[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in ...
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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 - Show and
tell
It's the time of the year again, so I'd be interested hear what new
(and old) ideas have come up. Previously asked on: 2023 -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38467691 2022 -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421 2021 -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095 2020 -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167 2019 -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863 2018 -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306 2017 -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804
Author : cvbox
Score : 249 points
Date : 2024-12-10 03:12 UTC (19 hours ago)
| vintageclothldn wrote:
| Clicky:
|
| Earlier in 2024 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194
|
| 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38467691
|
| 2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421
|
| 2021 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
|
| 2020 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
|
| 2019 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863
|
| 2018 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306
|
| 2017 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804
| cvbox wrote:
| thanks
| anotheracc88 wrote:
| It is work work not passive, but I write dev docs for $80/h. But
| it is simple work, you just go research and write. No Racoon
| calling out to Wingman to get user info provider services.
| Crier1002 wrote:
| do you have examples i can refer to? i'd love to learn to write
| better docs
| nicbou wrote:
| I write documentation for a living (a different, non-tech
| kind). The best resources in my opinion are the writing
| guides of various governments. Gov.uk leads the way, but the
| Australian government puts out great guides too.
|
| Steve Krug's "Don't make me think" is old but still applies
| to the modern web.
| toldyouso2022 wrote:
| How does one even find tech writing jobs?
| keen-keen wrote:
| I am also very interested in this kind of work.
| heliographe wrote:
| I'm making photography software: https://heliographe.net
|
| Right now my work is Apple platforms only (revenue through App
| Store), but I'm actively looking into ways to expand to other
| platforms.
|
| As a long time photographer, my philosophy is to make tools that
| are useful to me first and foremost, and to build smaller scope
| things that compose well (UNIX philosophy). I've got some
| exciting new things planned for 2025.
|
| These are all side projects right now, as my official full time
| occupation is Japanese language school student (I moved to Japan
| at the end of 2023 year after almost 15 years in SF Bay Area tech
| companies/startups, becoming a full time student at 34 surrounded
| by 21 year olds from a very different background has been an
| interesting experience on its own).
|
| Since the revenue has been increasing the last few months, I
| incorporated to keep things organized, but for now these projects
| are still "side projects". It'd be cool if I could justify
| financially to do this full time after I finish language school
| in 2026.
| keen-keen wrote:
| I'm happy for you. You are so smart and capable, so I hope you
| won't have bad luck in the end.
| ein0p wrote:
| Trichromy reminds me of Prokudin-Gorsky's color photographs
| from the 19th century. Except of course he tried to get rid of
| the effect. Clever!
| heliographe wrote:
| Yes, it's directly based on the trichromatic photographic
| process, which I learned about reading an article about
| Gorsky.
|
| And yeah, it's super interesting how when a new recording
| technology is created, we seek to avoid its limitations; but
| later on, those limitations get embraced on their own merits
| for aesthetic value!
| snackernews wrote:
| These are great.
|
| Always a pleasure discovering a portfolio of apps from an indie
| developer that genuinely do one thing well, are well designed,
| and all have the coveted "Data Not Collected" app privacy card
| to boot.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Not even halfway there with mine. Gonna make a reminder and look
| for this post in 2026!
| goenning wrote:
| I did not like any Kubernetes UI so I built my own
| https://aptakube.com
|
| It went from side project to my primary job in less than 6
| months.
|
| Everyone was saying that $99 was too much for "an API wrapper",
| but here we are, 2 years later and with hundreds of small to
| enterprise companies using it :)
| anonzzzies wrote:
| You really shouldn't listen to too many people. The only thing
| that counts is paying customers; everything else is just
| jealous people.
| j0hnyl wrote:
| How did you go from "I built my own" to making your first few
| sales?
| goenning wrote:
| I shared with a couple of co-workers/friends and they all
| liked it, I then built a simple website with screenshots and
| a download button for free.
|
| Then I started sharing the progress on LinkedIn/X, my co-
| workers shared on their network too which also helped.
|
| After 4 months I put a price on it and sold it with a 50%
| discount for early adopters. A lot of people bought it, which
| to me was a signal that I was into something that could
| become bigger if I invested more time on it.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| That UI looks nice, do you blog anywhere about tech you used to
| make it?
| 255kb wrote:
| I maintain https://mockoon.com, an API mocking tool for
| developers. I created it in 2017 and initially worked on it
| during my free time. I started focusing on it full-time three
| years ago and introduced cloud options to make the project
| sustainable alongside donations. Revenue is growing slowly but
| steadily, and I'm proud to 1) start making a living from it, and
| 2) ensure the project's open-source future.
| LordHeini wrote:
| That tool is nice. It saved my ass during covid where i had a
| customer with an API which could not be reached from home.
|
| My intern somehow managed to get it running inside docker for
| our dev systems.
| stealthcopter wrote:
| I made PortDroid, an Android Port Scanner and networking toolkit
| back in 2014 because I was learning programming and was curious
| to what was possible. I mainly wrote it for myself and I've done
| no marketing so have been quite surprised how popular it has
| become (~800k downloads).
|
| It's been a consistent passion project for me now over the years
| and I love getting feedback and suggestions from people using it.
| It'll never have ads (I hate them) and only data collection is
| optional crash reports.
|
| https://portdroid.net
| nischalsamji wrote:
| Wow... happy to see portdroid :) Had used your app for
| debugging an android app that I built some 6-7 years ago
| stealthcopter wrote:
| It sure has a way of making you feel old right? Thanks for
| using PortDroid :)
| epaga wrote:
| I made SmoothTrack, a no-equipment head tracking app for iOS and
| Android which lets you control the game camera in sim games (like
| MSFS 2024 for example) with your head - basically like TrackIR,
| just without any equipment and for $15 instead of $150. I
| originally made the app just for myself to save myself the money
| of buying a TrackIR system, but then /r/flightsim begged me to
| release it as a full app.
|
| Last month, I released SmoothTrack 2.0 which includes basic eye
| tracking and camera control gestures.
|
| https://smoothtrack.app
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| I love SmoothTrack!
| epaga wrote:
| Well, that's awesome to run into a SmoothTrack user here!
| Thanks for the kind words, all three of them. :)
| catonmylap wrote:
| I remember building my own track ir with ir leds and a floppy
| in front of an old webcam. This was more than a decade ago, but
| I would have assumed there is no more demand for this since VR
| headsets are a thing(I completely left gaming and everything
| about it since then). Anyway, great work!
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| > and a floppy in front of an old webcam
|
| I think you meant to write 'an artisanal and bespoke infra-
| red bandpass filter in front of an old webcam'.
| krageon wrote:
| This is _really_ cool, I think this may be the first time I
| watch one of these threads and be tempted to get something
| M3L0NM4N wrote:
| As a flight simmer, definitely going to check this out.
| dewey wrote:
| I'm definitely going to check this out for MSFS. Thanks for
| sharing!
| ambicapter wrote:
| How does this work without a virtual headset (don't you just
| end up looking off-screen)? Are you moving your head far less
| than the camera moves on the screen?
| geocrasher wrote:
| your phone watches your face move. It can be off to the side,
| as the neutral position need not be dead center.
| epaga wrote:
| > moving your head far less than the camera moves on the
| screen
|
| Precisely this. You keep your eyes on the screen and just
| nudge your head in the direction you want. Your brain "gets"
| it real quickly and it feels very intuitive.
| geocrasher wrote:
| As a long time simmer, I'm buying this tonight after work,
| especially now that my Pixel 4a 5G is sitting on my desk,
| propping up the 9 Pro XL that replaced it last week.
|
| Also, FS2024. Wow.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Tried it on my lunch hour (WFH FTW!) and _wow_ that is
| disorienting. Going to take some getting used to after 30+
| years without it!
| epaga wrote:
| Awesome! Hope you enjoy it - I recommend turning the
| sensitivity down to start with, also bind "toggle" in
| OpenTrack to turn it off when you don't need it.
| cwing50 wrote:
| Made an account just to say thanks for sharing this, just
| bought it and it seems super cool. I'm looking forward to
| trying it out tonight!
| lucas03 wrote:
| I made dividend tracking website. I am a backend engineer, so the
| UI is simple bootstrap and I focus on having data I find
| valuable. I've been working on it since I finished University, so
| it's like 7 years, and current MRR at $740 isn't great, but at
| least I don't have to pay for hosting (and financial data sources
| are expensive). I believe that spare money should be invested in
| stocks, so I like that I work on something I use, and will be
| using in the following decades. The website is DIGRIN.com
| (DIvidend GRowth INvesting), good value for free users as well
| IMHO.
| akudha wrote:
| What service do you use to get financial data?
| leetcodewizard wrote:
| https://leetcodewizard.io
|
| I released this fairly simple ChatGPT/Claude wrapper a few months
| ago. Currently it's doing about 15K/month. It's an invisible
| Electron app that can be used to cheat in coding interviews /
| OA's.
| throwaway77385 wrote:
| I love this.
|
| I honestly want everyone to cheat on these leetcode style
| interviews. I want that process to be broken and for the whole
| system to become completely ineffective, so that companies are
| forced to go back to actually putting some thought into hiring.
|
| I doubt it'll happen and instead surveillance during these
| interviews will probably just increase instead, but perhaps
| you've kicked off a game of cat and mouse here, which may make
| some hiring managers reconsider leetcode.
| tikotus wrote:
| I'm making a physical product with my wife: an illustrated
| narrative puzzle magazine. It's similar to escape games, but it's
| more story driven and easy to do in short sessions and at your
| own pace. It started with my wife making the first magazine
| pretty much by herself. Since then we've made more magazines
| together and the business is slowly growing.
|
| We're selling them mainly on our custom lightweight online store.
| It's done with minimal JS and Node as backend, Stripe as payment
| provider. We have a Meta pixel to help us track our advertising
| conversion, but we've disabled cookies, they just felt somehow
| dirty... It's nice to have power over these things when running
| your own business. As a next step for the website I'm thinking of
| including a templating language in the workflow, now I'm still
| doing edits with search and replace, sometimes missing things...
| but I do enjoy the simplicity.
|
| The actual business has two main challenges: First is
| discoverability. It's a pretty unique product, an adventure
| escape game in a magazine. It doesn't sell well in physical game
| shops since it doesn't look like a game. We sell well in
| conventions where we get to explain what the product is, but we
| also want some weekends for ourselves! Meta ads for our online
| shop are working surprisingly well though.
