[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Side project of more that $2k monthly revenu...
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Ask HN: Side project of more that $2k monthly revenue what's your
project?
I plan on starting a side project but don't really have a niche
yet. I am interested in knowing what business you run is it a
mobile app, website, Saas? And how long it took you to reach $2k
monthly revenue?
Author : max_
Score : 391 points
Date : 2023-04-14 10:35 UTC (12 hours ago)
| rubymamis wrote:
| I'm the founder of the open-source and cross-platform note-taking
| app 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.
| fm2606 wrote:
| Congrats on your accomplishments. I did not see any ads on your
| landing page. Am I missing something?
|
| In the early 00's when I was debating if I should pursue
| software dev (again) I wrote a couple of Win32 native apps in C
| and absolutely loved writing them. One of the apps was a
| workout timer which I submitted to Freewarefiles.com. It peaked
| around 48K downloads. Unfortunately freewarefiles is no more so
| I can't show off my one and only "successful" native app.
|
| Sometimes I feel I want to delve back into native apps instead
| of web based.
| rubymamis wrote:
| There is a small one on the landing page, but most of the
| revenue comes from the ones on the download page, actually.
|
| Awesome story! Come back to the light (literally) side.
| havblue wrote:
| What are your opinions about QT? Do you use the open source
| version or the paid version? (I like it myself but mostly
| because I like their wysiwyg and the debugger support is
| intuitive relative to other ides)
| rubymamis wrote:
| Overall, I love Qt. I started studying QML 2 weeks ago to
| implement a Kanban view based on the underlined Markdown
| styled todo items in the text editor, and it's been really
| great so far. Property bindings, signals & slots, integration
| with C++, it all makes so much sense, much more than other
| declarative languages/frameworks (looking at you, React) imo.
|
| Qt has been around for years, the documentation is extensive
| and the community is large and supportive. With QML I faced
| many problems, especially half-assed examples/documentation,
| Qt Creator's intellisense doesn't work well with QML
| sometimes, etc... But the tradeoff is worth it. I'm getting
| things done in a much faster pace with QML.
|
| A problem that is common both in Qt and other cross-platform
| frameworks is that you end up writing some custom code for
| each operating system to make the look and feel more native.
| But I think it's getting better with awesome open-source
| projects taking care of beautiful native window
| decorations[1].
|
| [1] https://github.com/wangwenx190/framelesshelper
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I was able to build things with Qt and Qt3D I wasn't sure
| would even be possible before starting (a very narrow-
| scoped robotics automation planner/simulator). It was
| remarkably easy to get moving with.
|
| Ironically the first version was mocked in Unity, thinking
| the tooling and ecosystem would make the MVP easy to build.
| It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't particularly easy either.
| The end result was extremely heavyweight and gave terrible
| performance. Qt on the other hand yielded fairly snappy and
| lightweight results, and the development experience wasn't
| bad at all.
|
| I wonder why more people don't use it, but then, that's my
| only exposure. Maybe it's not so great for other things,
| and I suppose there's the whole matter of having to pay for
| certain tooling and support. Us developers are sometimes
| super-hesitant to pay for the tools we use, haha.
| rubymamis wrote:
| I haven't got my hands on Qt3D, so that's nice to know. I
| agree, Qt is underrated.
|
| There are some really good courses for beginners by
| Voidrealms - Bryan Cairns[1] on Youtube, if anyone is
| interested.
|
| I think QML definitely deserve a better reputation. I
| even saw it being used for websites[2] although I'm still
| sticking with React for that.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/@VoidRealms/playlists
|
| [2] https://pureqml.com/
| [deleted]
| david_shaw wrote:
| Is this a fork of (open source but paid-value-add) Standard
| Notes?
| rubymamis wrote:
| Nope, I started it by myself 8 years ago. Now the project is
| getting many wonderful contributors.
| DaanDL wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thanks! Even more awesome features and improvements are
| coming soon (:
|
| We're on Github here btw:
| https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes
| mkl wrote:
| Do you plan to add syncing of notes between devices?
| rubymamis wrote:
| 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?
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Obsidian seems to have all the features of that note taking
| app + many more and even has plugin support.
| rubymamis wrote:
| Obsidian is not:
|
| 1. A native app (it's an Electron app).
|
| 2. Open source.
| codersfocus wrote:
| What's your RPM? That much income for a software download page
| seems impressive
| rubymamis wrote:
| $25.8
| djbusby wrote:
| Wow! Freaking monster!
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| That's quite high isn't it? Where does one get $25.80 per
| thousand impressions?
| nmajor25 wrote:
| By placing an ad with a green "Start Now" button that
| goes to a spammy browser extension download page? Users
| probably think that's the button to download the desktop
| application.
|
| At least that's the ad I get on that page.
| JoMendoza wrote:
| My friend and I built 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/
|
| 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.
| hugoroussel wrote:
| 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_gma...
|
| https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/gpt_for_doc...
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| asdffdsa wrote:
| Don't trust any numbers here blindly sir.
|
| Without verification you don't know if any of them are
| marking $2k+
| capableweb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The apps have over 250k installs you can see on the
| Marketplace listings
| duck wrote:
| 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 2:
| https://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/647
| gnrlst wrote:
| What's the current MRR out of curiosity? I think about it every
| time I get it in my inbox :)
| ayewo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thanks for doing it. Love receiving this.
| jason_zig wrote:
| 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
| monsecchris wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Cool. I made one of these too. Open source though...
| github.com/dicroce/revere
| nghiatran_uit wrote:
| 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
| olabyne wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| I'm happy to support you.
| klaaz0r wrote:
| I use proxyman a lot, you did an amazing job, it's a super
| slick and well working app
| nghiatran_uit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Already have it running!
| ffitch wrote:
| Proxyman (desktop) is a terrifyingly polished app, kudos!
|
| Really curious, how does the revenue from macOS and iOS
| compare?
| nghiatran_uit wrote:
| Thanks for the shoutout. I would not disclose the macOS
| revenue. We used to publish it as a #buildinpulic movement,
| but not anymore.
| ffitch wrote:
| Fair. Good luck with both platforms!
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Proxyman is fantastic. It replaced Charles for me.
| mikekoscinski wrote:
| Proxyman is great. It was essential to our development workflow
| for one of our user-facing products at my last job in
| healthcare.
| tevon wrote:
| You built Proxyman?! What a great project. This can't just be a
| side project though right?
|
| Even if its with a small team thats impressive, the UI is
| polished and full of features.
| nghiatran_uit wrote:
| Thanks. It's not a side project anymore. We've established a
| legal company in the US, have a small team, and commit full-
| time to it. Currently, we've working on the Windows & Linux
| version.
| tevon wrote:
| We use daily as a team
| kouteiheika wrote:
| I run a site for people learning Japanese (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
| jtth wrote:
| Oh hey! Thank you for developing this, it's a great resource!
| thangngoc89 wrote:
| Do you have any plans providing a Mandarin version of this?
| kouteiheika wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm asking because I'm learning Mandarin at the moment and
| the features you listed are just so freaking cool. Wish to
| have that!
| spacemannoslen wrote:
| Can you share with us the main differentiator your product has
| over some behemoth like Google translate? I'm personally an
| occasional tourist to Japan only and wish I could find a course
| in "tourist essentials" or "Tourist fluent" Japanese
| kouteiheika wrote:
| > Can you share with us the main differentiator your product
| has over some behemoth like Google translate?
|
| You might as well ask how a screwdriver is different from an
| apple. (:
|
| Google Translate, is, well, a translator. You give it text,
| and it translates it. That's it. My site's for people who
| want to actually learn Japanese to fluency, with a particular
| focus on media-based immersion.
