Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?
I plan on starting a side project but don't really have a niche yet.
I am interested in knowing what business you run is it a mobile app, website, Saas?
And how long it took you to reach $2k monthly revenue?
I've build BlueRetro [1] an universal Bluetooth controller adapter for nearly all pre-USB gaming console.
I made a gross income of around 3K a month last year out of Royalties on the soft for each device sold. It's Apache 2.0 software so people can do whatever they want.
I started making money when I decided to list on the GitHub README the list of manufacturers/makers that where sponsoring the project. (Only one person at that time) Soon after the others offered to give royalty as well.
I even got a Chinese company, notorious for selling "clone" of OSHW projects, to support the SW development as well via GitHub sponsor.
I've been working on it for the last four years. I entertained the idea to make and sell the hardware myself. But in the end I learned that's it's not something I'm interested to get into. What I really like is working on the software.
It naturally pivoted into a more community driven project where multiple makers are selling various variations of the HW.
I wrote a retrospective last years [2].
[1] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro
[2] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro/discussions/289
If it's Apache 2.0 how are you getting royalty payments from it?
People are nice? But most likely they want a good relationship with me in case they get problems. Also they benefits from being able to tell their customer they support the project.
Ahh, I see. So you are receiving donations. Royalties to me mean payments that are required not voluntary.
I consider donation what random user give me on patreon/gh sponsor/itch.io
I talked with the makers or manufacturer and we reached an agreement. So to me (and them) it's royalties.
What you consider and your manufacturer considers doesn't matter. The definition of royalties is what matters, it doesn't fit in this case as far as I can see. They aren't paying you money so they can use your software, they are donating money because they are nice, they could stop paying at any time and continue to use your software.
Ad.
?
They get ad placement for the money paid ie a commercial transaction not donation.
Pretty sure the license means you do not have to pay royalties, not that you are disallowed from paying royalties
Royalties are typically a contractual payment, though. Calling a voluntary payment a royalty is kind of an odd use of the word, if not plainly incorrect.
You're right, these are donations. But they are donations that are determined based on the number of units sold. I believe that's why the parent is using the term royalty.
It's not a contract, as the term "royalty" implies, but it is a royalty in the sense that it's determined per unit sold.
>> If it's Apache 2.0 how are you getting royalty payments from it?
It sounds like acknowledging the sponsors is "the right thing", good Karma, or simply advertising for them. Not everyone wants to just rip off open source and not give back, they're willing to share the wealth if you make it easy and let people know they're doing it?
I need to set up github sponsors myself. We get the occasional request "how can I contribute money to you guys" and we always say stuff like "just spread the word". I keep telling myself I don't want to feel obligated by money, but I also know that I'd love to make enough to work on open source full time.
You’re not obligated by money when the money is coming from donations. That’s what donations mean. The people giving them to you are not your customers.
Also I can recommend OpenCollective; I’m sure there are other similar solutions as well. It’s nice to be able to “expense” stuff and I’m sure donors appreciate transparency.
I think it's really important to make it clear that the contribution is for what is currently there. I get often ask "Will $$$ make you work on that issues" and I always answer no.
What will help fix that issue is my wife going shopping with the kids long enough for me to figure what is wrong. ;)
So the obvious answer is to take the $$$, give it to your wife, and ask her to take the kids shopping with her :-)
Creative workarounds like this is why I love hacker news. :)
What controllers you would recommend for retro games with a great d-pad and buttons? I can't find anything that's even remotely close to native controllers especially for Super NES.
Nintendo Switch SNES controller?
Otherwise personally my daily driver is PS5 DualSense
I've never managed to find a Wii-connector-to-USB adapter that wouldn't inexplicably die within six months, but the 1st-party SNES Classic controllers are basically perfect clones of the original. Ditto the NES versions they have. Wii Pro Controllers are also great and have a similar feel & quality, but with modern ergonomics (no rumble, though, so not great for e.g. Playstation games, and IIRC the triggers aren't analog, which is limiting)
You can connect Wiimotes to PCs over Bluetooth and use any of those Wii-connector controllers through them, which would make them wireless and solve the finding-a-reliable-adapter problem, but I've never managed to make that kind of set-up sufficiently stable. Always having to screw with re-pairing and such.
In the end, my go-to for BT emulation controllers is usually a PS3/4/5 controller. I haven't tried the XBone but I found the d-pad on the XB and XB360 controllers unusably inaccurate, and the face buttons weirdly slow when trying to play old-school Nintendo-hard games. Playstation controller d-pads are much better, and the face buttons feel quicker to switch between, for whatever reason.
For d-pads on Xbox controllers, you can cut a cross out of an old plastic folder and wedge it between the plastic and the membrane for better feel. It makes the pad crispy. 10/10 all my old controllers have it, too bad no one to play halo3 with. :(
https://www.8bitdo.com/pro2/ The ps2 and the SNES had a baby and it is a marvelous baby. (They sell them at Best Buy as well)
It has: Turbo key function for SNES games, Vibration, Macros, Pressure-sensitive triggers, Multi-system support (there is a switch on the bottom that changes the signal from windows to Mac to Linux mode and so on), And it just werks.
I like RetroBit's Sega Genesis bluetooth controllers. They feel substantially similar enough to the originals.
Something to look out for with retro gaming is a lot of modern controllers have increased latency, which can be frustrating on games that require precision. Unfortunately, the Nintendo Switch Online SNES controller isn't great in this regard. You can use this tool[0] to check latency.
Personally, I use an original Super NES controller + a Timville triple controller adapter[1], but a more modern controller that I like is the 8bitdo SN30 Pro+. I primarily play on a PVM via a MiSTer, so your use case may be quite different.
[0] https://rpubs.com/misteraddons/inputlatency [1] https://www.tindie.com/products/timville/triple-controller-c...
I recommend the PS5 controller! They're very available (unlike the console), come in a few colours, and are regularly on sale -- about $90AUD in my currency.
They're rugged, reliable, pair easily via bluetooth without any custom software required (just hold the PS button and menu button together), and have excellent button feel. I grew up on the super Nintendo so I'm picky at times.
Battery life is excellent, reported over Bluetooth (so linux and macos can see it), and the controller central pad acts as a mouse which makes navigating menus great without needing to put the controller down. They go to sleep automatically if you close the lid on a laptop they're paired to, and you can change the LED colour and brightness on the controller.
I've had and used one for quite a while now, and in that time two of my friends have purchased one to replace various alternatives (8bitdo, & another one I can't remember) for either reliability, pairing issues, or both.
To top off this review: I've never owned a PlayStation!
This actually made me happy, considering all the bad news lately:
> I even got a Chinese company, notorious for selling "clone" of OSHW projects, to support the SW development as well via GitHub sponsor.
I suppose that's RetroScaler?
Interesting that people voluntarily pay. Write-up of bloggers doing the "buy me a coffee" button suggested to me that nobody pays like that.
I guess software is a bit more tangible than a blog post even if both have value.
One difference I can see is the "buy me a coffee" button isn't a "these are the people who bought me a coffee" list. I imagine most of these sponsors (from their perspective) are paying for advertising.
Ah good point
Sounds like good advertising! If these companies are trying to sell hardware corresponding to this software, then having a callout right in the software's README is a great way to attract people who are discovering the project through GitHub. This wouldn't work as well if the product was oriented toward non-technical people (not discovering it through GitHub) or if the software wasn't directly related to the hardware (most OSS projects are probably run on general-purpose hardware).
does this work with steamlink? I have bought all these different supposed "PS3" controllers but BT doesn't connect!
sponsoring is not licensing and royalty income
great that you got this result, btw
I run HTTP Toolkit (https://httptoolkit.com) which passed $2k a couple of years back. No longer a side project, as it's made enough money for me to work on it full time for a fair while now, but it certainly started that way, and it's still a one-man show (plus many wonderful open-source contributors).
I suspect that'll be a common theme in answers here though: if you have a side project making $2k a month, in most of the world that's enough for you to go full-time and try to take it further. If you can make $2k/month on something working only part-time, you can definitely make a lot more if you focus on it.
On your questions: HTTP Toolkit is a desktop app (plus a mobile app and other components for integrations) but it's an Electron app that effectively functions as a SaaS (with a freemium subscription model) that just happens to have a component that runs on your computer. And actually getting to $2k wasn't overnight at all - it took a couple of years of slow steady slog. A few inflection points that made a notable difference (releasing rewriting support & Android support particularly) but mostly it was a matter of "just keep pushing", trusting the trajectory would keep going, and steadily grinding upwards. It's great where it is now, but it's hard work - a solo business is not for the faint of heart!
I absolutely love how easy it was to capture requests through ADB with your tool, only solution i could find which just worked out of the box.
Does it work for apps with pinned certs?
Depends on the setup, but for the proper certificate pinning cases where it doesn't work automatically, I have a Frida walkthrough & script you can use to easily do this at https://httptoolkit.com/blog/frida-certificate-pinning/ and I'm working on fully automating that part within HTTP Toolkit too (more details: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/frida-mobile-interception-fundi...).
