| [HN Gopher] Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in...
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Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 - Show
and tell
Previously asked on: 2022 -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152 2021 -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095 2020 -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
Author : mbrain
Score : 117 points
Date : 2023-01-22 21:28 UTC (1 hours ago)
| dandigangi wrote:
| Nothing really to show visually but I make about that passively
| selling/trading high end watches. More a hobby than anything just
| to wear them but some easy cash.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| Reptime?
| mjaques wrote:
| I sell cheap but high-quality Anki decks for language learning:
| https://deckmill.com
|
| Created using a mix of automation (TTS, machine translation,
| etc.) and human reviews.
|
| Built it with a friend, making around $500 a month, very stable
| over the last couple of years. Spend 1 or 2 hours a month on it,
| mostly customer support.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I just downloaded your sample deck for Spanish. One of the
| sentences is: Front: I'm not happy. Back:
| No soy feliz.
|
| This doesn't seem correct to me.
|
| I'm not happy (right now) => No _estoy_ feliz.
|
| No soy feliz means something like "I'm not a happy person".
| eps wrote:
| Why is there no pricing info?
| Arainach wrote:
| I read through the entire site and was convinced there was no
| price, but when I came back to reply I found that there is an
| element at the top of the homepage (next to "No
| subscriptions. No frills.") that says "Get access to all our
| decks for just EUR15.99."
| pell wrote:
| I think you probably missed it because it's right there:
|
| >Get access to all our decks for just EUR15.99.
| hifikuno wrote:
| On the front page it says EUR15.99 for access to all decks
| forever, including updates.
| [deleted]
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Linking to this comment from your Show HN, which describes how
| your decks are different from what people can put together
| themselves:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25678152
| Arainach wrote:
| Cool product. One bit of feedback: after downloading a deck,
| the page redirects away to "how to use our decks". This is
| confusing and not intuitive - my workflow was that I wanted to
| download the Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced deck for one
| language and I had to navigate back to that language 3 times.
| eximius wrote:
| https://hoppy.network/
|
| Basically WireGuard as a service but we give a dedicated IPv4 and
| IPv6 with Reverse DNS.
| hemmert wrote:
| https://www.escape-team.com - a printable escape game. It
| currently makes about $600 on iOS and $400 on Google Play, all
| through the $1.99 IAPs.
|
| I do not do any advertising for it, but as it is played in
| groups, it nicely advertises itself.
| hemmert wrote:
| A lot of traffic also comes from the mission editor:
|
| https://www.escape-team.com/create
| predmijat wrote:
| https://sre.rs - DevOps course (Udemy) for smaller teams and
| individuals
| rogual wrote:
| A long time ago, I made some Flash games. I recently converted
| some of them away from Flash and released them together as a
| desktop game for modern computers.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458090/Hapland_Trilogy/
|
| I am currently making more than $500 a month from this, although
| I don't necessarily expect that to continue. Games are a crowded
| market. It was a fun project, though.
| eps wrote:
| Holy smokes! What a massive time sink it was :) Brilliant
| little gems, absolutely brilliant.
| amcraig wrote:
| Oh my god, you made the Hapland games? I spent hours of through
| high school playing them. Wanted to say thanks for the great
| times!
| POiNTx wrote:
| What's the programming language and environment to run it for
| the non-flash version?
| nmstoker wrote:
| Details in this wonderful little article (which i think i
| read via HN but it came up in a search easily just now)
|
| https://foon.uk/how-flash-2022/
| itake wrote:
| I had 3 sources of side income last year.
|
| 1/ Started a niche dating app in 2017. Revenue ranges form
| 700-1,100/mo. Hosting is about $50/mo.
|
| 2/ Bought a house and rent our spare rooms for $3,100/mo.
|
| 3/ Contracting projects for a small dev shop earned $3-10k/mo
| (depending on how many hours I worked).
| Glench wrote:
| https://extensionpay.com -- A really simple way for browser
| extension developers to take payments in their extensions. I made
| it to use in my own extensions since it's a pain in the butt to
| take payments in browser extensions.