|
| For example, is there a Japanese anime you'd like to watch
| without subtitles? I can probably help with that; I have
| vocabulary lists for many shows, and the site can teach you
| (through flashcards/spaced repetition) most of the words
| you'll need to be able to understand it.
|
| I also have a plugin for the mpv video player where (if you
| load appropriate Japanese subtitles for the show you're
| watching) the plugin will color-code all of the words
| according to whether you know them or not, and you'll also
| have access to a popup dictionary where you can just hover
| your mouse over any of the words and see their definition.
| You can also use the plugin to make vocabulary flashcards
| with the screenshot + audio from what you're watching; demo
| video by one of my users: https://streamable.com/ww6x0e
|
| I can keep on going as there's a lot more, but I'll stop
| here! It's probably not appropriate for someone who just
| wants to learn a little bit of Japanese for tourism purposes.
| yurishimo wrote:
| This is wild for a side project?!?! I wish you had
| something like this for Dutch. I recently moved from
| America and something like this would be phenomenal. I can
| see why you have so many patron donations!
| kiru_io wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| agotterer wrote:
| 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| [flagged]
| h4ch1 wrote:
| That depends on what your definition of authentic is. If it
| means ingredients sourced from their host countries, then
| that's going to make it extremely hard for any restaurant to
| start; considering the logistical cost and generally things
| not being fresh enough. The appropriate definition should be
| authentic methods. If I want to cook dum biryani and market
| it as dum biryani, I should be cooking it in the traditional
| method of using a bread sealed handi; but calling it
| unauthentic if my chicken wasn't born in Hyderabad makes no
| sense.
| dffdsa432 wrote:
| It's strange how you are being downvoted when my foreign
| friends say the exact same thing. They say that the food at
| the restaurants we go to have a different smell from the food
| back home.
| plugin-baby wrote:
| Maybe when your friends travel, they change too.
| lozenge wrote:
| The other possibility- that the climate and soil are
| different- is too absurd?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you
| might want or wish you had at a later time."
| trillic wrote:
| That attitude isn't invited to the dinner party.
| epolanski wrote:
| [flagged]
| agotterer wrote:
| I "think" I understand what you're trying to get at. But
| it's an unfortunate and limited perspective. Sure, New
| York isnt Thailand and the restaurant didn't source their
| ingredients from a Bangkok market at 4am that morning.
| But that doesn't mean the chef didn't cook, study, or
| live in the region previously. So does that mean the only
| thing that makes a dish authentic is its local
| ingredients and there's no credit given for the chefs
| experience? Also, how do you know the chef didn't import
| any of the ingredients or spices from the place you're
| expecting for it to be authentic?
| epolanski wrote:
| > But it's an unfortunate and limited perspective.
|
| Well, if something that is not prepared with authentic
| ingredients is authentic to you we have divergent
| opinions.
| dffdsa432 wrote:
| You are coming from what I assume a Western perspective.
| You should talk to the restaurant owner about
| authenticity. They will likely have the same opinion as
| the person you're replying to. Meat or veggie ingredients
| if imported from a different continent, will often be
| frozen and not fresh. The water obviously is not imported
| and that affects the taste directly. The meat will have a
| different smell if sourced locally, etc.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| While I disagree with the above poster's attitude, I
| agree with the point about food tasting different
| depending on where you are.
|
| Perhaps you can get relatively authentic Indian food
| (ignoring the variations in Indian cuisine for a second)
| in the U.S. and Canada, compared to India (I've traveled
| India for comparison). Because there are tons of import
| markets in both countries to get all the same
| ingredients.
|
| But Indian food in Greece definitely has a Greek flavour
| to it, because it's quite hard to find the proper
| ingredients to make more authentic Indian food. They used
| feta instead of paneer!
| well_actulily wrote:
| I encountered this with "Mexican" food in Germany, which
| --anecdotally speaking, uniformly tasted of Maggi-brand
| chicken bouillon.
| pc86 wrote:
| You're right, how dare these rubes not ship in gallons of
| water from Turkey so they can boil _that_ to be truly
| authentic. What idiots.
| dffdsa432 wrote:
| If you know anything about cooking, water affects the
| taste of food. The water in Turkey vs America taste very
| different. Therefore it is very difficult for restaurants
| to achieve the same "authentic" taste in foreign
| countries.
| agotterer wrote:
| Edit: dishes authentic to a region cooked as close to
| authentic as the chef and ingredients allow.
| capableweb wrote:
| If you live in a metropolitan area, finding them in local
| niche shops tends to not be overly difficult. Not to mention
| that it's possible to import as well.
| keiferski wrote:
| One of the best things about meeting people in person is that
| no one is rude enough to make this kind of comment to your
| face. Unfortunately the internet removes that barrier.
| dffdsa432 wrote:
| Your comment is confusing rudeness with your ignorance of
| how foreigners feel about food in their host countries vs
| at home. His comment is not any different than what my
| Indian and Chinese friends say.
| keiferski wrote:
| No, you are missing the point. Saying the OP's comment,
| as stated, is just rude and socially inappropriate. In
| person, it would come off as being standoffish, nitpicky,
| and hostile. It's not a good way to make friends and
| influence people.
|
| This doesn't exist online, where it's acceptable to post
| "drive by" snarky putdowns that add nothing to the
| conversation and don't actually address the issue at hand
| - in this case, the difficulty of sourcing ingredients.
|
| A constructive comment would have asked about the
| difficulty of sourcing obscure ingredients and how the
| founder deals with that.
| dffdsa432 wrote:
| I am not missing the point. The person is giving an
| actual answer from his own lived experience and you are
| saying they are rude for it. I encourage you to expand
| your network of foreign friends so you can ask them about
| the food here vs at home. They will almost certainly say
| the exact same thing. The tase and the smell of the food
| here even if they make it will not have the same taste
| and smell back home.
| keiferski wrote:
| I have a huge network of foreign friends and have lived
| abroad for the last decade.
|
| Again; you are missing the point. It has nothing to do
| with whether the food is "authentic" or not, which is
| itself a highly debatable question. It has everything to
| do with the way you communicate to people when
| disagreeing with them or criticizing their ideas.
|
| If you don't care that people will immediately think
| you're a pedantic, difficult person, as long as you get
| to be "right", then sure, feel free to disregard what I
| wrote.
| jntvjnvutnuvt wrote:
| Have you asked them about the food here vs. back home?
| Will you return here when they tell you the food tastes
| different just like what the person said?
|
| The guy said two sentences. You may think it's rude but
| it's probably the language barrier and he's just trying
| to give his honest perspective and there was no rudeness
| intended.
| yellowapple wrote:
| "The food tastes a little different" != "The food is
| entirely inauthentic"
|
| Authenticity, in other words, is not an absolute. It's a
| spectrum, and you can get pretty darn close to the
| "authentic" end of said spectrum without needing to
| literally import foreign water.
| qumpis wrote:
| It's a spectrum and OP offers to get closer to one end of
| the spectrum when it comes to authenticity. What's the
| fuss about?
| wil421 wrote:
| I have lots of foreign coworkers and enjoy going to
| restaurants we find. No one sits there and complains
| about how this doesn't taste exactly right so what's the
| point in trying something new.
| StephenSmith wrote:
| Very cool! Any advice for someone who would want to replicate
| this endeavor?
| keiferski wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kentlyons wrote:
| Very cool story! How did you grow the group? Was it all
| through word of mouth from your initial seed group of
| friends?
| agotterer wrote:
| The first dinner was all 1st degree friends. Then it
| turned into friends of friends of friends. The 4th or 5th
| dinner was a big turning point. We had a minimum of 55 to
| hit for a popular restaurant we wanted and we were
| trending short (we actually would have ended up hitting
| it) and for the first time opened the dinner up to people
| who weren't directly connected. We posted an invite in a
| popular Long Island food Facebook group and after that we
| never had a problem selling out a dinner again. Last
| month Newsday wrote an article about us which added
| hundreds of Instagram followers and close to 100 new
| applications for membership. We sold out 48 seats for our
| April dinner in under and hour and ended up working with
| the restaurant to add a second night.