I really like the UX on the homepage of emailing a download link to myself.
Thanks! Yes, I found that a huge percentage of visitors to the site were on mobile (especially for HN/reddit/etc traffic) and when your product is a desktop app there's not much you can do with that, so for a long time I effectively didn't have a call to action for most visitors at all, which isn't great for anybody.
Under the hood it's just a tiny automated email flow set up via Mailchimp that sends out the download link when you sign up. Nothing fancy, but it's easy and it does the job.
Interesting project. Will definitely check it out next time I have to analyze the traffic from my phone.
I was just about to ask how do you differentiate your product from mitmproxy but on a quick google search I found this thread from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29627819
The nice bit of running a project for a long time is that eventually your old answers accumulate and save you time like this :-).
That said, one point there is outdated: HTTP Toolkit does now fully support websockets too. There's more I'd like to do there, but as far as I'm aware it's equally capable to mitmproxy in that sense today.
how is this different from devtools? is the main selling point easy of use, or more extra features on top of devtools?
Yes: ease of use, lots of additional power (for starters, you can modify traffic, not just view it) and being able to intercept anything (multiple tabs, multiple browsers, mobile, docker, CLI tools, backend services, you name) all in the same interface.
For the web dev case, for example, if you're debugging some interaction that means you can intercept your browser <-> server traffic and your server <-> upstream API traffic all in the same place, and see the full flow, and you can modify server responses or backend API responses in flight, to test out different edge cases.
There's a Chrome dev tools vs HTTP Toolkit comparison page here with a little more detail: https://httptoolkit.com/chrome-devtools-alternative/
That's very cool - does it support corporate proxy stuff like PAC files, HTTPS, NTLM, Kerberos, authenticating with current user, etc? For example would I be able to write a rule to capture traffic going to certain proxies and redirect it to another proxy? Sorry if this is explained somewhere already but I couldn't find anything about it on your webpage or github. Many thanks for your time!
Any tips on making a nice animated gif like your homepage?
Not really! To be honest it's a bit of a hassle and I don't have good tooling or a proper setup. I write a little script, then just record myself manually clicking through it (which is boring, and takes a bunch of tries to do smoothly) and then load it into iMovie and trim it down and speed up any awkward slow bits. It's not a perfect solution at all, but it does the job and I only update it once a year or so.
In a perfect world, I'd kill for a tool where I could define a script (something similar to a Playwright test) and it'd automatically run and record everything, so I could redo the video much more frequently and accurately. I think you probably can do that for a normal web app already (?) but the challenge here is that HTTP Toolkit is launching other apps that also pop up over the top, and so I need to record them all together.
If you're looking for inspiration around this sort of thing, the Android demo video is different and also worth looking at: https://httptoolkit.com/android/
Perhaps this recording tool built on top of / integrated with an e2e testing framework could be a revenue-generating side project for an enterprising soul :)
So first off, your gif looks great! I like your sizing and resolution--that's one of the things I was worried about. Video recording is new to me, so I'd love to know what you record with and resolution settings to pick?
I stumbled on this nice blog post on automating these recordings. Maybe a partial solution?
https://martinheinz.dev/blog/94
I was thinking of doing a manual process like yours for a start rather than automating, but hearing your thoughts makes me think I'll try automating sooner.
I see what you mean about the multi-app aspect. I'll have to switch to browser windows for mine as well. Your android approach is nice!
> I'd love to know what you record with and resolution settings to pick?
It's an _extremely_ simple setup. Actual recording is done with Mac's built-in screenshot tool: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208721. It's recorded at an arbitrary window size I eyeballed the first time, that now I probably have to stick to forever (because if they're all the same size, I can reuse parts to avoid re-recording unnecessarily).
All of this is suboptimal (using 1080p would have helped, for starters, since lots of tools work better with standard resolutions) but it doesn't really matter, it just annoys me mildly one day a year and that's it.
IMO: if you're at the start, unless you have a super unique situation, I wouldn't look at automating videos or perfecting the recording setup at all - just ship something barely acceptable and see if it works, and then focus on pain points that actually turn out to be blockers later. Getting a core product into real people's hands and getting real feedback ASAP is more valuable than tweaking the video resolution or anything similar!
Hey, I've used your tool many times to debug SSR applications! It was actually a Google engineer that recommended me it.
Like it a lot. Cheers.
Awesome, thanks! Glad it's working well for you :D
It's awesome.
This is a cool project. Looks like a good replacement for Charles (which I hate) and reminds me of Fiddler (which I love). The fact that this is a desktop app makes it all the more enjoyable to work on as a profitable side project, imo.
I've been looking [1] for a similar tool for a while; Just downloaded, really liking it so far! It's clean and intuitive. Thank you!
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35559469
This is so inspiring! Thanks for sharing your story.
I was wondering what the early days of the journey looked like. - What did the first iteration of this product look like? Was it more or less similar, or substantially different from the spirit of httptoolkit today? - How did you go from (some semblance of a product) to first sale? / acquiring first customer? - did you spend anything on marketing/distribution?
> What did the first iteration of this product look like? Was it more or less similar, or substantially different from the spirit of httptoolkit today?
Technically, the first iteration was https://github.com/httptoolkit/mockttp - an HTTP integration testing library for JS. Not a desktop app at all! I'd originally built that for testing uses, but as it matured I realised that with a UI and automated setup tools it'd be useful as a complete product (but Mockttp still powers all the internals today, and you can use it directly to build your own custom intercepting proxies too).
For the first real product, the very first public 'launch' was literally a landing page with some demos of the potential UI and a signup form, just to test interest and check it wasn't a terrible idea. The results looked promising, so that was followed a few months later by a very basic but usable free version (entirely read-only, and only supporting Chrome interception) with the freemium features on top appearing a few months after that. From this stage it was all very much the same spirit as today, just less feature complete.
> How did you go from (some semblance of a product) to first sale? / acquiring first customer?
Once I announced the paid version (a blog post to my tiny set of newsletter signups, plus a little response on HN/Reddit/Product Hunt etc) I got a handful of paying customers (but certainly less than 10) within 24 hours. Nice but not a meaningful income, and from that wild peak it dropped back down to maybe one new customer per week or so afterwards, so it was quite slow going at the start.
However, those paying customers (and the mere fact of offering a paid service generally) resulted in _much_ better feedback. Rather than "this is cool" all of a sudden I had real demands for specific features, from people with concrete use cases and money in their hands. The initial paid features were just made up off the top of my head, and honestly didn't create a particularly compelling paid feature set. It's very hard to really know what people will pay for! That feedback was incredibly unbelievably useful to fix that.
From there, building out the key features people asked for over the following 6 months boosted things very significantly, and started to get things moving for real, and then you get into a virtuous circle, where more users => more feedback => better product => more users => ...
> did you spend anything on marketing/distribution?
I tested advertising at a small scale for a few months, but it didn't really work great. I think largely because it's very very freemium - 99% of users pay nothing - so the acquisition cost for a paying user doesn't make sense, and also honestly I don't have much experience with ads and I'm not sure I'm any good at writing them.
Content marketing meanwhile has worked great, keeps passively returning dividends, and cost nothing. I've tried to fill the blog (https://httptoolkit.com/blog/) exclusively with detailed & high-value original content (detailed breakdowns of a recent HTTP security vulnerability, not "top 10 HTTP libraries for Python") which shares well on social networks for an immediate burst of traffic, and then (in most cases) provides both a long-term SEO boost and constant incoming traffic on related topics that converts into users. That starts slow, but again steadily builds up over years, if you keep working at it. Content marketing + SEO are pretty much the only marketing channels I work on right now.
Hi Terry, awesome project! Can I use it to MITM my smart TV, or TV stick?
Not him, but probably not. They likely use HTTPS with certificate pinning
It depends :-). If it's Android (like a Fire stick) then in some cases, but all the Android caveats apply, e.g. you'll need root access to access traffic from apps that don't opt-in to debugging. For testing your own apps that's fine, but for reverse engineering HTTPS traffic you'll generally need a rooted device. In practice, if you don't already have a rooted phone on hand it's usually best to use an Android emulator on your computer, since most of those provide root access out of the box.
Even with root, certificate pinning can cause problems (as the sibling comment points out) but you can usually defeat that fairly easily: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/frida-certificate-pinning/.
For non-Android, HTTP Toolkit can't set it up for you automatically, but you can absolutely intercept _anything_ manually if you can configure it with your own HTTP proxy setting (fairly common) and add a trusted CA certificate (less common).
Thank you - I love this tool
> A few inflection points that made a notable difference (releasing rewriting support & Android support particularly)...
Do you mean that improving documentation helped get customers? I have a small side project and I think this is one of its weaker spots, even if it is relatively simple [0]. I noticed "helper popups" are getting used quite extensively.
