancing a few times, I never manage to make it work. The clients I find all end up paying less than a “normal” job so I end up going back to that. I’m working as a Solutions Engineer now. Its basically freelancing without sourcing customers and a consistently big pay cheque every month. Any tips on starting freelancing?
    • iambateman 4y ago
      in my experience, the only thing that matters is who you know. Being connected to the right business folks seems to be the key.
  • tiborsaas 4y ago
    I was much more successful in creating a SaaS product, I've reached almost 3 digits of profits. But I still wouldn't suggest someone to do consulting because it's a different mindset. You can only earn money if you decide to work, while having a working SaaS project has great scaling potential, but I totally agree that it's far more riskier when you factor in opportunity costs.
    • detuur 4y ago
      >almost 3 digits of profits I hope this is a typo, because $99/mo is nice to have, but I'd honestly consider the SaaS I'm building a failure if it made less than 4 digits a month.
• colesantiago 4y ago
  Not really $2K/mo but I run a SaaS for pest control businesses that brings in $100K/mo and started this business during the pandemic.
  • caretak3r 4y ago
    Can you share your company's website?
  • pdksam 4y ago
    Is this an on demand platform like uber?
    • swah 4y ago
      You have a good idea here.. Even though I feel it already exists even on my local market.
      • Jemaclus 4y ago
        Don't let "already exists in my local market" stop you. Look at how many pizza places exist in your local market! In almost any market, there's room for competition, especially with an eye toward lifestyle business (as opposed to dominating a market).
  • jtha 4y ago
    Is it a platform to connect providers and customers? What's the business model?
  • nerdathlete 4y ago
    What geographic region?
  • xcubic 4y ago
    So it's a "business management platform", but for pest control businesses ?
• sph 4y ago
  $0 still, and haven't launched. But since I literally just deployed my new landing page for the Early Access, and looking to launch by the end of the month, I figure I might talk about it. I'm working on Bernard (https://bernard.app https://bernard.app), a link checker service for website owners. Since the job market is tight, I figured I might go all in into what I hope will become a profitable, lean, one-person business. Hoping to reach ramen profitability within the next 12 months.
• hackathonguy 4y ago
  We currently make about $3K per month with https://www.hiyodel.com https://www.hiyodel.com - ChatGPT-powered copywriting for Shopify stores. The Shopify ecosystem is a toughie and it's been a difficult road so far, but it's great having the "passive" income!
  • tianqi 4y ago
    I'm looking forward to learning more about why the shopify ecosystem is toughie? I had considered launching a data analytics system that we're using to monitor shopify site.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• darthcloud 4y ago
  I've build BlueRetro [1] an universal Bluetooth controller adapter for nearly all pre-USB gaming console. I made a gross income of around 3K a month last year out of Royalties on the soft for each device sold. It's Apache 2.0 software so people can do whatever they want. I started making money when I decided to list on the GitHub README the list of manufacturers/makers that where sponsoring the project. (Only one person at that time) Soon after the others offered to give royalty as well. I even got a Chinese company, notorious for selling "clone" of OSHW projects, to support the SW development as well via GitHub sponsor. I've been working on it for the last four years. I entertained the idea to make and sell the hardware myself. But in the end I learned that's it's not something I'm interested to get into. What I really like is working on the software. It naturally pivoted into a more community driven project where multiple makers are selling various variations of the HW. I wrote a retrospective last years [2]. [1] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro [2] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro/discussions/289 https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro/discussions/289
  • dom96 4y ago
    If it's Apache 2.0 how are you getting royalty payments from it?
    • darthcloud 4y ago
      People are nice? But most likely they want a good relationship with me in case they get problems. Also they benefits from being able to tell their customer they support the project.
      • dom96 4y ago
        Ahh, I see. So you are receiving donations. Royalties to me mean payments that are required not voluntary.
        • darthcloud 4y ago
          I consider donation what random user give me on patreon/gh sponsor/itch.io I talked with the makers or manufacturer and we reached an agreement. So to me (and them) it's royalties.
• monero-xmr 4y ago
  Yield farming crypto currency, make well over $2k per month. Some farms pay 50 to 70% interest
  • alostpuppy 4y ago
    Still?
    • monero-xmr 4y ago
      Plenty of places, check out https://app.velodrome.finance/ https://app.velodrome.finance/ for one
  • pcthrowaway 4y ago
    I found the high yields were always on shitcoins (where projects occasionally rug), or lost due to impermanent loss. I'd love to be able to find more than 10% consistently on something like USDC
    • monero-xmr 4y ago
      There are places to get > 10% on stables. But always the risk of rugs / hacks, you need to diversify. This is a crazy game, but if you are a software engineer it's a good side hustle / hobby to earn more money. I'm always mentally ready to lose 100%, it's about growing your stack and siphoning off some amount from the interest every week. I enjoy it
      • j0hnyl 4y ago
        Technically you can lose more than 100% because you owe taxes on your staking rewards.
  • hdlothia 4y ago
    Where's a good place to learn about this stuff
    • 4y ago
• pawurb 4y ago
  Sorry for spamming my blog but maybe you'll find it useful. https://pawelurbanek.com/anonymous-slack-bot-income https://pawelurbanek.com/anonymous-slack-bot-income this post describes my journey to total 50k profit from my bootstrapped side-project. TLDR it took 5 years. Current MRR is at ~3k USD.
  • Glench 4y ago
    This is cool, thanks for sharing. How did you find or form the mastermind group you mentioned in the post?
    • pawurb 4y ago
      Friends from local IT communities that are also into "indie" stuff. But I believe it should be possible to reach out to people from online communities like indiehackers to form a group. There's also YC startup school https://www.startupschool.org/ https://www.startupschool.org/ that does matchmaking for founders.
• steelbrain 4y ago
  Some really interesting projects here! I've been working on my own SaaS project called CorOpera (https://www.coropera.com https://www.coropera.com) for almost a year now. It's a cap table management solution for early-stage startups, helping them manage their cap table, do some bookkeeping, stay legally compliant, and potentially retain employees by offering them stock options. While not quite at the $2k/month mark yet, we're steadily approaching it. I have an engineering background so breaking into the marketing and sales domain has been quite a journey. It's been a roller coaster of ups and downs, but I remain hopeful. One of the things I've enjoyed most about building your own thing is just talking to other founders and learning about their experiences. While the dataset has not been large enough to make quantity compensate for quality, I've still learned quite a bit. It's been fascinating to read about everyone's side projects, and I'm curious to know if any other founders here have faced challenges with fundraising bookkeeping or cap table in general. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
• nghiatran_uit 4y ago
  If you have iOS/Android development experience, you can look at the Developer sector, which is relatively niche IMO. I've developed the iOS/iPadOS app, Proxyman for iOS [0], which gains steadily ~2k recurring revenue every month. Basically, it's an iOS app that helps you to capture and decrypt HTTP/HTTPS traffic on your phone. The app is needed if you need to inspect traffic from your app. Because it's an iOS app, published on AppStore, you can provide a subscription pricing model: e.g. $4.99/month, $39.99/year, or lifetime $99. I also develop the macOS version, but it's a huge market, which is out of context. - [0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/proxyman/id1551292695 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/proxyman/id1551292695
  • klaaz0r 4y ago
    I use proxyman a lot, you did an amazing job, it's a super slick and well working app
    • nghiatran_uit 4y ago
      Thanks. I assume you're using the macOS version. You might check out the iOS app too : ] Don't forget to activate the Premium for iOS with your Mac License Key. No need to purchase the Subscription.