|
| The second and bigger challenge is shipping. Our flat is filled
| with boxes, and the time I spend sorting magazines, enveloping
| them, printing address labels, carrying them to the post
| office... it's really not worth my hourly rate as an engineer
| (Nor my wife's, but I do it since my schedule is more flexible,
| and I've automated some parts of the process with a string of
| incredibly user hostile shell scripts). And the shipping costs
| are downputting to many, we're quite cornered here in Finland. We
| are slowly gaining some distribution partners in Europe, but we
| should also be looking into better shipping options, like perhaps
| some kind of shipping warehouse exist? Our volume is slowly
| getting big enough so that it might be feasible. I've only done
| some cursory googling on this but don't exactly know what I'm
| even looking for, and there's only so many hours in a day.
|
| A lot of work, small margins (ads+printing+misc takes a big
| slice), but around $500 profit per month. Feels absolutely
| fantastic to have an actual concrete business we own!
|
| https://cluehound.com
| goenning wrote:
| Dude this looks awesome! When I was a kid I used to read a lot
| of these "puzzle magazines", the ones we had were like:
|
| - Start on page 1, read the story and decide if you want to
| take path A or B
|
| - A = go to page 2, B = page 3
|
| - then there was another decision making, and the story goes
| on...
|
| Until you either escape the dungeon, or die (different ways of
| dying lol).
|
| It was so cool!
| tikotus wrote:
| Thank you! That's the sort of game that springs to mind for
| many when we explain the concept, and they were definitely an
| inspiration for us. This however is a more linear adventure,
| focused around solving enigmas. No choices and no way to
| lose. Once you know the answer to the puzzle, like "whose
| fingerprints are on the gun", you turn the next page and the
| story continues.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| Sounds a /bit/ like the Agent Arthur[0] books that I loved
| as a kid!
|
| Def interested in these! Thanks for posting!
|
| [0] https://usborne.com/gb/agent-arthur-s-arctic-
| adventure-97818...
| tikotus wrote:
| Oh wow! I've never heard of these, seems very much like
| what we're doing. Thank you for linking it!
| qup wrote:
| Those were called "choose your own adventure" books.
|
| On an early version of my personal website, I created one of
| these, but as the reader, you could reach an unwritten
| section. Your reward was that you got to write that page of
| the book, and the choices (or ending) that the character
| received.
|
| I seeded a few pages to set a story, and then let the readers
| go wild. It was pretty fun.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Just bought a set for my kids who are currently obsessed with
| escape games and puzzles in general. Looks like a huge win for
| long car rides/airplane trips!
| tikotus wrote:
| Thank you so much! I'll post it tomorrow, hopefully it'll
| arrive before the holidays!
| aardvarkk wrote:
| Such a cool idea. Just bought a set for my sister and her
| family! Thanks for making this!
| tikotus wrote:
| Awesome! Thank you so much! Hopefully the shipment will make
| it before the holidays!
| kebsup wrote:
| I have two!
|
| https://gifmemes.io, haven't touched the code for years, makes
| between 100-300$ a month, depending on the season.
|
| https://vocabuo.com - a side project I hope to turn into a
| business, so I work on it around two days a week, made around
| $3.5k in revenue last month but most of it went back into ads.
| ms7892 wrote:
| Wow! So both projects revenue come from ads?
| xutopia wrote:
| The vocabulary tool is from pay as you go on App Store.
| PinkPigeon wrote:
| https://pinkpigeon.co.uk
|
| Who'd have thought that a CMS could still make money in 2024, but
| this one is around PS500 a month.
|
| It obviously doesn't pay the bills or the mortgage, but it works.
| All my clients are word of mouth, I do not advertise at all (a
| combination of costs and insanely opaque / fractured advertising
| models by Facebook and co...I don't have time to get a phd in
| your ad platform to see if any of my money is actually doing
| anything)
|
| I build it originally because I was fed up with Wordpress /
| Squarespace / Weebly / Wix, because all of their interfaces are
| slow and don't work on mobile.
|
| This CMS is fast and works on mobile.
|
| It's also pretty cheap nowadays, as I've not been raising prices
| like everyone else.
|
| It won't do super-flashy websites. It's mostly about having low-
| JS, good SEO, easy access to information, which can be managed by
| very inexperienced users (I live rurally and we have a fair few
| pensioners as clients, they all get along with the system very
| well).
|
| There are just about a billion things I want to do with it, but
| it never made enough money to become my full-time job, so it
| mostly just sits there and does its job.
| rafram wrote:
| The "Lea Hill Holiday Cottages" link is broken!
| PinkPigeon wrote:
| Thank you for pointing that out, fixed!
| henrygabby wrote:
| Unsexy tech business making roughly $6-7k/mo. I partnered with a
| local janitorial company that targets industrial clients with
| recurring nightly cleaning needs and I make roughly 7% of gross
| revenue as a recurring weekly payment as long as the client stays
| on w/o much work. I help do some client support, SEO, and pay for
| things like Apollo.AI to reach out to customers but other than
| that it is pretty hands off. I feel very fortunate.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| But what does the business actually do?
| qup wrote:
| Sounds like brings leads to the janitorial company
| busterarm wrote:
| But also saves the janitorial company from having to hire
| people to do customer management/support.
| henrygabby wrote:
| Correct
| henrygabby wrote:
| Yes, it is a leads driven business. I have focused on
| improving SEO in three of their core markets. Any new
| customer that signs up as a result of my marketing efforts,
| as long as their base margin is met, I get paid for the
| lifetime of that account.
| busterarm wrote:
| I love everything about what you're doing here. There's a
| lot of opportunity in a lot of different niches and it's
| all just being slept on.
|
| Did you already have a relationship with this company
| somehow or did you have to go and sell them?
| henrygabby wrote:
| I was introduced to them via a friend. I know the market
| well enough to recognize that there was potential to find
| clients and take a "scrape" off the new business. I know
| the qualms customers have with their existing service
| providers so whenever there are any concerns I curate
| very specific messages during the sales process to reel
| them in. Once they are signed up, getting it right 100%
| of the time is impossible, so I also step in on the
| "support" side and help solve issues, provide proposed
| solutions to challenges, etc. I do agree with you. Many
| other types of "sticky" and "unsexy" businesses out-there
| that are very easy to rank highly in SEO locally in dense
| urban environments.
| busterarm wrote:
| > Once they are signed up, getting it right 100% of the
| time is impossible, so I also step in on the "support"
| side and help solve issues, provide proposed solutions to
| challenges, etc.
|
| Maybe I'm reaching here, but as a guess, are you able to
| offer your partner's services out the cut you take to
| smooth over issues? I'm just thinking that you have
| fantastic incentives to do stuff like that (prioritize
| long-term money) that a support person working as an
| employee of the company directly would not have real
| incentives to offer...
| henrygabby wrote:
| I think I am following your question but can you clarify
| if what you mean is if: I take a portion of the proceeds
| to send customers gifts, take them out to dinners, etc to
| ensure the relationship remains strong? If so, then not
| really. Usually these clients just want smooth problem
| free services. I am working with him on holiday gifting
| ideas but that's really the extent of it. I also incur
| some expenses such as marketing costs, software, etc but
| it is pretty nominal. In summary, clients just want the
| teams to show up, do a good job, not break anything,
| listen to special requests, execute those special
| requests, and rinse wash repeat.
| busterarm wrote:
| No, I meant if you need to discount or give them service
| gratis to smooth over an unhappy customer.
|
| In a former life I was a support drone. Days were full of
| us taking calls from abusive a-holes who just wanted to
| get over on someone and also people who had legitimate
| grievances and deserved relief. We typically weren't
| empowered to do anything about either of them.
| benhowdle wrote:
| https://reqres.in/ - roughly that much in ads revenue. Would love
| to add a paid plan for more features, but....time.
| Jabbs wrote:
| https://www.unlistedjobs.com/
|
| Scraper of job listings directly from company websites. I found
| my last day job by using a scraper that visits company websites
| in search of job listings. Now I've turned it into an app for
| others to use and access jobs that are posted on company websites
| (rather than paid employer ads on Indeed or wherever). This gives
| the job searcher an advantage to find jobs not listed on job
| search sites and show the company you have taken time/interest to
| visit their site.
| dchuk wrote:
| I've had a similar idea over the years. You should consider
| exploring whether competitive companies could be customers.
|
| As a competitor, getting alerts about roles another company is
| hiring for can be very interesting. Combine it with trends of
| postings over time...
| Jabbs wrote:
| Oh that's a really interesting idea. Yea I dislike the idea
| of charging the job seeker but have not found a good way to
| monetize companies (not that they even know about me anyway)
| stuckkeys wrote:
| What are you using to for the scraping? Playwright...selenium?
| I wanted to do something as a hobby but my IP kept getting
| reported lol. Also when you say companies...where are you
| getting the information from? Data brokers? Anyway, it is an
| interesting topic to me.
| Jabbs wrote:
| Selenium, although I'm using a wrapper library that uses it.
| I only query each company every few days or so which probably
| helps to not get banned IP-wise but also rotate them. But
| many of the company job links are through external sources
| too (lever, greenhouse, etc.) which don't seem to mind
|
| The company data was gathered online for a long time until I
| found https://www.thecompaniesapi.com/ (which now is the
| source for much of that data)
| stuckkeys wrote:
| I tried to use my own desktop machine to process some of
| these tasks. I can see my fans go jet mode when the
| scraping was being done lol. Do you have discord or any way
| to connect? Would love to chat around this topic. Feel free
| to drop any social media handles. I'll ping you.
| Jabbs wrote:
| Ohhh yea I run into this memory issue very quickly when
| scraping (especially if you have a large URL dataset then
| it will inevitably find a website with a giant bit of
| markup). So I have to set timeouts and blacklist timely
| requests but also completely reset the (headless) browser
| on 2-3 requests (which is overkill but I am restricted on
| memory for those workers). Feel free to drop me an email
| sometime (should be on my HN profile)
| fusslo wrote:
| can I make feature requests?
|
| I would love a map of job postings to see where it might make
| sense to move to in the future. If there's 10 jobs within 50
| miles... that might be a good place to buy a house.