[0]: https://aihelperbot.com/guide
> Do you mean that improving documentation helped get customers?
It probably did, but no that's not what I mean, sorry :-). By "rewriting support" I mean adding features that allowed you to rewrite arbitrary network traffic, rather than just viewing it (as in the very first PoC).
Love it, been using it for a long time. Much easier for 99% of use cases compared to Charles.
I used it once to get past a crux in my project , solid ui/functionality.
cool tool
Is it possible to make this tool work as a system-wide proxy - like Fiddler? Right now it does not support portable versions of browsers - only normally installed ones.
You can proxy anything, it's just the "intercept the entire system" isn't automated here (because targeted interception is usually preferable).
For system-wide setup, you'll just need to configure that manually - setting your system proxy and trusting the CA certificate. The settings you need are on the Intercept page, in the 'Anything' section. For portable browsers, you may also be able to configure proxy & CA settings within the browser itself, which might be more convenient, depending on your setup.
Really nice, man! Congratulations!
A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.
So far we’ve hosted 12 dinners over the past year. Growing from out first meal with 13 friends to as many as 80 guests for this months meal. Our mailing list has over 400 people on it and we’ve sold out every event since our 4th. Sometimes we end up hosting multiple nights.
It’s not a very scalable business as it exists today. For now is just a passion project that makes a few bucks, allows us meet interesting people, and provides the opportunity to discover new foods and restaurants.
Very cool! Any advice for someone who would want to replicate this endeavor?
Not the poster but I used to host potlucks on a semi-regular basis. No money involved but I imagine the skills are basically the same; inviting people, managing the incoming food, etc. I would probably start by hosting a potluck for 5-10 people and then scale up from there.
I'm happy to share my experience and lessons, but its a bit too much to type. If you are serious about starting one feel free to shot me an email (address in my profile).
What I will say is that I think the timing was right. My co-host and I lived in Manhattan pre-pandemic and regularly took advantage of the restaurant variety there. Our dinners are hosted on Long Island and our theory is that people who move from Manhattan to Long Island over the last 20 years started to expect higher quality food and a larger variety of ethnic options. Over the past decade or so the variety and quality of Long Island restaurants has greatly improved from what was here 25 years ago when I was growing up.
Post pandemic we saw an appetite (pun intended) for people to just get out of the house, be around other people, and have an experience. Quite a few people who come to the dinners say that they keep coming back because their partner/family aren't adventurous eaters so they never get to try new foods or typically wouldn't order some of the things we put on the menu. We aren't going for a fear factor vibe, but we do try to get people out of their comfort zone. We have a large number of solo guests who enjoy meeting new people and sharing a like-minded experience. Initially the group skewed heavily towards males in their 30's, which was our friends. Today its a very diverse group of people.
Very cool story! How did you grow the group? Was it all through word of mouth from your initial seed group of friends?
The first dinner was all 1st degree friends. Then it turned into friends of friends of friends. The 4th or 5th dinner was a big turning point. We had a minimum of 55 to hit for a popular restaurant we wanted and we were trending short (we actually would have ended up hitting it) and for the first time opened the dinner up to people who weren't directly connected. We posted an invite in a popular Long Island food Facebook group and after that we never had a problem selling out a dinner again. Last month Newsday wrote an article about us which added hundreds of Instagram followers and close to 100 new applications for membership. We sold out 48 seats for our April dinner in under and hour and ended up working with the restaurant to add a second night.
https://www.newsday.com/lifestyle/restaurants/dead-chefs-soc... (https://archive.is/w9Z1A)
How do you monetize it?
The cost per plate is negotiated with the restaurant ahead of time. We collect all of the money at time of RSVP which includes our margin. We then pay the restaurant and keep our fee.
How do you deal with drinks?
As a customer I'd probably want to run a tab at the restaurant for whatever I drink (assuming they're alcohol-friendly) but as an organizer I'd probably want an upfront corkage fee I could take a reliable cut of.
Most meals include at least one alcoholic drink as well as soft drinks. Anything not included can be purchased a la carte and paid directly to the restaurant. A couple of dinners have been BYOB if the venue doesn't have a license and there's no fees for that.
This is actually a really cool idea because for those of us who only dine out once or twice a month, it's nice to make it a unique or fun experience rather than a humdrum outing to eat average or templated food.
I would definitely be interested in something like this coming to our area.
Where do you host it? At the restaurant itself or at your own venue?
At the restaurant for the monthly meals. We are also experimenting with a "chefs table" with a smaller more intimate group hosted in pop up locations.
> For now is just a passion project that makes a few bucks, allows us meet interesting people, and provides the opportunity to discover new foods and restaurants.
What an unique side project, I'm very impressed.
7 years ago I started a site project for forwarding logs and metrics from k8s, docker, openshift in Splunk. It is enterprise offering, and I started making money pretty quick. After 6 months I already made 40k, and quit my employer. Tight now this company generates 7 figures, and still run by me with one more person helping with accounting.
https://www.outcoldsolutions.com
Now I also started macOS development for the last 2 years, and making around 2k a month.
https://loshadki.app
Would love to get into enterprise software. How did you get your first customer?
If you are a one-man shop, no you probably don't.
Enterprise customers seem very lucrative and in rare cases can be, if you are working with a small department or individual with autonomy.
If you find yourself being asked to make a sales presentation to an IT steering committee, run away.
Hmm,can you elaborate a bit? I know lots of people are saying that b2b is the greatest model, since businesses often are willing to pay way more than regular people. There are lots of people who make a decent living from micro-SaaS/SaaS with this business mode. From my personal experience working for companies, they often pay tons of money for quite simple software.
It depends on the business. I sell to a couple of companies and have multiple experiences.
One of my clients is a team that has a budget and that team makes the decision without involving other parts of the co.
In another one of my clients the decision is taken by multiple depts, first the team that is gonna use the product gets in touch and we create a contract for them, then the legal dept is involved, after it's all clear the dept in charge of payments is involved. In that last step they tried to renegotiate the amount of the contract saying they didn't have that kind of money. I told them no problem and just went silent, a couple of weeks later they approved the contract.
Sometimes it takes 1 year 'til the client starts using (paying) the product, other times they are good to go in 1 week, most of the times it takes 1 month.
How do you get enterprise customers to feel comfortable depending on a project run by a very small shop? Like, how do you assure them that their operations will not be impacted if something were to prevent you from working for a while, etc?
It was just a right moment. 7 years ago Splunk did not have a solution for showing to customers. Splunk has an app store where I published the apps, we become technical partners, and even participated with Splunk in a few tech events together as partners, like Docker, Kubernetes, RedHat conferences.
We don’t offer anything crazy on the support side. 2 business days reply. It is not sas, so nothing crazy to monitor from our side.
Also, we have insurances, a lot of resellers, we are technical partners with a lot of companies, have 7 years experience of business behind us.
It all came with time, and we build our confidence.
Is your pricing usage based on log volume?
This helps hockey stick revenue but is also the #1 customer complaint since logs will always grow (no cap).
Just curious how you hit millions in revenue with a 2-person company.
I'm sure lots would love to hear more about your story (e.g. perfect write-up for IndieHackers.com)
We do the same offering as openshift/docker, based on CPU. So we help customers to forward less logs, and not to have impact on our revenue.
I have a B2B micro-ISV, and getting our infosec product in front of the right people is tricky. Would love to hear something about your approach to marketing and advertising?
See my other reply. Basically just a right moment in a right time. We participated as Splunk technical partner in a lot of conferences in beginning and that definitely helped. And focused on making our partners wanting to sell our software by offering them good discounts.
curious ... why not "just use the UF"?
or "just use syslog-ng"?
We provide more complete solution, with metrics, alerts, dashboards, everything you need right from the start. So in 5 minutes you will get complete solution. Of course, you can build it in-house, and keep working on it, but it is going to take time and resources. And we don’t charge that much.
Also we provide very unique solutions, like transforming, redirecting logs with annotations applied to your pods/deployments/namespaces. Also can pickup logs from volumes without any additional deployments.
So some customers see benefits from us, some don’t.
I run two side projects atm but they are both becoming more and more the main job.
I am building a Zillow for Europe [1]. The real estate market in Europe is a big mess and for the past 10 years not much has happend so far in proptech because it was easy to rent/sell properties. Now things are changing and I see a lot more supply coming on the platform. So far rented out 40 apartments doing around 3k in profit a month. We focus primarily on overseas/expats right now
Another project I started with a good friend from Google is Webtastic AI [2] it's a lead gen platform that indexes large amounts of data and I am using simple ML models to clean it up and make sense out of it. It does around 1.9k a month now but we just launched 2 weeks ago so that looks promising. Thanks to google cloud we got 100k credits which makes it a bit more feasible because the startup costs are extremely high.
[1] https://homestra.com/ [2] https://webtastic.ai/
How do the properties get onto homestra? Do landlords find your site and enter the data + pay you? Or is the model different?