|
| https://www.newsday.com/lifestyle/restaurants/dead-chefs-
| soc... (https://archive.is/w9Z1A)
| sebiandev wrote:
| This is actually a really cool idea because for those of us who
| only dine out once or twice a month, it's nice to make it a
| unique or fun experience rather than a humdrum outing to eat
| average or templated food.
|
| I would definitely be interested in something like this coming
| to our area.
| artosispylon wrote:
| Where do you host it? At the restaurant itself or at your own
| venue?
| agotterer wrote:
| At the restaurant for the monthly meals. We are also
| experimenting with a "chefs table" with a smaller more
| intimate group hosted in pop up locations.
| pwython wrote:
| How do you monetize it?
| agotterer wrote:
| The cost per plate is negotiated with the restaurant ahead of
| time. We collect all of the money at time of RSVP which
| includes our margin. We then pay the restaurant and keep our
| fee.
| biztos wrote:
| How do you deal with drinks?
|
| As a customer I'd probably want to run a tab at the
| restaurant for whatever I drink (assuming they're alcohol-
| friendly) but as an organizer I'd probably want an upfront
| corkage fee I could take a reliable cut of.
| agotterer wrote:
| Most meals include at least one alcoholic drink as well
| as soft drinks. Anything not included can be purchased a
| la carte and paid directly to the restaurant. A couple of
| dinners have been BYOB if the venue doesn't have a
| license and there's no fees for that.
| quantumwoke wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| roblox?
| yarrak wrote:
| I run Ekofi Nova (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.
| HermanMartinus wrote:
| 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
| lampshades wrote:
| What do you find your customers are looking for that other
| blogging platforms don't provide?
| sideproject wrote:
| 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
| benrapscallion wrote:
| Not sure having a service that generates spammy websites is a
| good thing.
| 3dfan wrote:
| 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?
| trapexit wrote:
| 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.
| rlyshw wrote:
| 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?
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| The word "no" can be very effective. Remember that you
| control the type of work that you take on.
|
| I have a small side gig building "controllers." By
| controllers I mean devices that are typically arduino
| controlled and use peripherals in the arduino ecosystem. They
| span a very wide range, but are typically very feature-
| limited. e.g., I have a client who is converting massage
| chairs to be pay-per-use.
|
| As you noted, it's not easy to keep a service-based business
| from growing to take over all your time. I manage it by
| keeping the feature set clearly specified and working on
| fixed price.
|
| Want to add a feature we didn't discuss? That's another
| charge. My niche is taking on very small projects that are
| too small to move the needle for a full-blown engineering
| services company (I've worked for two) and I always work
| fixed-price, so I need to be very aggressive about scope
| creep.
|
| Project scope keeps growing? Either tell the client that it
| will be a while until I have time to complete it, or, more
| frequently, that they will need to find someone else. This is
| pretty easy to say because as mentioned above I'm clear about
| only taking on small projects.
|
| I've had people who basically want me to be their engineering
| department. That's a hard "no:" I simply don't have the time.
| [deleted]
| trapexit wrote:
| I don't take on huge IT projects anymore, or ones that have
| potential to require lots of changes over time.
|
| Used to do this as an agency principal and it involved a lot
| of time spent managing clients and projects and
| subcontractors. Drove myself crazy and took a couple years
| off after nearly burning out.
|
| I look for projects where the software solves a single
| targeted business problem and can quickly get to "done". Then
| the client is happy to pay for ongoing maintenance/ops, so
| any additional effort I put into the software is around
| reducing my ongoing workload.
| lampshades wrote:
| Would love to learn more about this. What type of SMBs do you
| target? How did you acquire your first customer?
| trapexit wrote:
| I work mostly in the travel industry. First client 10+ years
| ago came from a friend who worked as a manager in a large
| company and needed some special software built to improve his
| unit's results - the existing contractor was not good and
| internal IT did not have time/skill.
|
| Follow on work came from other people at that first client
| company who knew my work and went on to work at other
| companies.
| vageli wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pocket_cheese wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How does this work exactly? Are you doing arbitrage?
| quantumwoke wrote:
| 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.
| pocket_cheese wrote:
| Fraudulently obtained inventory is actually something I
| actively want to avoid. I don't want to go to jail, or risk
| getting banned from marketplaces - among ethical
| considerations.... I only go to authorized distributors
| where there is legal permission to resell these types of
| items. Incomm being the largest. Blackhawknetwork being
| another large player.
| pocket_cheese wrote:
| Correct! customer buys a playstation $10 card for $9.80, I
| buy it for $9.20, and pocket the spread.
| mpakes wrote:
| What is the wholesale source for the gift cards and CD keys?
| pocket_cheese wrote:
| There's a bunch of shady ones that I avoid, and the really
| big legal ones are blackhawk networks and incomm. Becoming an
| official distributor requires a lot of vetting from their
| side though, so it isn't like any joe blow can apply and get
| approval.
| iambateman wrote:
| 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.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >almost 3 digits of profits
|
| I hope this is a typo, because $99/mo is nice to have, but
| I'd honestly consider the SaaS I'm building a failure if it
| made less than 4 digits a month.
| jameshush wrote:
| I've tried freelancing a few times, I never manage to make it
| work. The clients I find all end up paying less than a "normal"
| job so I end up going back to that.
|
| I'm working as a Solutions Engineer now. Its basically
| freelancing without sourcing customers and a consistently big
| pay cheque every month. Any tips on starting freelancing?
| iambateman wrote:
| in my experience, the only thing that matters is who you
| know.
|
| Being connected to the right business folks seems to be the
| key.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| We need a thread on projects making <20$ a month and what went
| wrong, and maybe HN's comments can right that ship.
| agentofoblivion wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What was the course?
| klaaz0r wrote:
| 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/ [2] https://webtastic.ai/
| bosie wrote:
| A filter for elevators would be super-helpful. I tried [1] but
| it seems broken.
|
| after applying a filter i get a 404 (only fitler was bedroom
| size): https://homestra.com/houses-for-sale/?amount-of-
| bedrooms=2
|
| On the note of filtering, why do you not have upper bounds on
| bedrooms/bathrooms? it seems like filtering for a 2 bedroom
| isn't possible because "2+" would give me a ton i am not
| interested in
| klaaz0r wrote:
| Ohh that is interesting, how did you end up on that page, it
| should be https://homestra.com/list/houses-for-sale/?amount-
| of-bedroom... might have an old link somewhere :(
|
| Ill add the elevator filter, thanks for your input!
| bosie wrote:
| followed your map link, changed the filter and hit `apply`.
| can reproduce it now too
| klaaz0r wrote:
| Looks like the search model doesn't take the map into
| account when filtering, thanks for letting me know, will
| fix this ASAP
| tultra wrote:
| That's super interesting! I actually started developing 'Zillow
| for Brazil' a couple of years ago for the same reason (Brazil
| realstate websites are a total mess - there's no option to show
| locations on a map!), but dropped the project due to lack of
| knowledge (I was just starting my journey in computer science)
| and also because I thought that tackling such a project would
| require a gargantuan amount of work (external integrations,
| indexing addresses, and so on). Besides, I had doubts whether I
| would be able to make a net profit from the website considering
| that GoogleMaps API is quite expensive for Brazil standards.
| Congrats!
| mft_ wrote:
| > I am building a Zillow for Europe [1]
|
| As a European, I (at least) don't understand what this means -
| and therefore don't understand your offering, your USP?