|
| Additionally, if I filter by 'north america' I still get jobs
| from canada and india because they're remote only. I would LOVE
| to be able to filter out those positions. Also I would love to
| be able to AND 'remote' and 'north america'. I would like to
| work remotely, but only for US companies
|
| love your site <3
| Jabbs wrote:
| Thank you :) I appreciate the request + feedback. I have a
| story in the backlog to add location-specific links to the
| landing page but I really like your idea of having a map
| (heatmap or something) to show densities of jobs.
|
| So the inclusive vs exclusive filtering is something that I
| struggle to perfect here. I'm tempted to throw both in the UI
| (since its ready to go on the backend) but its hard to
| explain to users. One thing you can do that is not so obvious
| is add a tag for "Canada" but click on the tag again which
| will put a line through Canada and exclude that location from
| your filter (still need to have helpers to show users how to
| do that). The 'remote' tag is probably the toughest one to
| parse of a job listing because it might appear anywhere
| within the text, so there is some inaccuracies for sure but
| its improving I hope!
|
| Ah I could probably add filters for company locations
| specifically too (so you can filter US companies), that's an
| interesting use case too.
|
| Thanks for the compliment too, it has been really fun to
| build
| registeredcorn wrote:
| Here's a bit of feedback:
|
| * Job listings for "Quality Assurance" and "QA" are split into
| different listings in Job Search.
|
| * I really like the green highlight for Salary range!
| Personally, I would sort by jobs that list salary first, then
| by location (or relevance, or whatever).
|
| * The filter was a little confusing to use. I see you talked
| about it with other users in here. It needs some love, but it's
| getting there. :)
|
| * If you are going to target job searchers, it would be very
| helpful too see metrics based on the results. Here's a few
| examples I came up with
|
| Example 1: I select Help Desk -> Chicago
|
| I see a short-term graph showing whether demand has gone: up,
| down, or stayed the same - included is a red/green/yellow arrow
| giving me an idea at a glance. This helps me understand how
| many Help Desk postings are in Chicago
|
| Example 2: I select Cybersecurity -> I also select Information
| Security -> NYC
|
| I see a short-term graph showing demand for Cyber vs IS in NYC.
| This helps me understand if which job has more postings in NYC.
|
| Example 3: I select Python Developer -> Boston & Dallas.
|
| I see a medium-term graph showing demand for each location for
| Python Developer. This helps me decide whether demand is more
| consistent in Boston or Dallas.
|
| Example 4: I select Asia & Canada -> Advertising (Under
| Industry)
|
| I see a long-term graph showing the overall trend for that
| industry in each of those countries. This helps me track
| whether jobs are being outsourced, what I should expect in the
| coming years, and/or which country is the most competitive in
| that industry.
|
| Hope that helps! Good luck. :)
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| I made an AI chatbot for OnlyFans models. Their fans can speak to
| "them" via a third party messaging app. It's currently pulling
| ~15k USD MRR. I built my own GPU infra for inference and I run
| Llama 3 with a fewshot prompting to get the model to respond like
| a given OF model, typically using their actual DMs with fans.
|
| I don't have a website for obvious reasons, but if you're in the
| biz you've no doubt heard about my tool :)
| j0hnyl wrote:
| Your GPU infra is a local server?
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| not local, it's colocated, but I specced and built it
| specifically to do inference at scale
| lbhdc wrote:
| Can you describe your GPU setup? I have been super interested
| to get some coloc space, but have a ton of questions.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| Nothing fancy, just bought a motherboard from SM, and a 4U
| case. I have a couple of boxes with 6 NVIDIA 3080s and
| recently upgraded to a used super micro with 8 A100s
|
| Colocation wise, you pretty much buy the space, show up with
| the server and rack it yourself into a locked cabinet, not
| much else
| lbhdc wrote:
| That is sick, I wanna build out something of a similar size
| (sans gpus). How much does colocation cost in your area?
| munificent wrote:
| I don't mean this in a critical way to you but, man, this makes
| me _so sad_ to think about. Models making money from lonely
| people so desperate for a connection that they pay to chat with
| someone and then they don 't even end up chatting with a human
| at all.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| 25% of US college students on antidepressants. Up 64% from
| 2020. People staring at screens 3/4 of their life. Probably
| nothing. Technology making the world a better place.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| It's not really that sad. Young guys with a bit of disposable
| income could do a lot worse than subscribing to someone's
| onlyfans and chatting with a bot. I don't charge subscribers
| directly and don't do any pay-per-message scheme, it's free
| for the user (provided they're subscribed to my client's
| page).
|
| The conversations aren't even overtly sexual in nature,
| mostly just guys sending "hey hope you're having a good day"
| during work hours. Llama is good, but honestly I think anyone
| would probably know they're talking to a bot after a few
| days, but they still keep talking to it anyways.
| e12e wrote:
| > The conversations aren't even overtly sexual in nature,
| mostly just guys sending "hey hope you're having a good
| day" during work hours.
|
| I actually think that's worse.
|
| Ed: but props to you for filling a technology niche.
| dsco wrote:
| How much are you saving running your own GPU infra? What are
| the total monthly costs for the service?
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| Running costs are about 30% of what an equivalent AWS GPU
| setup would be
| ms7892 wrote:
| Interesting! How it works? I am a bit confused.
| timnetworks wrote:
| I am always in awe of people that simply solve a problem
| (instead of having to get all esoteric about it) but I cannot
| understand what problem chat solves when the subject is more
| interesting to look at than speak to. :)
|
| [edit] 20 jpegs into a 150MB LoRA
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| For chat, I'd say 70% of the messages are non-sexual in
| nature. People just want to have someone to talk to during
| their work day. Not all, but quite a few models have been
| open about how their chat during the day is AI generated.
| danpad wrote:
| Shame on you.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| You can moralize and pearl clutch as much as you'd like
| joshstrange wrote:
| It's not really MMR but I have a side business when I provide
| software for online and in-person festival payments
| (entry/food/drinks). If you take the total revenue (or profit)
| for the year and divide by 12 I'm well over the $500/mo limit.
|
| I currently do 3 festivals a year which all pretty much fell in
| my lap, I've yet to start any sort of sales/marketing due to
| being busy with my day job/life and not wanting to grow too fast.
|
| I started back in 2021 when a local company I've worked with to
| make apps came to me looking for a solution for their food/music
| festival that didn't require handing out and (almost as
| importantly) counting all the tickets/tokens that people bought
| to spend at the vendors. I did a quick turn around of a couple
| months to get a v1 out and working in time for the event. In the
| next year I essentially rewrote 90% of it and added in-person
| payment support (previously had just supported recording in-
| person payments made through a CC terminal.
|
| Each new festival has new needs but I'm starting to get fewer
| feature requests and less I need to build for each new client
| which is nice.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| Interesting. Are you comfortable sharing any architecture
| details? Im half wanting to do the same for a local fair that
| had a high friction ticket system. I wasnt happy with any
| designs I came up with though
| joshstrange wrote:
| Sure!
|
| It's QR-based, so customers create an account, load money
| onto their account, then show their QR code to vendors who
| scan it to charge their account. We also provide plastic
| cards (think: gift card) for people who don't want to use
| their phone but we see 80%+ of people interact completely on
| their phone/online. We have an app and website (same
| codebase, Quasar framework) and for in-person payment (entry,
| bar) we provide iPads with connected CC readers.
|
| My best advice is this: your hardest challenges will not be
| technical in nature. The hardest part is the equipment,
| dealing with customers, hand-holding the festival organizers.
| I don't say any of that as some gross thing or bad thing,
| just reality. In fact, I think I've succeeded larged based on
| the in-person aspect (We travel to the event and are on-site
| for the event) and being the "I have all the answers for your
| festival payments"-person. Rolling with the punches is a huge
| part of it.
|
| The whole thing runs on AWS Lambda with a postgres DB from
| Neon.tech. I'll be honest, it's incredibly over-architected,
| the whole thing could run a a couple (or even 1) servers as a
| traditional NodeJS app without issue (and with less
| complexity) but I used this project as learning experience
| and a chance to try our some technology I was interested in.
| Lambda is incredibly cool and I think I might have one of the
| best use-cases for it (incredibly spikey load: no traffic for
| 9 mo, tiny traffic for presales for 1-2 months, 1 month with
| higher sales, then 1-2 days of the event with crazy sales)
| but the debugging story isn't the best. SST makes it 10000x
| better than anything else I've tried and the developer
| experience is bar-none for writing lambdas but all the other
| crap (CloudFormation, logs, monitoring, etc) is so much
| overhead. If I was writing this again today I'd probably look
| at something like NestJS but I won't let myself re-write the
| code (again) without a pressing reason and if I need to spend
| time anywhere it's sales/marketing.
|
| Here is my, crappy, "marketing" website: https://grubbux.com/
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| I think I might just have downvoted you because I'm a
| clumsy idiot.
|
| So let me just say I love these honest no-bullshit posts!
| joshstrange wrote:
| Thank you! I appreciate you saying that.
|
| I love geeking out over my "stack" or talking about the
| business stuff, it's been rollercoaster and a huge
| learning experience for me. Really upended a ton of
| preconceptions I had about a number of things.
| jf93ap29sh wrote:
| Good for you man, happy to hear about your success and
| pains. A sign of maturity is realizing the tech is always
| the easy part.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Festival-goers can just pay for their food direct as well?
|
| _Sorry, I don 't understand your offering at all and the
| questions just sort of keep coming!_
|
| I see you combine payments, but I'm struggling to see the
| real-terms benefit over a tap-payment (card, watch or
| phone)? For a food stand, it would seem, not taking the
| money directly is a relatively large potential liability.
| Is the point to enforce a contract between vendors and the
| festival?
|
| Does the festival pay the food stands [something] up front?
|
| How's your liability insurance? Or do the festivals
| underwrite you for when Amazon/wifi is down and no-one can
| pay for their meals? (I did see you tout live updates, so
| transactions must be networked)
|
| Sounds easy to abuse (show someone else's code?), have you
| had much fraud?
|
| You're in USA? Did you need a banking license?
|
| Small festivals in UK would be 4-8000 people, say; average
| food spend is probably PS20+ per day -- are you carrying a
| debt to food providers for PS500,000+ over a long weekend
| (consolidating payments)?
|
| Fascinating.