We work with a lot of agencies/landlords mostly larger once now but making it more self serve in the upcoming months
Can you add a map to Homestra? That’s the one piece of functionality that most overseas real estate sites are missing.
Already have it: https://homestra.com/map/
It's hidden on mobile because I didn't have the time yet to optimise it!
Thanks! I was also about to write, please add a filter for location, as I couldn't find it in the UI. I want to look for a specific city, not really for the whole country, which I thought was the only option for location filtering.
A filter for elevators would be super-helpful. I tried [1] but it seems broken.
after applying a filter i get a 404 (only fitler was bedroom size): https://homestra.com/houses-for-sale/?amount-of-bedrooms=2
On the note of filtering, why do you not have upper bounds on bedrooms/bathrooms? it seems like filtering for a 2 bedroom isn't possible because "2+" would give me a ton i am not interested in
Ohh that is interesting, how did you end up on that page, it should be https://homestra.com/list/houses-for-sale/?amount-of-bedroom... might have an old link somewhere :(
Ill add the elevator filter, thanks for your input!
followed your map link, changed the filter and hit `apply`. can reproduce it now too
Looks like the search model doesn't take the map into account when filtering, thanks for letting me know, will fix this ASAP
Are you planning to deal with all the complexities that each market brings? For example, compare with one of the standard German property search websites: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/ and here are some things that I, personally, would or have used when searching for property that I don't immediately see on your site:
For apartments:
* Searching by floor (or below or above floor)
* Searching by presence/absence of elevator
For all property types:
* Searching by rented / unrented status (evicting tenants for your own use is hard)
* Searching by build phase, if you're interested in new-build properties
* Searching by build year (some people prefer Altbaus, some consider them the work of the devil)
* Searching by heating type (underfloor vs radiator)
* Searching by rooms, not bedrooms. In Germany, a 1-room flat is a Studio Apartment and doesn't have a bedroom.
* Display of and searching by fees when buying (typically this is searching for "no estate agent fee")
* Display of and searching by Warm & Cold rent when renting
* Ability to search by state & city (at a bare minimum, and note that state affects how much property tax has to be paid when purchasing)
I think most countries are going to have a lot of little quirks like this, and it's going to be a hard sell to get people to switch over until you've got a lot of these in place for each country. I know that I've used international sites like this in the past and ultimately abandoned them because they either made it too difficult to find what I wanted, or there just weren't enough properties on there.
There is a big update coming that is fixing/adding a lot of the features you mangent, build year etc. is added but I need to review harder on that.
Thanks for your feedback, really appreciated!
Ahh, cool, that's great to hear!
Both projects look like they are run by a team of 10+ people! Congratz on making them by yourself, that's very inspiring!
Thanks! I am teaming up with friends that are in marketing/sales, I learned the hard way that the whole romanticising of solo indiehackers is fun but you end up running in circles and never really have the time to do things perfectly. Now I have fun projects that are growing and working with amazing people
I agree, talent is triumphant. May I kindly ask where did you and your friends first meet?
> I am building a Zillow for Europe [1]
As a European, I (at least) don't understand what this means - and therefore don't understand your offering, your USP?
What does/will Homestra offer, and how will it be different from e.g. Immobilienscout?
Good question, it's for expats/digital nomads/overseas buyers. Europe is very segmented and every country has it's own real estate classified sites, these are great for internal market but lack a lot of the features to help a foreign buyer. If you are a German looking for something within Germany changes are you will not use the site for a long time (lets hope in 10 years it's a different story!)
That's super interesting! I actually started developing 'Zillow for Brazil' a couple of years ago for the same reason (Brazil realstate websites are a total mess - there's no option to show locations on a map!), but dropped the project due to lack of knowledge (I was just starting my journey in computer science) and also because I thought that tackling such a project would require a gargantuan amount of work (external integrations, indexing addresses, and so on). Besides, I had doubts whether I would be able to make a net profit from the website considering that GoogleMaps API is quite expensive for Brazil standards. Congrats!
Yeah domain knowledge/network is definitely needed, I am working with a friend who has that, it's a must in this field because it's almost set in the stone age.
Google maps was crazy expensive I went with Mapbox[1] for now which seems to have enough features and is less expensive.
[1] https://mapbox.com/
Brazillow
What kind of startup costs do you have for webtastic? Do you pay for data or scrape it?
We do everything manually, looks like most companies just buy data from each other and often it's not really complete. I had experience running large indexing services so that came in handy. Main costs come from storing large amounts of data, multiple databases etc.
I wish you success and soon. We're house hunting from the US for a house in France. We visit the target city quite frequently but you really have to be registered with every agent and then hope that they contact you if the right property comes up. The last two times we bought a property in the US we found them via Zillow.
I run small outsourced IT systems for SMBs. Web scrapers, reporting, stuff like that. Baisically private bespoke SaaS.
About $10k/mo gross revenue and takes a few hours of work a week (unless there’s a downtime event that needs fixing). A lot of upfront work to build some of these systems though.
Got to $2k/mo in the first month of doing this. I don’t recommend working (as a solo operator) with clients who have budgets less than $5-10k/mo. Too much overhead for too little return in that case.
In what little spare time I have left after my day job and looking after two small kids, I put more automation in place to improve reliability for my clients and reduce my own ops time requirement.
I get leads for this by referral from people I’ve done good work for in the past. But it’s the kind of thing you could bootstrap by direct outbound sales, publishing authority-building content to the right business audience, going to conferences/trade shows, or building a referral network from other service provides.
A couple questions, if you don't mind. How did you go about finding clients? What is the nature of the work agreement—project-based, hourly, or something else?
Clients for this work have come almost entirely by referral. See my other comments in this thread.
For ongoing things I do fixed rate or usage based pricing.
For custom one-off stuff, consultancy, and build-out of systems I charge a day rate.
I’ve thought about doing this, but a few reservations came up when I considered getting started with a family friend. I just pictured a contracted ”IT MANAGER” getting rabbit holed into some time-sink extreme;
1. Dedicated operational IT admin: Dealing with repetitive tasks+requests, like managing customer’s Microsoft environment and on-site infrastructure.. Owning physical and AD infra doesn’t sound like a part-time job.
For e.g; a/v and physical IT asks; like conference room operation maintenance and support, Desktop workstation triage (have you tried turning the monitor on?). The dreaded “can you set up the printer?”…
And what if the customer sets me up as their site’s dedicated AD domain admin? Resulting in repetitive requests for user/access management CRUD operations. And/or micromanagement of tedious things like email and mailing lists…
Or
2. Dedicated software developer, website or business workflows.
Building a website and getting micromanaged or overburdened. (“can you change the logo to blue?” “Can you redesign the whole home page?”)
Or, get pulled deep into providing a business-critical software workflow or application. Fielding sales/exec requests, interpreting their business requirements, and then building AND delivering (for e.g a customer management system) is not a part time job…
How do you operate to keep the scope limited? What steps help buffer yourself from a slippery slope of full-time services?
The word "no" can be very effective. Remember that you control the type of work that you take on.
I have a small side gig building "controllers." By controllers I mean devices that are typically arduino controlled and use peripherals in the arduino ecosystem. They span a very wide range, but are typically very feature-limited. e.g., I have a client who is converting massage chairs to be pay-per-use.
As you noted, it's not easy to keep a service-based business from growing to take over all your time. I manage it by keeping the feature set clearly specified and working on fixed price.
Want to add a feature we didn't discuss? That's another charge. My niche is taking on very small projects that are too small to move the needle for a full-blown engineering services company (I've worked for two) and I always work fixed-price, so I need to be very aggressive about scope creep.
Project scope keeps growing? Either tell the client that it will be a while until I have time to complete it, or, more frequently, that they will need to find someone else. This is pretty easy to say because as mentioned above I'm clear about only taking on small projects.
I've had people who basically want me to be their engineering department. That's a hard "no:" I simply don't have the time.
I don’t take on huge IT projects anymore, or ones that have potential to require lots of changes over time.
Used to do this as an agency principal and it involved a lot of time spent managing clients and projects and subcontractors. Drove myself crazy and took a couple years off after nearly burning out.
I look for projects where the software solves a single targeted business problem and can quickly get to “done”. Then the client is happy to pay for ongoing maintenance/ops, so any additional effort I put into the software is around reducing my ongoing workload.
Would love to learn more about this. What type of SMBs do you target? How did you acquire your first customer?
I work mostly in the travel industry. First client 10+ years ago came from a friend who worked as a manager in a large company and needed some special software built to improve his unit’s results - the existing contractor was not good and internal IT did not have time/skill.
Follow on work came from other people at that first client company who knew my work and went on to work at other companies.
I'm the founder of the open-source and cross-platform note-taking app https://www.get-notes.com (written in Qt C++).
I earn about $2000 a month from ads on the landing page (organic SEO), but very soon plan to add a subscription for pro features (while people could still compile it from source and get the full experience without paying, if they wish).
