22 ms·
Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects - what did you make?
It can be a SaaS app, a mobile app, or any side project that is netting you recurring revenue.
- halcyondaze 13y ago1. Niche music site monetized with apparel sales 2. Network of content sites monetized with ads
- zeeg 13y agogetsentry.com - saas
- palidanx 13y agoHow long has the sentry app been live? It looks pretty useful.
- acrooks 13y agoThe company I work at uses it across all products - Javascript and PHP. It's super handy and has helped us find bugs before our users! Definitely recommend giving it a shot since you can have Sentry logging your Javascript errors in 2 lines of code.
- TkTech 13y agoIt is /very/ useful. I managed to mooch a free account for an open-source project and it has been invaluable. For Python projects, it has the best integration (being written in python) of any of the many that I have tried (most of which seem to focus on RoR and everything else is an extra). I'm attempting to get it adopted at my workplace as well. The major point that seems to get the bosses interested is being able to host it ourselves (for free, it's open source) easily in the case that we outgrow the hosted version.
- nreece 13y agoGood on ya! Curious to know how do you market & promote the app, considering that it's a pretty competitive market segment?
- zeeg 13y agoOur marketing is simply trying to build the best product and assuming that well dominate the scene die to it Plus we are pretty lazy when it comes to that
- liamgooding 13y agoWe use Sentry at Trak.io and love it :)
- cyakimov 13y agoWe use Sentry @ crowdsourcedtesting.com and now we can't live without it.
- fheisler 13y agoKickstarted a Python course (now 2, soon to be 3 courses) - RealPython.com
- Nicholas_C 13y agoMy work VPN blocks this as porn. Ha!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- fheisler 13y agoOof, good to know... Any other false positives you've had so I can maybe figure out why? Edit: Never mind, I think your censorware might just have a more inventive sexual imagination than I do when it comes to domain names...
- veidr 13y agoNot sure it would be related, but python.com used to be a startling high-res extremely NSFW spread that you really didn't want to accidentally visit in a public setting when you really wanted python.org... (They are now 'no longer accepting new affiliates' though, and the pictures are gone.)
- Nicholas_C 13y agoNone that I'm aware of.
- Nicholas_C 13y agoThis was also blocked at work: >http://blogs.sfweekly.com/foodie/2013/12/amazonfresh_has_launched_in_ba.php http://blogs.sfweekly.com/foodie/2013/12/amazonfresh_has_lau... But the main site (http://www.sfweekly.com/ http://www.sfweekly.com/) and the blog site (http://blogs.sfweekly.com/ http://blogs.sfweekly.com/) aren't blocked. I'm going to guess my work filter is just screwy.
- mh- 13y ago
- ericabiz 13y agoMy blog at http://erica.biz http://erica.biz makes more than $1,000/mo in advertising and affiliate commissions. I built the blog after I bootstrapped and sold my first tech company. I talk a lot about growing your business/startup, and especially about all the failures I had while building my businesses. It became popular (1.2 million unique visitors last year alone.) I've now been blogging there for just over 6 years. Today I'm more focused on my startup, so my blog isn't bringing in as much income as it used to (though it's still over $1,000/mo.) My best month was over $24,000 in income.
- elwell 13y agoHave you noticed a decline related to the rise of AdBlock (and related)?
- ericabiz 13y agoGood question. I don't have a good ad stats program right now, and I charge a flat rate for banner ads on my site, so the honest answer is...I haven't checked! My ad service provider is going out of business on 12/31, so over the next few weeks I'll pick a different ad software program and/or ad service provider, and I'll then be able to track stats better.
- spurgu 13y agoInteresting question. I read her post, checked out the blog, disabled Adblock but still didn't see any ads. So I disabled Ghostery as well and finally saw the source of her income. My initial thought was "who the hell clicks these ads?". I suppose the target group isn't people like me who use extensions Adblock and Ghostery. And people like me are (and probably most of you) - at least for now - a pretty small group among web users.
