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Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?
As it's a new year 2015, let's re-open this topic to see how things are going on this front :)
It can be a SaaS app, a mobile app, or any side project that is netting you recurring revenue
- modoc 12y ago10MinuteMail - http://10minutemail.com http://10minutemail.com Temporary email. Got lucky with traffic, and run two Google Adsense ads.
- _kyran 12y agoThanks for making that! Out of interest, are you willing to share a rough idea of how many emails have been created or how many are made a day?
- modoc 12y ago40k-50k addresses are created, with about 80-85% of them receiving an email. I also get about 300k-500k email a day to expired addresses
- _xander 12y agoBig fan of 10minutemail - great job! How are you able to keep track of the emails going to expired addresses? Aren't those addresses destroyed? Do you ever repurpose expired addresses?
- ethbro 12y ago> I also get about 300k-500k email a day to expired addresses Ever had any ideas for monetizing the junk mail you receive? I'd imagine most of the mail filters do something similar to learn on, but it seems like there has to be some value from that volume.
- ethbro 12y ago> I also get about 300k-500k email a day to expired addresses Ever had any ideas for monetizing the junk mail you receive? I'd imagine most of the mail filters do something similar to learn on, but it seems like there has to be some value from that volume.
- ethbro 12y ago> I also get about 300k-500k email a day to expired addresses Ever had any ideas for monetizing the junk mail you receive? I'd imagine most of the mail filters do something similar to learn on, but it seems like there has to be some value from that volume.
- GordonS 12y agoHow much traffic do you get to make $1k+ a month with Adsense ads?
- modoc 12y agoI get 3.7-4 million page views per month from 850k-1 million unique users.
- GordonS 12y agoOK, that is a lot! What sort of hardware do you need for that kind of load?
- zrail 12y agoThat's approximately 2 hits per second. If you're serving static content (or heavily cached) you could handle that with a Raspberry PI. Heck you could probably do it with an arduino. Edit: this depends heavily on your traffic pattern, of course. Super bursty traffic from Reddit, TechCrunch, etc is going to swamp your IO, but CPU will never dominate the equation.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoMight as well serve it from Amazon S3 with Cloudflare in front of it.
- mattmanser 12y agoOf all the things that would be suited to Amazon S3 with Cloudflare, a simple mail client/server that saves email securely for 10 minutes is not one. At all.
- dpcan 12y agoDepends on your users I think. If 50% of that traffic is during a 10 hour window of time each day, that could be around 70 views per second. And pulling email for an account could be more costly than a static page view. Then if he's getting that many views, he could be processing tens or hundreds of emails a day per account more or less.... Could get expensive.
- tsiki 12y agoI'm a big fan of 10MinuteMail, it's saved from a lot of spam. Thanks!
- wertop 12y agoHow did you get approved for AdSense? I'm trying to get approval for a small app with little textual content, but it seems Google want reams of text so it gets rejected.
- modoc 12y agoI didn't have to do anything special (that I remember - this was many years ago).
- dragthor 12y agoNice idea. Thanks for sharing!
- misiti3780 12y agobig fan also - how are you dynamically creating those address on the backend ?
- ing33k 12y agoI use this almost daily ( for testing my web app ), thanks for creating this site !
- not_kurt_godel 12y agoHTTPS link for those who care about security: https://10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail/index.html https://10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail/index.html (Which should be everyone; I find it disappointing you would have posted the HTTP link at all, to be honest.)
- vlucas 12y agoAwesome. I used to run a similar service, but almost got banned from AdSense by users who received emails with adult content. What do you do to account for content in emails that users receive that may be objectionable to your advertisers?
- simi_ 12y agoI use your service religiously. Hi! PS: I will disable uBlock on your domain. I like people who advertise properly.
- richardbrevig 12y agoMay seem like a basic question, but I'm curious what different use cases your users us your service for. The obvious to me would be to sign up for a service that requires an email and use the fake one. What else is it used for? Thanks.
- avinassh 12y agoCurious, how did you market it?
- guestman987 12y agohow did you create the website and everything?
- MichaelCrawford 12y agoIt's been a few years, but at one time I averaged $3,500.00 per month, with two months at $5,000.00, from two AdSense units on just one single, quite lengthy but well-researched and well-written essay on legal music downloading. I am, today, skeptical that it's worth anyone's while to try to make money from ads published alongside one's articles. At one time that was widely accepted as the very best way to make money online, but no more. I'm getting ready to do a KickStarter project so I can devote myself full time to this: http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/ http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/ So far I have some remote employers and clients, and some employers in a few large US cities. After I have lots more remote employers, as well as some in a few other countries, I'll do the kickstarter. Someone managed to make fifty-six grand from a KickStarter in which he said "I'm making potato salad". Not that he was going to sell it commercially, or had come up with a killer potato salad recipe. I mean like he was fixing his lunch for the day. Just a couple days ago, I read that three times as much money is raised from crowdfunding than from VC. Consider that with crowdfunding, you don't lose any equity. You also don't have the problem with a bad VC giving you bad advice, or even demanding you do stupid things. There are some VCs who are very, very good. Despite having to fork over lots of equity, the good VCs are very worthwhile, but IMHO a bad VC is far worse than not getting funding at all.
- getdavidhiggins 12y agoSide projects usually enjoy a brief moment in the sun, and then start losing traffic (or in modern parlance - money). Any further effort to promote them is fruitless, because the chances are; the same people you are targeting have already seen your project. It's like when movie franchises (Dumb and Dumber for example) try and milk the format. A golden rule I try to live by is try many different things. Try every single avenue you can. When one avenue burns out, go down another one.
- MichaelCrawford 12y agoI still write lots of articles and essays, but I don't focus on any one topic. I'm not running ads anymore. Some of my articles still have affiliate ads for books, but I placed those ads years ago. My new material doesn't have any ads. I figure that if my writing is well-received, something good is bound to happen to me. Other than my plan for the KickStarter - which I am not dead certain I will actually pursue - I don't have any specific plans for monetizing my site.
- rememberlenny 12y agoI found a great article by Walter Chen yesterday about how to he brought his business to $1000 recurring revenue yesterday. http://blog.idonethis.com/how-we-got-to-1-000-in-recurring-revenue/ http://blog.idonethis.com/how-we-got-to-1-000-in-recurring-r... Im working on a similar service using SMS.
- zrail 12y agoI wrote a book[1] a year and a half ago that just recently crossed $42k in total revenue. These days it consistently earns $1.5k/mo without much further input from me, other than tweaks to the landing page copy and updates once in awhile when Stripe or Rails changes significantly. [1]: https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com Edit: If you'd like to read a preview, you can do so here: https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/read https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/read
- jchung 12y agoWhat proportion of that revenue are you receiving?
- zrail 12y agoI use Stripe (and sometimes PayPal) so I get 97% of the gross revenue. Monthly recurring expenses are a cheap VPS to run the app and Facebook retargeting fees.
- la6470 12y agoDo you mind sharing how you advertised your book or made it popular?
- zrail 12y agoI wrote an article[1] all about it a few months after I originally launched. There was some HN discussion about it too[2]. [1]: https://www.petekeen.net/adventures-in-self-publishing https://www.petekeen.net/adventures-in-self-publishing [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6320333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6320333
- aakilfernandes 12y agoI was thinking about doing something similar. Do you recommend using your own domain name (like nathan barry) or having a custom domain?
- 12y ago
- tootie 12y agoReddit thread on this subject from yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2rb487/people_who_have_built_sites_for_a_passive_income/ https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2rb487/people_who_h...
- umrashrf 12y agoreddit.com/r/SideProject is a great place to look for such projects.
- jafingi 12y agoI started a little niche webshop in 2011. In 2014, the monthly revenue were around $2500/month. It's not passive income, but I only use ~ 1 hour a day on it (packaging etc.)
- ozh 12y agoIs there any potential for improvement? Like, devote more time to it and make more? 1 hour a day = 31 hours a month = $80/h, roughly put.
- pan69 12y agoWhat is a "little niche webshop" if I may ask? What exactly do you do?
- pan69 12y agoWhat is a "little niche webshop" if I may ask? What exactly do you do?
- pan69 12y agoWhat is a "little niche webshop" if I may ask? What exactly do you do?
- jsherer 12y agoI left my full-time job back in February 2013 (coming up on 2 years). I currently split my time between consulting and growing my products (a downloadable and a SaaS). Revenue from my oldest app is still > $1000/month. Been a fun ride so far.
- vram22 12y agoWhat's the downloadable, if it's not confidential?
- sam_lowry_ 12y agoA local community website, earning from local ads.
- maxerickson 12y agoWould you mind sharing the population you reach?
- martyz 12y agoDo you work with retailers directly for local ads or an adsense-type site? You do $1k/mo for this?
- m3andros 12y agoWould you mind sharing the URL? Thanks!