|
| Do you do non-food transactions too - souvenir stands,
| onsite shops, [festival] activities? Like some festivals
| include a number of tokens and you can buy activities with
| them at the festival.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Happy to answer!
|
| > Festival-goers can just pay for their food direct as
| well?
|
| In a word? Data. Festivals normally charge vendors a
| percentage of sales to be at the festival and they need a
| way to track sales. "Trust me bro" doesn't quite work
| since restaurants/vendors will lie or shave their sales
| numbers so they pay out less. One festival told me about
| a time they had a vendor steal another vendor's tickets
| they had collected and try to turn them in as their own.
| I don't think all or even most vendors are dishonest but
| the ones who are mess it up for everyone. So instead the
| festival requires all payment to go through their
| festival currency (1 to 1 with USD). This gives them
| realtime data of all vendors and they use that data to
| decide which vendors to invite back and how much to pay
| out at the end.
|
| > I see you combine payments, but I'm struggling to see
| the real-terms benefit over a tap-payment (card, watch or
| phone)? For a food stand, it would seem, not taking the
| money directly is a relatively large potential liability.
| Is the point to enforce a contract between vendors and
| the festival?
|
| Yes, the point is to enforce the contract between the
| two. For a lot of festivals the food price is low (think
| $3-5) since it's meant to be a way to sample a lot of
| things. The $0.30/transaction (that Stripe charges) eats
| into total percentage quickly at lower price points. Also
| this lets all vendors take payment without needing any
| special equipment (other than their smartphone). Yes,
| some/most of them have their own POS but this lets the
| festival and festival-goers keep all their transactions
| in one place. Also the vendors have access to reports as
| well.
|
| > How's your liability insurance? Or do the festivals
| underwrite you for when Amazon/wifi is down and no-one
| can pay for their meals? (I did see you tout live
| updates, so transactions must be networked)
|
| All our contracts state that we cannot be held liable for
| internet issues, we operate completely on LTE/5G and do
| not provide WiFi at the events (that's a huge PITA if
| you've ever looked into it) and very often there isn't
| even an ISP we could work with to provide the internet
| service so if we are going to rely on LTE anyways might
| as well have each iPad talk directly to the towers
| instead of through extra infrastructure we need to
| manage. So far this has no been an issue but we do a
| cellular survey of the area when we take on a new
| festival to check how good the signal is.
|
| > Does the festival pay the food stands [something] up
| front?
|
| No, in fact often the vendors pay a small amount to
| reserve the space (mostly to make them have some skin in
| the game and show up, the number of no-shows always
| surprises me a bit). Vendors in general are very hard to
| wrangle. You can send them all the info ahead of time
| multiple times, in multiple forms, etc and at least 20%+
| will show up and have no idea what's going on. Thankfully
| we can train someone on the system in well under 5min and
| they rarely need follow-up help.
|
| > Sounds easy to abuse (show someone else's code?), have
| you had much fraud?
|
| This was a huge concern of mine up front but in practice
| it's been non-existent or at least non-reported (and
| trust me, I've dealt with every other type of support
| ticket), In fact couples/families will often just load 1
| account and share the QR between them. We also offer in-
| system transfers which isn't used as much as I would have
| expected but people do it that way as well.
|
| > You're in USA? Did you need a banking license?
|
| Yes, thankfully no license needed. I've worked/founded
| startups that needed Money Transmitter Licenses and I
| wouldn't touch those businesses with a 10ft pole (so much
| insurance and each state is done differently, no thanks).
| No, the money never touches my accounts, I use Stripe
| Connect so I help the festival get their own account
| setup and all the money dumps directly into their Stripe
| account (and then their bank account). I don't handle
| payouts to vendors because every festival has a different
| formula so it's easier to just give them all the money,
| give them the reports, and let them sort it out.
|
| > Small festivals in UK would be 4-8000 people, say;
| average food spend is probably PS20+ per day -- are you
| carrying a debt to food providers for PS500,000+ over a
| long weekend (consolidating payments)?
|
| I can't share exact numbers but 4-8K customers is the
| range we see as well but our numbers are low because
| people share accounts. The average spend is about $30-40
| depending on the festival. My answer to the previous
| question probably answered this for you but no, I don't
| carry the debt or deal with that, the festival does.
|
| > Do you do non-food transactions too - souvenir stands,
| onsite shops, [festival] activities? Like some festivals
| include a number of tokens and you can buy activities
| with them at the festival.
|
| Sometimes. We have special support for bars (to track
| stock) and you can put anyone on the system if you want.
| We have done entry ticketing, event ticketing (bourbon
| tasting for extra at the festival), and one festival ran
| all their T-shirts/stickers through the system as well.
| We support multiple ticket types so you can create a
| ticket type for anything you want. One festival didn't
| use the "festival currency" at all and instead wanted
| everyone to get 15 tasting tickets (we support
| packages/bundles as well) who bought the "Tasting
| package" and they redeemed those at the vendors.
|
| I hope that answers some of your questions!
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation. I had a lot of similar
| questions.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Omg, thank you for such open and clear answers. My
| inquisition-organ is replete with such satisfying
| answers!
| gknoy wrote:
| > show their QR code to vendors who scan it to charge their
| account.
|
| That sounds _brilliant_ -- being able to show a physical QR
| code card rather than dig out the phone sounds like it
| would help a lot with preventing damage/loss of phones.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Yep, because everything is QR-based I can provide almost
| the same experience for people on their phones or those
| who opt for a card. The card even has a URL on it you can
| go to to claim the card (convert to a user account in the
| system) or a page you can go to and see the balance
| without needing to create an account.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| https://roguestargun.com
|
| Solo Developed VR starfighter combat sim for Quest, PCVR, and
| soon the PICO4
|
| Meta, send me a free Quest 3, please.
|
| Would not recommend doing a game, let alone a VR game as a
| sideproject for anyone
|
| My day job is Machine Learning engineer, so I really should've
| picked an AI sideproject _facepalm_
| ericol wrote:
| Looks very cool. Will definitely give it a try.
| ssz wrote:
| I'm making a little by sharing all my nonfiction book
| summaries/notes on https://littlerbooks.com.
| werzum wrote:
| Thank you for sharing, that is a neat side project and was
| actually just looking for something like this. Can you share
| how your summarisation process works and if you use any
| specific tools or approaches to generate them?
| encoderer wrote:
| My SaaS Cronitor.io started here in 2014 as a side project. Left
| my job at Zillow 4 years ago and we are still going strong.
|
| Here's my reply from 2017:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15150205
| arnavpraneet wrote:
| oh hey, love cronitor! it is a killer tool for my personal and
| work stuff both!
| encoderer wrote:
| Thank you!!!! As a founder and developer I usually look at
| our product with a critical eye. Encouragement like this is
| really nourishing.
| ddgflorida wrote:
| Excellent job and idea.
| guico wrote:
| Just launched Story Treasure a way to create illustrated
| children's books, motivated by the fact that I'm a portuguese dad
| raising two bilingual girls in Germany... very hard to find
| portuguese books around here!
|
| https://www.storytreasure.ai/
| m3nu wrote:
| German speaker in Portugal. :-)
|
| That's awesome. Just did one.
| rstupek wrote:
| We made a couple apps to work better with Davinci Resolve after
| finding things it did or did inefficiently. One (SparkFX) is
| still a work in progress
|
| https://sparkfxstudio.com/
| dowakin wrote:
| Hi, I love your YouTube channel! I watched a bunch of videos
| from it last year! Thank you!
| rstupek wrote:
| Thanks! That's my business partner who makes the videos
| andygcook wrote:
| I started a side project with my older brother called NanaGram.co
| that makes it easy to text message photos to a unique phone
| number, then once a month they get printed and shipped to your
| loved ones.
|
| If you have kids, it makes a good holiday gift for the
| grandparents if you're stumped on what to get them.
|
| I've since moved on from it, but my brother makes enough to work
| on NanaGram full-time now. It's also just been really cool to see
| the project grow over the years and bring happiness to thousands
| of grandparents all over the world.
| aacook wrote:
| Thanks to F5Bot I saw this comment.
|
| Thanks for sharing brother!
| danvoell wrote:
| I hope F5Bot is on this list. Been using for free for years.
| just works. Reached out a while back and owner is very
| responsive.
| cccybernetic wrote:
| I built a web app that extracts data from documents, like PDFs,
| Word, etc. I've seen people say "GPT wrapper", but it
| consistently outperforms similar tools in the space. My main
| customer is a private equity fund that randomly reached out. I
| didn't know much at all about fintech, but it works and gets the
| job done.
|
| I don't have a proper marketing site yet since I've been focused
| on building the app, but it's coming soon (hopefully...)
| giarc wrote:
| How do you reduce errors or hallucinations? I recently uploaded
| a very clear PDF to meta.ai and asked it a few, very simple
| questions. It completely made up quotes, including page
| numbers, section numbers etc.
| cccybernetic wrote:
| I don't feed documents directly to an LLM. First, extract and
| process the data in a structured way that maintains the
| hierarchy and metadata of the content (this is important!).
| Then convert this into a scheme that you can control -- it
| doesn't really matter what it is (JSON, XML, markdown). From
| there, feed this to the LLM in chunks. This will get you most
| of the way there.
|
| There's different ways to validate, but that's why
| maintaining hierarchy and metadata is so important. If you
| track this information properly, you can cross-check
| responses across different LLMs!
| acrooks wrote:
| I'm interested, can you email me (address in profile)
| thdxr wrote:
| we sell coffee from the terminal
|
| ssh terminal.shop
|
| will do 6 figures in revenue the first year - not bad for a side
| thing!
| itslennysfault wrote:
| That's wild. I saw this when you(?) posted it a while back and
| assumed no one would want this. No offense, but it doesn't make
| the coffee taste any better...... unless it does............?
|
| Anyway, glad you're seeing success.
| skottenborg wrote:
| The people behind it are quite popular SWE YouTubers, so that
| might explain the reach :-)
| eigenhombre wrote:
| I love the concept and the implementation. Do you have a write-
| up on the implementation anywhere, blog posts, anything?
|
| It's a pleasure to see an online store implementation that
| doesn't use the Web or rely on some mobile app.