- pxue 13y agoyou don't have to click the ads to mean something. every time you see an ad you're most likely getting cookie retargeted as well, meaning the advertizers now can uniquely identify you across the internet. The next time you purchase something related to an ad you saw half way across the internet, she gets paid for showing you the ad.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- xur17 13y agohttp://pizzacodes.com http://pizzacodes.com My goal was to break $1k / mo by the end of this year. Last month I not only broke that goal, but more than doubled my next highest month.
- halcyondaze 13y agoLove this dude - great idea!
- xur17 13y agoThanks, really appreciate it! It's been my side project for about 2 years now. It really started to take off at the beginning of this year when I started to rank well for relevant keywords. This past summer, I switched domains to make it more memorable, and my ranking suffered pretty severely. My rank in Google search never recovered, but my traffic from other sources / direct traffic has increased quite substantially such that this doesn't matter anymore.
- jonotron 13y agoWhat was the old domain name?
- xur17 13y agohttp://abiteofpizza.com http://abiteofpizza.com Google analytics showed a decent amount of traffic from users searching for asliceofpizza, abitofpizza, etc, and I talked to some users that indicated they had trouble remembering the domain. Bought the new domain for ~$600 over the summer. My direct traffic has increased a lot since then, so I'm inclined to say it helped.
- halcyondaze 13y agoYou redirect properly + submit to Google, etc? A proper redirect + submission should see a dip then recovery, not a persistent dip.
- wyck 13y agoA good old fashioned web site which ranks high for a resort town which has a lot of tourists who don't know where to eat so they search in the Google. My next venture is a run on sentence shortening service.
- msr101 13y agodo you make money from the restaurants advertising directly or adsense etc?
- wyck 13y agoDirect only. Our competition is tripadvisor, it a david and goliath situation, even though we specialize in just one area for one thing. My friend owns a similar site in a much larger demographic and makes a lot more, but be advised.. this works mainly because of salesmanship and ranking well, the per month hours are now very minimal (5-10).
- eerburu 13y agoSo, do you call the hotels/restaurants and try to sell banners/ads?
- tinco 13y agoWhat is a sentence shortening service?
- marktangotango 13y agoFYI, it was a joke; the first sentence in the post was excessively long.
- tinco 13y agolol that totally went over my head :D I was thinking prison sentences :|
- jsnk 13y agoI wrote a short book on Ruby (http://dmtri.com/posts/65/just_enough_ruby_to_get_by http://dmtri.com/posts/65/just_enough_ruby_to_get_by) for beginners. I wanted to publish it via LearnPub originally and earn some money, but I decided to release it for free instead.
- mintplant 13y agoAnd how is it generating revenue?
- 23andwalnut 13y agoI make quite a bit more than $1k a month from Duet - http://duetapp.com http://duetapp.com It's a project management app for freelancers and small businesses. Hopefully one day soon it will be more than a side project.
- nreece 13y agoGood on you! Curious to know how do you market & promote the app, considering that project management is a very competitive/saturated market segment?
- 23andwalnut 13y agoIt's very difficult and I'm still figuring it out, but I get a decent amount of traffic from the free version http://getsoloapp.com http://getsoloapp.com.
- pcharles 13y agoFreemium model almost always works best! Best of luck
- davidcristello 13y agoThis app looks amazing! I'm doing something similar but in a much different vertical - if it makes sense I'd love to talk to you about UI !
- 23andwalnut 13y agoThanks! Feel free to shoot me an email from the contact page if you would like to talk.
- davidcristello 13y agodid you do the UI or was it based on an admin template?
- 13y ago
- drc37 13y agoI started a bag company, https://www.missionarybag.com/ https://www.missionarybag.com/, for a niche market (young adults who leave home for 18 months to 2 years). A contract sewer here in the US makes the bags and my stay-at home wife does the shipping/handling. This is our first month to hit $1,000 profit in a month in under 6 months. After spending 12 years in software development, I wanted to create something tangible. And all the ecommerce/SEO/marketing I have helped others with over the years has come in handy - learning a lot in the process. We are looking to fill some larger orders with an overseas manufacturer.
- phamilton 13y agoImportant to note: Missionaries are now discouraged from using backpacks, so a sidebag like this is great timing.