- xrobotx 12y agowhat is it ?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- brianpetro_ 12y agoCreate a Job Board, use the latest social routes to drive traffic and build a list. The amount you make from the Job Board post is heavily dependent on the amount social followers (drives traffic and makes purchasing more appealing). https://www.angularjobs.com https://www.angularjobs.com started making ~$1000/month in revenue with a highly targeted social reach of ~10k followers. Technical co-founder type? Take what you know about programming and offer recruiting services to the early users of your site. Both companies and developers visit job boards, providing both the clients and talent needed to collect recruitment fees(over 10K in major US cities). My main gig is http://www.LinkPlugApp.com http://www.LinkPlugApp.com where I play a technical role. LinkPlug is how I drive traffic to the JobBoard from social media accounts like the ones below(click a tweeted link to see an ad for the JobBoard): https://twitter.com/AngularJS_news https://twitter.com/AngularJS_news https://www.linkedin.com/groups?groupDashboard=&gid=4896676 https://www.linkedin.com/groups?groupDashboard=&gid=4896676 https://twitter.com/angularjobs https://twitter.com/angularjobs edit: added Twitter account examples.
- wuliwong 12y agoI'd love to talk to you more about this if you have the time. You can connect to me on twitter https://twitter.com/patrickjbradley https://twitter.com/patrickjbradley I have a website for finding tutorials about the Swift language. I've been considering adding a job board as a revenue source. Would love to hear your thoughts and advice. Even what you posted here is a big help already.
- brianpetro_ 12y agoAwesome! The JobBoard is a great way to get some passive income, but, there is a lot more money to be made if you want to devote your time to recruiting. Having a non-recruiting domain in the space you want to recruit in is a huge advantage when getting both JobBoard and recruiting leads. Definitely focus your recruiting efforts in one locale at first. DC, SF and NYC are the top markets if you are based in the US. The JobBoard should be worldwide (easier to facilitate than restricting it anyway). Feel free to send me sensitive questions via email: brian at linkplugapp.com
- 12y ago
- jasmcole 12y agoI wrote an Android app based on a blog post of mine which got popular: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jasmcole.wifisolver https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jasmcole.w... http://jasmcole.com/2014/08/25/helmhurts/ http://jasmcole.com/2014/08/25/helmhurts/ It reached the reddit front page for a day, and earned £3,000 during that day. Since then, it's averaged ~£150 per month, with only small input from me (minor updates)
- Osmium 12y agoI saw your write-up on this before; very cool work. Could you talk a little about the programming side of things and what you had to do to go from your initial mock-up (what did you use for that?) to the Android app, and how that process went? I saw that you'd written it was your first time with Android/Java.
- jasmcole 12y agoThanks! And sure, I wrote the initial simulation code in Matlab, which is very simple, just adding 2D arrays which Matlab is fairly quick at. I then saw the traction the blog post was getting, so wanted to capitalise on that quickly. I had an Android phone, so for simplicity (and ease of monetisation) decided to write an app for that. From zero knowledge of Java it took probably 30 hours over a weekend to get the app out, then perhaps another 10 hours over the next week on a few updates and bug fixes. Getting the app up and running was relatively simple, most of the time was spent looking up API functions in Google's SDK documentation (and SO!). The only complication was making sure the CPU-intensive parts ran in a separate thread to avoid locking up the UI, and dealing with different device display sizes and resolutions. Everything else (dealing with input, generating images etc.) wasn't particularly difficult, but did take time to implement.
- coolhand 12y agoI could have used this last month. I went through 4 crap routers before caving and buying a 250$ router to cover my home.
- tessierashpool 12y agoI wrote a bunch of ebooks and created a bunch of videos. I sold them from my blog and via Twitter; in fact, although I started in 2010 and have made at least 10 products, to this day, I only have web sites for one ebook and one video series. (Count each video in that series as a separate product and I've probably made at least 20 products.) TBH, the worst part about this is that it's so easy, I got pretty lazy about it. This is why I haven't answered the "what did you make?" question - I got so lazy about it in 2014 that the side projects brought in about half what they made in 2015. Kinda painful in retrospect. Likewise, if I had web sites for this stuff, if I built email marketing systems, I'm sure they'd make more money. I even have a Kindle version of one of my books, and I still haven't gotten around to sharing it with my customers. Kind of embarassing, actually. But even then, I'm well over the $1K/month mark. No worries there. All you really need to do is create stuff that people find worthwhile.
- innguest 12y agoThanks for sharing this candidly. It motivates me (an incredibly lazy person) to put something together at least.
- michaelbuckbee 12y agoI developed a service that does SSL installation for you on Heroku: https://www.expeditedssl.com https://www.expeditedssl.com
- shaaaaawn 12y agohaha. this is great. simple product.
- nailer 12y agoSounds like a great product! Some questions. 1. Your video mentions you 'buy the SSL certificate' for users. How does that work? Are you a CA or do you resell another CA? 2. Your video mentions latest security practices - are you selling EV certificates? Or just 'encryption to someone who owns this domain' certificates? 3. If you resell another CA, how can the identity verification process be 20 minutes? Pardon all the questions, but I'm currently waiting on godaddy, who take 15 days, so I'm interested in this stuff.
- nailer 12y agoAh I just watched your video and I see you resell rapidssl. But the video also showed the certificate being generated on your server, rather than making a CSR on the desktop. Wouldn't you then know the private key? Again, sorry for all the questions and thanks for answering!
- lambtron 12y agoCool service, been looking for something like this!! Mind sharing more details, i.e. time to launch, rev numbers, cost, etc? Has heroku providing free shared SSL impacted your numbers at all?
- wesbos 12y agoI wrote a book and video series on Sublime Text - https://SublimeTextBook.com https://SublimeTextBook.com It's done about 80k in sales in 3 months - I'm in the process of writing a blog post about how I did it, what worked and what didn't. It's not inexpensive, but it pays for itself quickly so people are fine with spending the $45 on the book + videos. Feel free to ask questions here so I have content for the post.
- Killah911 12y agoThat's pretty cool. How did you market it? What's your net looking like(assuming 80k is gross sales)?
- wesbos 12y agoThere have been 5-6 things that have contributed to - the biggest one is that I'm somewhat of an expert in the community - I have lots of free blog posts and videos so I've gained trust there.
- k__ 12y agoHow did you get into writing? I tried to write blogs and had to write papers for university, but I always struggle. I have the feeling that some people can produce much text from nothing, where I put my ideas into a few sentences...
- wesbos 12y agoIt was really hard to write - took me 1.5 years, tons of research and re-writing. This isn't something I slapped together over a weekend. Far from passive income. Creating content for me is always hard, but once it's done, I love to deliver it (via talks, teaching, videos or books...)
- shaaaaawn 12y agoGreat job man. Skimmed your book a couple months ago.
- ClintFix 12y agoI sell 6 and 12 month leadership development programs to companies. I make 50% of the sale. At $50/mo per employee on the program, I make an extra $1000/mo at 40 employees. http://LIFELeadershipCorporate.com http://LIFELeadershipCorporate.com
- johansch 12y agoJudging from what I've been exposed to from HR departments, this is a seriously underdeveloped area... (I mean the content, not the selling of it.)
- ClintFix 12y agoMy specific content or the content that is normally available by other companies?
- redfalcon6 12y agoIs this your self-made content, or are you essentially an affiliate for someone else's course? Mind sharing a bit more how this works? Very interesting!
- ClintFix 12y agoAffiliate, but I know all of the creators personally. We have a smattering of other leadership/personal development products as well.
- itengelhardt 12y agoI wrote a SaaS app for SEO professionals that helps them find link opportunities for their client's websites - https://www.LinksSpy.com https://www.LinksSpy.com . It currently makes about $1,200/mo. I do somewhat detailed income reports over at http://www.it-engelhardt.de/income-reports http://www.it-engelhardt.de/income-reports
- iurisilvio 12y agoSmall niches are cool, but you probably can't live from ads. Choose a lame subject with lots of users and make a clean and easy to use website. I have a small directory website. It's pretty boring stuff, but it is a good source of almost passive income. Never published it. I just created the website and sent the sitemap to Google Webmasters. It's 8 months old and I have 400k pageviews/month. I have lots of projects in idea stage, I want to execute at least two in 2015. My plan is to reinvest all money from this first side project to create others.
- joshdance 12y agoWith 400k page views what does your Adsense look like?
- iurisilvio 12y agoI don't send all my traffic through AdSense, some go to other services, which give me less profits with less rules. I have a CPM around $2. depending on the ads platform. AdSense is definitely the best one for me. I started with AdSense 3 months ago and I'm still afraid of being banned and lose all my revenue. I don't explicitly violate any terms, but it is not original content and can easily be framed as doorway pages.
- wuliwong 12y agoWhat is the url?
- iurisilvio 12y agoSorry, never published the URL of this service and really don't want to do it now. To be honest, this is the first time I wrote about it. One of my goals to 2015 is a better project to publish here.