| hiatus wrote:
| Might be using something like
| https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish
| brundolf wrote:
| This is wild. Using SSH like a web browser, wonderful concept
|
| Edit: Oh wow, and people don't even have to make an account
| because their SSH user is their account!
| PTOB wrote:
| This is absolutely beautiful. I love it so much, and I want the
| rest of the world to be like this.
| nudpiedo wrote:
| is the certificate right?
|
| mmmmm someone might want to steal my coffee...
| doctoboggan wrote:
| I sell custom jewelry on Etsy and my Shopify website
| (lulimjewelry.com). I have a background in 3d printing and
| through that I realized that the sweet spot for 3d printed
| products is something that is small, high value, and custom. The
| jewelry industry fits this perfectly, and has already seen a
| large uptake in 3d printer adoption.
|
| I built a pipeline using fabric.js, flask, and blender that lets
| me take my customer's customizations (fingerprints, signatures,
| other engravings) and place them on a ring. I ultimately generate
| a STL file that I send over to my casting house in LA. They 3d
| print the STL in wax, and then cast that wax mould with precious
| metals using the traditional casting process.
|
| It's a fun side business as I get to tinker with new technologies
| (recently working on integrating a LLM into the ring design
| process). I have decent profits (enough to pay my mom and sister
| to help with customer support and shipping), so the workload I
| take on myself is relatively small.
| scottishbee wrote:
| Ornaments? Parents keep asking for my kid's to "create" an
| ornament. The fun of doing on paper is obviously great, but
| it'd be neat to convert it into something more durable too.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| I've definitely taken kids handwriting/drawings and put them
| on rings or pendants before. Nothing as large as a standard
| ornament though.
| commieneko wrote:
| Who is your casting house in LA?
| doctoboggan wrote:
| https://hightechcasting.com
| JoeMattie wrote:
| I built the frontend for https://rigged.ai
|
| We do statistical processing and breakdown of options sweep data,
| and generate realtime alerts that people can use to copy trade
| big Wall Street traders. We also have a strategy playground you
| can use to test different strategies that could be used for a
| trading bot.
| connectsnk wrote:
| Do you have a tutorial on how this tool can be used? Any
| backtest on how such alerts worked? Asking as a potential
| customer?
| JoeMattie wrote:
| Check out the docs section or any of the YouTube videos.
|
| And yes, I'm pretty proud of our backtesting tool (it's
| called strategy playground) that lets you set some bot
| parameters and filters for what alerts you want to trade
| based on (it has access to all the alerts we've generated
| historically, as well as symbol and option prices for all
| tracked options) and then does a full tick by tick simulation
| run and generates charts
| yqiang wrote:
| I'm building a better calorie/macro tracker called FitBee:
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fitbee-calorie-counter/id64439...
|
| Tracking my food has helped me get into much better shape but the
| leading apps in this space IMO are all quite clunky. I wanted to
| built something that was fast and lets you get on with your life.
|
| A few stand out features:
|
| - Nutrition label scanning if I don't have the food you're
| looking for - Photo Logging for restaurant meals or complex meals
| you don't want to manually track - It's light weight & fast -
| Interactive widgets for things like water tracking.
| giarc wrote:
| I laser cut wall art and sell over Facebook marketplace. Making
| $2000-5000/month.
|
| I have a website, but most sales are done over FB and customers
| pick up at my house. I either purchase designs on Etsy, pay a
| designer to create dxf file or do it myself (if it's easy). To be
| honest, I don't like the position I'm in with this. It makes too
| much to give up, but not enough to be a "real thing". Plus, I'm
| still trading time for dollars.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| Mind sharing your website? Genuinely curious.
| giarc wrote:
| I can message it privately, don't really want to post
| publicly. 99% of orders are local pick up, shipping is just a
| hassle as most pieces don't fit in regular box (plus Canada
| Post is on strike right now). EDIT - messaged you on your IG.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| Please do! My email is on my profile.
| hactually wrote:
| I'd love to see it too if possible - based in Aus here,
| contact on bio
| giarc wrote:
| Sent an email.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Depending on where you live in Canada, get on Stallion
| Express or Chitchats Express, which will be cheaper than
| Canada Post. They'll either get you better rates through
| Canada Post, or access to the 3rd-party couriers like
| Amazon uses (FleetOptics, UniUni, ICS & others).
| binarymax wrote:
| Have you considered selling at a bulk discount to local
| merchants? They have the physical presence and would remove the
| hassle/danger of people coming to your house. Keep your digital
| presence and just point people to the local shops or accept
| orders for the shops and send them there.
| giarc wrote:
| I've done this a few times, both local shops and one further
| away (driveable, but I shipped to them instead). They take
| quite large margins (50-60% or monthly shelf fees) and for it
| to be profitable for both of us, they would have to price the
| pieces quite high. I need to find a product that has higher
| value that's not already done.
|
| As for people coming to my house, I've completed nearly 1000
| orders (most have done local pick up) and have never had an
| issue. Most often I leave the order at the front door and
| they either leave cash in mailbox or they e-transfer at pick
| up. Knock on wood, but I've never had anyone not pay.
| binarymax wrote:
| Makes sense, thanks for sharing. My folks were artists and
| it brings me joy to see you making some money from your
| art.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| Hey I sell jewelry online as well (mostly Etsy and Shopify),
| and have been considering selling on fb marketplace.
|
| Do you pay for ads, or just make for sale posts? How often do
| you need to manage the posts? I know there are a ton of people
| who message sellers and then just waste their time. How do you
| handle customer support?
|
| Feel free to shoot me a message at jack at minardi dot org
| giarc wrote:
| Sent you an email with some info.
| chrsstrm wrote:
| What laser setup are you using?
| giarc wrote:
| Thunder Nova 51. It's a big, fairly expensive laser, but it's
| owned by a makerspace I'm part of.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| I still make about ~$1000/month with my 5/3/1 app :
| https://fivethreeone.app/
|
| Managed to raise some money from friends to work full-time on a
| successor that allows you to write your own workout programs with
| formulas.
| wlamartin wrote:
| I've been using your app for the last 3-4 months very
| successfully. There are a few niggles here and there but
| overall it's been exactly what I needed, and I'm very grateful
| for it!
| cyrialize wrote:
| This app looks great! I'll definitely try it out when I move
| onto 5/3/1.
| markowitz wrote:
| no
| catchmeifyoucan wrote:
| I built a Figma plugin that makes it easier to upload and host
| and manage images from Figma.
|
| https://figmage.com
| pentacent_hq wrote:
| https://www.keila.io
|
| I'm building an Open Source (AGPLv3) email marketing platform
| with Elixir/Phoenix and it's only just crossed that MRR threshold
| - three years since the first version.
| dowakin wrote:
| I started a mini-SaaS focused on identifying what content/scripts
| are blocked on websites by AdBlockers, Firefox Tracking
| Protection, and similar tools.
|
| I initially aimed for an cheap monthly pricing plan and many
| clients, but that strategy hasn't been successful so far.
|
| However, in the process of finding clients, I found two
| 'enterprise' customers. I built a custom on-premise version for
| them and charging $300 per month for each, which technically sums
| to over $500. Not sure it is what I wanted )
| iandanforth wrote:
| Totally counts though!
| Bellspringsteen wrote:
| https://blog.labsbell.com/blog/SkippiesPart2 selling 4.99$ shoes,
| strangely fun to see the inner workings of ecommerce. I dont
| understand how amazon sellers make any money.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| damn my wide feet. nice shoes tho. wish they'd fit me
| fidrelity wrote:
| I love this and want to order a couple pairs!
|
| 1. Are the branded/not branded models the same cut? Since the
| angle on the pictures are different it's hard to judge.
|
| 2. Why do you not have more pictures of the shoes? Since those
| are probably impossible to try/return I want to try and avoid a
| wasted purchase.
|
| 3. What import taxes can one expect ordering to the EU?
| duck wrote:
| Still running https://hackernewsletter.com/ after 15 years and
| 60k+ subscribers. It has been hard to put a lot of focus on it
| the past couple years, but been finally getting some time to
| spend on some improvements there. Income here has always been
| simple sponsors which I'm very grateful for.
| outime wrote:
| Congrats! Time to update the (c) years? It may look abandoned
| to the newbies.
| duck wrote:
| Ha, good call.
| outime wrote:
| Another thing I've noticed is that the logo for this thing
| in Curpress is broken.
| phildenhoff wrote:
| Also, maybe update the "recent issue" to be more recent than
| 2021! Just subscribed though; I'm looking forward to
| receiving it wherever I read my emails.
| duck wrote:
| Yeah, redoing this site is on my list.
| ayewo wrote:
| This is one of the few newsletters that are worth reading so
| thanks for your service for all these years.
|
| BTW, 15 years is really impressive!
| duck wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words and being a subscriber!
| ramthehack wrote:
| I wrote a small application for a Customer which enables File
| Transfer, Notifies Users about files that they should have
| uploaded and displays some progress. The Customer is a law firm.
| No Recurring Renevue, But yielded 10000EUR in 6 months. Is More
| of a second Job than a side project tho
| nspeller wrote:
| I built an interactive Music Theory course 8 years ago over a
| winter break and it continues to bring in enough to pay my rent
| each month.
|
| I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn
| music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives.
|
| It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars,
| and other demos.
|
| I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and
| after that initial spike in traffic has been fairly consistent
| over the past 8 years.
|
| It uses Stripe for payments and for the first few years it was
| only Stripe. 3 years in I decided to add PayPal support...
| revenue doubled overnight, mostly from international customers.
|
| https://www.lightnote.co/
| cpursley wrote:
| This is really cool, wishing you the best of luck!
| catchmeifyoucan wrote:
| really cool! Can't wait to use this for my next musical
| learnings
| jjcm wrote:
| I wish I had this when I was learning. This is amazing - great
| work on all the interactive demos!
| krzys wrote:
| It's awesome! It's so accessible, from now on I'm gonna send it
| to my non-musician friends whenever they show any interest in
| music.
| dabernathy89 wrote:
| Can this be gifted? Or will the purchase be tied to my email
| only?
| Soupy wrote:
| I run https://pastmaps.com as a lil' solo bootstrapped labor of
| love. Think Google Maps, but for OLD maps. It has 185K+ fully
| georeferenced high-res maps covering all of America, as well as
| satellite, LiDAR, and 3D layers to enable exploration through
| space and time.