- famousactress 13y agoTangential curiosity: Why discouraged from using backpacks?
- jthurman 13y agoI can't speak for the church or any particular mission, but from my experience as a Mormon missionary over a decade ago, backpacks 1) Make missionaries look like students, when they are not. 2) Are awkward on public transportation (and using them on transport is considered quite rude in some cultures). 3) Are more prone to being pickpocketed or losing things than a bag at your side/front that you can see more readily.
- tekalon 13y agoThe first option is the one I've heard the most.
- drc37 13y agoThe other aspect is that they actually want to discourage them from carrying so much stuff. They have many problems with back pain and the such. And like the other guy said, they want Missionaries "to look professional, and backpacks are not professional".
- kalamari 13y agoAdult comics - http://www.8muses.com http://www.8muses.com
- haxx00 13y agonsfw
- throwaway125 13y agoHow did you obtain the right to distribute jab comix for free?
- lifeformed 13y agoA music album I made fits that description, although it is winding down, as to be expected: http://lifeformed.bandcamp.com/ http://lifeformed.bandcamp.com/ Via album sales, Spotify streams, iTunes, etc, all done through TuneCore (https://www.tunecore.com https://www.tunecore.com).
- tprice7 13y agoCool album. How did you get a big enough audience to make real money from this? Was it just word of mouth from making good tracks? Or was it also from doing shows or reaching out to music blogs or something?
- tprice7 13y agoNevermind, I got it: http://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=lifeformed%2C%20dustforce&cmpt=q http://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=lifeformed%2C%20dustfo...
- lifeformed 13y agoYup, it was mostly piggybacking off of the game itself. Also, it was in a Game Music Bundle, which got another $10k in a week.
- tinco 13y agoAh that's great, thanks for linking to the album, I love video game music :)
- investor1234 13y agoI made a nest egg of $150,000 through advanced use of the "spend less than you make" framework. I invest passively with index funds. I average about 6% annually, but this year was significantly more than that. Easily $1k/month.
- anon292929 13y agoI built and run the internet sales for my fathers and friend company and both produce over $1k a month for me: http://bluebidet.com http://bluebidet.com and http://naturalsinsonline.com http://naturalsinsonline.com
- felixrieseberg 13y agoA tiny Zombie Shooter (www.snipezombies.com)
- simonhamp 13y agobuiltwithbootstrap.com
- manyxcxi 13y agohttp://www.shipadick.com http://www.shipadick.com - no joke. They sell themselves.
- akanet 13y agohttps://coderpad.io https://coderpad.io is a SaaS product I built that provides the highest fidelity experience out there currently for interviewing other programmers over the phone. I got to my current rev with a mix of self service plans and enterprise deals.
- veesahni 13y agohttp://www.supportfu.com http://www.supportfu.com - SaaS. bootstrapped.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- appbot 13y agoI make ~$2.5k a month from my simple iOS apps http://www.bytesizeapps.net/ http://www.bytesizeapps.net/
- anthonycerra 13y agoVery clever 4 in a row game! Makes me want a 5c.
- appbot 13y agoThanks!
- ashishb 13y agoPersonal blog: http://ashishb.net/ http://ashishb.net/ Makes money from adsense. No where close to 1K/month but growing towards that.
- illegalsmile 13y agoHow does that make any money? I don't even see ads and I don't have adblock.
- welly 13y agoI bet you're making no where close to 1k. There's no ads.
- felipesabino 13y agofound the ad, it's waaaay down the footer
- santa_boy 13y agoHow much traffic do you get? Is there a place to understand the earnings correlation of traffic and earnings through google ads?
- davidsmith8900 13y ago- I will like to thank everyone for their contributions. I have learnt so much from Hacker News.
- jthurman 13y agoI built and sell a collection of plugins for the Delphi IDE at http://www.twodesk.com http://www.twodesk.com. (Yes, people still use Delphi), for a consistent single-digit multiple of $1K each month.
- nobleach 13y agoThat is AWESOME... back in 2000, I was writing a vertical app for an oil company using Object Pascal/Borland Delphi (it was still Borland... and Kylix... at that point) It got me using Interbase/Firebird/FirebirdSQL for a couple of years. Glad to hear it's still around.