|
| What does/will Homestra offer, and how will it be different
| from e.g. Immobilienscout?
| klaaz0r wrote:
| Good question, it's for expats/digital nomads/overseas
| buyers. Europe is very segmented and every country has it's
| own real estate classified sites, these are great for
| internal market but lack a lot of the features to help a
| foreign buyer. If you are a German looking for something
| within Germany changes are you will not use the site for a
| long time (lets hope in 10 years it's a different story!)
| 3dfan wrote:
| How do the properties get onto homestra? Do landlords find your
| site and enter the data + pay you? Or is the model different?
| klaaz0r wrote:
| We work with a lot of agencies/landlords mostly larger once
| now but making it more self serve in the upcoming months
| blainehoyt wrote:
| Can you add a map to Homestra? That's the one piece of
| functionality that most overseas real estate sites are missing.
| klaaz0r wrote:
| Already have it: https://homestra.com/map/
|
| It's hidden on mobile because I didn't have the time yet to
| optimise it!
| ipsi wrote:
| Are you planning to deal with all the complexities that each
| market brings? For example, compare with one of the standard
| German property search websites:
| https://www.immobilienscout24.de/ and here are some things that
| I, personally, would or have used when searching for property
| that I don't immediately see on your site:
|
| For apartments:
|
| * Searching by floor (or below or above floor)
|
| * Searching by presence/absence of elevator
|
| For all property types:
|
| * Searching by rented / unrented status (evicting tenants for
| your own use is _hard_ )
|
| * Searching by build phase, if you're interested in new-build
| properties
|
| * Searching by build year (some people prefer Altbaus, some
| consider them the work of the devil)
|
| * Searching by heating type (underfloor vs radiator)
|
| * Searching by _rooms_ , not _bedrooms_. In Germany, a 1-room
| flat is a Studio Apartment and doesn 't have a bedroom.
|
| * Display of and searching by fees when buying (typically this
| is searching for "no estate agent fee")
|
| * Display of and searching by Warm & Cold rent when renting
|
| * Ability to search by state & city (at a bare minimum, and
| note that state affects how much property tax has to be paid
| when purchasing)
|
| I think most countries are going to have a lot of little quirks
| like this, and it's going to be a hard sell to get people to
| switch over until you've got a lot of these in place for _each_
| country. I know that I 've used international sites like this
| in the past and ultimately abandoned them because they either
| made it too difficult to find what I wanted, or there just
| weren't enough properties on there.
| klaaz0r wrote:
| There is a big update coming that is fixing/adding a lot of
| the features you mangent, build year etc. is added but I need
| to review harder on that.
|
| Thanks for your feedback, really appreciated!
| ipsi wrote:
| Ahh, cool, that's great to hear!
| ggregoire wrote:
| Both projects look like they are run by a team of 10+ people!
| Congratz on making them by yourself, that's very inspiring!
| klaaz0r wrote:
| Thanks! I am teaming up with friends that are in
| marketing/sales, I learned the hard way that the whole
| romanticising of solo indiehackers is fun but you end up
| running in circles and never really have the time to do
| things perfectly. Now I have fun projects that are growing
| and working with amazing people
| hazhu wrote:
| 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 [2]
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/charades-what-am-i/id159211843...
| [3]
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yangmeistu...
| 3dfan wrote:
| ASO is like SEO for appstores?
| valbaca wrote:
| Yep
| hazhu wrote:
| Yes exactly
| secondcoming wrote:
| Try adding some 320x50, 300x250 ad inventory! It can be very
| profitable.
| hazhu wrote:
| 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
| Glench wrote:
| I run a service that lets browser extension developers easily
| take payments in their extensions: 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!
| es7 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do you mind to share genre?
| [deleted]
| rwilinski wrote:
| 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
| mikecsh wrote:
| Do you mind sharing what UI / component framework you use? It
| looks great!
| y-curious wrote:
| Please! Give me some breadcrumbs here. Do you just hook into
| the AWS API/CLI?
| samjett wrote:
| 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.
| bbauman wrote:
| 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/id16...
| bradgessler wrote:
| How did you market the app? Or did people just find it in the
| App Store?
| bbauman wrote:
| Twitter mostly - https://twitter.com/brettunhandled/status/16
| 1317951121827840...
|
| It was also picked up by FastCompany, TechCrunch, some
| others, which has helped people continue to find it
| 3dfan wrote:
| Is the business model in-app purchases? For what do the users
| pay?
| colesantiago wrote:
| 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.
| pdksam wrote:
| Is this an on demand platform like uber?
| swah wrote:
| You have a good idea here.. Even though I feel it already
| exists even on my local market.
| Jemaclus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is it a platform to connect providers and customers? What's the
| business model?
| nerdathlete wrote:
| What geographic region?
| xcubic wrote:
| So it's a "business management platform", but for pest control
| businesses ?
| caretak3r wrote:
| Can you share your company's website?
| chickahoona wrote:
| 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).
| p3rls wrote:
| I built 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 wrote:
| Via ads?
| p3rls wrote:
| Yep. We also have a subscription available
| https://kpopping.com/subscription/plus
| 3dfan wrote:
| The subscription costs money? I don't see any info about
| pricing.
| p3rls wrote:
| Yeah, it's $30 a year, you need to sign in to be able to
| subscribe for it though
| chown wrote:
| 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
| hambos22 wrote:
| 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
| xcubic wrote:
| Why not use something like shopify?
| hambos22 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Tbh, it makes complete sense.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I always wonder who "owns" the property such as this in the
| event of a breakup
| hambos22 wrote:
| She. I don't keep all the eggs in the same basket.
|
| *edit typos
| csomar wrote:
| 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.
| hambos22 wrote:
| This.
|
| I'm already doing kinda the same work with 2 established
| ecommerce B2B industry businesses, one in US and one in my
| country, and I'm getting payed a percentage of the gross
| profit from online sales & leads.
|
| We have a competitive advantage because no competitor on
| these sectors has an "in-house" dev for ecommerce ops.
| shrimpx wrote:
| This is great. Curious, have you scaled the "making" operation,
| as in have you hired people to make products, or does your gf
| still make all the products?
| hambos22 wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| Yes she still makes all the products (with help though now)
| as she finds a lot of enjoyment doing it and as we're trying
| to find shortcuts for our work, she found her ways on
| becoming more productive on the making process. At some point
| this whole thing became unmanageable, especially on
| Christmas.
|
| Now the business operates with 3 people on board, me for the
| digital part, she for the art behind the brand and another
| one person full time for order management, client support,
| helping on the making etc..
|
| And very soon we'll hire one more and move out of the house
| to a bigger space because we'll enable B2B as there is demand
| on these kind of products.
| mcsniff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Talk about a teaser!
| wufufufu wrote:
| 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 [2]
| https://groomba.ai
| richrichardsson wrote:
| If I got my side project to generate $2k/month it would no longer
| be my side project!
| jb1991 wrote:
| In many places (most places), it would be hard for 2k/month be
| your full income.
| tomxor wrote:
| > In many places (most places)
|
| You might benefit from looking more broadly (friendly
| suggestion).
| Name_Chawps wrote:
| Your "friendly suggestion" is extremely rude.
| ggregoire wrote:
| Stating that 2k/month is not enough income for "most
| places" is ridiculous and rude in a way too. Was an
| unnecessary comment.
| jb1991 wrote:
| No offense intended. I was merely pointing out that it's
| not much for many places and many would not be able to
| leave a full-time job for that. Keep in mind that this is
| approximately the poverty line for the United States so
| it might be hard for most people to leave a full-time gig
| for that.
|
| It's a nice start though!
| OJFord wrote:
| 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.
| lm28469 wrote:
| (?) 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bmalicoat wrote:
| 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
|
| [2] https://wellwordgame.com
|
| [3] https://www.birdcartel.com
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| 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 =)
| totoglazer wrote:
| Not sure if you're interested in feedback, but I found well
| world intimidating and didn't understand the
| objective/affordances. Clicked it and had a bunch of letters
| and no idea what to do. Closed it. Looks pretty though.
| sph wrote:
| [flagged]
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| 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.
| bigcloud1299 wrote:
| I am trading micro contracts. And been able to make money
| lavrton wrote:
| I am building Polotno SDK (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.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| I run 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.
| hackathonguy wrote:
| We currently make about $3K per month with
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What's your business model?