|
| History is cool yo. And apparently lucrative - it currently makes
| ~$5000/mo and is slowly but surely growing through word of mouth
| gloflo wrote:
| Where did you acquire those scans?
| Soupy wrote:
| Vast majority are currently from the USGS, but this is going
| to wildly shift and diversify soon as I've been working to
| bring a wider variety of sources. The next wave is coming
| mainly from public library systems from all across the globe
| (my background is in search so I literally am running a map
| crawler)
|
| I stand on the shoulders of these giants that have done
| amazing work to digitize the paper maps and I mainly am
| hoping to just aid in the ease of discoverability and
| exploration of these assets
| registeredcorn wrote:
| At a guess, you probably have a _very_ large base of
| genealogists on there!
|
| Old maps are incredibly useful for genealogy because it helps
| you do lots of stuff. Say someone lived on "House #3 Country
| Road" in (county), but County Road no longer exists, and all
| that can be found is a brief description of "County Road is now
| Main Street, Bank Avenue, and Church Road" It would serve as a
| vital clue as to where their ancestors house used to be (or may
| still be!)
|
| It also helps to give a better narrative of how the community
| has expanded and changed over the years. Instead of just, "It
| was probably all forest land, then farm land, then suburbs or
| something?" Instead you can see stuff like if there were
| spikes/declines in populations in response to various events
| (gold rush, mining, factory work, railroads, war, highways
| bringing/diverting traffic, and so on). They can also show how
| the land may have changed from environmental factors (mud
| slides, earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes). Maybe you're
| from a "Military family" but never knew why, only to find out
| that a Military Depot opened up 2 minutes from their house
| _just_ as great-grandpa turned 18.
|
| In a real sense, it describes not just the family and where
| they lived, but the type of place they knew, and community they
| grew up in. It hints at how they saw and experienced things
| over the years. "But _why_ did great-great-grandpa insist on
| moving his entire family? He had lived in that beautiful house
| his entire life! Ah. They put the railroad 6 inches from his
| backdoor! "
| firefax wrote:
| I play Texas Holdem.
|
| It's not enough $$$ to be a full time role, especially
| considering the costs of purchasing health insurance w/o a
| traditional W2 employer, but it's perfectly possible to buy in
| for the the table max (500) and leave with between between three
| hundred and a thousand dollars in profit in ~8 hours of play.
|
| (Real life, not online. "Caro's Book of Poker Tells"[1] will aid
| you more than fancy math, though knowing the basics of what is a
| good hand, what a check raise is, that sort of thing will help --
| the biggest thing to remember is to play less hands, and be
| aggressive when you do. Fold or raise -- no calls!)
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/carosbookofpoker00caro
| pkkkzip wrote:
| wrote a lengthy paragraph on the perils of online poker then i
| realized you were doing it offline!
|
| are you playing in the casinos? US I assume? tell me where the
| fishes are young man!
| deaddodo wrote:
| There are plenty of states were poker rooms or private poker
| is legal (California, for instance), here's a map of poker
| rooms:
|
| https://encrypted-
| tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTyeLgf...
|
| Also, many people, who play poker semi-professionally, travel
| and play poker rooms in places like Mexico, Austria, Czechia,
| etc.
| mettamage wrote:
| How is it not enough $$$ for a full-time role if you make
| 1300/2 = 650 per 8 hour session? Is it because of CA?
| greazy wrote:
| My guess: events are not frequent, at least not in the above
| commenters neck of the woods. Travelling costs money, so they
| stick locally.
| apt-apt-apt-apt wrote:
| OP may be highly skilled and disciplined, but the implication
| here is probably a bit exaggerated.
|
| Assuming he is talking about buying in a full $500 at a $3/5
| table, that's 16 big blinds an hour (16bb/hr x 5usd/bb * 8hr
| = $640), which is a god-tier rate in the long run.
|
| For mere mortals with less skill and patience, it's also
| possible to lose the same amount the next 8hr session,
| resulting in a net zero for two days of work. Or, to sit
| break even for 8hrs with crappy unplayable hands, because you
| do need to play less hands to win as he mentioned.
| I-M-S wrote:
| I'm making a fiction podcast (that actually launched on HN) that
| is now earning ~$1100 USD monthly. I just wrote the latest report
| documenting how I got there, which you can find and discuss at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42380474
| crazymoka wrote:
| I run clearpayments.ca completely word of mouth and referrals
| only payment processing services and sytescope.com
|
| I give all clients the best rates possible because it doesn't
| matter as its not my primary source of income. However, business
| owners hate change so its hard to convince them lower fees and
| better products are better for them in the long run.
|
| I make between $3500/m - $5000/m maybe 10 support emails a month.
|
| I also build apps on the side for sytescope.com integrations.
| palsecam wrote:
| https://FreeSolitaire.win brings around $500/mo in advertising
| revenue. It's a Klondike Solitaire PWA (progressive web
| application).
|
| I started making it in 2016 and I've been slowly iterating on it
| over time. It has stayed minimal & lightweight, on purpose. No
| framework, no cruft, no obtrusive ads.
|
| Fun fact: because it's so lightweight, it was included in 2020 in
| Moya (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nu.bi.moya),
| a popular messaging app in South Africa that is "data-free" for
| users (it does reverse-billing). Now ~40% of players are South
| Africans!
|
| Discussed on HN from to time, for instance:
|
| -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42026575 (38 days ago, 19
| points)
|
| -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41971887 (43 days ago, 25
| points) _"Quick side-note. Thank you for freesolitaire.win. It 's
| such a beautiful implementation of solitaire. Works so well as a
| PWA, I can enjoy it even without proper internet connection, it's
| simple, does the basics, but does it perfectly. There's nothing
| to add to it, but more importantly... nothing to take out."_ (!)
|
| -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34483398 (2023, 4 points)
|
| Feedback always welcome, and happy to answer any question!
| xz18r wrote:
| This is neat! First off, the app itself is really nicely
| diesigned, props. Before the Moya thing, how did you lure
| people to your site? I assume there are literally hundreds of
| places where you can play Solitaire in the browser like this?
| palsecam wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Wrt attracting visitors: Word of mouth, mainly. Posted it on
| Reddit back then, things like that. It grew organically from
| that. And, although it's far from being on top results on
| SERP (search engine result pages), some people do find it
| that way. But yes, the Moya thing was a big boost!
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Great app, everything seems to work well. The only thing I
| noticed was that the suit symbols on the cards are a little odd
| because they're all the same size (almost?) so a 3 looks like
| it has 5 symbols on it, etc. But that's minor!
| softienigga wrote:
| OnlyFans, putting up their bungholes for modern audiences.
| bengold14 wrote:
| RankPic (https://www.rankpic.info) is an app to help users
| crowdsource their best photo.
|
| I've been building over the past 3 years & just recently
| monetized and crossed the $500/m mark through a Pro subscription.
| It's grown into a lovely community of people who help each other
| pick their best pictures for dating apps, professional photos
| etc.
|
| I've seen some pretty fun novel use cases, such as (multiple!)
| people using it to pick out glasses, wedding invites & so on
|
| -- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rankpic-photo-
| ranking/id160299... (ios)
|
| --
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.rankpic.ra...
| (android)
| mettamage wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why did you start this?
|
| I've always used photofeeler.
| bengold14 wrote:
| Thanks for asking! I also used photofeeler and found the way
| it rated me 1-10 fairly harmful to my mental health. RankPic
| has users rank your photos best to worst, so it's just
| against yourself.
|
| Additionally it allows users to get more mileage out of each
| test, when you can do 2-6 photos instead of just one at a
| time.
|
| Anecdotally I've also heard it is a more fun experience for
| the rankers.
| themdonuts wrote:
| Very smart the best to worst ranking. Well done!
| bengold14 wrote:
| Thank you! The ranking queue was a fun thing to
| implement.
| Nashooo wrote:
| Without any offense to you, the creator of this app. It's
| obvious a lot of care went into it and you wanted to create a
| better product than what is out there. Even considering the
| mental impact such ranking could have.
|
| However, I genuinely feel that the need for this app is what's
| wrong with society.
| bengold14 wrote:
| No offense taken, I also have many qualms about the role
| looks and photos play in our society. The destruction &
| gamification of social interaction by tech is a genuine harm.
|
| Unfortunately it's what we're dealing with right now, and
| people need feedback to be able to play the game.
| apt-apt-apt-apt wrote:
| What's wrong with this? Seems like a more independent
| alternative to asking a friend which picture looks better.
| funksta wrote:
| I've built a custom planner/calendar generator targeting e-ink
| tablets like the reMarkable, Supernote, and Kindle Scribe.
| Revenue is highly seasonal, but now consistently over the $500/mo
| threshold :)
|
| https://hyperpaper.me/
| dewey wrote:
| FWIW it took at least 30 seconds for the images to show up,
| first I thought it's a collection of white papers before it
| populated.
| funksta wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up! That page is normally very fast but
| I can reproduce those images loading slowly. Will
| investigate...
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| In 2023, I started selling solid wood rolling trays designed by
| my little sister and I on Etsy (The Stoned Craftsmen).
|
| Almost immediately I was making $1200-2000 per month. Some months
| can be big months (especially around Thanksgiving/Christmas)
| where I'm getting $75-200 a day in sales, but some months can be
| dogs (July and August this year were literally $0 months - the
| only 2 on record - I think an algorithm changed on Etsy and we
| got punished or something). When the sales were growing, the work
| was fun, when they plateaued then dipped, it made it hard to feel
| energized to do the work.
|
| The first year I spent a lot of time optimizing everything on the
| manufacturing side. Better tool paths, less tool changes, better
| speeds to not break everything, better use of materials, better
| use of disposables. I tried optimizing my Etsy store, but I
| couldn't get anything to increase sales, and moving to my own
| Shopify was a waste of $40/mo for 6 months because driving my own
| paid traffic from social media (which has rules against
| paraphernalia) was hard, so eventually I dropped that and stuck
| with Etsy and tried to wholesale to dispensaries and headshops
| around me, but my wholesale price is too high, and I don't want
| to offshore my manufacturing to get my price low enough.
|
| I had grand plans on growing the brand. I was in talk with major
| brands in the space for collaboration, but our wholesale price
| point was too high, and 1 celebrity brand said the gap was too
| large, the other never got back in touch after sending them our
| wholesale sheet.
|
| So I think I'm just going to have a nice side biz as a niche
| maker of solid wood rolling trays.
| iandanforth wrote:
| TIL a "rolling tray" is a tray designed specifically to aid in
| rolling joints.