|
| It has an open source library that works across all browsers and
| allows for one-time or subscription payments. Since 2021
| developers have made over $125k with ExtensionPay which makes me
| happy :)
| mateuszbuda wrote:
| Scraping Fish - a web scraping API powered by custom-build,
| ethical, mobile proxy pool: https://scrapingfish.com/
| enraged_camel wrote:
| I'm one of the cofounders of PriceTable. [1]
|
| About a year and a half ago I posted about it on HN [2] and back
| then our revenue was $2,500/mo. We recently passed the $6,000/mo.
|
| At this point we have a few very happy customers who make up the
| bulk of our revenue. We have been trying to grow more, but our
| challenge is that we haven't been able to figure out a cost-
| effective way of reaching potential customers. We target the
| landscaping market, and most landscaping companies are either too
| small, or they don't have tech-savvy owners/staff who are
| motivated to learn and leverage a software solution effectively
| in order to grow their sales. Phone and email outreach haven't
| worked well.
|
| If anyone has experience in this market or similar, please drop
| me a line! ege@pricetable.io
|
| [1] - https://pricetable.io [2] -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26855726
| eps wrote:
| The question was about one's personal side projects.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Read his show hn link, it is a side project.
| outcoldman wrote:
| macOS applications https://loshadki.app $1,500-3,000 USD /month
| valryon wrote:
| I make videogames for a living:
|
| - Flipon (https://flipon.net) an arcade puzzle/match-3 inspired
| by Tetris attack on PC mobiles and switch
|
| - Steredenn (https://Steredenn.pixelnest.io) a roguelike shoot
| them up, pc, iOS, switch.
|
| I've been lucky to have an extra income with those two games for
| a few year.
| entelechy0 wrote:
| [dead]
| jerryu wrote:
| ERD Lab - Database design tool built for developers
| https://www.erdlab.io
|
| Login as guest directly at https://app.erdlab.io No registration
| required to test. No email confirmation needed to register either
| if you choose to do so.
|
| Here is a 1 minute video of ERDLab in action.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VaBRPAtX08
| jerryu wrote:
| Would love some feedback from HN community. Any thoughts?
| lucasmerlin wrote:
| I made collaborative painting apps, https://hellopaint.io and
| https://malmal.io (there might be some slight NSFW content). In
| the best months I made 800EUR+ in ad revenue from malmal but
| currently it's a lot less. I think there's potential to make a
| lot more though, although I'd like to stop showing ads and switch
| to some more predictable income model. I do have a patreon but it
| only brings in ~100EUR per month. I could promote it more though.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Awesome work! Saw some furry porn being drawn live on the front
| page, that was kind of funny :"D
| kedmi wrote:
| OpenSay - Responsible anonymity in Slack, moderated by AI and
| team effort.
|
| https://OpenSay.co
| bobleeswagger wrote:
| Very cool, I don't think most folks realize how much this would
| help reduce favoritism and nepotism in the workplace.
| kedmi wrote:
| Thank you! Precisely. Anonymity levels the playing field. We
| aim to capture the upside of anonymity by moderating with AI
| and team effort.
| windowshopping wrote:
| One bit of small feedback - I would say your landing page is
| very busy, it could use some more space separating content once
| you start scrolling down past the top part.
| kedmi wrote:
| Thanks! Will look into it.
| bosch_mind wrote:
| Neat. What lib implemented that radar graph on the landing
| page?
| kedmi wrote:
| Thanks! Heavily edited ChartJS Radar Chart
| sphuff wrote:
| I got pretty into Stable Diffusion soon after it came out. Like a
| lot of users, I tinkered around with different ways to run it,
| going the usual route of running on my weak local machine, then
| going on to runpod, then implementing my own custom solution.
|
| What I came up with worked pretty well for me, so I created a
| site that allows users to upload custom models and run Stable
| Diffusion "in the cloud".
|
| I launched in early December and it ended up being more
| successful than I expected. I just got to $700 MRR, which I'm
| definitely happy about after years of side projects making
| exactly $0.
|
| The site in question: https://stadio.ai
| radicalriddler wrote:
| Unless you're wanting people to save the images on the landing
| page, please optimize the images. WebP and only as big as they
| need to be rendered.
|
| If I go to a service designed around images and it's taking 5
| seconds on a SOLID fiber connection to fully download, it
| doesn't give me confidence that I'm going to get a fast
| experience in the rest of your site (even if it's not directly
| related).