      • klaaz0r 4y ago
        Already have it running!
  • olabyne 4y ago
    Does it work with DNS-over-https queries from Apple ? I tried to grab the Airtag position from my Ipad with MITM Proxy running on a computer, but because it is DNS based some http packets from Apple wouldn't be visible
    • nghiatran_uit 4y ago
      I've never tried it. Maybe you should give it a try. If it doesn't work, please create a ticket at https://github.com/ProxymanApp/Proxyman/issues https://github.com/ProxymanApp/Proxyman/issues I'm happy to support you.
• trapexit 4y ago
  I run small outsourced IT systems for SMBs. Web scrapers, reporting, stuff like that. Baisically private bespoke SaaS. About $10k/mo gross revenue and takes a few hours of work a week (unless there’s a downtime event that needs fixing). A lot of upfront work to build some of these systems though. Got to $2k/mo in the first month of doing this. I don’t recommend working (as a solo operator) with clients who have budgets less than $5-10k/mo. Too much overhead for too little return in that case. In what little spare time I have left after my day job and looking after two small kids, I put more automation in place to improve reliability for my clients and reduce my own ops time requirement. I get leads for this by referral from people I’ve done good work for in the past. But it’s the kind of thing you could bootstrap by direct outbound sales, publishing authority-building content to the right business audience, going to conferences/trade shows, or building a referral network from other service provides.
  • vageli 4y ago
    A couple questions, if you don't mind. How did you go about finding clients? What is the nature of the work agreement—project-based, hourly, or something else?
    • trapexit 4y ago
      Clients for this work have come almost entirely by referral. See my other comments in this thread. For ongoing things I do fixed rate or usage based pricing. For custom one-off stuff, consultancy, and build-out of systems I charge a day rate.
  • rlyshw 4y ago
    I’ve thought about doing this, but a few reservations came up when I considered getting started with a family friend. I just pictured a contracted ”IT MANAGER” getting rabbit holed into some time-sink extreme; 1. Dedicated operational IT admin: Dealing with repetitive tasks+requests, like managing customer’s Microsoft environment and on-site infrastructure.. Owning physical and AD infra doesn’t sound like a part-time job. For e.g; a/v and physical IT asks; like conference room operation maintenance and support, Desktop workstation triage (have you tried turning the monitor on?). The dreaded “can you set up the printer?”… And what if the customer sets me up as their site’s dedicated AD domain admin? Resulting in repetitive requests for user/access management CRUD operations. And/or micromanagement of tedious things like email and mailing lists… Or 2. Dedicated software developer, website or business workflows. Building a website and getting micromanaged or overburdened. (“can you change the logo to blue?” “Can you redesign the whole home page?”) Or, get pulled deep into providing a business-critical software workflow or application. Fielding sales/exec requests, interpreting their business requirements, and then building AND delivering (for e.g a customer management system) is not a part time job… How do you operate to keep the scope limited? What steps help buffer yourself from a slippery slope of full-time services?
• klaaz0r 4y ago
  I run two side projects atm but they are both becoming more and more the main job. I am building a Zillow for Europe [1]. The real estate market in Europe is a big mess and for the past 10 years not much has happend so far in proptech because it was easy to rent/sell properties. Now things are changing and I see a lot more supply coming on the platform. So far rented out 40 apartments doing around 3k in profit a month. We focus primarily on overseas/expats right now Another project I started with a good friend from Google is Webtastic AI [2] it's a lead gen platform that indexes large amounts of data and I am using simple ML models to clean it up and make sense out of it. It does around 1.9k a month now but we just launched 2 weeks ago so that looks promising. Thanks to google cloud we got 100k credits which makes it a bit more feasible because the startup costs are extremely high. [1] https://homestra.com/ https://homestra.com/ [2] https://webtastic.ai/ https://webtastic.ai/
  • 3dfan 4y ago
    How do the properties get onto homestra? Do landlords find your site and enter the data + pay you? Or is the model different?
    • klaaz0r 4y ago
      We work with a lot of agencies/landlords mostly larger once now but making it more self serve in the upcoming months
  • blainehoyt 4y ago
    Can you add a map to Homestra? That’s the one piece of functionality that most overseas real estate sites are missing.
    • klaaz0r 4y ago
      Already have it: https://homestra.com/map/ https://homestra.com/map/ It's hidden on mobile because I didn't have the time yet to optimise it!
      • 4y ago
• chown 4y ago
  I made Cleavr as a desktop app first and gave it away for free. I got lots of downloads as well as lots of support requests. To keep support tickets away I put a small price tag on it. People still kept downloading and reaching out for support (not necessarily bugs but eben if they have their app issues). I then decided to go the path of a cloud SAAS app. The desktop app didn't hit $2k mostly be ause the price tag was small and I just wanted to do good and give it away. Once I went cloud, it took only about 4 months to hit $2k per month. [1] https://cleavr.io https://cleavr.io
• melias 4y ago
  I run Loopz Gift Cards (https://www.loopz.io https://www.loopz.io). First line of code in 2012, pivoted in 2016, launched in 2019 and took about a year and half to get to $2k/month. At $18k atm. Switched to full-time a year ago.
• abinaya_rl 4y ago
  Built https://remoteleaf.com https://remoteleaf.com to help remote job seekers. We hand-pick remote jobs from all over the internet and send you the personalised list of remote jobs that are fit for you. It took 2 years to reach $2k revenue and I lost interest in this project due to a lot of manual work. With the advancements in AI, I'm planning to focus on it again.
  • mmaia 4y ago
    You've invested a lot of time on this! I doing something similar (completely automated) for another niche, let me know if you wanna exchange ideas (twitter in bio).
• lee101 4y ago
  [dead]
• Glench 4y ago
  I run a service that lets browser extension developers easily take payments in their extensions: https://extensionpay.com https://extensionpay.com Started making $0.15 a day and has taken a couple years to make decent monthly revenue. One cool thing is that it's also helped developers make a lot of money — over $200k so far and growing!
• rwilinski 4y ago
  I made Dynobase [1], an alternative GUI for DynamoDB. Passed 2k/mo few years ago. Runs 100% automatically now, I spend ~2h/week mostly responding to customer inquiries. I could leave my full time job but I just like it (and money) too much. [1] https://dynobase.dev https://dynobase.dev
  • samjett 4y ago
    You made Dynobase? Dude such a needed product - the DDB GUI is awful inside AWS and painfully slow to work with. Been trying to convince my manager to buy personal licenses for everyone on my team - glad to support this excellent product.
  • mikecsh 4y ago
    Do you mind sharing what UI / component framework you use? It looks great!
  • y-curious 4y ago
    Please! Give me some breadcrumbs here. Do you just hook into the AWS API/CLI?
• hambos22 4y ago
  I don't know if that counts, but I see it as a tech side project. Last year I've built for my gf, a custom D2C (direct to client) ecommerce webapp [0] for her handmade products. Then I started looking into PPC, tracking, social advertisement & marketing etc.. Now we are profitable avg ~8k / month only on retail. [0] https://yuma.gr https://yuma.gr
  • xcubic 4y ago
    Why not use something like shopify?