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| As a CNC enthusiast I wondered what this was and what the
| market was like (I don't partake so hadn't heard of a rolling
| tray).
|
| A quick look on Etsy and it seemed super saturated, do you push
| through the noise somehow?
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| The niche I went into was making rolling trays I wouldn't
| mind my grandma seeing, because they don't look like the
| cheap steel Rick and Morty trays that they sell at head
| shops.
|
| I don't know why I'm able to make so many sales. A lot of the
| other shops that are in this space don't sell as many, so
| maybe it is design + price point? At crafts shows (which I
| haven't sold at), similar sized but much "trashier" trays
| sell for double what I sell for on Etsy, but I'm not able to
| increase my price at all on Etsy (fucks the algorithm up).
| martin-adams wrote:
| I'm currently making about $1K a month on my book/course Atomic
| Note-Taking which has sold in 69 countries--something I didn't
| anticipate!
|
| https://atomicnotetaking.com
|
| Along side this I'm build a note-taking app--flowtelic that aims
| to help you get into flow and have an autotelic experience. It's
| to put into software the goals of my note-taking book where I
| feel other apps are missing the mark.
|
| I have a waitlist if anyone is interested
|
| https://join.flowtelic.com
| mrieck wrote:
| Same as last year - still making between $500 and $1k on SnipCSS.
| Didn't work on it for 6 months, but recently added Tailwind
| conversion:
|
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/snipcss/hbdnoadcmap...
| AtticusTheGreat wrote:
| https://SerpentineGame.com brings in close to that with
| advertisements and premium subscriptions. It is a clone of a game
| called Tangleword that is itself a clone of Boggle. I originally
| wrote it in 2008 and am currently re-writing it from scratch
| because the technology stack is so old and cumbersome to
| maintain.
| kethinov wrote:
| What ad platforms do you like and dislike?
| yakhinvadim wrote:
| I made News Minimalist -- a news aggregator where all news is
| ranked by significance on a scale from 0 to 10.
|
| The ranking lets readers select a "significance threshold" and
| ignore all news below it.
|
| It's making close to $1000 MRR now with all money coming from
| premium subscriptions: users can personalize their feed with
| category/country filters, block topics and get access to news
| summaries.
|
| https://www.newsminimalist.com/
| markvdb wrote:
| Silly related question...
|
| How much gross taxable do you need to make from your side gig to
| take home 500/m net from a side gig? Here, that's about 1360/m if
| itemising expenses, or 900EUR/m with the standard deduction for
| side income and doing your own taxes.
| darthcloud wrote:
| I've build BlueRetro [1] an universal Bluetooth controller
| adapter for nearly all pre-USB gaming console.
|
| I guess I could update from my previous post in a similar thread.
| [2]
|
| Long story short, my open source firmware is used by product
| makers and they make a voluntary contribution often base on how
| many unit they sell. It is also widely used by Chinese company on
| AliExpress.
|
| I got one of those Chinese company to sponsor me a significant
| amount on GitHub sponsor since August 2022. I guess they forgot
| about it, still going ever since!
|
| I still make 1000 USD a month from the various HW makers.
|
| One new thing I made this year after 5 year of doing this hobby,
| is that I finally manufactured and sold one adapter base on this
| code myself for the OG Xbox console. [3]
|
| Factoring all the expenses I made 7K for a batch of 300. I plan
| to do a 2nd batch next year, which should yield double that since
| I will only incur raw materials & shipping expenses.
|
| It took me 48 hour of manual labor to assemble them and ship
| them. So it's doesn't make much sense TBH, but it's a good
| experience. Made me appreciate my desk job.
|
| [1] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35568543
|
| [3] https://blueretro.com
| parski wrote:
| I've heard great things about your stuff.
| graphpapermaker wrote:
| I'm building Virtual Graph Paper (https://virtual-graph-
| paper.com) which is a web app for sketching on a grid.
|
| Basically a (limited) vector graphics editor that's trying to be
| very approachable, aimed at use-cases where something like
| Illustrator or a CAD package wouldn't be a great fit. I keep
| hearing about new things people use it for, which is something I
| truly enjoy.
|
| It's free and ad-free, but there's also a paid version in the
| form of a downloadable Electron app or a subscription.
| xz18r wrote:
| This is awesome. How is Excalidraw so huge in this space and
| you aren't?
| kiru_io wrote:
| I have been building a few apps, combined (+ with my saas
| sites/games) I manage to reach 500$:
|
| WhatDinner[0]: Basically Tinder to decide what to eat
|
| FleuntRead[1]: A new app I am working on to learn languages by
| learning sentences by heart
|
| [0] https://whatdinner.com/
|
| [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fluentread-language-
| learning/i...
| janosch_123 wrote:
| I built custom electric cars, and now I am sharing my knowledge
| for free in a knowledge base and in a YouTube series:
|
| https://foxev.io/batteries
|
| https://youtube.com/@foxev-content
|
| I hope this helps someone :)
|
| My knowledge is EV and renewable energy knowledge from first
| principles and for an open source tool.
|
| https://openinverter.org lets you re-purpose the drivetrain from
| any EV, like Toyota Prius or Tesla Model S and put it into
| another car.
|
| For this I offer paid support at $200/call and have about 2 of
| them per month.
|
| I am trying to turn this trickle of revenue into a more
| predictable stream, suggestions welcome. The videos are meant to
| give free help and at the same time serve as lead-gen.
| flashu wrote:
| SpaceShout (https://spaceshout.com) is Social Mapping Platform
| focused on our user's content and interaction.
|
| Project is in active development since 2 years, 10+ ppl engaged,
| iOS and Android apps published in the stores. We're not yet into
| making money but we're on the way to start with profits.
|
| iOS - https://apps.apple.com/app/spaceshout/id6475599807 Android
| - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spaceshout
| andyfchen wrote:
| I built my language learning app, which is helps learners to
| study common Chinese idioms. The website
| (https://everydaychengyu.com/) has the content for free and a kid
| friendly app teaching the material with flash cards and spaced
| repetition is available on the app store
| jaflo wrote:
| I have been working on Audjust (https://www.audjust.com/) on and
| off in my spare time. It's a service to manipulate
| (shorten/lengthen/loop) audio for video editors and music
| producers.
|
| I had a Show HN a while back that was well-received and kicked
| things off (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36480687). Since
| launching I have changed the name and added paid accounts which
| have brought in enough money to cover costs and make some profit!
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| I develop a basketball coaching app called Elite Hoops, it makes
| $3.5k/month and thankfully growing:
|
| --> https://elitehoopsapp.com
|
| I wrote a book series over iOS development, self-published, made
| over $120k:
|
| --> https://bestinclassiosapp.com
|
| I do one sponsored ad a year, which translates to over $500/month
| (i.e. your criteria):
|
| --> https://www.swiftjectivec.com
|
| And launching another app soon to follow D2/D3 collegiate scores,
| hoping to get that up and over $500 MRR quickly:
|
| --> https://x.com/JordanMorgan10/status/1864796895396110737
| rahilb wrote:
| I just about qualify! My first side project that actually
| delivered anything: Reminder Sync for Obsidian!
| https://turquoisehexagon.co.uk/remindersync/
|
| I built it for myself after I began using Obsidian for day to day
| note making. A simple idea: get reminders for tasks you create in
| Obsidian. People seem to like it.
|
| previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39764919
| timmit wrote:
| I made a website to alert people about inside trading and
| congress trading, https://tradeinsight.info (updated)
|
| Not $500/month yet, but towards it, the work flow is quite
| simple, the infrastructure is a bit complicated, need quite
| amount of time to maintain.
| passwordreset wrote:
| Tradesinsight? Plural? Because tradesinsight is a DNS not
| found, but tradeinsight.info will notify me when Nancy pelosi
| and other Congress members trade.
|
| Always make sure you get that name right.
| timmit wrote:
| My bad, TradeInsight without s. :(
|
| Maybe this is why I didn't get customers, keeping typing it
| wrongly. :(
| jetter wrote:
| I am running a web scraping API ScrapeNinja
| https://scrapeninja.net. 10K+ subscribers.
|
| It is a (rather messy) node.js codebase. Two rendering engines,
| including a hacked puppeteer package with stealth mode for better
| success rate. A big set of proxy providers under the hood.
| Bootstrapped.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Pretty basic 3d printing. Right now I'm focusing on the usual
| kinds of products (either commercial-compatible CC licenses or
| models of those I've purchased licenses to), but I'm working
| towards learning Autodesk Fusion and creating my own products.
| (Probably focus more on functional items, since I'm definitely
| not artistic). Netting around $500-1000 a month (eBay, Etsy,
| Mercari, some FB marketplace)
| Always42 wrote:
| I believe Amazon has price rules such that you cannot price
| gouge on Amazon. Do the vendors you list have any rules like
| that? Or do you just not care?
| greenie_beans wrote:
| I just launched a website for buying organic Mississippi sweet
| potatoes online: https://sweetclay.net.
|
| I've made $910 in revenue in the first three weeks. Does that
| count?
| brundolf wrote:
| Sounds lovely!
|
| Just fyi I tried clicking the link, and my work laptop flagged
| it as "malware". I'm not sure why, but thought I would let you
| know
| greenie_beans wrote:
| thank you for the heads up!!! hmmm...
| fm2606 wrote:
| I went to it on my Android phone and it worked fine.
| brundolf wrote:
| Yeah, mine was via a corporate policy. God knows how it
| decides such things, but it's not a message I've ever
| seen before, so there could be something wrong with the
| site that other security software might flag
| fm2606 wrote:
| I think it does.
|
| How did you get your farmer network set up?
|
| Reminds me of https://www.vidaliaonions.com/. The guy who
| started that bought the domain before he knew what he was going
| to do with it.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| I copied him. His HN post from 2019 is what planted the seed:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132
|
| I'm from Mississippi and know some small farmers but none of
| the big sweet potato producers. "Mississippi Sweet Potatoes"
| coming from the "Sweet Potato Capital of the World" has
| always been a strong branding in my head growing up, just
| being near the influence of that. It's not hard to get their
| wholesale but I wanted to have some orders before finding a
| partner.