- tomrohlf 12y agoI created a card game that I sell on Amazon. I have it manufactured in China and sell it though Fulfillment by Amazon. Quite a change from my day job working in software but I enjoy the diversity. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PJKCXJC http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PJKCXJC
- mcphage 12y agoMind talking some about how you do it?
- mfringel 12y ago+1 I've been trying to understand the full remote supply chain, going directly from the offshore supply chain directly to FBA.
- tomrohlf 12y agoIts difficult to completely automate the supply chain as incoming FBA shipments expire 30 days after they are created. If you're shipping heavy freight from China this is cost prohibitive. I currently "touch" my inventory one time in-between the source and FBA. I'm working on streamlining that part though.
- rab_oof 12y agoBe sure that your mfgr isn't running off extra for AliBaba, free markets or other channels. Contract mfgrs are notorious about ripping off IP and product.
- kyllo 12y agoHow is it possible to be sure of that, though? If they're a contract mfg then by definition they've already signed a contract that says they can't do that, so if they do it, they've broken the contract.
- 12y ago
- chias 12y agoI made a a community built around sharing creative writing, story telling, digital art and artistic expression. It also has a few browser games and a "digital collectibles" aspect to it. I started it about a year and a half ago with a digital-artist friend. It's got a standard F2P model for the collectibles aspect: you can get everything for free by playing the games / posting in the forums, or you can pay for it. It probably doesn't make as much as it could as I refuse to employ "dirty F2P Tricks", but that's a personal choice. Check it out if you care to :) https://www.mycenacave.com/ https://www.mycenacave.com/
- MichaelTieso 12y agoI'm bringing home about $2,500 a month on my side project. This year I plan on doubling it. The issue is that this is really starting to becoming another full-time job.
- sarciszewski 12y agoThat was a little vague. Care to share more details?
- MichaelTieso 12y agoYou're right. I'm Sorry. I run a membership site called travelblogsuccess.com. My full-time job is at WooThemes for WooCommerce. I'm a firm believer of "eating your own dog food" thus we use WooCoommerce and several other plugins on my own side project. This has given me a better understanding of the products we sell at WooThemes as an actual customer on a live site. I learned more about our own products using it for my side project than learning and testing our plugins on a local development server. As for the site itself it does require maintenance so not quite passive. It's important that we communicate with our community and update our lessons and courses often. We just introduced a public Slack community yesterday for example. We're now a team of four and could easily need more help. 2014 saw huge growth. Initially I was concerned that my side project was going to take up too much of my time resulting in having two full-time positions. It did take some lifestyle changes in the beginning to free more time like spending less time messing around Facebook or Twitter and optimizing my time spent on my side project. In the end everything has worked very well. I spend on average an hour or two each day on my side project. Sometimes more if I'm simply watching TV while working on a few tasks during my downtime. Sorry for the initial vague comment. Please do feel free to ask me any questions.
- frist45 12y agoI wrote a book called Build a Ruby Gem ( http://brandonhilkert.com/books/build-a-ruby-gem/ http://brandonhilkert.com/books/build-a-ruby-gem/). After release, it's required very little work and has totaled about $20k in 9 months since launch.
- gedrap 12y agoHow did you market this book? Do you think having 1k twitter followers helped with sales?
- frist45 12y agoMostly in places I knew Rubyists hang out online. Message boards, link aggregators, etc. Twitter helped very little towards sales. Although I use Twitter here and there, focusing on capturing emails was more valuable.
- benblodgett 12y agohttps://hopsie.com https://hopsie.com I wrote a site creator for non-profits that allows them to create customized fundraising sites.
- ishanr 12y agoI wrote a book on Google Authority 2 years back and after steadily growing in sales it gives about 800USD/month now: https://gum.co/ppyJ https://gum.co/ppyJ Although I haven't spent a single penny on promotion and selling it for less than I should I guess.
- majc2 12y agoCan I make a suggestion - try a month at $29 and see what happens? If it doesn't work out change it back.
- rab_oof 12y agoAlways experiment with pricing. It's easy to misprice ewares optimally by a magnitude of 2.
- trienthusiast 12y agoin which direction ?
- gedrap 12y agoThere was a number of similar active threads over the years, some great ideas in them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7094402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7094402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8246255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8246255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4639271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4639271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5903868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5903868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387789
- jayleno 12y agocommenting for reference later. Thanks for gathering these
- shaaaaawn 12y agoThanks for tracking these down!
- TheBiv 12y agoThank you
- wangarific 12y agoThank you for this!
- shanecleveland 12y agoGreat resource.
- 12y ago
- ronaldgl 12y agoI wrote a puzzle app for iOS - https://itunes.apple.com/app/id906543727 https://itunes.apple.com/app/id906543727 It's free to download and try it out, but then I charge for additional puzzles. I was keen to give a complete version of the app for free (without ads) so that people understand clearly what I'm offering. This strategy seems to be working with good and returning custom. Not $1k yet but some reason for optimism ;)
- Osmium 12y agoWhat's the current situation with In-App Purchases and patent issues? I'd like to do fund a smaller project of my own but I'm put off by the problems other developers have had in the past.
- ronaldgl 12y agoA good question. I didn't take this into a great deal of consideration - I haven't seen any press or heard anything about it since 2013, and I felt that publishing something good would have value beyond this concern. This is the latest I can find: http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/01/03/ding-dong-patent-troll-lodsys-is-finally-probably-dead-after-its-domain-has-expired/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/01/03/ding-dong-patent-tro...
- ronaldgl 12y agoA good question. I didn't take this into a great deal of consideration - I haven't seen any press or heard anything about it since 2013, and I felt that publishing something good would have value beyond this concern. This is the latest I can find regarding Lodsys/in-app purchase patent: http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/01/03/ding-dong-patent-troll-lodsys-is-finally-probably-dead-after-its-domain-has-expired/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/01/03/ding-dong-patent-tro...
- ronaldgl 12y agoA good question. I didn't take this into a great deal of consideration - I haven't seen any press or heard anything about it since 2013, and I felt that publishing something good would have value beyond this concern. This is the latest I can find regarding Lodsys/in-app purchase patent: http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/01/03/ding-dong-patent-troll-lodsys-is-finally-probably-dead-after-its-domain-has-expired/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/01/03/ding-dong-patent-tro...
- leehro 12y agoI have two apps in the iOS app store. One launched in 2009 (Filer) and the other in 2010 (FLAC Player). I've been really lucky that both have done so well, especially 5 years on. I maintain them for major iOS releases and hardware changes, but the little time I have I try to work on new stuff and supporting them. My wife helps with support emails now, which has been a huge help. Neither app has any server-side components, so they don't cost me anything but squarespace fees for my website and my iOS dev program membership. Edit: Oh yeah, they're both paid apps and I don't fiddle with the pricing
- reuven 12y agoI wrote an ebook ("Practice Makes Python", http://lerner.co.il/practice-makes-python http://lerner.co.il/practice-makes-python ) for people who have learned Python basics, but want to gain fluency. I'm working on videos for a higher-tier offering, and then will start to market it more seriously. I only launched the book about 1.5 months ago, and I'm at about $1500 in revenue. I'm definitely hoping to see greater income with the higher tiers (including video) and greater marketing. I'm also speaking with some companies about them buying site licenses of the book, which would increase the revenue even more.
- stickperson 12y agoHow have you marketed this so far?
- reuven 12y agoTo my mailing list, via a bunch of blog posts (on my blog), at free Webinars I've given, during a talk a gave at the hack.summit(), and on Twitter. I tried some ads (Facebook, Google, and Reddit) for a short time, but they didn't work -- mostly, I'd guess, because the landing page is still immature, and because I didn't give away any free chapters or other elements. The landing page is now better than it was, and people now have a choice between buying the book right away and getting a chapter's worth of exercises and solutions over a 10-day period via a drip campaign. These improvements have definitely raised the conversion levels.
- sgt 12y agoAre you still writing for Linux Journal etc? I remember your articles from back in 98, 99, 00.
- reuven 12y agoYup! Every month since early 1996...
- pbhjpbhj 12y agoFWIW I just finished a beginners python course on Coursera - Programming for Everyone (PR4E, https://class.coursera.org/pythonlearn-003/ https://class.coursera.org/pythonlearn-003/). There's no natural follow on as the course uses a book for which only the first part has been translated in to a course. There were a lot of people on the course asking what to do as follow-up; might be a lead for you. I just signed up for your samples as 'pbhj' if you want to get in touch. Incidentally, when one adds themselves to your email list for samples it takes you to https://lerner.leadpages.net/new-practice-makes-python/thank-you/ https://lerner.leadpages.net/new-practice-makes-python/thank... but there's no route back other than using the back button. IME this tends to mean people will just close the tab, providing a route back or on to a related page might help conversions or give you chance to get affiliate conversions or what-have-you.