I started the project 8 years ago to create a slick looking note-taking app for myself on Linux. Then I open-sourced and published it, and it just took off and got popular (more than 1.2 Million downloads).
Took around 2 years to get a high rank on Google. Then it was just a matter of putting ads (which I don't like but my income relies on) and ever since it's been quite stable.
Wuut.. Never heard of this! It looks very slick, I searched and searched for a nice note taking app on Linux and eventually landed with NoteKit, but this looks better.
Thanks! Even more awesome features and improvements are coming soon (:
We're on Github here btw: https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes
Do you plan to add syncing of notes between devices?
The main goal is to support working with arbitrary folder (currently, we store notes in a local databse), so it will be easier to sync using your existing cloud provider (eg, Dropbox, etc..)
But maybe in the future will create our own paid syncing service, is that something you'll want?
Earlier today I was looking for an Evernote replacement. Basically the ability to get my notes or info from any device is a core need for any note taking program in my opinion. (I mean you write things down in a paper note book to have with you when you need then, right? You don't just leave the note pad on a shelf.)
I wouldn't be keen to pay a monthly storage fee but I would pay a one time fee to unlock the ability to connect the data to my own storage like Dropbox, Mega, Google drive, etc.
Obsidian seems to have all the features of that note taking app + many more and even has plugin support.
Obsidian is not:
1. A native app (it's an Electron app).
2. Open source.
What’s your RPM? That much income for a software download page seems impressive
$25.8
Wow! Freaking monster!
That's quite high isn't it? Where does one get $25.80 per thousand impressions?
By placing an ad with a green "Start Now" button that goes to a spammy browser extension download page? Users probably think that's the button to download the desktop application.
At least that's the ad I get on that page.
What are your opinions about QT? Do you use the open source version or the paid version? (I like it myself but mostly because I like their wysiwyg and the debugger support is intuitive relative to other ides)
Overall, I love Qt. I started studying QML 2 weeks ago to implement a Kanban view based on the underlined Markdown styled todo items in the text editor, and it's been really great so far. Property bindings, signals & slots, integration with C++, it all makes so much sense, much more than other declarative languages/frameworks (looking at you, React) imo.
Qt has been around for years, the documentation is extensive and the community is large and supportive. With QML I faced many problems, especially half-assed examples/documentation, Qt Creator's intellisense doesn't work well with QML sometimes, etc... But the tradeoff is worth it. I'm getting things done in a much faster pace with QML.
A problem that is common both in Qt and other cross-platform frameworks is that you end up writing some custom code for each operating system to make the look and feel more native. But I think it's getting better with awesome open-source projects taking care of beautiful native window decorations[1].
[1] https://github.com/wangwenx190/framelesshelper
I was able to build things with Qt and Qt3D I wasn't sure would even be possible before starting (a very narrow-scoped robotics automation planner/simulator). It was remarkably easy to get moving with.
Ironically the first version was mocked in Unity, thinking the tooling and ecosystem would make the MVP easy to build. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't particularly easy either. The end result was extremely heavyweight and gave terrible performance. Qt on the other hand yielded fairly snappy and lightweight results, and the development experience wasn't bad at all.
I wonder why more people don't use it, but then, that's my only exposure. Maybe it's not so great for other things, and I suppose there's the whole matter of having to pay for certain tooling and support. Us developers are sometimes super-hesitant to pay for the tools we use, haha.
I haven't got my hands on Qt3D, so that's nice to know. I agree, Qt is underrated.
There are some really good courses for beginners by Voidrealms - Bryan Cairns[1] on Youtube, if anyone is interested.
I think QML definitely deserve a better reputation. I even saw it being used for websites[2] although I'm still sticking with React for that.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@VoidRealms/playlists
[2] https://pureqml.com/
Congrats on your accomplishments. I did not see any ads on your landing page. Am I missing something?
In the early 00's when I was debating if I should pursue software dev (again) I wrote a couple of Win32 native apps in C and absolutely loved writing them. One of the apps was a workout timer which I submitted to Freewarefiles.com. It peaked around 48K downloads. Unfortunately freewarefiles is no more so I can't show off my one and only "successful" native app.
Sometimes I feel I want to delve back into native apps instead of web based.
There is a small one on the landing page, but most of the revenue comes from the ones on the download page, actually.
Awesome story! Come back to the light (literally) side.
Is this a fork of (open source but paid-value-add) Standard Notes?
Nope, I started it by myself 8 years ago. Now the project is getting many wonderful contributors.
Props to you for allowing compilation for the pro version, I'd probably support you just for doing that
Woah i never heard of this. I’m the type of person who loves trying out different notes app
This looks incredible I’m definitely going to use it
Thanks! More cool features coming soon.
Threads like this one always baffle me. You have to think of the competitive landscape like a jungle. All of the creatures in the jungle are looking for food, and some have far more competitive advantages than you. If you find a food source that no one else has happened to stumble upon, would you scream out that you've found it? No. If someone is asking you, it's because they want to know how they can get what you have. Much like the amount of food in the jungle is limited, so is the size of any market.
Don't create competition for yourself. They can go on having no idea how lucrative your little side project is and you can go on reaping the benefits. As soon as you tell someone with more resources that your little side idea is actually turning over large sums of money, you better believe their wheels will be spinning on how to get a piece of it. It's so easy to avoid this, you just have to not run your mouth.
The economy isn't a zero-sum game. Everyone wins in the long-term when we help each other succeed.
Can't really argue that with the massive wealth gap
The ideal version of capitalism with zero barriers to entry isn’t a zero sum game. The actual reality that is our current economy doesn’t reach that ideal and there are definitely situations where groups lose out form the benefit of others
Exactly this.
Every once in awhile, there are threads and comments here on HN about the various people who have had their UI, content, data or concepts stolen as well.
Unless you’re a full-time hobbyist or boast a mature project, please be cautious.
Most businesses here are inspiring to me in the same way that a monkey in the jungle is inspiring to an anteater - it's great hearing how the monkey is doing but if I want to compete I have to cross half the jungle and climb a tree.
Sometimes competition ain't as easy to attract as you might think
Extending the metaphor, a competitor can be good for business depending upon your strategy. If you're a hyena, you benefit from having lions around because the lions can kill a much larger animal than a pack of hyenas ever could. Maybe someone else on HN can advertise their copy of a product, but all that's doing is growing the target market for the OG product which already has a (small) monopoly.
Competition is often a validation of there being a need for your product.
This seems like a reasonable take, but I can tell you with 100% certainty I'm not a threat to any of the devs/entrepreneurs in this thread. For me, it's just fun to see how other people are scratching out a living. My feeling is that not all successful ideas are easily replicable when you consider all the factors that contribute to one's success, so just because someone else managed to pull it off doesn't mean I could.
Evil idea: post lies about finding lots food at location X, then secretly sell tools that help people get to location X.
Oops, forgot rule #1.
I suspect a lot of people here are going to get business from other people discovering their products also
"Thread like this" are popular and entertaining for a variety of reasons. You assume that they're only about making money, stealing someone else's ideas, etc. but that's not necessarily the case. To me, the interesting bit of these threads is to understand the human thought process behind a successful idea: ie was the founder happy with life or in a bad place, working full time or freelancing, was it an impulsive thought or something carefully planned...
I’m really unsure it works like this. It sounds logical but in practice stealing an idea is hard.
I’d actually love to read a thread about people making 2k per month on a stolen sass idea.
I’ve come across a number of people who are hesitant to share their idea because they’re afraid someone will “steal” it.
The idea is not the hard part. The hard part is building the software, building the customer base, building the automation processes, and doing all the business-things associated with it.
I’ll grant that if you say “Hey, this thing is actually a marketable product” that you’re reducing the cost of a potential competitor, but really there is so much work to do. Even if you can get a lot of it COTS, there’s still a lot of effort to be put in.
Extending this logic, you should never tell anybody anything about anything. Which is clearly not true, nor how humans work.
One simple reason to post: For every potential competitor reading about your project, there are thousands of potential customers.
> One simple reason to post: For every potential competitor reading about your project, there are thousands of potential customers.
If you’re happy with your existing cash flow this point seems less relevant; the better choice would then be to protect your competitive advantage and stay hidden, right?
Something's making money, it is more than an an idea. it exists, it has found a small corner place in the market. someone paid for the product, not the idea.
These threads attract unique businesses, with a twist. (Almost) None have groundbreaking, earth shattering ideas. They usually have an interesting story to them. It attracts people like me, who just love to immerse myself in such conversations, stories and experiences. Maybe potential customers, if not me, could be someone I talk to.
Secrecy isn't a strong competitive advantage after you're in the market.
The world is significantly larger than you think. Most of the people posting here are from the US, which makes up ~5% of the population.
If your idea is so fragile that anybody else with a similar idea can knock you out of the market, it's probably not very good.
If you have iOS/Android development experience, you can look at the Developer sector, which is relatively niche IMO.