| pier25 wrote:
| Still not hitting $500 consistently but...
|
| Wavekit https://wavekit.app/
|
| It's an audio hosting service with high quality audio and a
| customizable unbranded player.
|
| Embeds are done with iframes but we're starting to offer web
| components which offer some cool opportunities like interaction
| between components.
|
| Most of our customers are selling some kind of audio product or
| service. Think plugin developers, sound designers, media
| composers, etc.
|
| Currently working on a B2B integration with an API so that it
| would be trivial to add audio to any web app. Think chats,
| marketplaces, etc.
| wesvance wrote:
| I built https://explorehere.app to help you learn about the
| history of the world around you by sending a push notification
| whenever you pass a new historical marker on your travels!
|
| It's a freemium app with a pro subscription for advanced
| features; our revenue is just under $1k/month.
|
| We're working towards ExploreHere being a passive adventure
| guide. As you go about your travels ExploreHere will nudge you
| about interesting information wherever you go; history, unique
| things to see, special food known only in the city you're in,
| etc.
| fm2606 wrote:
| Just a few weeks ago I was on a trip through back roads of NC
| and VA and saw a bunch of historical markers and wondered how
| to do something with them. And now I know.
|
| My thinking was to stop and get a gps coordinate and then what?
| How do I get them all across the states? And that is about how
| far my thinking got before a SQUIRREL ran through my brain.
|
| Glad to see some of my thoughts aren't to far out there. Now
| just have to work on DOING instead of THINKING.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Start small, get the GPS co-ords of those markers, and create
| your visualisations, etc.
|
| Then share them with family/friends
|
| Then they'll start collecting marker co-ords for you
|
| THEN worry about how to get strangers involved
| (using/submitting/etc)
|
| Facebook started with a single University...
| fm2606 wrote:
| Great point. Thanks for sharing.
|
| I admit I get the cart before the horse.
|
| I'm not looking for life changing money, but it would be
| nice to actually be able to submit a $500 mrr project here
| on HN.
|
| These are my favorite threads
| PTOB wrote:
| I too had this experience in Texas over the holidays. Sigh.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| I find it disturbing how many people allow apps to access their
| location 24/7.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >I find it disturbing how many people allow apps to access
| their location 24/7.
|
| Why? It doesn't effect you at all.
| jpcom wrote:
| Maybe he's a healthcare CEO
| marco-dev wrote:
| I founded [Marin Labs](https://www.marinlabs.io), a studio where
| I get to develop whatever comes to mind. Last Friday, I launched
| a mobile game on iOS and Android, it's a popular trivia game but
| tropicalized for Latin America. I'm currently sitting on a juicy
| $14.00 MRR. Gotta start somewhere, I guess.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| I guess if you spread this over 12 months it counts?
| https://www.esp32rainbow.com/
|
| I'd really like to build on this and start a hardware company.
| h317 wrote:
| I was tired of coming home after networking events and shift
| through pile of business cards, so I made an app to just scan
| cards and export them to csv. Pretty much just for fun app for
| myself, friends, and friends of friends, but other people started
| using it too.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/krane-build-relationships/id67...
| arahman4710 wrote:
| I built a tool called Canyon to help jobseekers land their dream
| job by helping them perfect their resume, be much faster at
| applying to jobs, and practicing with our mock interview tool.
|
| https://www.usecanyon.com/
| paulorlando wrote:
| I wrote these two books based on work I had done in/with startups
| over the years.
|
| Why Now: How Good Timing Makes Great Products:
| https://www.amazon.com/Why-Now-Timing-Makes-Products/dp/B0CY...
|
| Growth Units: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GJVV8RJ/
| iamwil wrote:
| We wrote a zine on System evals for LLM-driven apps. Lots of
| people building impressive demos with AIs, but to get it working
| well in production over time (maintainable), you need some kind
| of system eval. It's like some kind of open secret, since lots of
| people are still floating on vibes-based engineering and looks-
| good-to-me@K metrics.
|
| https://forestfriends.tech
|
| Sri and I wrote it as a way to collaborate after doing a podcast
| together, which made no money. Picked a topic that people seemed
| to be interested in. Did the whole customer dev thing, and
| honestly, we were unsure if it'd make any money at all.
| Representing the AI as a shoggoth is from that meme, and we
| merely thought juxtaposing it with some furry animals was funny.
|
| But it turns out people like it. It introduces system evals
| without jargon, and frames how to get started with evals for AI
| engineers that moved into the space from other kinds of
| engineering. It feels pretty good when people buy it and say they
| like it.
| ajstiles wrote:
| Awesome - subscribed!
| rolandpeelen wrote:
| I made https://konfig.xyz/ after making about 6500 images for a
| product configurator. Instead of using images, we use 3d models.
| Initially quite simple and for use with relatively flat scenes
| (ie - no tree like structure for options / scenes) but grown over
| time to sort of support those too.
|
| The main use case are fixed-in-size products that can be
| customize-able. So colours and materials, but also swapping one
| object for another, or turning one on or off (imagine rims on a
| car, or a bow thruster on a boat).
|
| We tried saas'in it completely, but the onboarding is proving to
| be quite hands-on. So we've partnered with a 3d firm that does
| the 3d work so we can focus ok building software
| mclau156 wrote:
| reminds me of the Sims 3!
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| Very cool, since there's no pricing, what's the ballpark cost
| of some of the demos on the website?
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| I don't know if I should really say it, but here I go.
|
| You can order certain pills that are meant for men for like 50c a
| piece online from India and sell them for 10EUR a piece face to
| face to normies. Handing out a few freebies ALWAYS leads to the
| guys becoming frequent future customers. Because those damn
| pills, while not considered addictive, make things so, so much
| better. And not every country already has easy, cheap and low
| effort ways to order them normally...
|
| (I am talking about vitamin pills aimed at men and nothing else
| and I am not doing this, I heard someone tell me this story.)
| wutwutwat wrote:
| How many guns do you own to protect your territory and vitamin
| empire, and ensure the riches gained aren't taken by anyone? Do
| you have vitamin groupies? Do you recruit vitamin runners to
| distribute the small quantities and take most of the risk? Do
| you move vitamins by the kilo?
| knowingathing wrote:
| I run https://getloaf.io/ an app which lets you customise SVG
| animations that are built into the app. Constantly plugging away
| for 4ish years now!
| codeisawesome wrote:
| It would be great if these questions also included a sub-question
| on distribution strategy, that's one of the hardest things to
| visualize as a developer from $0 to $500.
| mtw wrote:
| I make between $3k to $6k from putting a log cabin on Airbnb.
| This started during period of boredom during the pandemic. I
| operate remotely with smart home devices and with a local
| cleaning team/handyman.
|
| I had a project to completely automate this with an AI agent but
| Airbnb doesn't offer a publicly available API.
|
| $3k seems high but the costs add up and the time as well (details
| here https://studiozenkai.com/post/airbnb-the-good-the-bad-the-
| pr... ). I always have a bit of profit at the end of year and the
| mortgage costs are entirely paid so no complaints here
|
| If I ever get fed up from tech projects, I can see myself getting
| a bigger vacation property and making this my own version of
| Barista FIRE
| lpeancovschi wrote:
| I made a plant care app for iOS and macOS. Making few hundreds
| $$$ on it - https://apps.apple.com/app/plant-care-identify-
| flowers/id161...
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I built an agentic marketplace where people create agents which
| get a cut of the task price if their agents take part in doing
| something in the chain.
|
| Making more than $500 but it is a side project.
| ssiddharth wrote:
| I'm building Sink It for Reddit (https://gosinkit.com), a
| Safari/Chrome/Firefox/Edge extension to make Reddit usable on the
| web. It's similar to RES (Reddit enhancement suite) but supports
| all of Reddit's designs and is being actively developed with
| around 300k users, mainly on the Apple platforms.
|
| It was built during the Reddit API shenanigans last year and is
| making four figures a month. 99% of the app's feature are free
| with the money coming from a premium (dark mode etc) for old
| Reddit and donations.
|
| Have a few high five figure/low six figure acquisition offers
| already but I'm afraid it'll be turned into malware so haven't
| gone through with it.
| parski wrote:
| I develop a modular media center compatible with Stremio addons
| for Apple platforms. It's called [Vidi](https://vidi.plomo.se/).
|
| I've done zero marketing and have a few thousand users from
| organic growth alone since August. It's a one-time purchase type
| of deal and I'm overwhelmed by positive feedback.
| flixing wrote:
| http://profileoptimizer.org/
|
| LinkedIn Profile Optimizer is an AI-driven service designed to
| enhance your LinkedIn profile, making it more appealing to
| recruiters and expanding your professional network. By analyzing
| each section of your profile, it provides personalized
| recommendations to help you stand out.
|
| Key Features: * AI-Powered Analysis: Thorough examination of your
| profile to identify areas for improvement.
|
| * Tailored Content Suggestions: Customized advice for posts and
| updates to engage your audience.
|
| * Optimized Headline and About Sections: Creation of compelling
| summaries that highlight your expertise.
|
| * Profile Visibility Boost: Strategies to increase your profile's
| reach and attractiveness to recruiters.
|
| * CV Generation: Development of resumes tailored to specific
| LinkedIn job postings.
|
| * Content Strategy Development: Formulation of plans to
| effectively engage your network.
|
| By comparing your profile to industry leaders and staying updated
| with LinkedIn's latest trends, LinkedIn Profile Optimizer offers
| actionable, prioritized recommendations to elevate your
| professional presence.
| AutoAPI wrote:
| https://postalagent.com is my side project that lets you building
| mailing lists and send postcards online
|
| https://checkanyvin.com is a slightly older project that lets you
| run vehicle history reports cheaper than other services
| lpeancovschi wrote:
| I made an invoice maker app. Available for iOS and macOS. It's a
| document-based app with custom file format for invoices:
| https://apps.apple.com/app/invoice-maker-quote-builder/id153...
| lpeancovschi wrote:
| I made a Resume Builder app for iOS and macOS:
| https://apps.apple.com/app/professional-resume-builder/id135...
| alpn wrote:
| I made a simple service that lets you read Substack newsletters
| on your Kindle.
|
| https://substack2kindle.com
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