- dirtyaura 12y agoSomething to think about: Based on the answers here and in the related Reddit thread it seems that information products (e-books, targeted blog posts, link collections) still generate better revenue (either sales or ad revenue) than pure software products as side projects.
- karterk 12y agoA lot more people who write books talk about their experience than those who run a niche profitable SaaS app for obvious reasons (competitive advantage). In my experience, it's much easier to have a stable recurring revenue from a SaaS app than a book. Books go out of date much faster.
- Osmium 12y agoOn the other hand, a book can't go bankrupt/get shut down/go out of service after you've bought it and invested time into. In that sense, it's a safer purchase.
- mafellows 12y agoLead generation service for mobile developers: iOS Leads - http://iosleads.com http://iosleads.com & Android Leads - http://androidleads.net http://androidleads.net Have an assistant that helps curate freelance/contract positions from around the internet and through opportunities I hear about offline. I'm a mobile developer, so it's an effective side business to be working on. Many people have scored new clients and worked on interesting projects through the service. Some people find it's not for them. Definitely offer a money-back guarantee if you're working on something digital/saas. No reason to be taking people's money if they're not getting value out of your product. Another valuable lesson: we did really well with podcast advertising thanks to Release Notes (http://releasenotes.tv/ http://releasenotes.tv/). If you can find a podcast with 10,000 - 20,000 listeners that serves a niche, you should be able to produce a nice return. IMO our landing page is terrible, but it converts quite well.
- corobo 12y agoOut of interest regarding the podcast advertising - how much does that sort of thing cost? Obviously there's going to be differences based on the podcast, listeners, etc but as an vague number were you looking at $hundreds, $thousands?
- mafellows 12y agoPer episode with the size audience mentioned, you're looking in the hundreds. Start out with one advertisement to test the waters. I ran one advertisement that had good results (5-10x return). Like an idiot, I assumed I milked the cow dry and should look for other podcasts or advertising mediums in general. That was dumb. I booked a couple of episodes again with Release Notes that produced the same ROI. If you're having success with an advertisement, don't be afraid to double down and spend thousands. Ideally, you should get a bulk discount from the show. I don't have conversion rates based on % listener or cost per listener. Would love to see podcast advertising evolve to this point in the future, but it certainly hasn't yet. The folks at Baremetrics (https://baremetrics.io/ https://baremetrics.io/) run an awesome service for monthly recurring Saas companies that use Stripe. If you know what your lifetime customer value is, you really have more faith in your advertising dollars.
- adzeds 12y agoI created a soccer app that provides information on betting. It trickled along nicely and then in November it jumped to £3k (~$4.5k) then December it jumped to £7.7k (~$11k) and looks to be on that line still as it is on £2k after 5 days of January!
- gedrap 12y agoCould you share more, what information on betting? I was looking into this area.
- adzeds 12y agoI have developed an algorithm that has a strong strike rate for picking outcomes of matches. My app/website simply provides this information to users for free. One of the good things about affiliate relationships in the betting niche is that they offer lifetime earnings if you go down that route. They also offer fairly strong CPAs if you negotiate with the brands you drive a lot of traffic to. I am now branching out into more sports such as Tennis over the next 6 months! (Chances are this will be less of a side project and more of a full time gig in a few months time if it keeps growing)
- adzeds 12y agoI should point out that I had never made an app before giving this a try! Beginners luck!
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- gedrap 12y agoOh, so your revenue comes from affiliates? I thought that you have a monthly subscription fee :)
- adzeds 12y agoNo monthly fee. I don't really like services that charge for this data. I prefer to make it available for free and then make the money by signing people up for bookies that they might not normally use.
- dynofuz 12y agoI made http://bankofamericaroutingnumber.com http://bankofamericaroutingnumber.com It took less than a day and makes about $150/month. Not quite the 1k but not bad for minimal work.
- aeikenberry 12y agoHow does it make money? Just curious.
- jwcrux 12y agoLooks like ads.
- aeikenberry 12y agoI always forget that my ad block extension is active. Makes sense. Thanks.
- jwcrux 12y agoThat's ingenious - good work, and I'm glad it's working out well.
- dangson 12y agoDid you also make http://www.chaseroutingnumber.com/ http://www.chaseroutingnumber.com/ ? Looks exactly the same.
- ricardonunez 12y agoYes, it's at the bottom of the page and Wells Fargo too.
- frogpelt 12y agoThere's a link to it and a Wells Fargo version at the bottom, so I would say yes.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- wolframhempel 12y agoI wrote a GPL licensed layout manager (https://golden-layout.com/ https://golden-layout.com/) that also comes with commercial licenses. It's been out for three months now and seems to appeal to financial institutions. Revenue is ok, especially since most sales are the more expensive (399 GBP) multi domain license, but a lot of the bigger customers don't want to just purchase it through the website, but rather enter into a more bespoke contract which comes with some overhead.
- Cyph0n 12y agoThat looks pretty cool actually. Is it really just a side project though? Could you provide us with some numbers?
- wolframhempel 12y agocheers, it's a side project, but I'm also going to try my luck at starting a start-up this year and this is one of the components it needs - so its killing two birds with one stone. Revenue was between 1600 and 1000 GBP a month so far - although after just two and a half months this isn't exactly a representative sample.
- endeavour 12y agoHow did you go about marketing this? Did you have contacts at financial institutions or they just happened to stumble upon it?
- wolframhempel 12y agoActually, all I did was post it on hackernews. This generated a lot of initial momentum, but page views are now slowly declining, so I guess I need to find new channels to promote it.
- samsnelling 12y agoI launched my first "real" SaaS this year, https://embedkit.com https://embedkit.com - and got just 1 enterprise customer to net 1k revenue a month.
- fuckall 12y agoI sell drugs. It's a lot harder than you might think. My clients give pretty reliable recurring revenue, so much so that it's gone from a side project to a full time gig for me.
- zaqokm 12y ago> It's a lot harder than you might think. Sounds like those spam emails for Viagra
- branchless 12y agoI've been having problems with getting people to come back. How do you do this?
- tekromancr 12y agoHow do you scale customer acquisition? That seems very risky the moment you move outside of friend-of-a-friend networks.
- jchatelaine 12y agoI made https://QuickMail.io https://QuickMail.io for lead generation (making +$5,000/month) This is the quick (1 min video) version of how I did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0y28HmcqUo&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0y28HmcqUo&feature=youtu.be This is the longer version: http://blog.quickmail.io/category/journey-to-1k-paying-customers/ http://blog.quickmail.io/category/journey-to-1k-paying-custo...
- xrobotx 12y agocongratulations, how do you get new customers ?
- trg2 12y agoI have an online SEO course that hit six-figures in 2014. I wrote a post on it: http://www.clickminded.com/six-figure-side-project/ http://www.clickminded.com/six-figure-side-project/
- iguanayou 12y agohttp://bestattendance.com http://bestattendance.com. Built it over a summer back when I was a high school teacher and had summers off. Not sure I would have been able to do it without a nice 3 month block of time. Doing side projects on weekends and evenings only is pretty tough.
- earlz 12y agoI'm making about $500/month (was $800/month when bitcoin price was better) by code reviewing altcoins for exploits, undisclosed premines, and other scams that can hide in code. I have an arrangement with an exchange for a monthly fee, and sometimes am paid by others as well. I've successfully stopped 1 full blown exploit (admanteumcoin) where there was code that allowed a block to mine any amount of coins desired, (and had RPC calls modified to hide this). I started out doing it to try to help the altcoin ecosystem, because it's pretty interesting, and because it's a great way to learn more about cryptocurrencies and all their implementations. My code review directory (that isn't actually up to date) is on github: https://github.com/Earlz/coinreviews https://github.com/Earlz/coinreviews
- SyneRyder 12y agoDo you do code reviews outside of altcoins? After reading your page I immediately wondered if you're a freelance code reviewer & what languages you specialize in. If so, you should add more details about that in a Services / Work section of your site, and link to those details at the end of your blog posts about code reviews. Kudos on your About page too, instantly builds connection through good taste in music & drinks!
- earlz 12y agoI've never really considered it. Reviewing altcoins is easy because all you do is figure out a known-safe coin it's forked from (since everything eventually boils down to bitcoin) and check the differences. I really don't pay enough attention to my blog these days, but glad you like it :)
- doh 12y agoA year ago I developed an universal video downloader site http://savedeo.com http://savedeo.com. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but people liked the site and kept coming back. Year later the site generates around $30k a month and the operation costs are around $90 (close to nothing). The site is very lightweight as it doesn't really downloads anything. It just extracts direct links to the files. There are a great challenges that I have to deal with (like YouTube blocking IPs, sites changing designs all the time, etc.).
- eob 12y agoThat's pretty awesome. I just tried it out to see how you make money and noticed that you have both banner ads and also open popup-tabs. Are you comfortable sharing how much of the revenue is from the banners versus the popups? Are those the only two streams?