- jthurman 13y agoThanks! I've been doing this since 2002. It's a fun project and a very interesting business to be in.
- xauronx 13y agoI was developing primarily in Delphi for 5 years, took a year off, and now doing it on a the side again a little bit. It's not SO bad mumble mumble mumble
- taphangum 13y agoI was making ~$3k/month with http://myapptemplates.com http://myapptemplates.com. Recently sold it. Now working on an ad tech startup.
- travissummerlin 13y agoI now blog at http://ta.gd/mypost http://ta.gd/mypost no ads no nothing, it really just a feed for all things tech, also original post. About 3 years ago I had a news blog called alternative news daily which I sold for about 7 times revenue. My best day ever I took down 800 and change in a day. It was during the bp oil spill ordeal, I heard Lindsey Williams on a talk radio show talking about all the toxic chemicals and gas the spill would produce, and how the worker were getting sick from it. up until then I had never heard of anything like this in main stream news, so I wrote a lengthy article on it. A few days later guess what... The story was a hot item in main stream news! Not only did alternativenewsdaily.com have the top position in search, the distribution channels I submitted the story too made up the rest of the serps. Traffic poured in by the thousands and my ads were catching clicks like crazy. Later on the momentum wore off and I was drowned out by NYTimes, huffpost, and others, but that short time I was on top was freaking awesome. I still have decent ranking blogs that I will try to post breaking news on as soon as I hear about it to try to get a jump on mainstream outlets, I monitor drudgereport for that, but I doubt I'll ever get anywhere close to that day traffic surge. for a good laugh you may be interested in my post http://ta.gd/boyband http://ta.gd/boyband how to start the ultimate boy band in 5 easy steps (no ads)
- jsherer 13y agoMy first software product I launched on the side 5 years ago still makes quite a bit more than $1k/m (and that's in non-recurring revenue). Its best month was more than $15k while I was working full time. I was able to quit my corporate job back in February to focus on some new products.
- fantastical 13y agoCan you share what the product is?
- benhirashima 13y agoI made an Android app, Unlock With WiFi, three years ago. It has brought in about 64K over that time. The app unlocks your phone when you're connected to your home wifi. I'm currently working on a complete rewrite that will support patterns and face lock for root users. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.benhirashima.unlockwithwifi https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.benhirashi...
- motyar 13y agoGreat idea.
- chaddeshon 13y agohttp://www.brombone.com http://www.brombone.com It's a service that solves SEO for javascript driven websites. For the most part, Google can't crawl sites that manipulate the DOM using javascript (AngularJS, Backbone.js, Ember.js, etc). The solution is to use a headless browser to make html snapshots for all your pages and serve those to Google instead of the page that requires javascript. This turns out to be a bit of a pain in practice. So, BromBone does it for you. It generates, hosts, and updates the html snapshots. When Googlebot visits your site, you proxy the snapshot from BromBone and serve it to Google. Now Google can see the same thing your users see.
- 27182818284 13y agoHuh. I totally thought Google would penalize your ranking for trying something like that. Have you heard of that happening at all?
- chaddeshon 13y agoThis method follows Google's own guidelines on Making AJAX website crawable. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/ https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/
- jxi 13y agoCool, what's your average monthly income?
- propelledjeans 13y agohttp://best.ly http://best.ly It's a SaaS providing A/B testing for mobile apps that started out as a side project.
- someotheridiot 13y agohttp://rebrickable.com http://rebrickable.com - a LEGO database that does some number crunching and tells you what you can build by combining parts from all your sets. Lots of user submitted content that is also searched and can be built, everything with instructions.
- halcyondaze 13y agoeasily coolest idea in the thread for me (and I posted as well). Nice!
- someotheridiot 13y agoThanks, it's a lot of fun too :)
- makerops 13y agoReally cool!
- vijayr 13y agoMost creative and original idea in this thread. Congrats.
- yitchelle 13y agoAwesome site! :-) Is most of your revenue from affiliate marketing of Lego items (most obvious one)?