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| 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.
| mateuszbuda wrote:
| For 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.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Good question. Here we explain, with a few simplifications,
| how we source our IPs: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-
| mobile-proxy-for-web-scrap...
| uptown wrote:
| Wouldn't this mean that you're bandwidth constrained by the
| data plan associated with the SIM from the mobile carrier?
| mateuszbuda wrote:
| 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.
| edumucelli wrote:
| Props to you guys for putting a complete tutorial on that
| and not keeping it for you. Cheers!
| mateuszbuda wrote:
| Thanks! Internally we use more sophisticated system
| required by larger scale to support higher volume and
| concurrent connections from multiple clients, but for
| smaller scale limited to one person or a small team,
| everything described on our blog should be enough.
| martin_a wrote:
| Looks great, will give it a try.
|
| Bug found: Your "Buy" page is missing the header bar for
| navigation etc.
|
| edit: Contact page has the same problem. :-)
| mateuszbuda wrote:
| Actually, it's a feature :)
| sgc wrote:
| Some of us find that type of attempted lock-in extremely
| off-putting. I know it is common, but just a heads up. I
| have no idea how much of a minority we are.
| danstewart_ wrote:
| I've got no use for it now but damn this used to be such a pain
| point in an old job. Looks great!
| parrot987 wrote:
| 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
| anddt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Exuma wrote:
| My entire life is side projects
| ronyfadel wrote:
| 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/
|
| [2] https://aiprofilepic.app/
|
| [3] https://fadel.io/missioncontrolplus
|
| [4] https://fadel.io/batteries
|
| [5] https://usekay.xyz/
| mthoms wrote:
| 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.
| thedangler wrote:
| 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 or US https://clearmerchantsol.com
|
| [2] https://sytescope.com
| fatih-erikli wrote:
| 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.
| melias wrote:
| I run Loopz Gift Cards (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.
| darthcloud wrote:
| 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
|
| [2] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro/discussions/289
| FloatArtifact wrote:
| What controllers you would recommend for retro games with a
| great d-pad and buttons? I can't find anything that's even
| remotely close to native controllers especially for Super NES.
| darthcloud wrote:
| Nintendo Switch SNES controller?
|
| Otherwise personally my daily driver is PS5 DualSense
| pwpw wrote:
| Something to look out for with retro gaming is a lot of
| modern controllers have increased latency, which can be
| frustrating on games that require precision. Unfortunately,
| the Nintendo Switch Online SNES controller isn't great in
| this regard. You can use this tool[0] to check latency.
|
| Personally, I use an original Super NES controller + a
| Timville triple controller adapter[1], but a more modern
| controller that I like is the 8bitdo SN30 Pro+. I primarily
| play on a PVM via a MiSTer, so your use case may be quite
| different.
|
| [0] https://rpubs.com/misteraddons/inputlatency [1]
| https://www.tindie.com/products/timville/triple-
| controller-c...
| comptrollers wrote:
| https://www.8bitdo.com/pro2/ The ps2 and the SNES had a baby
| and it is a marvelous baby. (They sell them at Best Buy as
| well)
|
| It has: Turbo key function for SNES games, Vibration, Macros,
| Pressure-sensitive triggers, Multi-system support (there is a
| switch on the bottom that changes the signal from windows to
| Mac to Linux mode and so on), And it just werks.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I like RetroBit's Sega Genesis bluetooth controllers. They
| feel substantially similar enough to the originals.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I've never managed to find a Wii-connector-to-USB adapter
| that wouldn't inexplicably die within six months, but the
| 1st-party SNES Classic controllers are basically perfect
| clones of the original. Ditto the NES versions they have. Wii
| Pro Controllers are also great and have a similar feel &
| quality, but with modern ergonomics (no rumble, though, so
| not great for e.g. Playstation games, and IIRC the triggers
| aren't analog, which is limiting)
|
| You can connect Wiimotes to PCs over Bluetooth and use any of
| those Wii-connector controllers through them, which would
| make them wireless and solve the finding-a-reliable-adapter
| problem, but I've never managed to make that kind of set-up
| sufficiently stable. Always having to screw with re-pairing
| and such.
|
| In the end, my go-to for BT emulation controllers is usually
| a PS3/4/5 controller. I haven't tried the XBone but I found
| the d-pad on the XB and XB360 controllers unusably
| inaccurate, and the face buttons weirdly _slow_ when trying
| to play old-school Nintendo-hard games. Playstation
| controller d-pads are much better, and the face buttons feel
| quicker to switch between, for whatever reason.
| roflchoppa wrote:
| For d-pads on Xbox controllers, you can cut a cross out of
| an old plastic folder and wedge it between the plastic and
| the membrane for better feel. It makes the pad crispy.
| 10/10 all my old controllers have it, too bad no one to
| play halo3 with. :(
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| This actually made me happy, considering all the bad news
| lately:
|
| > I even got a Chinese company, notorious for selling "clone"
| of OSHW projects, to support the SW development as well via
| GitHub sponsor.
|
| I suppose that's RetroScaler?
| heywhatupboys wrote:
| does this work with steamlink? I have bought all these
| different supposed "PS3" controllers but BT doesn't connect!
| Havoc wrote:
| Interesting that people voluntarily pay. Write-up of bloggers
| doing the "buy me a coffee" button suggested to me that nobody
| pays like that.
|
| I guess software is a bit more tangible than a blog post even
| if both have value.
| HomeDeLaPot wrote:
| Sounds like good advertising! If these companies are trying
| to sell hardware corresponding to this software, then having
| a callout right in the software's README is a great way to
| attract people who are discovering the project through
| GitHub. This wouldn't work as well if the product was
| oriented toward non-technical people (not discovering it
| through GitHub) or if the software wasn't directly related to
| the hardware (most OSS projects are probably run on general-
| purpose hardware).
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| One difference I can see is the "buy me a coffee" button
| isn't a "these are the people who bought me a coffee" list. I
| imagine most of these sponsors (from their perspective) are
| paying for advertising.
| Havoc wrote:
| Ah good point
| dom96 wrote:
| If it's Apache 2.0 how are you getting royalty payments from
| it?
| darthcloud wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Ahh, I see. So you are receiving donations. Royalties to me
| mean payments that are required not voluntary.
| darthcloud wrote:
| 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.
| dom96 wrote:
| What you consider and your manufacturer considers doesn't
| matter. The definition of royalties is what matters, it
| doesn't fit in this case as far as I can see. They aren't
| paying you money so they can use your software, they are
| donating money because they are nice, they could stop
| paying at any time and continue to use your software.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Ad.
| shlant wrote:
| Pretty sure the license means you do not have to pay
| royalties, not that you are disallowed from paying royalties
| kube-system wrote:
| Royalties are typically a contractual payment, though.
| Calling a voluntary payment a royalty is kind of an odd use
| of the word, if not plainly incorrect.
| taftster wrote:
| You're right, these are donations. But they are donations
| that are determined based on the number of units sold. I
| believe that's why the parent is using the term royalty.
|
| It's not a contract, as the term "royalty" implies, but
| it is a royalty in the sense that it's determined per
| unit sold.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> If it's Apache 2.0 how are you getting royalty payments
| from it?