| sphuff wrote:
| It's a great point. I had been using BunnyCDN to optimize the
| images/serve as webp, but there are a few on the model
| preview page that I definitely need to shrink further.
|
| Thanks for the feedback!
| harel wrote:
| When previewing models and your email is no validated, the link
| comes up in glorious html on the screen:
|
| Click here to verify your email.
| sphuff wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up! I'll take a look - last I checked
| that link was rendering correctly, so I'll see what's going
| on there
| harel wrote:
| While we're both here, it's not exactly clear to me what
| that whole thing means and does. Arguably i'm not too clued
| up in SD models and what they are and why would I want
| them. Might be a good idea to explain this or if
| explanation exists make it more prominent to hook ignorant
| people like me. :-)
| trympet wrote:
| I made a simple app for tracking stock prices on your desktop:
| www.stockdesktopwidget.com
| kureikain wrote:
| https://mailwip.com email forwarding with extra stuff like
| webhook, full inbox log, SMTP support, and "email to blog"
|
| I made this because every time when I start a project and bough a
| domain and setup email. first thing. So I scratch my own itch :).
| porsager wrote:
| I wanted to give swift a try when it came out in 2014. I created
| the keyboard I know you all miss on the iPhone, and it's been
| doing quite great since. https://typenineapp.com
| eps wrote:
| This has gotta be a massive patent minefield.
| jurgenwerk wrote:
| I sell handmade sculptures of influential people and famous
| monuments on Etsy - https://www.etsy.com/shop/jurgenstudio.
| Revenue is 2-6k USD depending on the season. I hired someone part
| time who took over production and shipping. it's mostly passive
| revenue for me apart from growing the business by developing new
| products when I feel like it. The profit margin is around 50%
| after all material and labor costs are paid.
| xcambar wrote:
| I was expecting Rihanna or Gizeh, not Zizek ans the Berghain,
| and I love every bit of the surprise!
|
| Congratulations!
| mattl wrote:
| How much do you spend on likeness rights for the people or the
| similar thing for famous monuments?
| noah_buddy wrote:
| I think it depends on how the work is produced for
| celebrities. If it's a mass produced product and not one off
| artisan creations, OP might run into problems
| mattl wrote:
| They look to be making several of each person.
| guywithahat wrote:
| Out of curiosity when you say you hired someone to take over
| production and shipping, do you mean you outsourced it? Or like
| that from craigslist is producing them now?
| kylecazar wrote:
| This is super cool. Admittedly, I know nothing about creating
| concrete figures -- I imagine the real artistic work is in
| creating the mold? Can you share how that is done -- is a
| sculpture created and then surrounded by the mold material?
| julienmarie wrote:
| I love the selection and I'm thinking of buying a couple! Is it
| possible to have special requests made? Wittgenstein would be a
| great addition (the tryptic Nietzsche / Freud / Wittgenstein
| has been what forged my weltanschauung )
| andyish wrote:
| I built https://team-today.com in a lock down as a way for my
| remote team to see when people are on holiday, going to site, or
| wfh.
|
| Since then it's grown to include other features like desk booking
| and PTO approvals. But at it's all been built around the core
| concept of seeing when your colleagues are working and where
| they're planning on working from.
| mrichman wrote:
| Nice! What's your tech stack and how long did it take to build
| your MVP? Can you share your current revenue and expenses?
| adithyasrin wrote:
| https://www.arbeitnow.com - a job board for Germany. It's been up
| for two years this January and it keeps me going! Revenue and
| traffic fluctuate a lot, does not really matter to me as long as
| people keep finding jobs through it so I'll keep working on it as
| long as I can.
| joshmn wrote:
| During COVID I was in Mexico. At some point I wanted to go
| horseback riding. I was researching places to go horseback riding
| and I was not at all surprised to see I would have to make some
| calls to book.
|
| Fast-forward a few weeks, I become pretty good friends with the
| owner at the ranch I went to. We grab tacos one night and he
| shares his concerns: They're not doing so well financially and
| are worried about whether or not they'll be able to afford feed
| in a month.