- postertext 13y agoI run http://postertext.com http://postertext.com. We design art prints for bibliophiles. All illustrations are made entirely out of text. I've been running it while traveling the world for 3 years non-stop now. Check out my AMA on reddit if you're interested: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1rneli/ive_been_traveling_around_the_world_for_3_years/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1rneli/ive_been_travel...
- HackyGeeky 13y agoThis is interesting, just requested a book I'd like.
- tchadwick 13y agoI bought a couple poster texts about 3 years ago. They're awesome :)
- postertext 13y agoThank you for your business!
- robwilliams88 13y agoI made a service where I find leads for other freelancers. Something I desperately wanted for my own freelance biz.
- collyw 13y agoAny chance of posting it here? I am sure people on this site would find it useful.
- heldervasc 13y agoIn my spare time i make more than $1,000/mo designing and building Android Native Applications for companies and businesses. Is hard to balance your time between your day-day job and your personal projects but i think is possible with a good management of time.
- santa_boy 13y agoCool. How do you find clients? Its one of the biggest challenges I have to deal with.
- adidash 13y agoA service that helps businesses recover from Google Penguin penalty. The number of websites using poor link building and seo practices is unbelievably high. I help them undo the poor practices and recover/prevent from Penguin penalty.
- yetisinger 13y agoHow do you identify your leads?
- adidash 13y agoMostly through referrals from existing clients. Also, got a few clients from various blogs and forums.
- kerrsclyde 13y agoI run a forum (historic vehicles) members donate to see additional content, mainly old posts and bigger images, this is the primary income. Our recurring income is in that range. Certainly not hi-tech but valuable to our membership and increases by at least 10% each year. We don't run any keyword advertising but in the past year I we started selling advertising space in 12 month plans which has supplemented income. Facebook has taken a bite out of our daily posting figures but it has made no difference to traffic/income. Facebook can't compete when it comes to delivering old content. There are several associated niches to ours which don't have a centralised web site, much potential, you do however need a good knowledge of the subject matter and time to build the community.
- rk0567 13y agoMy side project : http://html5portfoliotemplate.com http://html5portfoliotemplate.com is generating some revenue. (not closer to above mark but in next few months it may reach there)
- visadoor 13y agohttp://www.visadoor.com http://www.visadoor.com Visadoor lets you search through employment based green cards petitions and H1Bs. I make a couple of hundred dollars from adsense.
- satyap 13y agoI made a course and documentation management, and grading system for speech pathology students. Netted me >12k last year (before tax).
- tonixx 13y agohttp://iOSapps.com http://iOSapps.com and http://Vineos.net http://Vineos.net bring me about $1,000 per month. My aim is to make $3,000 per month by the end of next year
- chuckouellet 13y agohttps://snipcart.com https://snipcart.com It is a shopping cart service developed for developers and web design agencies. This is the a side project we have with the team @ spektrummedia.com. We are up and running since last August, we won the site of the day on Awwwards.com back in August and then we have a lot of traffic and we are getting new customers everyday.
- the_watcher 13y agoHave you thought about some kind of drop shipping business? Find a vendor, make a store on Shopify/Volusion/BigCommerce, whatever. A lot of items can have 50%+ margins while still staying within range of competitors.
- pcharles 13y agopromoting it is the hard part. You also have to beware of the bargain basement shoppers that will vampire you
- stevenp 13y agoMy mobile app, Routesy (http://routesy.com http://routesy.com), falls into this category through a combination of sales of the paid version and advertising in the free version. It was one of the first 500 apps in the App Store when it launched in 2008 and has been pretty consistent in its earnings ever since then.
- wsieroci 13y agoThis is my brand new project: http://metrics11.com/ http://metrics11.com/ It helps you find profitable keywords niches you can use on your site to get free traffic from Google. It shows you how many people search for given term per month in chosen country, what is competition for that term, and other metrics like trends or domains availability. We focus mostly on competitors metrics. I think it is the most comprehensive keyword research tool on the market right now. Try the demo on the front page.
- gregormck 13y agoI started http://buildtracks.com http://buildtracks.com as a side project. Now working on it full time.