- doh 12y agoThere are no banners only pop-up ads. There are two different providers, one generating around 1/3 the other the rest. I get probably one inquiry a week to test new ad system, which I mostly do. This way I went up from 6-7k a month to beyond 30k.
- corobo 12y agoAny thoughts towards allowing people to promote their videos to that top list you've got there on the homepage? I'm er.. asking for a friend!
- magnetpeep 12y agoI started thumbnailing porn torrents at http://www.magnetpeep.com http://www.magnetpeep.com, then the Pirate Bay went down (who I used to index the torrents). I need to get back on that project.
- stickperson 12y agoThat's an interesting technical challenge, at least to me. Could you talk a bit about it? edit: Could you also talk about SEO and how you market your site?
- magnetpeep 12y agoSure. What would you like to know?
- stickperson 12y agoI'm just curious how you go about doing it and how you actually index the links. Let's say you scrape tbp (or any other site) every X minutes. You see a link-- how do you know if you already saved that link? From there, I'm assuming you just have a simple model for each link which you save and render on the frontend. I'm used to building pretty simple webapps, so doing something like this is really interesting to me from a learning perspective. In addition to the technical tasks, how did you go about marketing your site? Thanks!
- magnetpeep 12y agoWell, I used Ruby on Rails (I'm a Rails dev). Initially I expected to have to scrape TPB, but checked out google and found there was a PB API. I started looking into that, and was going to write a Ruby wrapper for it, but then realized if I was gong to do it that someone else probably already did it. Looked for a few minutes and found a couple of Ruby gems ready to go. So what I would do was check TPB every hour, and get the links through the API. If I didn't have them in my DB, I added them. If I had them I updated the seeder / tracker info. Once I have that info, I scan the DB for magnet links that haven't yet been thumbnailed. I use the transmission-daemon to manage the torrent downloads, and keep a handful of them going at all times. Getting that working properly was kind of a pain in the neck. Once a torrent is downloaded, I use ffmpeg to scan it and make 10 thumbnails of every movie file in it. The torrents are deleted after they're thumbnailed. Not much marketing, I just post about it here and there in places where people would be interested in hearing about it. I'm hoping TPB comes back up soon so I can refresh my data. It's way out of date.
- DevFactor 12y agoNot sure if this counts, but in 2013 I made ~17k off of freelancing & consulting in my free-time. I also operate some "for fun sites", which are all small projects for example a video-game discount aggregator (just scapes sites for discounts) all together ~$200/mo.
- leesalminen 12y agoI spent all of 2014 building a SaaS for dog daycare/kennel owners. The MVP turned out beautiful. Went to a few trade shows towards the end of last year and people went crazy over the software. 0 outbound marketing yet, and already have 22 customers at $100/month. This year my goal is to scale up to 200 customers. It's a really weird market niche where no one has built software for in 10 years. Pretty neat.
- zrail 12y agoThat's awesome! Congrats on your success.
- m4re 12y agoLink please. My wife's a groomer and recently evaluated the available software there, not many options - would like to see the similarities.
- leesalminen 12y agoURL: gingrapp.com Company Phone: +1 877-324-7759 We're currently building out our "Additional Services" tool, which are services that get applied on top of a reservation. I'm currently working with a couple of groomers to build in some tools that could help fit their needs. Could use all the feedback possible.
- arethuza 12y agoAny specific reason for it being dog only - we put our cats in a cattery fairly often when we travel and I'd love to be able to use an online system to book things.
- leesalminen 12y agoAwesome question! The software has completely customizable "reservation types" and "breeds", which allows for all kinds of animals. We actually don't say the word "dog" once in the app. Not only can you manage your reservations online, we also feature photo/video report cards over SMS :). That's my personal favorite feature...love getting a video of my 2 dogs wrestling at daycare. We have a pretty generous referral program, get in touch if you have a business you'd like to refer.
- ricardonunez 12y agohttp://tailoredwp.com/ http://tailoredwp.com/ Recurring revenue is from hosting services plus some affiliate commissions. It started as a side project, and I think this year will become my main source of income.
- withinthreshold 12y agoCongrats! When did you start?
- ricardonunez 12y agoThank you. Sorry, I only saw your comment today. I created the website in 2011, but for two years I was just doing some testing and SEO on the side. The last six months I have been more serious about it and the business have been increasing every month.
- jeremyjarrell 12y agoI create videos, mainly focused on agile techniques, that I distribute online. Currently all of my videos are on Pluralsight but I've signed deals to start branching out to other distributors with new content in 2015. http://www.pluralsight.com/author/jeremy-jarrell http://www.pluralsight.com/author/jeremy-jarrell Currently the videos generate about $3,500/month in revenue. There's little out of pocket expense for the initial production of each video (stock imagery, reference books, etc) and no ongoing expenses after production is complete. I started out just focusing on topics that I was interested in but didn't have a lot of success. Once I started approaching things as a business my return improved dramatically.
- rosspanda 12y agoWe make about $300 in donations a month over at http://moodpanda.com http://moodpanda.com , we don't do it for the money, its a good way of opening doors and getting invited to events etc.
- tkiley 12y ago"Profitable side-project" might be an unstable equilibrium. If you're doing something without scale, it will die when you lose interest. If you're doing something with scale, perhaps it should grow into a bootstrapped startup. inquicker.com started as a hobby / learning opportunity (2005) and grew into a side project with about $20k/yr in recurring revenue from corporate customers (2008). Eventually, it turned into a full-time job (early 2009) and I found a co-founder (late 2009). We hired our first four employees in 2010. In 2011 we signed our 100th customer and hit $1m in recurring revenue. In 2013 we hit $5m in recurring revenue.
- gedrap 12y agoWe need more stories like this! It's not all about crazy growth over a year or two after founding like in the most front page stories.
- mattm 12y agoGreat job in being persistent!
- bbcbasic 12y agoFor a rational actor, it should be an unstable equilibrium. If you can make more profit per hour spent in your spare time that in your job, then it won't be long until you quit and spend all of you time. If not then you will give it up, unless it is just a hobby. (Hobbies might be exception to the rule)
- derefr 12y ago> If you're doing something without scale, it will die when you lose interest. I read most of patio11's advice as being about exactly this: how to build a not-necessarily-scalable business that you can lose interest in without it dying. (Namely, by contracting out content-generation and community management and treating the commissions/wages of those people as part of your user acquisition costs.)
- megaframe 12y agoCombination Machine Learning, NLP, Neural Networks, stock analyzer. Does automated day trading. Not HFT style stuff. More what a bank pays an analyst to do, type of trading, but smaller scale since it's only my personal funds.
- nacho_weekend 12y agoHow much profit does this generate, if I may ask? And how much do you have invested as capital for it to trade on?
- megaframe 12y agoI make about what a Hedge fund makes 15-28% a quarter depending on how well the market is doing. I just don't pay hedge fund fee's. It's not wildly innovative I'm just circumventing paying a hedge fund, which often use the exact same methods I used.
- Jemaclus 12y agoCan you elaborate? Any resources on getting started with this kind of thing?
- megaframe 12y agoLike most tasks start by teaching yourself to trade on news/price info. Then automate yourself step by step. For instance News articles pop up, what are you trying to glean from them, its usually sentiment and and critical alerts. You can automate that with an NLP. Kind of just goes from there back into higher level decision making processes.
- arnold_palmur 12y agoThis is really interesting, I would love to hear more about how you are going about doing this.
- megaframe 12y ago
- ralphholzmann 12y agoSend to Dropbox. Allows you to email attachments to your Dropbox. Makes roughly $2,500 a month currently. More info in this other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8699687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8699687
- quaffapint 12y agoThis was another one of those ideas that popped in my head that I went to check google on. Already done. Nice job.
- QuasiAlon 12y agowow. kudos! pretty incredible it makes so much money today, when you can do it with ifttt
- xrobotx 12y agohow do you make money if it is free ?
- flippyhead 12y agohttp://fetching.io http://fetching.io makes well over $1,000 / month but we're just getting started ;)
- alexivanovs 12y agoLooks good, might become a customer soon!
- mandeepj 12y agoHow it is different from google.com\history besides tagging and notes? Just curious. Not trying to put you down.
- deanclatworthy 12y agoI run http://unfriend.io http://unfriend.io - I used to make over 1000e a month with an un-named advertiser who decided to revoke my account without appeal. Now my money comes from donations.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- joesavage 12y agoAround two years ago now I created a League of Legends champion information/countering website: https://www.championcounter.com/ https://www.championcounter.com/ Growth was slow but steady, and the site now receives ~1.4M pageviews per month. The money to keep things up and running comes through banner ads - it's not a huge amount (have only started hitting just about $1000/mo in recent months, and don't know how long that'll last for), but it's still a nice revenue stream to have.