|
| I got involved and we solved that problem and a few more:
| revamped the website (it looked and felt like it was from 2006),
| I whipped up a booking/reservation system to get more customers
| through the door, and exit surveys to make sure everything was
| perfect (and figure out what went wrong if it wasn't).
|
| Bookings this month are up 490% from 2018 (according to the paper
| waivers they had) and that's without a single dollar spent in
| paid marketing. I answer a few emails every day from prospective
| riders and make sure everyone's happy. I get a percentage of each
| reservation which is cool, but the coolest part is that I get to
| say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranch.
| jorgesborges wrote:
| Nice! Was the booking system simple CRUD, or did you require
| credit cards for payment or reservation?
|
| Edit: Saw the URL from another comment. Great work, simple and
| does exactly what's needed.
| joshmn wrote:
| It's mostly CRUD, and the stack is very boring:
| Rails/Hotwire/Bootstrap, about 10k lines (we have apps for
| the staff on the ground, agents and agencies that we partner
| with, and some other stuff in there). The tricky part of
| handling the bookings is that on any given day we have a
| limited number of horses and multiple types of rides: 3
| trails at 10AM, 1 trail at 3PM. A few times a month we'll max
| out the horses and not have availability for a given time. We
| can burst horsepower if we need to and accommodate bigger
| groups if we're hitting capacity and suspect load will
| maintain its current HPH. (that was a stretch; I tried)
|
| We also track what horses have been used and how much so that
| we're not riding them into the ground -- the people on the
| ground have an app I built in Framework7 to manage
| everything; they love it and Framework7 is very fun once you
| get rolling.
|
| We ask for a 20% deposit to "hold [your] horses" and to
| prevent no-shows; the rest is transacted at the ranch (though
| we make the option to pay in full available if you email us).
| Our cancellation policy extremely flexible and though we say
| 24 hours on the site, we've never not refunded someone.
| lampshades wrote:
| An absolutely amazing story. I've wondered for a while how
| powerful bringing skilled software engineers (let's be
| honest, people don't give us credit for the amount of
| actual business skill is required to effectively do this
| job) into small businesses would work. Most people who
| don't work in tech or advertising don't think so much about
| tracking _everything_. It presents a pretty big opportunity
| for both small business owners and software people.
| joshmn wrote:
| One of the things I wanted to do was understand who our
| customer was. They had really no idea. Waivers are all
| digitalized and ask for the basics: name, date of birth,
| where you're from, emergency contact. I use a "gender
| API" to get the gender of the rider the best we can, and
| from there we have learned a lot about who our typical
| customer is.
|
| Some fun factoids:
|
| * typical rider is 35-44. Less than 10% of riders are
| under the age of 24,
|
| * about half of people book when they're in Mexico
|
| * average lead time is 7 days
|
| * about 66% of riders have riding exp; about 33% consider
| themselves "novice" or "expert" riders
|
| * 45% of riders are male, 55% are female
|
| * 1 rider reported they are from Antartica
| pcardoso wrote:
| Very cool to know.
|
| I did something very similar for Surfing schools. Not yet
| making any money off it, but I am trying to. Reaching out to
| other surfing schools, improving the product adding new
| features.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| It's a great website, really well done!
| unity1001 wrote:
| > I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranc
|
| You must get business card made and start distributing them to
| friends and family whenever you get the chance. Not for
| marketing - to brag and to be able to be mildly annoying.
| joshmn wrote:
| It's definitely my favorite fun fact. I'm grow up in the city
| but I spent a few summer days on a horse growing up. One of
| my earliest memories was horseback riding with my mom. I must
| have been no older than 18 months.
| unity1001 wrote:
| Note that you can also use the ranch business cards as 'get
| out of jail cards' to avoid social chatter when you need to
| change the subject: You note that the in-law starts taking
| the discussion towards some uncomfortable topic during
| thanksgiving dinner. You immediately use the card: "Say,
| have I given you my business card?" - and then you move on
| to talk about the ranch. Even if they interrupt you and try
| to get back to the topic, the topic will be derailed for
| good. Usable every 6 months by pretending that you forgot
| that you already gave them your business card...
| pxue wrote:
| Mexicos overall internet presence is literally stuck in the
| early 2000s.