    • hambos22 4y ago
      Because I want 100% control and flexibility. It would take me more time to do this in shopify as it holds a lot of custom behavior and it has many automations on the backend. Also with a custom admin dashboard we were able to scale a lot in our & employee's productivity [edit] I would use shopify for bootstraping temporary viral campaigns for niche products.
      • xcubic 4y ago
        Tbh, it makes complete sense.
  • pcthrowaway 4y ago
    I always wonder who "owns" the property such as this in the event of a breakup
    • hambos22 4y ago
      She. I don't keep all the eggs in the same basket. *edit typos
    • csomar 4y ago
      This is not a large company or a fully established business. The value could be derived from both, or only from one side. If the value is derived from the metrics setup that OP has implemented, he can re-produce this with another creator. Think about it as two partners (one developer and one designer) starting a freelancing business. There is no "business" to own.
• eerikkivistik 4y ago
  We built pepchecker.com (Saas) as a weekend side project back in 2019 and have been slowly adding functionality over the course of a few years. It's now profitable and growing pretty rapidly. If we had put more effort into it, I think we could have crossed the $2k mrr threshold in a year.
• ronreiter 4y ago
  learnpython.org Generates ~10k/month. Plus, teaches a bunch of people how to code for free :)
  • aristofun 4y ago
    Where’s the money coming from? Subscription? Also how much time it took to reach that point?
    • tultra 4y ago
      Probably from ads. I just wonder whether those 10k are coming from learn python alone or all 'learn' websites combined. I'm actually developing a Codecademy 'clone' for Brazil and have looked at these sites for reference.
    • ronreiter 4y ago
      Took about 5 years. Right now it's just ads but I'm trying to make revenue from certifications now.
  • tultra 4y ago
    That's super nice, mate! I love teaching and am building a website to teach programming myself. Now, if its ok for you to disclose, how do you manage the evaluation/testing of user submitted code in the backend? Thanks and congratS!
    • ronreiter 4y ago
      I just review the pull requests :)
• cleverfoo 4y ago
  I built Scanii [1], an unsafe/malware content detection API/SaaS, as a way to keep my coding skills sharp as I moved into engineering leadership roles. Over the years it has grown into a lovely $35k/month business while spending $0 in marketing thanks to our amazing customers. My advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: get it out there quick, listen to your customers and be ready to act on their feedback. Finding product/market fit is a journey even if you are selling into the most well understood vertical since it's not just about what the market expects it's about what your engineering talent/capacity can delver in a reasonable amount of time. [1] https://www.scanii.com https://www.scanii.com
  • lampshades 4y ago
    Congratulations on your success! > get it out there quick What did "getting it out there" consist of for you? How did you get it out there in the beginning?
    • cleverfoo 4y ago
      > Congratulations on your success! That is very kind of you, thank you. > What did "getting it out there" consist of for you? How did you get it out there in the beginning? For Scanii in particular, the original product was a thin wrapper around an open source AV engine, a hacked on a weekend UX, and a credit card processing integration to collect payment - the very minimal needed to find out if _anyone_ was willing to pay for this service. With that said, what worked for me in this case is not what I would focus here since it depends on what kind of business you are trying to build. What I do believe is important is focusing on the economics of your space which, for IT, is all about productivity or, more succinctly, saving people's time - they pay you X for something that could cost them, in terms of people's time, Y to do. So, what you want to ask yourself is whether signing up, paying and onboarding onto your product (the X in the equation above) is significantly lower than the next best alternative, either doing the same on a competitor product or building something themselves - the Y above. For scanii, even at launch it saved people lots of time managing and operating malware detection engines which are cumbersome and hard to keep up to date. I had a feeling that would be the case when I launched but I couldn't be sure until our first customer voted with their credit card.
• tyingq 4y ago
  Quite a long time ago, I had some success with finding things that were custom made and making tools to better model/simulate what the end product would look like. So, for example, some place that sells custom pendants/necklaces with a name on it. A front-end that lets people enter the name and produces a photo-realistic rendering of the necklace can drive sales they wouldn't otherwise get. I got past $1k/mo in revenue, but then had to put it aside for reasons unrelated to the work.
• pqvst 4y ago
  Started AwardFares (https://awardfares.com https://awardfares.com) back in 2018. It's a search engine for finding flights to book using your airline miles. Started as a side-project, completely bootstrapped and self-funded. We hit $2k monthly revenue after about 1.5 years. Growth completely stopped during COVID, but is now growing very well (more than 10x that).
  • 3dfan 4y ago
    How do you earn money? Affiliate links?
  • xcubic 4y ago
    How do you source the info?
  • koch 4y ago
    This is a good idea, I was just thinking if something like this existed the other day. Good domain name too.
• fatih-erikli 4y ago
  I don't recommend starting a profit-oriented side project. Money comes with it's hussle. It will eventually take the fun part of the process.
• jermaustin1 4y ago
  I'm a little early, but this month, my side project SHOULD hit $2k, all signs point that way. Back in March, I decided to get serious with my CNC, and started designing things, dozens and dozens of things. Eventually I settled on something that felt like it had potential: Rolling trays and vape holders. I get the wood from my grandpa's mill. I use both redcedar and pine, but I'm currently experimenting with oak (much slower wood to CNC and it is much more expensive as well). I made a couple for family and friends, they thought they looked great and said I should be selling them. So at the end of February this year, I reopened my Etsy from when the pandemic first shuttered me inside my house, and listed my vape holders first. After a week, I had a few sales, and then I added my first rolling tray. By mid march, I had already racked up 20-ish sales before I told my Facebook friends about it (which is a shitty feeling - selling to people who probably get hit up by MLMs from all the other highschool people you wish you could forget), but that secured 7 more sales, and they started to snowball after that. I'm currently just under $1000 in revenue for the month of April, and everyone on the Etsy forums are saying this is the slowest time of the year for them (Easter + Tax Season), so fingers crossed after Monday, everything just starts picking up steam.
  • system2 4y ago
    I have a laser/cnc shop as well. I never tried etsy. Are you using just a cnc router to create your products? Does the product price justify the time you are spending for them?
    • jermaustin1 4y ago
      CNC is 75% of the way there, then there is sanding away most of the machine marks, then finish sanding. My current personal best is around 10 minutes per tray, and I make about $15 of each one (after fees and shipping and materials). So My time isn't exactly uncompensated, but its no where close to how much my time is worth as a software engineer with nearly 20 years of experience. I batch out a bunch of them on the CNC at once (in fact I have to do a boatload more this evening), then while those are cutting, I have a pile of others that I need to sand. About the time I'm done with those, the next will come off the CNC, then takes me 5 minutes to set it up again and keep going. It gets tedious sometimes, but I can basically zone out while I do my sanding and listen to podcasts and music and still be able to hear the CNC start to cut something incorrectly (happens far to often).
• tommoor 4y ago
  https://getoutline.com https://getoutline.com – A team knowledge base, hit $2k MRR a couple of months after turning on paid plans, has always been steady growth since then. A few years in and almost reached what I'd consider v1 feature complete.
  • DANmode 4y ago
    Very happy paid user, after testing many other offerings. You're really onto something.