- phrasemix 12y agoI created a website for folks learning English as a foreign language: http://www.phrasemix.com http://www.phrasemix.com I've been running it for the last 5 years. The first 2 years, it was just a blog that I maintained for free. 3 years ago, I started selling access to audio recordings of the lessons as a subscription. The site generates about $2K per month off of around 300K monthly visitors. It continues to grow but very slowly.
- mappum 12y agoAn Android app I made in a few hours makes $500/m from ads, and has 1M+ downloads on Google Play. It claims to be a radar detector for your phone, but that's not even possible (it's actually just completely random). The description says that it is for novelty purposes, but the reviews show people believe it works and it has a placebo effect. Most reviews say things like "I drove past a police station and it went off! 5/5". https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vox.radardetector&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vox.radard... It's funny to see it up in the top 20 of the Transportation category on Play, alongside companies that are heavily VC funded. https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/TRANSPORTATION/collection/topselling_free https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/TRANSPORTATION/c...
- guiomie 12y agoFunniest thing I've read all day.
- dcalacci 12y ago"I seriously didn't think it would work at all but to my surprise it did so I put my phone along side my $500 Valentine detector and they both went off same time" amazing
- eloisant 12y agoIt's actually totally possible with crowdsourcing, and a lot of applications actually work, like Waze. So people believing it works are not stupid, they can legitimately believe you're pulling that from a common database with an app that lets user signal radar or police cars.
- mappum 12y agoThe description clearly says "Your phone is able to detect strong radio signals, just like the ones directed at your car by police when measuring your speed.", and the reviews show people expect it to work by radar detection, not crowdsourcing. Many comments are police officers that tested it with their radar guns (and they of course realize it is fake).
- RealGeek 12y agoI built http://www.ranksignals.com http://www.ranksignals.com SEO tools. It's a SaaS app and a Chrome Extension. It has tens of thousands of monthly active users and makes $x,xxx per month.
- w0ts0n 12y agoI have a few small joke websites that run on a vps. I set most of them up as a kid. www.downloadmoreram.com is around $500 m/o on it's own.
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- jonoalderson 12y agoI run https://www.daysoftheyear.com https://www.daysoftheyear.com, a calendar website which lists all of the weird, funny, odd etc national days, holidays events. Alternative celebrations, like 'Ferris Wheel Day' on Feb 14th (vs Valentines Day). They're all real celebrations researched, described, etc. It was built (and rebuilt several times, and constantly iterated) by me, from scratch, on WordPress, in my spare time over a period of years. The site generates >$1.5k per month at the moment from AdSense alone, without any marketing other than SEO and broadcasting to the social followers we've accumulated. This revenue is secondary to the real and long-term value being generated in the form of large numbers of membership/email subscriptions and social followers.
- bnzelener 12y agoThis is a cool project - must have been fun to do the research on and build. Are you using any optimization techniques for AdSense? Would love to hear them if you don't mind sharing.
- jonoalderson 12y agoIt's great fun, and the research is never-ending. Up to ~1,300 unique 'Days' at the moment, and tons more to research. Loads of months, weeks and years to do too, which have taken a back-burner. No AdSense optimisation at all; barely touched the account. The most sophisticated it gets is that it's using the async code (which we got access to quite early on), and there's a bit of conditional logic which fires to determine which size to serve based on the viewport width. Love to hear any ideas you have - though AdSense is really a temporary cost covering measure while we grow the email database, develop the app, etc. We'll bin it when we're large enough to move reliably to other methods.
- ambr 12y agoHow are you guys marketing these? I'm not making anything close to that but I've worked on a side project of mine for months with no gain. At this point I'm debating if I should just move on. It's not revolutionary but but any advice would be beneficial. http://www.psswrd.io http://www.psswrd.io
- heliodor 12y agoMy visit to your site started with a spinner that lasted about 7 seconds before I saw any content. Might want to fix that. You can have a beautiful landing page without heavy tech or heavy content (whichever is causing this problem). Then, once the content loads, I can't read anything because the custom accelerated scrolling is sending me all over the page. I'm guessing you could see a nice improvement in your conversion funnel if you fix these two issues.
- bennesvig 12y agoMake the copy more benefit focused. Take inspiration from https://agilebits.com/onepassword https://agilebits.com/onepassword
- robinhood 12y agoI've created five years ago http://www.totalwireframe.com http://www.totalwireframe.com, based on a hunch that it would interest people. It's a site where I sell libraries for an obscure/niche market. The first year, I sold for $0 of librairies. In 2014, I've made ~$45,000 and it's 100% passive income. I'm not proud to say that I've worked a total of 30 hours on the site last year (it sounds as if I'm lazy, and I'm not). Moreover, I've never spent a single dollar on marketing, no matter its form. It works so well that I've taken the decision to leave my daily job to work on the site full time. I (perhaps naively) think that if I make that much money while doing practically nothing, I can surely make a ton more by actually working on it every day for a year. On Feb 1st, I'm making the jump. It has been tough to get there though. The first year has been a disaster. I nearly abandoned the site. Then, one day, I started to gain traction. To this day, I have no idea why. Then, months after months, the sales went up. It took me weeks and weeks of work to create the libraries I'm selling today. I also did a lot of variations, based on the feedback I received from my customers. My customers are the best, I think. They like what I do, they give me a lot of feedback. In the course of my business, I also did stupid things I regret immensely, like copy a competitor (but honestly it was not intentional), and I'm really, really not proud of this. Sales have reached a peak of $7500 for the month of May 2014. The site is based on http://jekyllrb.com/ http://jekyllrb.com/ and is hosted on https://www.webfaction.com/ https://www.webfaction.com/, on a 9$ per month plan. As the site is static, I just need Nginx. That's it. GetDPD allows me to collect payments with both Paypal and Stripe. To let people pay and downlaod, I use http://getdpd.com/ http://getdpd.com/. They are fantastic. I've tried a lot of other options and even though GetDPD looks terrible, it's a great product, well worth the tiny monthly cost. I hope my story will let people know that it's totally feasible to do a great business as a side project. I honestly wonder EVERY.SINGLE.DAY how come it worked for me, but well,... it worked :-)
- rifung 12y agoGreat story! I'm also extremely curious as to how it started to gain traction. I'm wondering if it has to do with where the site appeared in search results. For example if Google changed their algorithm or if perhaps your web host somehow changed something? Do you remember when it started to gain traction?
- sauere 12y agoNot $1k, but might be a inspiration anyway: 2 years ago i made some simple LAMP+HTML/CSS Videotutorials and put them on YouTube. Production quality isn't great but better than 90% that was on YT at the time. Along with that, created a little site with the Videos and some code examples. Videos + site are making me $100/month.
- ehsana 12y agoI developed a chrome extension in the early days of Google+ (2011) as a side project to help me remove inactive people from my google+ circles and unfollow unfollowers. Circloscope is now a full-fledged Google+ circle management tool which can help you build and grow your audience in Google+.
- rk0567 12y ago~$1k+ per month from few side projects. + pc builder site http://assembleyourpc.net http://assembleyourpc.net (I created ~1.7 years ago, generates revenue from Adsense and few affiliate programs, 2-6 hours of work (per month)) + other niche tools : http://portchecker.co http://portchecker.co and http://signature-maker.net http://signature-maker.net (weekend side projects, 0-2 hours of work(per month))
- nickcano 12y agoI made a fully autonomous bot for a 15 year old MMORPG. The bot can completely play the game with very little intervention, and I have about 2,000 people paying $5.75 monthly for it.
- jere 12y agoInteresting. Everquest? Asheron's Call? Bots were pretty big in AC, but I recall them being rather simple and using them could get you banned.
- tolas 12y agoArtwork Archive - https://www.artworkarchive.com https://www.artworkarchive.com It's an inventory/career management platform for working Artists. Slow but steady growth, mostly word of mouth and recommendations by influencers in the space. Me and one other business partner. We had our first $1k month in our 4th month of operation. We are well over that now and with current growth it should match the income of my full time job in the next year or so.
- edmazur 12y agoI built and run http://bots4.net http://bots4.net. It's made a little over $40k since opening in 2011. bots4 is a freemium text/browser-based robot fighting game. It was making $3,000/month at one point, but revenue has dropped significantly since then (and it fluctuates a lot based on the activity of whales). Operating cost is $25/month for Linode VPS hosting. Here's the revenue history as of August 2013: http://i.imgur.com/rqcxQgv.png http://i.imgur.com/rqcxQgv.png It makes money purely through in-game purchases. Players can buy what are known as "stars" for $10 USD each. Stars let you order items for your bot so that you don't have to camp for them. The alternative if you don't have stars is to wait for your item to appear, so stars ultimately don't enable you to do anything you couldn't do without them, but they are a big convenience, especially in late game where certain items appear very infrequently (still only O(hours) though). If you want more info, you can read through my posts here (linked to archived version because it's not loading on the original domain): https://web.archive.org/web/20140210074542/http://community.bbgamezone.net/revenue-promotion/$100-per-day-with-online-games/25/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140210074542/http://community....