|
| It sounds like acknowledging the sponsors is "the right
| thing", good Karma, or simply advertising for them. Not
| everyone _wants_ to just rip off open source and not give
| back, they 're willing to share the wealth if you make it
| easy and let people know they're doing it?
|
| I need to set up github sponsors myself. We get the
| occasional request "how can I contribute money to you guys"
| and we always say stuff like "just spread the word". I keep
| telling myself I don't want to feel obligated by money, but I
| also know that I'd love to make enough to work on open source
| full time.
| hnarn wrote:
| You're not obligated by money when the money is coming from
| donations. That's what donations mean. The people giving
| them to you are not your customers.
|
| Also I can recommend OpenCollective; I'm sure there are
| other similar solutions as well. It's nice to be able to
| "expense" stuff and I'm sure donors appreciate
| transparency.
| darthcloud wrote:
| I think it's really important to make it clear that the
| contribution is for what is currently there. I get often
| ask "Will $$$ make you work on that issues" and I always
| answer no.
|
| What will help fix that issue is my wife going shopping
| with the kids long enough for me to figure what is wrong.
| ;)
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| So the obvious answer is to take the $$$, give it to your
| wife, and ask her to take the kids shopping with her :-)
| lylejantzi3rd wrote:
| Creative workarounds like this is why I love hacker news.
| :)
| abinaya_rl wrote:
| Built 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 wrote:
| 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).
| Aulig wrote:
| I've been working on 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 wrote:
| 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?
| desmondrd wrote:
| I built 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sorry, what is GTM?
| achempion wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Haha sorry - yeah as the kind person above says.. "go to
| market" -- just your question about how I take it to
| market.
| acqbu wrote:
| Go to market?
| palenchc1 wrote:
| I run a bookmarking site https://backtoit.io I haven't gotten to
| 2k yet but getting very close.
| tananaev wrote:
| Open source GPS tracking platform - Traccar
| (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.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| pards wrote:
| We AirBnB the spare bedroom in our basement and it brings in
| about $2k/month.
| sec400 wrote:
| If in the US, major metro?
| pards wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 :-(
| atari800 wrote:
| 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.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Yield farming crypto currency, make well over $2k per month. Some
| farms pay 50 to 70% interest
| alostpuppy wrote:
| Still?
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Plenty of places, check out https://app.velodrome.finance/
| for one
| hdlothia wrote:
| Where's a good place to learn about this stuff
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Not knowing what your technical abilities are, a potential
| place to start going down the rabbit hole is
| https://www.coinbase.com/learn
|
| The Bitcoin Standard explains the philosophical underpinnings
| of why this isn't a big Ponzi and there is real material
| value to stateless money:
|
| The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to
| Central Banking https://a.co/d/bC6XZqm
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| eerikkivistik wrote:
| 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.
| jmduke wrote:
| 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.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Spoiler: nobody ever gets their shit together
| gorjusborg wrote:
| but try anyway
| martin_a wrote:
| Not sure that really helps. :-D
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| 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.
| jmduke wrote:
| 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.
| sammyo wrote:
| Well unless you tell them, don't do that;-)
|
| ..sigh and don't ask me how I know.
| sharemywin wrote:
| That's was the most profound lesson I've heard in a long
| time.
|
| it touches on some many things.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think it is the brain's compression algorithm that does
| it.
| shreedx wrote:
| 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!
| paulgb wrote:
| 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.
| tmountain wrote:
| Really nice!
| dstick wrote:
| Looks nice! Congrats :)
| chrisvalleybay wrote:
| 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.
| pawurb wrote:
| Sorry for spamming my blog but maybe you'll find it useful.
| 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 wrote:
| This is cool, thanks for sharing. How did you find or form the
| mastermind group you mentioned in the post?
| pawurb wrote:
| 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/ that does matchmaking for
| founders.
| pimterry wrote:
| I run HTTP Toolkit (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!
| epolanski wrote:
| Hey, I've used your tool many times to debug SSR applications!
| It was actually a Google engineer that recommended me it.
|
| Like it a lot. Cheers.
| pimterry wrote:
| Awesome, thanks! Glad it's working well for you :D
| spotplay wrote:
| Interesting project. Will definitely check it out next time I
| have to analyze the traffic from my phone.
|
| I was just about to ask how do you differentiate your product
| from mitmproxy but on a quick google search I found this thread
| from a few years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29627819
| pimterry wrote:
| The nice bit of running a project for a long time is that
| eventually your old answers accumulate and save you time like
| this :-).
|
| That said, one point there is outdated: HTTP Toolkit does now
| fully support websockets too. There's more I'd like to do
| there, but as far as I'm aware it's equally capable to
| mitmproxy in that sense today.
| plugin-baby wrote:
| Hi Terry, awesome project! Can I use it to MITM my smart TV, or
| TV stick?
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Not him, but probably not. They likely use HTTPS with
| certificate pinning
| pimterry wrote:
| It depends :-). If it's Android (like a Fire stick) then in
| some cases, but all the Android caveats apply, e.g. you'll
| need root access to access traffic from apps that don't opt-
| in to debugging. For testing your own apps that's fine, but
| for reverse engineering HTTPS traffic you'll generally need a
| rooted device. In practice, if you don't already have a
| rooted phone on hand it's usually best to use an Android
| emulator on your computer, since most of those provide root
| access out of the box.
|
| Even with root, certificate pinning can cause problems (as
| the sibling comment points out) but you can usually defeat
| that fairly easily: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/frida-
| certificate-pinning/.
|
| For non-Android, HTTP Toolkit can't set it up for you
| automatically, but you can absolutely intercept _anything_
| manually if you can configure it with your own HTTP proxy
| setting (fairly common) and add a trusted CA certificate
| (less common).
| ruffrey wrote:
| Thank you - I love this tool
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| > A few inflection points that made a notable difference
| (releasing rewriting support & Android support particularly)...
|
| Do you mean that improving documentation helped get customers?
| I have a small side project and I think this is one of its
| weaker spots, even if it is relatively simple [0]. I noticed
| "helper popups" are getting used quite extensively.
|
| [0]: https://aihelperbot.com/guide
| pimterry wrote:
| > Do you mean that improving documentation helped get
| customers?
|
| It probably did, but no that's not what I mean, sorry :-). By
| "rewriting support" I mean adding features that allowed you
| to rewrite arbitrary network traffic, rather than just
| viewing it (as in the very first PoC).
| synergy20 wrote:
| how is this different from devtools? is the main selling point
| easy of use, or more extra features on top of devtools?
| pimterry wrote:
| Yes: ease of use, lots of additional power (for starters, you
| can modify traffic, not just view it) and being able to
| intercept anything (multiple tabs, multiple browsers, mobile,
| docker, CLI tools, backend services, you name) all in the
| same interface.
|
| For the web dev case, for example, if you're debugging some
| interaction that means you can intercept your browser <->
| server traffic and your server <-> upstream API traffic all
| in the same place, and see the full flow, and you can modify
| server responses or backend API responses in flight, to test
| out different edge cases.
|
| There's a Chrome dev tools vs HTTP Toolkit comparison page
| here with a little more detail:
| https://httptoolkit.com/chrome-devtools-alternative/
| slowmotiony wrote:
| That's very cool - does it support corporate proxy stuff
| like PAC files, HTTPS, NTLM, Kerberos, authenticating with
| current user, etc? For example would I be able to write a
| rule to capture traffic going to certain proxies and
| redirect it to another proxy? Sorry if this is explained
| somewhere already but I couldn't find anything about it on
| your webpage or github. Many thanks for your time!
| ericb wrote:
| Any tips on making a nice animated gif like your homepage?