    • tommoor 4y ago
      Thanks! Really appreciate the positivity
  • y-curious 4y ago
    Your website is also really pretty, what did you use to make it?
    • weekay 4y ago
      https://github.com/outline/website https://github.com/outline/website has the source
  • crispinb 4y ago
    Nice that you released the source. Some might say a little risky for a commercial hosted app. Not knocking it though. What made you decide to?
  • nagyf 4y ago
    This seems very similar to Notion. I am currently a Notion user, how does this compare to Notion? What would make me switch from Notion to Outline?
• outcoldman 4y ago
  7 years ago I started a site project for forwarding logs and metrics from k8s, docker, openshift in Splunk. It is enterprise offering, and I started making money pretty quick. After 6 months I already made 40k, and quit my employer. Tight now this company generates 7 figures, and still run by me with one more person helping with accounting. https://www.outcoldsolutions.com https://www.outcoldsolutions.com Now I also started macOS development for the last 2 years, and making around 2k a month. https://loshadki.app https://loshadki.app
  • lampshades 4y ago
    Would love to get into enterprise software. How did you get your first customer?
    • SoftTalker 4y ago
      If you are a one-man shop, no you probably don't. Enterprise customers seem very lucrative and in rare cases can be, if you are working with a small department or individual with autonomy. If you find yourself being asked to make a sales presentation to an IT steering committee, run away.
      • ihorm95 4y ago
        Hmm,can you elaborate a bit? I know lots of people are saying that b2b is the greatest model, since businesses often are willing to pay way more than regular people. There are lots of people who make a decent living from micro-SaaS/SaaS with this business mode. From my personal experience working for companies, they often pay tons of money for quite simple software.
        • is_true 4y ago
          It depends on the business. I sell to a couple of companies and have multiple experiences. One of my clients is a team that has a budget and that team makes the decision without involving other parts of the co. In another one of my clients the decision is taken by multiple depts, first the team that is gonna use the product gets in touch and we create a contract for them, then the legal dept is involved, after it's all clear the dept in charge of payments is involved. In that last step they tried to renegotiate the amount of the contract saying they didn't have that kind of money. I told them no problem and just went silent, a couple of weeks later they approved the contract. Sometimes it takes 1 year 'til the client starts using (paying) the product, other times they are good to go in 1 week, most of the times it takes 1 month.
• jason_zig 4y ago
  I've been building Zigpoll [1] over the past 4-5 years as a solo project. It's a micro survey platform (Saas) that can live on any website and can be triggered at key moments during your customer journey. I found a niche in post-purchase surveys for Shopify which helped get me over the 2K mark and build a meaningful customer feedback loop I could iterate on to find a tighter product market fit (very meta for a survey platform I know). This took about three years to hit and it helped greatly to be on an app store since it's a full service marketing channel which 1. is my weakest skillset and 2. you want all the leverage you can get if it's a part time project. The post purchase survey angle is growing steadily but the platform was built to be flexible so I'm looking for other use-cases to focus on what competitors don't currently service for a phase 2. Also recently it's been a great way to experiment with OpenAI and see what all the buzz is about. So far the ChatGPT API has been very impressive at spotting trends in user-provided data to share with our customers. Honestly this feature alone makes me consider focusing on it full time; but it would be a bit of a leap financially given current circumstances. TLDR: I recommend building something, keeping your head on a swivel, getting feedback (being on an app store or marketplace makes this easier) and adjusting as rapidly as possible if you want to get paid and have a shot at bootstrapping bigger. [1] https://www.zigpoll.com https://www.zigpoll.com
• HermanMartinus 4y ago
  I run Bear Blog [1] an opinionated, simple, and speedy blogging platform. It runs as a freemium SaaS and is turning a healthy profit. There area about 15k blogs running on the platform right now. I ran it completely free for about 2 and a half years. When I added the "upgrade" with some add-ons it jumped to $2k a month in a matter of weeks. [1] https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev
  • lampshades 4y ago
    What do you find your customers are looking for that other blogging platforms don't provide?
    • cameron_b 4y ago
      As a paying customer, the combination of dead simple MD and the ability to run with my own domain. It’s easier to get a blog up than to make a sandwich.
  • sachinjain 4y ago
    How do you compare it with superblog? It is run by a Linkedin connection and I keep hearing about it.
• agentofoblivion 4y ago
  I made an online course over a 6 month period and then did a little over $40k in revenue the first year. It’s slowed down quite a bit now. Haven’t decided if I’ll do it again or not. It was quite a bit of work, and having a full time job and young family, not sure the money is worth it.
  • lloydatkinson 4y ago
    What was the course?
• hazhu 4y ago
  I built a Charades-game [1] for both iOS [2] and Android [3]. Launched last year and just recently got to around 2k a month, some months like December are of course better than let's say September because of holidays like New Year etc. It took about 10-12 months reaching those numbers, and I'd say we still have lot's of room for improvement. It's also very low maintenance, but highly scalable. What I do is basically localise the game to as many big languages as I can, and then throw some ASO on it and hold my fingers. Haven't spent any dollars at all on the marketing otherwise. [1] https://yangmeistudios.com/games-and-apps/charades https://yangmeistudios.com/games-and-apps/charades [2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/charades-what-am-i/id1592118437 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/charades-what-am-i/id159211843... [3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yangmeistudios.charades https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yangmeistu...
  • secondcoming 4y ago
    Try adding some 320x50, 300x250 ad inventory! It can be very profitable.
    • hazhu 4y ago
      Thanks for the advise, we do have some full screen ads, but use it conservatively. It is always more satisfying getting revenues through in app purchases since it’s a sign that people value what I’ve created
  • 3dfan 4y ago
    ASO is like SEO for appstores?
    • valbaca 4y ago
      Yep
    • hazhu 4y ago
      Yes exactly
• mcsniff 4y ago
  My "side project" makes ~$5K/month but I am constantly worried about it not continuing to bring that in, so I keep my day job which is WFH and very easy. I also never share it because I am concerned about a competitor coming in. Took me about 6 months from publishing my app to hit $2k and another 3 months to hit $5k. Edit: to clarify, I sell a physical product, so there are added costs in terms of manufacturing, shipping, stock keeping, etc...
  • aflag 4y ago
    Talk about a teaser!
• pchm 4y ago
  I run https://pixelpeeper.com https://pixelpeeper.com on the side. It's a micro-SaaS for photographers who edit in Lightroom. Lets you reverse-engineer Lightroom edits from JPG files and download them as presets that you can apply on your own photos. Took a month or two to reach $2k/mo, riding the wave of instagram's popularity in 2017-2018, plus the project went viral initially. However, the niche is ultimately too small to grow the revenue significantly. Still chugging along, almost 6 years later, though.
• samstr 4y ago
  [dead]
• JoMendoza 4y ago
  My friend and I built https://apitude.co/ https://apitude.co/ around 4 years ago as a side project. It consists of a group of REST APIs like this: https://apitude.co/en/docs/services/renapo-mx/ https://apitude.co/en/docs/services/renapo-mx/ The site did: - $200 a month the first year. - $900 a month the second year. - $2K a month the third year. - $5K a month the third year. (We started working full time). - $9K a month this year. Even when it was only a side project it demanded a lot of work, but we love the space so it was ok.