- raffi 12y agoI launched Feedback Army on HN in 2008. It's consistently paid my part of my Washington, DC rent for years. I gave some details about how I marketed it on its blog and in the side projects book someone put together awhile ago. Sadly, I can't find a link to the side projects book or I'd post it here. http://blog.feedbackarmy.com/ http://blog.feedbackarmy.com/ I owe a lot to Feedback Army. It was the first thing I made where I made money without putting an hourly value on a unit of my time. I learned to think of my business as a system for fulfilling what I promised and collecting money from customers. This side project was a great way to cut my teeth on some business and service fundamentals.
- smhanov 12y agoI have three side projects that together became my "full-time" job. I'm able to spend a lot of time with my kids since I can work fewer hours. I'm tired all the time due to a 4 month old baby, so I'm not doing a lot of things I should. My method is simple and has only four steps. 1. Write something cool and put it online for free. 2. Wait 4 to 5 years. 3. Gather all the emails asking if they can license it or pay you to adapt it. 4. Then slap on a price/marketing page emphasizing what everybody asked for. http://websequencediagrams.com http://websequencediagrams.com is my SAAS business. When I was working on 3GPP at RIM we had to spend hours in Visio moving boxes around, and pasting the results into word documents. It was a challenging layout problem. By 2007 I made a python script that did sequence diagrams automatically and put it online. I began to get emails from companies saying they wanted to license it, so I obliged. After I left RIM, I converted it into a freemium product. I have about 400 users paying $9 to $15/month. http://zwibbler.com http://zwibbler.com gets about 70 visits a day. It's a javascript drawing library with full-service from me. Again, it started as a free HTML demo, and I began to get emails requesting me to adapt it for pay. Instead, I created the front page that offers a complete solution for $1500. By answering emails and talking on the phone, I can get 3 or 4 clients a month without even trying. I figure out what they want and reposition the buttons to do it. My favourite is http://rhymebrain.com http://rhymebrain.com because I don't have to do anything. Google just transfers $1-2K into my account every month for Adsense.
- celticninja 12y agohow does rhymebrain generate income? i dont have adblock and i am not seeing any ads when i view the site, not even after a number of searches.
- smhanov 12y agoRight now they only appear for people that arrive from a search engine directly to a word page. http://rhymebrain.com/en/What_rhymes_with_purple.html http://rhymebrain.com/en/What_rhymes_with_purple.html My theory was that those people are looking to buy something. Also I hated ads. But I'm going to enable them universally soon, if only to stop the constant emails from ad companies.
- mooktakim 12y agohttp://tweet-a-lot.com http://tweet-a-lot.com - #tweet-a-lot is a great way to start your own contest to encourage twitter users to post with your hashtag. The service uses gamification to reward behaviour that helps you promote your brand to the most followers.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Exuma 12y agoI started a personal project last year that's currently pulling $350,000-$400,000 profit a month. Currently I'm working on scaling very hard. It was a good year, and it feels good that 15 years of insanely hard learning have paid off... It feels surreal, like I'm dreaming and I'm going to wake up.
- atom-morgan 12y agoDo you have any additional details?
- Exuma 12y agoI'd rather not really share. I guess that goes against the spirit of the thread - Sorry!
- atom-morgan 12y agoNot even a link to the product? There could be potential customers here.
- JungleGymSam 12y agoYou should delete your post. It has no relevance here.
- JDiculous 12y agoCare to elaborate? Sounds like you've struck gold.
- xrobotx 12y agowhat type of business is it ?
- chezmo 12y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358778
- shovel 12y agoInteresting that Joel's post only had 1 comment back then - nobody really cared about it. I wonder which of the posts from this thread will end up following Buffer's trajectory.
- someotheridiot 12y agohttp://rebrickable.com http://rebrickable.com - using your existing LEGO collection, find other stuff you can build. Thousands of custom designs with building instructions and parts lists.
- QuasiAlon 12y agoawesome awesome idea. any willingness to disclose a few numbers?
- v_ignatyev 12y agoI created http://builds.io http://builds.io and http://udid.io/ http://udid.io/ The first one is the store destributing iOS apps removed from AppStore. And the second one is the service to get UDID of iPhone in one tap. Together they generates revenue around $1000 month on subscriptions and AdSense.
- jonweber 12y agoTickChek.com is a side-project I launched in collaboration with my university's wildlife laboratory to offer tick testing for Lyme and other diseases. We've grossed over $4k in out best months this last year.
- hpeikemo 12y agoI created an iOS app http://ideon.co/theconverted/ http://ideon.co/theconverted/ as a side project. I've had hopes to be able to survive entirely on revenue from my own projects instead of relying on client work. I'm very far from that goal at this point, but the extra income is nice.
- karolist 12y agoLooks awesome, do you mind expanding a bit on how the GUI/animations were built?
- hpeikemo 12y agoThanks! GUI and animations are all custom. I wanted very specific multitouch capabilities that would not be practical by using standard gesture recognizers. So a lot of work went into imitating the rubber banding and momentum scrolling of the all-familiar scroll view. It was definitely worth it in my view. Said gestures manipulate two base values; origin, and scale (1D scroll and zoom.) Values on each side are defined as a multiple and an offset of the base (linear function.) All numbers on screen are basically entities of a particle system and are spawned, positioned, and destroyed according to their relation to origin and scale.
- v_ignatyev 12y agoI made ShotBuf iOS app (http://shotbuf.com http://shotbuf.com) and earned $100 on sales in 2014 :) It's kind of fail story))
- wildmXranat 12y agoSome of these posted ideas are actually pretty good.
- nitinsingla0999 12y agoInspired by this thread i just created this site (took me couple of hours today), monetizing by Amazon associate program. : http://www.watchaisle.com http://www.watchaisle.com Will complete it by next weekend.
- stickperson 12y agoLooks good! Now the tricky part-- driving traffic and SEO.
- nitinsingla0999 12y agoThanks! yea driving traffic is the hard part. If it was more of a blog writing reviews you could get good SEO but since my goal is to keep the site simple for users I don't want to add text. Let's see I will have to do some research on SEO - I'm just a beginner. But if you have any pointers on those, I will highly appreciate.
- mlwarren 12y agoAre you pulling the watch pictures from Amazon manually? Or have you automated it to some extent?
- nitinsingla0999 12y agoNo pulling from Amazon manually. I'm doing lot of research manually and trying to find very best watches. Not sure if this can be automated but great point!!
- mlwarren 12y agoThere is an Amazon API for that, but since you're trying to curate for only the best watches, manual work best.
- tjradcliffe 12y agoIt would be fascinating to see a complement to this thread, "Side projects that never got any traction". The tech press has a huge bias toward reporting on "what works" based on projects or companies that succeeded, without ever looking at the many projects and companies that do exactly the same things as the successful ones without ever getting anywhere. I've been very successful in the technology world, including running my own scientific and software consulting company for many years, but as a novelist and poet I've been a complete failure, despite approaching the two in very similar ways. Maybe the markets are simply very different, or maybe it's just luck, or something else. So I think it would be interesting to see some side-by-side of projects that took off and projects that didn't. There are lots of really interesting things people are posting here, but I bet for every success story there is a story of failure that involves a great many of the same elements, yet somehow never grew beyond the "that was an interesting way to spend my spare time for a while" stage.
- bbcbasic 12y agoI guess there are 100 failed projects for every financially successful ones. So it could get a bit TL;DR. Here is one that makes $5-$10 a month from admob. A lot less than I hoped: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.martincapodici.babypiano&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.martincapo.... Most of the installs are from non-english speaking countries. I spent about $20 on Fiverr to get the descriptions translated into Russian, Portuguese etc, which helped me get a few more downloads. I now have 1000 downloads, 250 current installs, and about 10 new installs (and 10 uninstalls!!) per day.
- rab_oof 12y agoWe need a thread about most revenue from least investment ($, time). :)
- cade 12y agoThis is fudging the question, but after many months of nights-and-weekends toiling, I launched https://www.land-of-nosh.com https://www.land-of-nosh.com out of beta testing today and hope to be making $1,000+/month at some point! My wife has always hated the meal planning/recipe organization and sharing process and available tools (she'd used a few different products). After asking lots of friends for recommendations and hearing enough times, "I use X, but I don't like it, so if you find something better, let me know." it seemed like a promising lead for a side project! Worst case: I make no money, and my wife finally has the meal planning tool she's always wanted.
- GFischer 12y agoIt looks REALLY nice, congratulations. It's something I could see myself using, but it seems too US-centric at the moment :) . Still, I'll give it a try :) Do you have an e-mail or something for feedback?
- cade 12y agoThanks! :) Fair critique for being too US-centric. I see you're from Uruguay! My wife grew up in Ecuador, is fluent in Spanish and still has family there, so there could be some I18N on the horizon! Feel free to e-mail me directly (in my profile) or there's a feedback form on the site (in the profile navigation dropdown). I'd love to hear your thoughts!