I've developed the iOS/iPadOS app, Proxyman for iOS [0], which gains steadily ~2k recurring revenue every month. Basically, it's an iOS app that helps you to capture and decrypt HTTP/HTTPS traffic on your phone. The app is needed if you need to inspect traffic from your app.
Because it's an iOS app, published on AppStore, you can provide a subscription pricing model: e.g. $4.99/month, $39.99/year, or lifetime $99.
I also develop the macOS version, but it's a huge market, which is out of context.
- [0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/proxyman/id1551292695
I use proxyman a lot, you did an amazing job, it's a super slick and well working app
Thanks. I assume you're using the macOS version. You might check out the iOS app too : ]
Don't forget to activate the Premium for iOS with your Mac License Key. No need to purchase the Subscription.
Already have it running!
Does it work with DNS-over-https queries from Apple ? I tried to grab the Airtag position from my Ipad with MITM Proxy running on a computer, but because it is DNS based some http packets from Apple wouldn't be visible
I've never tried it. Maybe you should give it a try. If it doesn't work, please create a ticket at https://github.com/ProxymanApp/Proxyman/issues
I'm happy to support you.
Proxyman (desktop) is a terrifyingly polished app, kudos!
Really curious, how does the revenue from macOS and iOS compare?
Thanks for the shoutout. I would not disclose the macOS revenue. We used to publish it as a #buildinpulic movement, but not anymore.
Fair. Good luck with both platforms!
You built Proxyman?! What a great project. This can't just be a side project though right?
Even if its with a small team thats impressive, the UI is polished and full of features.
We use daily as a team
Thanks. It's not a side project anymore. We've established a legal company in the US, have a small team, and commit full-time to it. Currently, we've working on the Windows & Linux version.
Proxyman is great. It was essential to our development workflow for one of our user-facing products at my last job in healthcare.
Proxyman is fantastic. It replaced Charles for me.
What tool do you use to create the screenshots with the text in the App Store? I always struggle with that.
Not OP, but have a look at [0]. It’s not great, but good enough. I regularly use it for App Store screenshots with captions and text.
[0] https://theapplaunchpad.com/
Not OP, but I use Figma to do this. There are lots of templates in the community, or you can make your own pretty easily.
If you don't want to do it as manually there are paid tools that will help. Google "app store screenshot maker" for options.
I started Hacker Newsletter [1] almost 14 years ago and sent out the 647th issue today [2] to 58k folks. It took over a year to break 1k subscribers and a few more years to get to that type of revenue. I could do a lot more with it and plan to one day, but really only focus on it a couple hours each week when I build the issue and talk to sponsors.
1: https://hackernewsletter.com 2: https://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/647
Thanks for starting it and keeping it going.
It is one of the few newsletters I look forward to so I can “catch up” with topics that were popular during the course of a week on HN.
I'm a happy subscriber! Funny thing is, I ignore it most weeks because I'm checking HN a lot anyway; but if I have so much as a long weekend offline then your newsletter is the answer to my FOMO.
I love the simplicity and I don't mind the ads.
Thanks for doing it. Love receiving this.
What's the current MRR out of curiosity? I think about it every time I get it in my inbox :)
Hmmm... all the stories on the 647 sample issue are ones I had already read here on HN. So you are just curating the HN feed?
Yeah, all links come from HN (I use the API to pull them into my tool). I'm not just grabbing the highest voted items though, but rather a mix. Basically I'm taking the ~1500 posts that got at least 5 votes and picking ~70 for each issue. If you saw all 70 of those then you're on HN all the time and it probably isn't much use to you.
I don't have HN open all day so I love this newsletter. I'm also in Australia so sometimes I miss posts as they slide away during US work hours. Love your work
Thanks Dan, glad to hear it is useful. Mudmap looks very cool!
Your newsletter is the best part of my Friday mornings. Thank you.
I love it. I read it while having coffee on Saturday mornings.
https://hackers.ee was started as a volunteering project to help people who got scammed on the internet. You know, all these fake investment schemes where callers play on stupidness and grid.
I've helped them to gather and do properly documented their cases, and support them during their visits to the police to make a claim. Police try to bounce as it's always a headache due to multiple countries/jurisdictions involved - VOIP provider from Finland, hosting in the Netherlands, money goes to Chinese company bank account, etc.
I had to demonstrate to them it's not something impossible, so I've provided guidance, prepare requests drafts, etc. I've dived deeply into OSINT, forensics, audit, bank compliances and procedures, infrastructure enumeration, and other cybersecurity things to solve these problems.
There were never payments required, but when it works people donated some money to keep infrastructure, as a tip or so. When it becomes 30k+ annually years ago, I've decided to make it my full-time job, with some pivot on what we're doing - now it is mostly cybersecurity services to businesses and companies. But still helping civilians to handle scam attempts every month.
I built mmm.page [1] originally for personal websites, or "internet canvases."
They're meant to be pages for very easy combinations of text, mixed media, embeds, etc. — let more people create fun/interesting places on the internet. [2]
I started working on mmm.page in Feb 2021, and launched it that May on Hacker News [3], then it hit $2k/mo last year, and has been growing steadily since. There are roughly 30,000+ users at the moment. Revenue has been trickier for this project because it's a SaaS aimed at consumers, who are more price sensitive — but the flip-side is I love working with all the people who use the platforms. Just today, someone shared this moodboard that captured exactly how I've been thinking about it mmm.page [4]. Some other fun examples here [5]. I'm planning a second launch in May. Hopefully some good news to share there.
One note: it's a website, and most people edit it on desktop, but a surprising # of users convert /after/ trying it on mobile. I also found the conversion rate increased significantly after I made the homepage itself editable — thereby demo'ing the product without a login. Just a small note.
Anyway, feel free to reply or DM on Twitter if you have questions — especially re: solo bootstrapping "fun" consumer products that are trying to also become self-sustainable.
[1] https://mmm.page
[2] https://twitter.com/xhfloz/status/1631746024120221698
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424
[4] https://diemichi.mmm.page/moodboard
[5] https://showcase.mmm.page
> I also found the conversion rate increased significantly after I made the homepage itself editable — thereby demo'ing the product without a login.
I just visited your homepage to check it out, but was greeted with a page that said "You can't edit this page" with a grayed out Edit button. And I'm not sure why, or what I should do so I am able to edit it (maybe sign up? but I wanted to see the demo before signing up).
Wow. I can't believe I let such a large bug slip by -- must have happened during a deploy this morning. I've just pushed out a fix.
Okay. Confirmed live now. That was quite the boneheaded move on my part lol.
Wow this is lovely! Really reminds me of the Mac apps from the power PC era.
Thank you! They have been a huge source of inspiration.
Thanks for keeping the internet alive.
I absolutely love the non-registration title page editing. Both impressive (haven't seen anything like that) and clear how it works. Can't wait to think of an idea what I want to build... :-D
Thank you! Let me know if you have any questions :)
I run Buttondown (buttondown.email) full-time now, but until this past year it was a side project for me alongside my day job as an IC (later EM).
It took...around two and a half years, I think, to hit $2k/mo MRR. It was definitely not the stereotypical "launch → iterate a bit → boom, PMF" story that you often hear, which was fine because it was 'just' a side project and I didn't have to worry about running out of money or time.
Looks nice! Congrats :)
I never hear that story. But I hear the 2 year one alot. The advantage of getting older is time is at warp speed so 2 years is nothing ha ha!
> The advantage of getting older is time is at warp speed so 2 years is nothing ha ha!
To be honest: Realising that time is going by so fast really scared me this week. Being mid-30s I really need to get my shit together, soon... :-D
Spoiler: nobody ever gets their shit together
There's a quote from Sarah Manguso's _300 Arguments_ that I love:
> With great and solemn portent, my teacher announced she would tell us something that her teacher had told her, and that her teacher’s teacher had told him, and so on, back to Yeats: The thing to remember is that no one ever finds out that you don’t know what you’re doing.
That's was the most profound lesson I've heard in a long time.
it touches on some many things.
Well unless you tell them, don't do that;-)
..sigh and don't ask me how I know.
but try anyway
Not sure that really helps. :-D
I'll give you a small anecdote.
A few months ago, my uncle died. To the outside world, he was very well put together, eloquent, and admired by all who knew him. Worked on physics books as a proofreader for a major publisher his whole life and was celebrated for his work. He was a recluse, but very sociable and an excellent go-between for any socially difficult situation, a real keeper of the peace.
When I went to clear his home, I discovered that his personal space was the opposite of all the above. Dirty, messy, not well organized.
Of all the people I ever expected that from, it wasn't him, but he did an excellent job of appearing to have his shit together.
I shared this with a few others who had late family members that had done very well in their respective field, and the sentiment was the same: nobody ever really seems to get their shit together, they just get better at presenting the parts of themselves that matter.
He was a very happy soul.
Coming up on 40. A quarter feels about as long as two weeks did when I was 10, I reckon.
If this keeps going, each year will feel like a day by the time I'm 60 or so.