• sideproject 4y ago
  I built Newsy. It's a tool that automatically generates content-aggregators. I focus on people who have domain names that are unused. https://www.newsy.co https://www.newsy.co
  • 3dfan 4y ago
    Isn't the revenue per generated site super low? How can domain owners put in all the work to bring their own monetization and still pay you?
  • benrapscallion 4y ago
    Not sure having a service that generates spammy websites is a good thing.
• pocket_cheese 4y ago
  I am a gift card reseller. Pretty much, there are marketplaces where you can sell gift cards and cd keys for games and when a customer places an order, I make an API call to procure that item and deliver it. Currently at 70k Euros a month. It took me about 3 years to get here. And it took a few months to get to 2k monthly revenue.. However, the first two months I was at break even and it took me about a year before I could figure out how to get this system running profitably. Currently profit margins are about 7%
  • GordonS 4y ago
    Have you had any issues with the authorities or law enforcement? Are you planning on shutting it down once you reach a certain figure? (I ask, since this seems very risky!)
    • pocket_cheese 4y ago
      I only go to authorized distributors, where the brand themselves has approved the vendor to resell the cards. For game keys, I haven't done anything in bulk, but the best route is going directly to the publisher and getting permission, but this requires large order commitments and game prices fluctuate too much and can be super risky. My real biggest risk though is when I open up my own store is chargebacks. Digital goods have a very very high chargeback risk, and I need to be clever on how I mitigate that!
  • leros 4y ago
    How does this work exactly? Are you doing arbitrage?
    • quantumwoke 4y ago
      Often left unsaid in the "gift card" (or, "game key reseller" market) is that the items are acquired illegally and resold for a profit. This is money laundering territory, and is very easy to run afoul of the law.
      • 4y ago
• xhfloz 4y ago
  I built mmm.page [1] originally for personal websites, or "internet canvases." They're meant to be pages for very easy combinations of text, mixed media, embeds, etc. — let more people create fun/interesting places on the internet. [2] I started working on mmm.page in Feb 2021, and launched it that May on Hacker News [3], then it hit $2k/mo last year, and has been growing steadily since. There are roughly 30,000+ users at the moment. Revenue has been trickier for this project because it's a SaaS aimed at consumers, who are more price sensitive — but the flip-side is I love working with all the people who use the platforms. Just today, someone shared this moodboard that captured exactly how I've been thinking about it mmm.page [4]. Some other fun examples here [5]. I'm planning a second launch in May. Hopefully some good news to share there. One note: it's a website, and most people edit it on desktop, but a surprising # of users convert /after/ trying it on mobile. I also found the conversion rate increased significantly after I made the homepage itself editable — thereby demo'ing the product without a login. Just a small note. Anyway, feel free to reply or DM on Twitter if you have questions — especially re: solo bootstrapping "fun" consumer products that are trying to also become self-sustainable. [1] https://mmm.page https://mmm.page [2] https://twitter.com/xhfloz/status/1631746024120221698 https://twitter.com/xhfloz/status/1631746024120221698 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424 [4] https://diemichi.mmm.page/moodboard https://diemichi.mmm.page/moodboard [5] https://showcase.mmm.page https://showcase.mmm.page
  • webscout 4y ago
    [dead]
  • ipince 4y ago
    > I also found the conversion rate increased significantly after I made the homepage itself editable — thereby demo'ing the product without a login. I just visited your homepage to check it out, but was greeted with a page that said "You can't edit this page" with a grayed out Edit button. And I'm not sure why, or what I should do so I am able to edit it (maybe sign up? but I wanted to see the demo before signing up).
    • xhfloz 4y ago
• quantumwoke 4y ago
  Doing about 5k/mo passive income on my addon for a popular children's game. Took about 4years to get here though, COVID was massive for the genre. Only costs are time and file hosting, which comes out at about $50/mo.
  • hu3 4y ago
    roblox?
• palenchc1 4y ago
  I run a bookmarking site https://backtoit.io https://backtoit.io I haven't gotten to 2k yet but getting very close.
  • TenJack 4y ago
    I don't really see any links to your site. How are you getting traffic?
• parrot987 4y ago
  I built prop_odds [1]. It's an API offering live (and historical) sports betting odds from different sites. I've been working on it for about 2 months. While not quite at 2k/month yet, it's nearly there and progressing in that direction. Revenue is coming from several customers who are using the data to build Discord bots that alert them (and their own paying users) about good odds, arbitrage opportunities, etc. [1] https://www.prop-odds.com https://www.prop-odds.com
  • victorbjorklund 4y ago
    Nice! I been looking for this last week actually. But would help if you list which sites you actually have. I have no idea if you have the sites im looking for and would love to know that before signing up.
    • parrot987 3y ago
      Hey, sorry for a late reply! I've just updated our website's Features page [0]. It lists all the sportsbooks and sports we currently support, and what will be added next. [0] https://www.prop-odds.com/features https://www.prop-odds.com/features
  • anddt 4y ago
    I guess you scrape odds from bookmakers' websites (I expecxt a fair bit of headless Selenium). Is there any legal implication of scraping data this way and reselling re-packaged as an API?
    • parrot987 4y ago
      Some books we're able to partner with and they give us an API to access the data through. Other we do need to scrape, given that there is no explicit "you can't do that" in their Terms & Conditions. Some books do have such a statement, so we aren't able to offer those.
• duck 4y ago
  I started Hacker Newsletter [1] almost 14 years ago and sent out the 647th issue today [2] to 58k folks. It took over a year to break 1k subscribers and a few more years to get to that type of revenue. I could do a lot more with it and plan to one day, but really only focus on it a couple hours each week when I build the issue and talk to sponsors. 1: https://hackernewsletter.com https://hackernewsletter.com 2: https://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/647 https://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/647
  • sethlivingston 4y ago
    Your newsletter is the best part of my Friday mornings. Thank you.
  • ayewo 4y ago
    Thanks for starting it and keeping it going. It is one of the few newsletters I look forward to so I can “catch up” with topics that were popular during the course of a week on HN.
  • biztos 4y ago
    I'm a happy subscriber! Funny thing is, I ignore it most weeks because I'm checking HN a lot anyway; but if I have so much as a long weekend offline then your newsletter is the answer to my FOMO. I love the simplicity and I don't mind the ads.
  • ansc 4y ago
    Thanks for doing it. Love receiving this.
  • gnrlst 4y ago
    What's the current MRR out of curiosity? I think about it every time I get it in my inbox :)
  • passedpawn 4y ago
    I love it. I read it while having coffee on Saturday mornings.
  • dave333 4y ago
• yarrak 4y ago
  I run Ekofi Nova (https://nova.ekofi.capital https://nova.ekofi.capital). We are building & validating your dream SaaS product, as an MVP. Plans are: $1500/mo, $2000/mo, $2500/mo. The difference is the effort - we're more into the highest priced projects. Currently have 2 customers.