| pimterry wrote:
| Not really! To be honest it's a bit of a hassle and I don't
| have good tooling or a proper setup. I write a little script,
| then just record myself manually clicking through it (which
| is boring, and takes a bunch of tries to do smoothly) and
| then load it into iMovie and trim it down and speed up any
| awkward slow bits. It's not a perfect solution at all, but it
| does the job and I only update it once a year or so.
|
| In a perfect world, I'd kill for a tool where I could define
| a script (something similar to a Playwright test) and it'd
| automatically run and record everything, so I could redo the
| video much more frequently and accurately. I think you
| probably can do that for a normal web app already (?) but the
| challenge here is that HTTP Toolkit is launching other apps
| that also pop up over the top, and so I need to record them
| all together.
|
| If you're looking for inspiration around this sort of thing,
| the Android demo video is different and also worth looking
| at: https://httptoolkit.com/android/
| ericb wrote:
| So first off, your gif looks great! I like your sizing and
| resolution--that's one of the things I was worried about.
| Video recording is new to me, so I'd love to know what you
| record with and resolution settings to pick?
|
| I stumbled on this nice blog post on automating these
| recordings. Maybe a partial solution?
|
| https://martinheinz.dev/blog/94
|
| I was thinking of doing a manual process like yours for a
| start rather than automating, but hearing your thoughts
| makes me think I'll try automating sooner.
|
| I see what you mean about the multi-app aspect. I'll have
| to switch to browser windows for mine as well. Your android
| approach is nice!
| pimterry wrote:
| > I'd love to know what you record with and resolution
| settings to pick?
|
| It's an _extremely_ simple setup. Actual recording is
| done with Mac's built-in screenshot tool:
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208721. It's recorded
| at an arbitrary window size I eyeballed the first time,
| that now I probably have to stick to forever (because if
| they're all the same size, I can reuse parts to avoid re-
| recording unnecessarily).
|
| All of this is suboptimal (using 1080p would have helped,
| for starters, since lots of tools work better with
| standard resolutions) but it doesn't really matter, it
| just annoys me mildly one day a year and that's it.
|
| IMO: if you're at the start, unless you have a super
| unique situation, I wouldn't look at automating videos or
| perfecting the recording setup at all - just ship
| something barely acceptable and see if it works, and then
| focus on pain points that actually turn out to be
| blockers later. Getting a core product into real people's
| hands and getting real feedback ASAP is more valuable
| than tweaking the video resolution or anything similar!
| jeffreyq wrote:
| Perhaps this recording tool built on top of / integrated
| with an e2e testing framework could be a revenue-generating
| side project for an enterprising soul :)
| nigma1337 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Does it work for apps with pinned certs?
| pimterry wrote:
| 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/ and
| I'm working on fully automating that part within HTTP
| Toolkit too (more details:
| https://httptoolkit.com/blog/frida-mobile-interception-
| fundi...).
| iamlolz wrote:
| I really like the UX on the homepage of emailing a download
| link to myself.
| pimterry wrote:
| Thanks! Yes, I found that a huge percentage of visitors to
| the site were on mobile (especially for HN/reddit/etc
| traffic) and when your product is a desktop app there's not
| much you can do with that, so for a long time I effectively
| didn't have a call to action for most visitors at all, which
| isn't great for anybody.
|
| Under the hood it's just a tiny automated email flow set up
| via Mailchimp that sends out the download link when you sign
| up. Nothing fancy, but it's easy and it does the job.
| jeffreyq wrote:
| This is so inspiring! Thanks for sharing your story.
|
| I was wondering what the early days of the journey looked like.
| - What did the first iteration of this product look like? Was
| it more or less similar, or substantially different from the
| spirit of httptoolkit today? - How did you go from (some
| semblance of a product) to first sale? / acquiring first
| customer? - did you spend anything on marketing/distribution?
| pimterry wrote:
| > What did the first iteration of this product look like? Was
| it more or less similar, or substantially different from the
| spirit of httptoolkit today?
|
| Technically, the first iteration was
| https://github.com/httptoolkit/mockttp - an HTTP integration
| testing library for JS. Not a desktop app at all! I'd
| originally built that for testing uses, but as it matured I
| realised that with a UI and automated setup tools it'd be
| useful as a complete product (but Mockttp still powers all
| the internals today, and you can use it directly to build
| your own custom intercepting proxies too).
|
| For the first real product, the very first public 'launch'
| was literally a landing page with some demos of the potential
| UI and a signup form, just to test interest and check it
| wasn't a terrible idea. The results looked promising, so that
| was followed a few months later by a very basic but usable
| free version (entirely read-only, and only supporting Chrome
| interception) with the freemium features on top appearing a
| few months after that. From this stage it was all very much
| the same spirit as today, just less feature complete.
|
| > How did you go from (some semblance of a product) to first
| sale? / acquiring first customer?
|
| Once I announced the paid version (a blog post to my tiny set
| of newsletter signups, plus a little response on
| HN/Reddit/Product Hunt etc) I got a handful of paying
| customers (but certainly less than 10) within 24 hours. Nice
| but not a meaningful income, and from that wild peak it
| dropped back down to maybe one new customer per week or so
| afterwards, so it was quite slow going at the start.
|
| However, those paying customers (and the mere fact of
| offering a paid service generally) resulted in _much_ better
| feedback. Rather than "this is cool" all of a sudden I had
| real demands for specific features, from people with concrete
| use cases and money in their hands. The initial paid features
| were just made up off the top of my head, and honestly didn't
| create a particularly compelling paid feature set. It's very
| hard to really know what people will pay for! That feedback
| was incredibly unbelievably useful to fix that.
|
| From there, building out the key features people asked for
| over the following 6 months boosted things very
| significantly, and started to get things moving for real, and
| then you get into a virtuous circle, where more users => more
| feedback => better product => more users => ...
|
| > did you spend anything on marketing/distribution?
|
| I tested advertising at a small scale for a few months, but
| it didn't really work great. I think largely because it's
| very very freemium - 99% of users pay nothing - so the
| acquisition cost for a paying user doesn't make sense, and
| also honestly I don't have much experience with ads and I'm
| not sure I'm any good at writing them.
|
| Content marketing meanwhile has worked great, keeps passively
| returning dividends, and cost nothing. I've tried to fill the
| blog (https://httptoolkit.com/blog/) exclusively with
| detailed & high-value original content (detailed breakdowns
| of a recent HTTP security vulnerability, not "top 10 HTTP
| libraries for Python") which shares well on social networks
| for an immediate burst of traffic, and then (in most cases)
| provides both a long-term SEO boost and constant incoming
| traffic on related topics that converts into users. That
| starts slow, but again steadily builds up over years, if you
| keep working at it. Content marketing + SEO are pretty much
| the only marketing channels I work on right now.
| lampshades wrote:
| This is a cool project. Looks like a good replacement for
| Charles (which I hate) and reminds me of Fiddler (which I
| love). The fact that this is a desktop app makes it all the
| more enjoyable to work on as a profitable side project, imo.
| Nurbek-F wrote:
| I've been looking [1] for a similar tool for a while; Just
| downloaded, really liking it so far! It's clean and intuitive.
| Thank you!
|
| [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35559469
| zudabi wrote:
| 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.
| cleverfoo wrote:
| 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
| lampshades wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| lampshades wrote:
| I guess more of what I'm asking is, how did you launch? The
| biggest problem I have is getting word out about my
| product, which always ends up killing them.
|
| I'm a developer by trade, so marketing and the like isn't
| my forte. Did you use ProductHunt? Indiehackers? Reddit?
| Twitter? Word of mouth?
|
| Thanks for the reply btw, very helpful info. I've been
| iterating on something in my free time that fills a very
| small budgeting niche. I'm going to wrap it up with a
| website this weekend and see if I can gain any traction. At
| the very least, I know that if I had found the product I've
| built for $1.99 a month or something, I would have just
| paid the money. Hoping that others feel the same.