[EDIT] Incidentally, I reject the "routine & boredom are what do it" thing. High school felt like it took forever and was far more regimented and regular and boring than my life is now.
I think it is the brain’s compression algorithm that does it.
Looks amazing, good job man :) I'm actually way more motivated by seeing a post like this where you specifically say it took effort and time to build something meaningful, than seeing "10k$ MRR in a week, no-code" crap that we get bombarded with lately. Keep up the good work!
Really nice!
Buttondown is great! It seems that being indie allows you to just ship a good product that does what it says on the box, instead of trying to squeeze every last bit of juice out by building a bloated product that is a jack of all trades but master of none.
I run https://pixelpeeper.com on the side.
It's a micro-SaaS for photographers who edit in Lightroom. Lets you reverse-engineer Lightroom edits from JPG files and download them as presets that you can apply on your own photos.
Took a month or two to reach $2k/mo, riding the wave of instagram's popularity in 2017-2018, plus the project went viral initially. However, the niche is ultimately too small to grow the revenue significantly. Still chugging along, almost 6 years later, though.
I built a few mobile games for iOS and Android.
I launched my first game in 2015 which took 6 months to even reach $100/month. From there it earned around $500/month for the last 7 years. It required a huge upfront investment, ongoing updates to keep relevant and a significant fraction of revenue going into advertising.
I launched a few additional games that were low quality and ended up removing them. I started another 4-5 ideas that were abandoned.
In 2021, during a few month break from my job, I produced one more game that has averaged around $2000/month revenue for the last 2 years. Also needs regular updates and promotion to stay relevant.
Overall I would only recommend this route if you’re really passionate about game dev. The overall time investment has been really high, and it isn’t truly passive income because mobile games lose users quickly when not updated often.
Do you mind to share genre?
> Also needs regular updates and promotion to stay relevant.
Are you able to share details on both aspects?
Awesome results!
I run a site for people learning Japanese (https://jpdb.io) as a side project. I'm currently at exactly ~$1996/month from Patreon donations. (It's not an aggressively monetized project.)
I've been doing this for over 2 years now. You can take a look at my changelog to see most of the updates (at the beginning I did not maintain a changelog so it doesn't start exactly when I started the site): https://jpdb.io/changelog
Wow, this is great! Love the simplicity of the website (focused on the essentials, no fancy design). Do you share the number of visitors / regular users?
A few thousand daily.
Not everyone uses every feature though; some people only use the dictionary, some people use the SRS, some people look at my difficulty lists, some people look at my vocabulary lists, some people only upload their Anki decks to see which shows/books/etc. have the most known vocabulary, etc.
Do you have any plans providing a Mandarin version of this?
Maybe someday, but not at this point.
I'd love to support other languages too, but at this point it isn't very feasible. I'm just a single man, and this is just a side project, so I simply don't have the resources to even do everything that I want to do with Japanese (and there's still so much more I want to add/improve!), never mind branching out into other languages.
I’m asking because I’m learning Mandarin at the moment and the features you listed are just so freaking cool. Wish to have that!
Oh hey! Thank you for developing this, it's a great resource!
Can you share with us the main differentiator your product has over some behemoth like Google translate? I'm personally an occasional tourist to Japan only and wish I could find a course in "tourist essentials" or "Tourist fluent" Japanese
> Can you share with us the main differentiator your product has over some behemoth like Google translate?
You might as well ask how a screwdriver is different from an apple. (:
Google Translate, is, well, a translator. You give it text, and it translates it. That's it. My site's for people who want to actually learn Japanese to fluency, with a particular focus on media-based immersion.
For example, is there a Japanese anime you'd like to watch without subtitles? I can probably help with that; I have vocabulary lists for many shows, and the site can teach you (through flashcards/spaced repetition) most of the words you'll need to be able to understand it.
I also have a plugin for the mpv video player where (if you load appropriate Japanese subtitles for the show you're watching) the plugin will color-code all of the words according to whether you know them or not, and you'll also have access to a popup dictionary where you can just hover your mouse over any of the words and see their definition. You can also use the plugin to make vocabulary flashcards with the screenshot + audio from what you're watching; demo video by one of my users: https://streamable.com/ww6x0e
I can keep on going as there's a lot more, but I'll stop here! It's probably not appropriate for someone who just wants to learn a little bit of Japanese for tourism purposes.
This is wild for a side project?!?! I wish you had something like this for Dutch. I recently moved from America and something like this would be phenomenal. I can see why you have so many patron donations!
$2000/m in two years is amazing. How are you marketing it? Is most of your traffic just from Google Search?
Thanks for making jpdb! Even without your srs system, just the catalogue of media and difficulty ratings has been monumental for immersion.
I run Afterplay (https://afterplay.io). It's a game emulation platform where you bring your own games. It took 18 months from first line of code to 2K. It's now my full time job :)
Clever way to offer gaming without copyright issues. Congrats!
Thank you :)
I read that as afterpay at first. Was thinking why is a billionaire posting in this thread :-)
This made laugh :) Thank you.
this is such an awesome idea, i can't wait to check this out!
Thank you. It's still very much a work in progress :)
This looks super awesome! I just tried it in Chrome however, and after a minute of playing the game it just drops me back to the game library screen. Love the idea though!
That's strange. I'm sorry about that. Did it happen more than once? Did you hit the backspace key? I will investigate :)
Yeah, it was happening on Super Mario Kart. I just tried Super Mario RPG and didn't have any issues. Let me know if I can get you more info or help with a repro.
Hey! I've used Afterplay haha. Funny seeing the creator here. Thanks for making this!
No way :) It's a small world. Thank you. I hope you're enjoying it. If you have any suggestions please feel free to let me know :)
I built Scanii [1], an unsafe/malware content detection API/SaaS, as a way to keep my coding skills sharp as I moved into engineering leadership roles. Over the years it has grown into a lovely $35k/month business while spending $0 in marketing thanks to our amazing customers.
My advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: get it out there quick, listen to your customers and be ready to act on their feedback. Finding product/market fit is a journey even if you are selling into the most well understood vertical since it's not just about what the market expects it's about what your engineering talent/capacity can delver in a reasonable amount of time.
[1] https://www.scanii.com
Congratulations on your success!
> get it out there quick
What did "getting it out there" consist of for you? How did you get it out there in the beginning?
> Congratulations on your success!
That is very kind of you, thank you.
> What did "getting it out there" consist of for you? How did you get it out there in the beginning?
For Scanii in particular, the original product was a thin wrapper around an open source AV engine, a hacked on a weekend UX, and a credit card processing integration to collect payment - the very minimal needed to find out if _anyone_ was willing to pay for this service.
With that said, what worked for me in this case is not what I would focus here since it depends on what kind of business you are trying to build. What I do believe is important is focusing on the economics of your space which, for IT, is all about productivity or, more succinctly, saving people's time - they pay you X for something that could cost them, in terms of people's time, Y to do.
So, what you want to ask yourself is whether signing up, paying and onboarding onto your product (the X in the equation above) is significantly lower than the next best alternative, either doing the same on a competitor product or building something themselves - the Y above.
For scanii, even at launch it saved people lots of time managing and operating malware detection engines which are cumbersome and hard to keep up to date. I had a feeling that would be the case when I launched but I couldn't be sure until our first customer voted with their credit card.
I guess more of what I'm asking is, how did you launch? The biggest problem I have is getting word out about my product, which always ends up killing them.
I'm a developer by trade, so marketing and the like isn't my forte. Did you use ProductHunt? Indiehackers? Reddit? Twitter? Word of mouth?
Thanks for the reply btw, very helpful info. I've been iterating on something in my free time that fills a very small budgeting niche. I'm going to wrap it up with a website this weekend and see if I can gain any traction. At the very least, I know that if I had found the product I've built for $1.99 a month or something, I would have just paid the money. Hoping that others feel the same.
Got it, in that case it helps to build a product for a community you can interact with. In my case, this was connecting with folks on Stackoverflow that were struggling with integrating malware detection into their apps... that was all the marketing I did to get the product validated - but keep in mind that was 10 years or so back.
Best of luck with your launch!
Thanks for all the advice!
Impressive! What do you think it is that you do that allows you to compete with VirusTotal, and even free tools like Jotti?
Presumably you're now using commercial AV tools, rather than Clam? Did you have to get some kind of special license from them to use it like this?
> Impressive! What do you think it is that you do that allows you to compete with VirusTotal, and even free tools like Jotti?
Thanks and good question. We don't really compete with virus total since it's more of a research tool and, for a while, their terms explicitly prohibited commercial use (but I think that has changed). Jotti is a similar thing, more of a research tool than a high performance API you can use to build commercial products on.
> Presumably you're now using commercial AV tools, rather than Clam? Did you have to get some kind of special license from them to use it like this?
Yeah the product has expended a bunch over the years and we use multiple detection engines [2] to catch all kinds of unsafe content. But you are right, we do license a commercial AV engine to act as a backup to our own to ensure best possible detection rates. The licensing process warrants a blog post of its own since it's not what I would call easy.