• wufufufu 4y ago
  I'm at about $700/mth but I don't see why I can't make it to $2k monthly. It's a Slackbot [1,2] that assists user story refinement for Jira. If you're a SWE that uses agile methodology this may be interesting to you. [1] https://slack.com/apps/A01EL1SR7V4-groomba https://slack.com/apps/A01EL1SR7V4-groomba [2] https://groomba.ai https://groomba.ai
• somid3 4y ago
  You Exec started as a side project, ARR at $2.2m now — but decreasing
• marvinblum 4y ago
  I'm building Pirsch Analytics [0], a privacy-friendly web analytics tool. I think it took the two of us ~1.5 years to get to $2000 MRR. Currently we're setting just above $4000 MRR. It started as an experiment for my personal website and I was in the same position as you're right now. We were already working on a Notion like app to take notes, but didn't make any money and probably went into the wrong direction. As my prototype seemed to work quite well, we decided to turn it into a product. My initial goal was to do server-side analytics without the downsides of parsing access logs, but of course we now also have a "regular" JS snippet integration. You can learn more about our journey here [1] and on our blog [2]. Let me know if you have any questions! [0] https://pirsch.io https://pirsch.io [1] https://pirsch.io/about-us https://pirsch.io/about-us [2] https://pirsch.io/blog https://pirsch.io/blog
  • ansc 4y ago
    Love it. That's great. Been looking for something like this. If you don't mind me asking -- did you do the landing page yourself? It looks really, really good.
    • marvinblum 4y ago
      Thanks! Yes we did that ourselfes :) We'll be adding a lot more content soon, it's nice but there is not much text, so no good for SEO.
  • kjksf 4y ago
    A paying customer of pirsch with feature request for the dashboard: for page views stats, could you make more space for urls? My urls aren't even that long but get truncated because they get only 30% of the space. Make more space for links: allow me to hide some columns and persist that across sessions. I really don't care about bounce rate or percentages. Also, a deadly sin of arrogant designers: in your infinite wisdom you decided to to limit the width of that page so even if I go fullscreen I don't see the full URL but a lot of unused space. Why do you hate me?
    • marvinblum 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• p3rls 4y ago
  I built https://kpopping.com https://kpopping.com, a platform for international fans of Korean music. It's been six grueling years (what they say about b2c is completely true) but these days we bounce around from $3k-5k in monthly revenue. I estimate we have another two-three years before we are finished... +_+
  • 3dfan 4y ago
    Via ads?
    • p3rls 4y ago
      Yep. We also have a subscription available https://kpopping.com/subscription/plus https://kpopping.com/subscription/plus
      • 3dfan 4y ago
        The subscription costs money? I don't see any info about pricing.
        • p3rls 4y ago
          Yeah, it's $30 a year, you need to sign in to be able to subscribe for it though
• DamnInteresting 4y ago
  I launched DamnInteresting.com in 2005, and just last year it started consistently earning $2k/month. That's gross revenue, a goodly chunk of that goes out for hosting costs, research expenses, paying writers/editors, licensing fees, etc. It's been interesting to see the changes in the audience over time. In 2005, 100% of our audience was desktop browser readers. Somewhere around 2011, mobile readers became the dominant group. Today, our biggest audience by far is podcast listeners. We'll probably need to start creating videos soon if we don't want to get left behind. And what comes next? AI-enhanced immersive binaural VR experiences? The future is weird.
  • 3dfan 4y ago
    What's your business model?
    • DamnInteresting 4y ago
      Mostly it is asking for reader/listener donations in a non-aggressive way. For example, if one is reading on the site, the request for donations appears only if one reaches the end of the text. If listening, the request comes after the story. This is supplemented by licensing our work occasionally to magazines, other websites, etc., and a wee bit of merchandising.
  • edmundsauto 4y ago
    I've been a fan for over 15 years, just wanted to say thank you! Great content, super cool domain name too :)
• chrisvalleybay 4y ago
  I've built a software called Mino that creates a frontend for managing enterprise accesspoint deployments in student housings. Super niche. It allows the students to set up their own WiFi and it offers a backend system for the janitors that typically do the support out in the field. I charge around between $20-30k everytime a new setup is created and for each customer I charge around $650 per month for the SLA. Additional development is offered at $155 per hour. Currently I have three different installations that net me around $2100 per month in addition to extra features here and there. It took around 2-3 years before I hit $2k.
• es7 4y ago
  I built a few mobile games for iOS and Android. I launched my first game in 2015 which took 6 months to even reach $100/month. From there it earned around $500/month for the last 7 years. It required a huge upfront investment, ongoing updates to keep relevant and a significant fraction of revenue going into advertising. I launched a few additional games that were low quality and ended up removing them. I started another 4-5 ideas that were abandoned. In 2021, during a few month break from my job, I produced one more game that has averaged around $2000/month revenue for the last 2 years. Also needs regular updates and promotion to stay relevant. Overall I would only recommend this route if you’re really passionate about game dev. The overall time investment has been really high, and it isn’t truly passive income because mobile games lose users quickly when not updated often.
  • bbayer 4y ago
    Do you mind to share genre?
  • islanderfun 4y ago
    > Also needs regular updates and promotion to stay relevant. Are you able to share details on both aspects? Awesome results!
• m3kw9 4y ago
  We need a thread on projects making <20$ a month and what went wrong, and maybe HN's comments can right that ship.
• ronyfadel 4y ago
  I make around that with each of my side projects: - VidCap [1] - AI Profile Pic [2] - Mission Control Plus [3] - Batteries [4] - Kay [5] (makes less, currently at $600 MRR) [1] https://vidcap.app/ https://vidcap.app/ [2] https://aiprofilepic.app/ https://aiprofilepic.app/ [3] https://fadel.io/missioncontrolplus https://fadel.io/missioncontrolplus [4] https://fadel.io/batteries https://fadel.io/batteries [5] https://usekay.xyz/ https://usekay.xyz/
  • mthoms 4y ago
    I use both Mission Control Plus and Batteries. Very useful! No problem if don't want to answer, but I'm curious about what rough percentage of your income from those apps comes from Setapp? How does their compensation even work for a permanently running utility? As far as I know, there's not a lot of information out there about their business model and how they compensate developers. Anyways, thanks for the useful apps.
    • ronyfadel 4y ago
      Setapp income accounts between 10% and 30% depending on the app. The Setapp SDK tracks usage time and the app makes a fraction of user monthly payments (factored by app price and user time spent on the app)
• thedangler 4y ago
  Payment processing [1] Website builder / development [2] Both are side and I'm currently ramping them both up now that they are self sustaining and I can focus on hiring sales agents and app devs. [1] https://clearpayments.ca https://clearpayments.ca or US https://clearmerchantsol.com https://clearmerchantsol.com [2] https://sytescope.com https://sytescope.com
  • abdullahkhalids 4y ago
    Typo on https://clearpayments.ca/ https://clearpayments.ca/ > Making it easy for owner to fine apps to streamline their processes.
• bbauman 4y ago
  I run an iOS app on the side thats at ~$2500 MRR. It lets you generate music playlists from a prompt, like "make me a playlist for music to listen to while coding". I launched in January and it took 2 weeks to get the first $2k in revenue. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/playlistai-playlist-maker/id1631703551 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/playlistai-playlist-maker/id16...
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    How did you market the app? Or did people just find it in the App Store?
    • bbauman 4y ago
      Twitter mostly - https://twitter.com/brettunhandled/status/1613179511218278401?s=20 https://twitter.com/brettunhandled/status/161317951121827840... It was also picked up by FastCompany, TechCrunch, some others, which has helped people continue to find it
  • 3dfan 4y ago
    Is the business model in-app purchases? For what do the users pay?