| cleverfoo wrote:
| Got it, in that case it helps to build a product for a
| community you can interact with. In my case, this was
| connecting with folks on Stackoverflow that were
| struggling with integrating malware detection into their
| apps... that was all the marketing I did to get the
| product validated - but keep in mind that was 10 years or
| so back.
|
| Best of luck with your launch!
| lampshades wrote:
| Thanks for all the advice!
| GordonS wrote:
| Impressive! What do you think it is that you do that allows you
| to compete with VirusTotal, and even free tools like Jotti?
|
| Presumably you're now using commercial AV tools, rather than
| Clam? Did you have to get some kind of special license from
| them to use it like this?
| cleverfoo wrote:
| > Impressive! What do you think it is that you do that allows
| you to compete with VirusTotal, and even free tools like
| Jotti?
|
| Thanks and good question. We don't really compete with virus
| total since it's more of a research tool and, for a while,
| their terms explicitly prohibited commercial use (but I think
| that has changed). Jotti is a similar thing, more of a
| research tool than a high performance API you can use to
| build commercial products on.
|
| > Presumably you're now using commercial AV tools, rather
| than Clam? Did you have to get some kind of special license
| from them to use it like this?
|
| Yeah the product has expended a bunch over the years and we
| use multiple detection engines [2] to catch all kinds of
| unsafe content. But you are right, we do license a commercial
| AV engine to act as a backup to our own to ensure best
| possible detection rates. The licensing process warrants a
| blog post of its own since it's not what I would call easy.
|
| [2] https://docs.scanii.com/article/149-how-do-the-different-
| det...
| tyingq wrote:
| 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.
| tommoor wrote:
| 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.
| y-curious wrote:
| Your website is also really pretty, what did you use to make
| it?
| weekay wrote:
| https://github.com/outline/website has the source
| DANmode wrote:
| Very happy paid user, after testing many other offerings.
|
| You're really onto something.
| ronreiter wrote:
| learnpython.org
|
| Generates ~10k/month. Plus, teaches a bunch of people how to code
| for free :)
| tultra wrote:
| 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!
| aristofun wrote:
| Where's the money coming from? Subscription?
|
| Also how much time it took to reach that point?
| tultra wrote:
| 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.
| somid3 wrote:
| You Exec started as a side project, ARR at $2.2m now -- but
| decreasing
| pqvst wrote:
| Started AwardFares (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).
| koch wrote:
| This is a good idea, I was just thinking if something like this
| existed the other day. Good domain name too.
| xcubic wrote:
| How do you source the info?
| 3dfan wrote:
| How do you earn money? Affiliate links?
| outcoldman wrote:
| 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
|
| Now I also started macOS development for the last 2 years, and
| making around 2k a month.
|
| https://loshadki.app
| alberth wrote:
| Is your pricing usage based on log volume?
|
| This helps hockey stick revenue but is also the #1 customer
| complaint since logs will always grow (no cap).
|
| Just curious how you hit millions in revenue with a 2-person
| company.
|
| I'm sure lots would love to hear more about your story (e.g.
| perfect write-up for IndieHackers.com)
| outcoldman wrote:
| We do the same offering as openshift/docker, based on CPU. So
| we help customers to forward less logs, and not to have
| impact on our revenue.
| lampshades wrote:
| Would love to get into enterprise software. How did you get
| your first customer?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| abeppu wrote:
| How do you get enterprise customers to feel comfortable
| depending on a project run by a very small shop? Like, how do
| you assure them that their operations will not be impacted if
| something were to prevent you from working for a while, etc?
| outcoldman wrote:
| It was just a right moment. 7 years ago Splunk did not have a
| solution for showing to customers. Splunk has an app store
| where I published the apps, we become technical partners, and
| even participated with Splunk in a few tech events together
| as partners, like Docker, Kubernetes, RedHat conferences.
|
| We don't offer anything crazy on the support side. 2 business
| days reply. It is not sas, so nothing crazy to monitor from
| our side.
|
| Also, we have insurances, a lot of resellers, we are
| technical partners with a lot of companies, have 7 years
| experience of business behind us.
|
| It all came with time, and we build our confidence.
| GordonS wrote:
| I have a B2B micro-ISV, and getting our infosec product in
| front of the right people is tricky. Would love to hear
| something about your approach to marketing and advertising?
| outcoldman wrote:
| See my other reply. Basically just a right moment in a right
| time. We participated as Splunk technical partner in a lot of
| conferences in beginning and that definitely helped. And
| focused on making our partners wanting to sell our software
| by offering them good discounts.
| warrenm wrote:
| curious ... why not "just use the UF"?
| warrenm wrote:
| or "just use syslog-ng"?
| outcoldman wrote:
| We provide more complete solution, with metrics, alerts,
| dashboards, everything you need right from the start. So in 5
| minutes you will get complete solution. Of course, you can
| build it in-house, and keep working on it, but it is going to
| take time and resources. And we don't charge that much.
|
| Also we provide very unique solutions, like transforming,
| redirecting logs with annotations applied to your
| pods/deployments/namespaces. Also can pickup logs from
| volumes without any additional deployments.
|
| So some customers see benefits from us, some don't.
| marvinblum wrote:
| 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
|
| [1] https://pirsch.io/about-us
|
| [2] https://pirsch.io/blog
| ansc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Hey thanks for your suggestions! I think we can most of that
| work. A full-width dashboard is on our list already, so we
| can include that in the next bigger update, which will also
| have the option to white label your dashboard.
| pchm wrote:
| I run 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.
| steelbrain wrote:
| Some really interesting projects here! I've been working on my
| own SaaS project called CorOpera (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!
| xhfloz wrote:
| 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
|
| [2] https://twitter.com/xhfloz/status/1631746024120221698
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424
|
| [4] https://diemichi.mmm.page/moodboard
|
| [5] https://showcase.mmm.page
| webscout wrote:
| [dead]
| ipince wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Wow. I can't believe I let such a large bug slip by -- must
| have happened during a deploy this morning. I've just pushed
| out a fix.
| xhfloz wrote:
| Okay. Confirmed live now. That was quite the boneheaded
| move on my part lol.
| sleepychu wrote:
| Wow this is lovely! Really reminds me of the Mac apps from the
| power PC era.
| xhfloz wrote:
| Thank you! They have been a huge source of inspiration.
| ansc wrote:
| Thanks for keeping the internet alive.
| lee101 wrote:
| [dead]
| vapidness_is wrote:
| I run Afterplay (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 :)
| Davertron wrote:
| 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!
| vapidness_is wrote:
| That's strange. I'm sorry about that. Did it happen more than
| once? Did you hit the backspace key? I will investigate :)
| Davertron wrote:
| Yeah, it was happening on Super Mario Kart. I just tried
| Super Mario RPG and didn't have any issues. Let me know if
| I can get you more info or help with a repro.
| vyper91 wrote:
| this is such an awesome idea, i can't wait to check this out!
| vapidness_is wrote:
| Thank you. It's still very much a work in progress :)
| mysterydip wrote:
| Clever way to offer gaming without copyright issues. Congrats!
| vapidness_is wrote:
| Thank you :)
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I read that as afterpay at first. Was thinking why is a
| billionaire posting in this thread :-)
| vapidness_is wrote:
| This made laugh :) Thank you.
| sebiandev wrote:
| Hey! I've used Afterplay haha. Funny seeing the creator here.
| Thanks for making this!
| vapidness_is wrote:
| No way :) It's a small world. Thank you. I hope you're
| enjoying it. If you have any suggestions please feel free to
| let me know :)
| samstr wrote:
| [dead]
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| 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/
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