|
| Most business' official website are a Facebook page.
|
| In a country of 150M people and growing expat presence, there
| is a TON of opportunities for software businesses to enter the
| market.
|
| For example: Riviera Maya has no MLS style real estate
| tracker/listing platform. The entire real estate industry
| operates on word of mouth, WhatsApp and Facebook messages.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Awesome work! Would you mind sharing? I live in Mexico City and
| would love to try horse back riding.
| joshmn wrote:
| Sure. We're in Vallarta if you ever make it out this way. :)
| https://ranchoelcharro.com
|
| Obligatory disclosure: some semblance of ownership.
| xiande04 wrote:
| I live in Veracruz. Will be paying you a visit in the
| future!
| dimaor wrote:
| The team page made me laugh out loud :D
| joshmn wrote:
| Thanks! We get a lot of compliments on the copy. I wanted
| to reflect that we are indeed a Mexican horse ranch
| without the site being incredibly boring. There's only so
| many cool things you can show/say before you realize that
| horses aren't really all that interesting on the
| internet.
| Swizec wrote:
| https://seniormindset.com/ - book and workshop helping people
| with the shift in mindset that goes into being a senior
| [software] engineer.
|
| You can tldr my philosophy as "business results trump technical
| excellence"
|
| No MRR but made about $40k in sales last year. Biggest challenge
| is figuring out how to turn that into stable revenue. Biggest
| opportunity is that unlike my previous (technical) infoproducts,
| this one doesn't expire in 6 months.
| tedmcory77 wrote:
| I have a weird set of skills that I've grown from just doing
| things that are interesting and fun.
|
| https://www.munkle.it - Think Anki, but optimized for speed, and
| will be focused on content creators. First sale this month
| (>$500_ from manual outreach to a big content creator Individual
| purchases will be turned on eventually, but we're not focused on
| that right now. This is a labor of love as through college and
| 20+ professional certifications I wanted something faster and
| easier than what was available.
|
| https://www.skullsplitterdice.com - I spend around 4 hours a week
| on this, but I used to do this full time. Currently it runs high
| four to low five figures 100% organically, but can easily do more
| if I ran ads. It 100% wouldn't be worth my time if I weren't
| using it to teach my kids things like customer service, product
| design, how to make content valuable to people so you get search
| traffic, single piece flow, etc.
|
| It's also cool because I can geek out on a new thing in the area
| and apply it to something to see if I make any money on it or
| just have fun making art. Things I've done in the past is
| includes making a book for the game these are used for, a "choose
| your own adventure" style Facebook messenger adventure linked
| from hidden inserts in products, and working with visual and
| voice over artists to make stories around different products. My
| latest was using midjourney to create a character that I animated
| to say a script talking about a product.
|
| Did I make money from that? No, was I entertained? Heck yes.
| holgersindbaek wrote:
| I started a solitaire website 5+ years ago. When Covid hit, I
| ended up finally putting ads on it. Since then it's been growing
| steadily and about half a year back I made it my full-time gig.
|
| You can check out the game here: https://online-solitaire.com/.
|
| I wrote a post about my journey on Indie Hackers if someone is
| curious about it: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-a-
| simple-solita....
| jerriep wrote:
| https://www.usecloudpress.com/ - Allows you to export content
| from Google Docs and Notion to Content Management Systems like
| WordPress, Webflow, Contentful, etc. I will export the content
| with the correct formatting, export images, and also handles
| other elements like tables, embeds, and more.
| willswire wrote:
| Back in college (2016-2020), I used to work part-time for my
| university's IT department. Most of my time was spent doing
| software development, but when I wasn't busy working on a
| project, I helped work the help desk ticket queue.
|
| Believe it or not, our ticket queue did not have an auto refresh
| feature - and manually refreshing my dashboard webpage drove me
| crazy. As a die-hard macOS user, I've always used Safari as my
| primary browser, but unfortunately no auto-refresh web extensions
| were available on the App Store at the time. So I learned how to
| package web extensions for Safari and sell them on the App Store.
|
| Fast-forward to today, and I now have a collection of Web
| Extensions that net me ~$750 a month. Feel free to check out
| Simple Refresh for Safari here:
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simple-refresh-for-safari/id14...
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