• bmalicoat 4y ago
  I'm slowly building some success in Android and iOS games (most revenue comes from iOS!). I've got a paid game that is a yahtzee-inspired poker game with just a touch of cosmic horror [1] and a free-to-play word game [2]. I've been fortunate to get some featuring by Apple which has driven most of my sales. I'm hopeful the daily word game, Well Word, will start to take off because it's the best game I've made and I'm really proud of it. I started working on Pine Tar Poker while I had a different job about 13 months ago and I've since switched to trying my hand at converting my side project into my full-time gig [3]! My short-term goal is to be able to pay my mortgage with the proceeds. [1] https://www.pinetarpoker.com https://www.pinetarpoker.com [2] https://wellwordgame.com https://wellwordgame.com [3] https://www.birdcartel.com https://www.birdcartel.com
  • UnpossibleJim 4y ago
    What do you see as your best routes to monetization on the Apple v. Android and how FTP differs on each platform? Also, what routes of promotion have you been taking to build a customer base? Sorry to ask so many questions, but as a maker of personal projects which are games, I'm curious about the promotion and monetization of mobile games =)
    • bmalicoat 4y ago
      I haven't yet tried an ad-supported game (with an IAP to remove ads), but I think those perform the best overall. Personally I'm opposed to ads for a number of reasons (privacy, bandwidth usage, ad quality), so I'm not sure I'll ever try one of those. I was lucky to get my first game, Downwordly, as Game of the Day on iOS. This plus other sustained featuring (Essential Word Games) led to 50k+ downloads. Unfortunately I did a bad job with the IAP value proposition (both explaining it and what it actually is), so the conversion rate is abysmal (<1%). Pine Tar Poker was also Game of the Day a few weeks back and had some sustained featuring (Best New Games). That let me ship a few hundred copies over a few days but once the featuring dried up, the sales did too. Well Word is currently featured under Best New Games and is getting decent download numbers in the mid 100s and has a great conversion rate of ~15%. I'm hopeful that it can continue to spread through word of mouth and the built-in score sharing. I have made next to nothing on Android. I've never (that I know of) had any featuring and the Play Store doesn't have as many editorial pushes in my experience. To be honest, the download count and revenue from Android is such that I only release games there because it takes less than an hour or so (thanks Unity) and my brother uses Android. I'm currently working on an expanded version of Pine Tar Poker for console + Steam so I'm interested to see what I can learn in that space! Let me know if you have any other questions. I hope hearing about my experience so far was helpful.
• zudabi 4y ago
  https://hackers.ee https://hackers.ee was started as a volunteering project to help people who got scammed on the internet. You know, all these fake investment schemes where callers play on stupidness and grid. I've helped them to gather and do properly documented their cases, and support them during their visits to the police to make a claim. Police try to bounce as it's always a headache due to multiple countries/jurisdictions involved - VOIP provider from Finland, hosting in the Netherlands, money goes to Chinese company bank account, etc. I had to demonstrate to them it's not something impossible, so I've provided guidance, prepare requests drafts, etc. I've dived deeply into OSINT, forensics, audit, bank compliances and procedures, infrastructure enumeration, and other cybersecurity things to solve these problems. There were never payments required, but when it works people donated some money to keep infrastructure, as a tip or so. When it becomes 30k+ annually years ago, I've decided to make it my full-time job, with some pivot on what we're doing - now it is mostly cybersecurity services to businesses and companies. But still helping civilians to handle scam attempts every month.
• desmondrd 4y ago
  I built https://www.withphoton.com https://www.withphoton.com that helps people overlay multiple calendars in any timezone, and quickly format a message that contains your availability to save time and eliminate typos. It's a simple keyboard-first electron app that hooks up with your Google / Outlook cal. Target market is folks who schedule meetings outside their org like founders, CSM, biz dev, sales, EAs, etc. E.g. Do any of these times (CT) work for you? April 13 (Thursday) * 3:30 pm - 4:00 pm April 14 (Friday) * 2:00 pm - 2:30 pm
  • zffr 4y ago
    Since your pricing is a one-time fee, I assume you need to keep finding new customers to hit $2k / month. Just curious, how do you market your product?
    • desmondrd 4y ago
      Yep - that's correct. My hunch was that people are tired of paying for subscriptions but would drop $20 on something that makes their life slightly better. GTM is the hardest but mostly through referrals / word of mouth. I want to do more Twitter/LI ads.
      • zffr 4y ago
        Sorry, what is GTM?
        • acqbu 4y ago
          Go to market?
        • achempion 4y ago
          GPT chimes in: In this context, GTM stands for "Go-To-Market." It refers to the strategy and tactics used to introduce and promote a product or service to potential customers.
        • desmondrd 4y ago
• enraged_camel 4y ago
  I run https://pricetable.io https://pricetable.io on a part-time/side-project basis. We are currently hovering around $6k/mo. I think it took us a couple of years to break the $2k/mo threshold.
• tananaev 4y ago
  Open source GPS tracking platform - Traccar (https://www.traccar.org/ https://www.traccar.org/). I think picking a small B2B niche is the best way to become successful. You're not going to be super rich, but you can have a good stable lifestyle business.
• __mharrison__ 4y ago
  Technical books. I started writing in 2011. After a few books I was able to do look during launches but sales fell dramatically after. Now I have a couple books doing $2k / month. Since I do corporate training I have probably made dramatically more than this from the marketing from my books but don't really have a way to track that. https://store.metasnake.com/ https://store.metasnake.com/
• Aulig 4y ago
  I've been working on https://webtoapp.design https://webtoapp.design since December 2019. I cracked $2k/month after around 2 years. Could've probably done it quicker if I did more things that don't scale (as people often say). Should've focused less on SEO and more on outreach or other growth channels. I've since got my CS degree and I'm working on it full time now :)
  • 3dfan 4y ago
    How does it work? Do you upload an SPA and then you download something that can be uploaded to the appstore? How can your customers be sure you do not inject any faulty or malicious stuff into their apps?
    • Aulig 4y ago
      The apps work similar to a browser, so we don't need access to the website's source code. And yes, for Android you get the aab file you can upload to Google Play. For iOS, we upload the app to your developer account for you, since that's the easiest way there. We obviously don't inject malicious stuff since that'd ruin our reputation immediately (& open us up to lawsuits). I could see that happening with free app builders, but we make our money from subscription fees, so we have no need to turn to such illegal stuff to monetize the apps. Even going open source wouldn't solve the issue, since most customers wouldn't be able (due to lack of technical knowledge) to compile the app themselves.
• rawoke083600 4y ago
  I have two: (it's 50% just ship something, 50% luck) but in my humble opinion few ppl are lucky enough to make it big with their first 5 or 10 projects. Just figure out how can you ship many things per year ! [0] fibretiger.co.za - Price comparison for fibre internet services in South Africa. It's an extremely fragmented market, we have about 10 fibre networks (10 that matters) and twice as many ISPs [1] littlebigstats.com - Corrective Maintenance and Planned Maintenance for Restaurants or anything with assets and 10+ branches (KFC Kenya) is one our clients. You will be surprised how many org are trying todo PPM and CM with a whatsapp group and spreadsheet. We even implemented a version (you have to squint a little) of SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) methods so you just have to define the "rules and boundaries" for a good and efficient maintenance process. Example: any new tickets logged by branches should be assigned within 1 hour. Or no more than 20% of your corrective maintenance tickets can have a "AWAITING PARTS" status. etc.