- GFischer 12y agoDon't optimize prematurely, there's probably a lot of people in the U.S. that can use your site first ! :) Best of luck :) Edit: also, U$ 8 / month is a huge barrier for international adoption.
- cade 12y agoGood point on the pricing. I know not many people are going to see this comment at this point, but I'd be curious to know if anyone has experience or recommendations on how to do price discovery for one's non-native country!
- rainhacker 12y agoI developed a wifi hotspot locator using NYC Open Data. It is deployed on Google App Engine: http://elemental-shine-793.appspot.com/ http://elemental-shine-793.appspot.com/ Source Code: https://github.com/rainmaker7/locator https://github.com/rainmaker7/locator
- rab_oof 12y agoIs it monetizing 1k+/month?
- morenoh149 12y agoI was about to make something similar but then found http://www.wifimap.io/ http://www.wifimap.io/ was a thing
- rab_oof 12y agoSeveral folks do a few hundred / month with a few ad-supported utility mobile apps. That's enough for gas and food. To get to ramen profitability, either a good mobile or biz SaaS app. B2C should rarely be depended on for bootstrapping.
- cx42net 12y agoI've built VoilaNorbert (https://www.voilanorbert.com https://www.voilanorbert.com) with a friend more than a year ago just for our purpose, and got LifeHacker(ed) in September (2014) with more than 20k visitors in one day. We decided to re-write it to include a paid service and we now get around 450 € per month that we split together. Among that, I started selling Prestashop modules on May 14, and now I get around 800/1000 € per month from this. Getting money on your side project is (imho) the best feeling in the world. You get notifications (email for Prestashop, SMS that I configured for VoilaNorbert) at every sales, and when you receive them, oh that feels great! :) This lead me to learn something very important : you have to finish what you start. It's my big default, I always stop in the middle. Norbert and the modules for Prestashop was an exception, and now they make money!
- mapster 12y agoVery nice. For the life of my I couldn't understand this Viola Norbert. What does it do?
- cx42net 12y agoThank you :) VoilaNorbert helps you find the email of a specific person in a company. Say for example you have the full name of a person (the CEO) and his company's website. You can use Norbert to try and find his email. Using his personal email, you will have more chances to reach him than just using contact@... . Norbert simply try and check the existence of general combinations of emails (firstname.lastname, f.lastname, etc) until one is found.
- dalacv 12y agoI have some shitty Udemy courses that net me just over that much: https://www.udemy.com/u/andrewvega/ https://www.udemy.com/u/andrewvega/
- ca98am79 12y agoI made http://park.io http://park.io last June I got into this stuff because I am very interested in domains - especially .io domains At first domains were just a fun hobby - to collect for future projects. But then I sold a few and bought a few more and scaled it out. I created park.io to automate things.
- detaro 12y agoNote: blocked third-party scripts seem to break your site unnecessarily. The site loads fine, but the full-screen loading thing keeps covering it. Yeah, I know, my fault for running ublock, but maybe that is easily fixable. Also, do you plan to extend to more TLDs?
- moveelo 12y agoMine was not over $1,000/mo but I'm working to get it there. http://undupe.com http://undupe.com was something I spun up one day, it gained a little interest and now it runs around $400+ a month(with under 10 users). Not very much, but a nice start. I'm working on moving this one up a notch past $1,000/mo while adding other small products to my portfolio. $1k/mo is still a milestone I've been working on reaching. Up until now, I've been an active contract developer. Still have lots of product tests running and seeing what will be next. Eventually, this will turn into a nice portfolio of digital assets and income.
- lukasluke 12y agoI created a videotutorial course to teach people how to design and code trading robots - udemy.com/build-your-trading-robot. It's doing about 1.5k/mth. Launched it 2 months ago. Took me 6 months to create it. Still adding content to it though, will probably take about 1 year more before I complete it. The site that hosted the course did most of the marketing for me so I just focused on the product. Startup cost was about $150. Spent it on microphone and digital writing pad.
- seekingnames 12y agoHave a website that allows folks to create custom logos and backgrounds for their google search engine. People can type anything they want, choose a logo and choose a background. www.lyfts.com
- viktorhanacek 12y agoMy site with totally free photos. I made it because no stock photo agency/site want my photos. — http://www.picjumbo.com http://www.picjumbo.com Today it has 1mio pageviews/month, PREMIUM Membership, Photoshop Plugin, AdSense and some "30-days" ads. And photos are still FREE :)
- ewams 12y agoViktor, do you take all the photos? Does the site pay for your travel? Great idea, it is all free but get someone to pay for convenience.
- viktorhanacek 12y agoYes, I think 98% of photos are mine. Some others are my friends who kindly submit their own photos to picjumbo. Yep, there is some income for traveling and other stuff :)
- greenpinguin 12y agoI'm working on multiple ideas. haven't cracked the 1000/month yet, but have put together a common repo I use as a starting point for all my projects. It recently got featured on the Google Developers Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_7zdqz01sk&list=PL2fzhe-bAEC1eSoe4j_-tGiv4_lFZ8gpE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_7zdqz01sk&list=PL2fzhe-bAE...
- blaurenceclark 12y agohttps://www.linktexting.com https://www.linktexting.com text to download forms for mobile apps!
- logicb 12y agoInteresting. What you did for marketing this?
- shovel 12y agoI publish Hackerpreneur Magazine. It's a free app in the Apple newsstand and revenue is from subscriptions (in app purchases). http://hck.co/mag http://hck.co/mag
- thenduks 12y agoMy first real side-project-turned-business is/was Bugrocket (https://bugrocket.com https://bugrocket.com, launched March 2011, bug tracking for small dev teams). Subscription-based and grows very slowly, it mostly hovers around $500/month in revenue. The market is just feels really small these days between Trello and GitHub Issues being decent now (in 2011 it was very lacking). Next, my wife and I started CourseCraft (https://coursecraft.net https://coursecraft.net, launched December 2012, e-course creator tools + we handle transactions for 5%-9% of sales). Since it's transaction-based it's a lot less consistent monthly, but growing faster. A typical month is $300-$400 in revenue, but it's been a lot higher (and a lot lower) here and there.
- ingen0s 12y agoAmazing thread - 2015 sure looks like a hit already.
- sjtrain69 12y agoI built a niche website about Cockapoo dogs monetised with an ebook http://www.cockapoo.me http://www.cockapoo.me Why? 200,000 searches per month on goggle UK + moz keyword difficulty of 31% = opportunity
- trienthusiast 12y agoand how is it going?
- mihirptl89 12y agoI generated $1000/month selling pens to writers, moms, artists and creative . The project is called Humble Pen. It is a side project. By partnering up with artists from around the world would hep me promote the brand. It also changed lives. Win-win situation! www.humblepen.com
- tvmalsv 12y agoInteresting site, but it took a little effort to view. When visiting the site via Firefox and Adblock Plus, the site renders as just an empty page.
- quinnftw 12y agoI haven't seen too much profit yet, but http://www.linkwallet.ca http://www.linkwallet.ca pulls in a little bit.
- findjashua 12y agohow is this different from pocket?
- novelco 12y agoI launched a side project in 24 hours last month (which I documented here: justinmcgill.net/24-hour-product-challenge-twist/). It is called LeadFuze (www.leadfuze.com) and it's an email prospecting and outreach service that generates leads via email. Good for B2B businesses and startups, or even companies looking to validate ideas. I've managed to hit $1k/mo ($1,100) in recurring revenue within 30 days. Going to be a much bigger focus of mine now that it is gaining traction.
- mapster 12y agoVery interesting app. How did you launch and gain users?
- riskpeep 12y agocommenting for reference later
- heintzsight 12y agoAlthough we haven't hit the $1K/mo just yet, we're getting close. Perhaps overly ambitiously, we started https://ceanow.org https://ceanow.org - we saw a need with the bad advice that was given to startups and wanted to educate the "advice-givers." Our audience is primarily accountants and lawyers. It's a SaaS model in education and there's been a lot of interest. The big problem is the time bandwidth.
- ironman86 12y agoHow We Earned $10,120 in 30 Days by Sending Horse Poop to People: Amazing Kickstart of a Marketing Experiment http://www.shitexpress.com/blog/how-we-earned-10120-usd-in-30-days-by-sending-horse-poop-to-people-amazing-kickstart-of-a-marketing-experiment http://www.shitexpress.com/blog/how-we-earned-10120-usd-in-3...
- tonixx 12y agoI've written some articles regarding bootable USBs and I've put them online: http://BootableUSB.net http://BootableUSB.net With more than 330 comments, this is the most popular post: http://bootableusb.net/install-windows-7-usb-drive-easy-way/ http://bootableusb.net/install-windows-7-usb-drive-easy-way/ The site brings about $700 per month from AdSense