[HN Gopher] My 10 Year Side Project Story
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       My 10 Year Side Project Story
        
       Author : jonathanberger
       Score  : 74 points
       Date   : 2021-10-27 16:20 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (dateful.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (dateful.com)
        
       | kristaps320 wrote:
       | thanks for sharing! the story is very inspiring and i like your
       | product especially the domain name you chose, could you share
       | more about how you used google trends to decide the domain name
       | to take?
        
         | jonathanberger wrote:
         | My original domain was www.thetimezoneconverter.com. I can't
         | remember what my original search was 10 years ago but I tried
         | out a number of queries on Google Trends to see which variation
         | of "time zone", "time zone calculator", "timezone converter",
         | etc. (different spaces and such) were most popular. Then I
         | named the site that and got that domain.
         | 
         | Many years later (and just a few months ago) I switched over to
         | a new domain "Dateful" as I had accumulated a number of
         | different features for the site that went beyond just timezone
         | conversion. "Dateful" isn't based at all off Google Trends, I
         | just like the name.
        
       | dolphenstein wrote:
       | Can relate. I built a little web utility back in 2009. Did
       | practically nothing with it (occasional updates every 2/3 years)
       | and it slowly accumulated inbound links and google ranking. Then
       | finally in 2019 I decided to put a bit more effort into it. Now I
       | make my living from it! :-)
        
         | hihihihi1234 wrote:
         | What is your web utility, if I may ask?
        
       | jonathanberger wrote:
       | I made this post but credit to kw_dev who inspired this with his
       | https://kwcodes.com/how-i-failed-5-side-projects-in-6-years-...
       | HN post from a few days ago.
        
       | sloreti wrote:
       | As someone with a couple side projects kicking around, enjoy
       | posts like this. Would you be willing to share what kind of ad
       | revenue a tool like this can generate with 1M views per month?
        
         | jonathanberger wrote:
         | I'm hesitant to share publicly but if you send me a message I
         | always love to discuss side projects. :)
        
       | fuckthedangcunt wrote:
       | Dang is a massive cunt
        
       | hu3 wrote:
       | Thanks for sharing! Inspiring little project that made the world
       | a better place and earned you some ROI.
        
         | jonathanberger wrote:
         | I appreciate the comment and "world a better place" is exactly
         | how I like to think about it.
        
       | rgbrgb wrote:
       | very cool, thx for sharing and for making a useful thing on the
       | internet! I _know_ it 's gauche, but I'd love to get a rough feel
       | of how much you're making from that ad. You think you'd ever go
       | full-time on this type of side project?
        
         | jonathanberger wrote:
         | Thanks! My dream actually is to do it full-time but there's
         | only so much I can reduce my personal burn rate by. I also sent
         | you a direct message.
        
       | hbn wrote:
       | I made a very small and simple scraper utility for a photo
       | sharing website (it's one of those sites that doesn't let you
       | download through the app or easily on the website, similar to
       | Instagram). Grab the link, throw it in a box on my site, and it
       | gives you the full-res image you can right click -> download.
       | 
       | It's doing pretty decent in traffic, ranking around number 4 in a
       | fairly generic search for this utility, and gets about 1200-1400
       | invocations of the download functionality per day. I'd like to
       | monetize it but I'm not really sure what I can do. I put some ads
       | up from a small ad network that's slowly been building up a
       | couple cents per day maybe (and Adsense isn't really interesting
       | in my type of site -- I tried), but I'm not even really sure how
       | valuable my traffic is anyway.
       | 
       | If someone has suggestions for a better way to monetize, I'd be
       | willing to hear you out!
        
         | forgotmypw17 wrote:
         | Donation button in a visible but non-intrusive spot.
         | 
         | Share a little bit about yourself to humanize.
         | 
         | It will probably make you more than the ads.
        
       | xupybd wrote:
       | "another said it should have taken an hour not a weekend to
       | create."
       | 
       | I hate comments like that. Maybe someone could make it in less
       | time but I suspect the commenter hadn't even tried. Why throw
       | your estimate out there as better than someone's real effort?
       | That level of arrogance is frustrating.
        
         | is_true wrote:
         | I guess it could be either: Different constraints or ignorance.
        
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       (page generated 2021-10-27 23:00 UTC)