• Exuma 4y ago
  My entire life is side projects
• atari800 4y ago
  I created a SaaS CRM/DMS for manufactured housing retailers ("mobile home" dealerships.) Monthly gross is about $4,000. Expenses other than my own time are $400 per month for the server. So about $3,600 a month net. The MH industry contracted drastically after the 2008/2009 financial crisis, and the handful of dealership software companies still in the industry went under. So I basically have the market to myself right now. The total market is not very big, though - maybe 1,500 independent manufactured housing "street dealerships" in the USA at this point. I have 15-ish paying customers right now. I'd love to be able to spend all my time on growing the business, but I've been too afraid to quit the other freelance dev work I do. Also, I unwisely took on a big contract that I haven't been able to finish in a timely manner, which is dragging me down. I wish I'd spent that time growing the MH SaaS instead.
  • gremlinsinc 4y ago
    how did you even find this niche?
    • atari800 4y ago
      My father owned a successful mobile home dealership for about 40 years. As a teenager, and later in college, I did grunt work (mostly manual labor) at the business in the summers. Later, in my mid-thirties, I left corporate software development for six or seven years, and managed the business for my dad. While I was there I wrote software to help me manage things, which, after I left the business to return to software development, I turned into the SaaS product which I've sold to other dealerships.
• lavrton 4y ago
  I am building Polotno SDK (https://polotno.com/ https://polotno.com/). It a mix of SaaS and paid javascript library and react components. It is a design editor that you can integrate into your web app. From the first paying customer it took around 1 year to get 2000 MRR. And I spent around 9 months on making first version before the first paying customer. It took me a very long time to find the idea of SDK. Previously I was thinking only about B2C cases. B2C market is already VERY crowded with Canva and million of its competitors. But B2B market was almost empty when I started.
  • gubikmic 4y ago
    How did you market it?
• tem-tem 4y ago
  I made exactly $2 (two) dollars on my expense tracking app this month https://apps.apple.com/us/app/logs-pure-expense-tracker/id6445955890 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/logs-pure-expense-tracker/id64...
• bigcloud1299 4y ago
  I am trading micro contracts. And been able to make money
• chickahoona 4y ago
  I have build Psono, an open source password manager. The company was founded about 2.5 years ago (during the high times of COVID) and it was generating $4k on average directly from start. One should mention that I developed the product for a couple of years before I started the company and already had customers alined before I founded the company. I was running it then for 1.5 years as a side project and then beginning of this year decided to quit my cozy WFH, well paid, not stressfull day job to work full time on it (with recession and mass layoffs in the news).
• IAmGraydon 4y ago
  Threads like this one always baffle me. You have to think of the competitive landscape like a jungle. All of the creatures in the jungle are looking for food, and some have far more competitive advantages than you. If you find a food source that no one else has happened to stumble upon, would you scream out that you've found it? No. If someone is asking you, it's because they want to know how they can get what you have. Much like the amount of food in the jungle is limited, so is the size of any market. Don't create competition for yourself. They can go on having no idea how lucrative your little side project is and you can go on reaping the benefits. As soon as you tell someone with more resources that your little side idea is actually turning over large sums of money, you better believe their wheels will be spinning on how to get a piece of it. It's so easy to avoid this, you just have to not run your mouth.
  • person101x 4y ago
    The economy isn't a zero-sum game. Everyone wins in the long-term when we help each other succeed.
    • vinyl7 4y ago
      Can't really argue that with the massive wealth gap
    • lovich 4y ago
      The ideal version of capitalism with zero barriers to entry isn’t a zero sum game. The actual reality that is our current economy doesn’t reach that ideal and there are definitely situations where groups lose out form the benefit of others
  • jollofricepeas 4y ago
    Exactly this. Every once in awhile, there are threads and comments here on HN about the various people who have had their UI, content, data or concepts stolen as well. Unless you’re a full-time hobbyist or boast a mature project, please be cautious.
  • lifeisstillgood 4y ago
• sachinjain 4y ago
  I started building Requestly (https://requestly.io https://requestly.io) as a side-project back in 2014 and It took me pretty much every Saturday for 7y to hit ~$2K revenue and to get few companies paying for the product. It was slightly hard to monetize chrome extension due to lack of payments APIs support in chrome ecosystem. I actually went full time in Sep'21 and was fortunate enough to get into YC(W22). Now we are a small team based in India building Requestly. Requestly is an open-source [1] Chrome & Firefox extension [2] that I started to help me in faster web development by capturing & modifying network requests directly in the browser without using any external tools. It eventually replaced Charles & Fiddler for many companies but now we are building a desktop version[3] too. On a side note, Side Projects are a long-term game but the good part is you can do multiple along with your job and pick the one getting more traction. For example - I did many other side projects but continued with Requestly for 2 reasons - I was using it myself almost everyday and It was gaining organic traction. Good luck in finding the project of your calling. [1]: https://github.com/requestly/requestly https://github.com/requestly/requestly [2]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/requestly-redirect-url-mo/mdnleldcmiljblolnjhpnblkcekpdkpa https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/requestly-redirect... [3]: https://requestly.io/desktop https://requestly.io/desktop
• dang 4y ago
  Related ongoing thread: Ask HN: Side projects making less than $2k MRR, what's your project? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35571486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35571486
• openplatypus 4y ago
  * Wide Angle Analytics https://wideangle.co https://wideangle.co – to go beyond simple web analytics alternatives to Google Analytics (paid); SaaS; web with mobile-friendly dashboards * Not Robot https://notrobot.eu https://notrobot.eu – online CAPTCHA; beta live; GA coming soon :) (free); SaaS; We support open start-ups https://wideangle.co/open https://wideangle.co/open, but we are not publishing our numbers :)
  • lma21 4y ago
    thanks for sharing. How does Not Robot generate revenue?
    • openplatypus 4y ago
      It does not. It is a project I use for other projects of mine. Furthermore, it has very little overhead, i.e.: it is cheap to operate to the point I am happy to do it and make a dent in reCAPTCHA land grab. It is still backed by real business with SLA and operational support. It is free, but it is not a toy. I am considering adding analytics (hit/miss) for a symbolic fee. But time will show if there is interest.
• phpsecure 4y ago
  We are also launching our product now. It will be available for trial on a free introductory. I don't think about monetization. Just want to make a useful product. I have created many different websites for myself. But I was always apprehensive that my sites could be hacked at any moment, and data and money from projects could be stolen. Therefore, I decided to assemble a team of experienced enthusiastic engineers and develop a scanner that protects against site destruction, theft of personal information, and implementation of data that changes the database and its content. Hope this will be helpful.
• XCSme 4y ago
  I built and run UXWizz (https://uxwizz.com https://uxwizz.com), the revenue varies, but averages around $2k per month in a year. It is not a service, but has one-time payments, so there is no stable MRR figure. It was initially sold through CodeCanyon, here's a graph with my earnings there: https://i.snipboard.io/7lubPE.jpg https://i.snipboard.io/7lubPE.jpg Being a one-man-team, I tried to keep operation as simple as possible and automate the processes that could be automated.