[2] https://docs.scanii.com/article/149-how-do-the-different-det...
I'm a little early, but this month, my side project SHOULD hit $2k, all signs point that way. Back in March, I decided to get serious with my CNC, and started designing things, dozens and dozens of things. Eventually I settled on something that felt like it had potential: Rolling trays and vape holders.
I get the wood from my grandpa's mill. I use both redcedar and pine, but I'm currently experimenting with oak (much slower wood to CNC and it is much more expensive as well).
I made a couple for family and friends, they thought they looked great and said I should be selling them. So at the end of February this year, I reopened my Etsy from when the pandemic first shuttered me inside my house, and listed my vape holders first. After a week, I had a few sales, and then I added my first rolling tray. By mid march, I had already racked up 20-ish sales before I told my Facebook friends about it (which is a shitty feeling - selling to people who probably get hit up by MLMs from all the other highschool people you wish you could forget), but that secured 7 more sales, and they started to snowball after that. I'm currently just under $1000 in revenue for the month of April, and everyone on the Etsy forums are saying this is the slowest time of the year for them (Easter + Tax Season), so fingers crossed after Monday, everything just starts picking up steam.
I have a laser/cnc shop as well. I never tried etsy. Are you using just a cnc router to create your products? Does the product price justify the time you are spending for them?
CNC is 75% of the way there, then there is sanding away most of the machine marks, then finish sanding. My current personal best is around 10 minutes per tray, and I make about $15 of each one (after fees and shipping and materials). So My time isn't exactly uncompensated, but its no where close to how much my time is worth as a software engineer with nearly 20 years of experience.
I batch out a bunch of them on the CNC at once (in fact I have to do a boatload more this evening), then while those are cutting, I have a pile of others that I need to sand. About the time I'm done with those, the next will come off the CNC, then takes me 5 minutes to set it up again and keep going. It gets tedious sometimes, but I can basically zone out while I do my sanding and listen to podcasts and music and still be able to hear the CNC start to cut something incorrectly (happens far to often).
Thank you for your detailed response. I just purchased a laser marker (50W) and planning to utilize it for the customized items. I think it might justify my cost eventually. I am also thinking about the software engineering with experience vs handmade wooden / metal things to sell. But I realize I also waste time doing weird hobbies and why not make money while having fun so that would be the justification. Last question if you don't mind, did you try metal or any metal product modification mixed with wood?
Sorry for the late response, had to batch out a couple dozen trays yesterday... The answer to metal, is no. I never learned metal. It's not that I don't think I can, but I have always loved wood. It is warm and soft, and I've been a hobbyist furniture maker for almost 20 years in my spare time.
Makes sense. I started with metal (4KW fiber laser cutter) and moved to lighter stuff (CO2 cutter 150 watts) then to CNC router for wood and acrylic. Now I am enjoying wood more because of its easiness. Thanks for the answers :)
I'm slowly building some success in Android and iOS games (most revenue comes from iOS!). I've got a paid game that is a yahtzee-inspired poker game with just a touch of cosmic horror [1] and a free-to-play word game [2].
I've been fortunate to get some featuring by Apple which has driven most of my sales. I'm hopeful the daily word game, Well Word, will start to take off because it's the best game I've made and I'm really proud of it.
I started working on Pine Tar Poker while I had a different job about 13 months ago and I've since switched to trying my hand at converting my side project into my full-time gig [3]! My short-term goal is to be able to pay my mortgage with the proceeds.
[1] https://www.pinetarpoker.com
[2] https://wellwordgame.com
[3] https://www.birdcartel.com
What do you see as your best routes to monetization on the Apple v. Android and how FTP differs on each platform? Also, what routes of promotion have you been taking to build a customer base?
Sorry to ask so many questions, but as a maker of personal projects which are games, I'm curious about the promotion and monetization of mobile games =)
I haven't yet tried an ad-supported game (with an IAP to remove ads), but I think those perform the best overall. Personally I'm opposed to ads for a number of reasons (privacy, bandwidth usage, ad quality), so I'm not sure I'll ever try one of those.
I was lucky to get my first game, Downwordly, as Game of the Day on iOS. This plus other sustained featuring (Essential Word Games) led to 50k+ downloads. Unfortunately I did a bad job with the IAP value proposition (both explaining it and what it actually is), so the conversion rate is abysmal (<1%). Pine Tar Poker was also Game of the Day a few weeks back and had some sustained featuring (Best New Games). That let me ship a few hundred copies over a few days but once the featuring dried up, the sales did too.
Well Word is currently featured under Best New Games and is getting decent download numbers in the mid 100s and has a great conversion rate of ~15%. I'm hopeful that it can continue to spread through word of mouth and the built-in score sharing.
I have made next to nothing on Android. I've never (that I know of) had any featuring and the Play Store doesn't have as many editorial pushes in my experience. To be honest, the download count and revenue from Android is such that I only release games there because it takes less than an hour or so (thanks Unity) and my brother uses Android.
I'm currently working on an expanded version of Pine Tar Poker for console + Steam so I'm interested to see what I can learn in that space! Let me know if you have any other questions. I hope hearing about my experience so far was helpful.
Not sure if you’re interested in feedback, but I found well world intimidating and didn’t understand the objective/affordances. Clicked it and had a bunch of letters and no idea what to do. Closed it. Looks pretty though.
Really appreciate the feedback, thank you. Truth be told, the website is kind of an after thought version of the game. The Android and iOS version are the real deal. If I haven't lost you entirely, and you like word games, please give it a shot on your phone.
I just tried well word, unlike a sibling comment I think it's fun :)
Though I have to agree that it's a bit unclear how to proceed at first. Maybe make a link to the tutorial more easily accessible, or even auto-suggested on first visit?
Thanks for giving it a shot! I used to automatically show the tutorial but then some folks would play on a phone versus their computer and have to see the tutorial again and skip it. I probably swung too far in accommodating that scenario and left new players confused when I removed that feature. I'll try to improve it, thanks for the feedback.
I mentioned it in another comment, but the mobile version (also free) is where I put most of my energy. If you liked the web version, please give it a try and let me know what you think. Appreciate the support!
Do you have a lengthier description of what Pine Tar poker is about?
I like Yahtzee so it interests me.
Thanks
At its core, Pine Tar is about making poker hands (two pair, full house, etc) with five cards using up to two extra deals. You can choose to keep cards around and replace other cards on each deal. There are usually ~12 hand types you can score, if you can't score anything the game is over.
As you play, you can use your winnings to buy items that give you an edge and transition your play from pure luck to more skill based. Along the way, you can have your fortune read to unlock puzzles that reward you with magick runes that can transform cards to allow you to score hands that at first glance are impossible.
Here's the trailer which shows some gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuLh8Ft4Uhg
Thanks for the reply. Looks good!
For https://scrapingfish.com/ it took us about 5-6 months from idea to $2k/month. It’s still not our main source of income. It was fun to build especially that it involved working with hardware.
I've got no use for it now but damn this used to be such a pain point in an old job. Looks great!
Just curious, so how exactly do you source your IPs? I clicked on the "How IPs for web scraping are sourced" page expecting an answer on how you do it, but it doesn't actually tell me that; it just tells me how they're not sourced. You said that "it involved working with hardware", so did you source your own mobile SIM cards in various countries, hook up your own phones to that and use those as proxies?
Good question. Here we explain, with a few simplifications, how we source our IPs: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scrap...
Wouldn't this mean that you're bandwidth constrained by the data plan associated with the SIM from the mobile carrier?
Yes, but we have so many plans and actually many of them are unlimited. We also track data usage and can either add extra data package or a SIM card gets excluded from our proxy pool.
Props to you guys for putting a complete tutorial on that and not keeping it for you. Cheers!
Thanks! Internally we use more sophisticated system required by larger scale to support higher volume and concurrent connections from multiple clients, but for smaller scale limited to one person or a small team, everything described on our blog should be enough.
Looks great, will give it a try.
Bug found: Your "Buy" page is missing the header bar for navigation etc.
edit: Contact page has the same problem. :-)
Actually, it’s a feature :)
Some of us find that type of attempted lock-in extremely off-putting. I know it is common, but just a heads up. I have no idea how much of a minority we are.
https://getoutline.com – A team knowledge base, hit $2k MRR a couple of months after turning on paid plans, has always been steady growth since then.
A few years in and almost reached what I'd consider v1 feature complete.
Very happy paid user, after testing many other offerings.
You're really onto something.
Thanks! Really appreciate the positivity
Your website is also really pretty, what did you use to make it?
https://github.com/outline/website has the source
Nice that you released the source. Some might say a little risky for a commercial hosted app. Not knocking it though. What made you decide to?
This seems very similar to Notion. I am currently a Notion user, how does this compare to Notion?
What would make me switch from Notion to Outline?
Depending on your goals, have you considered freelancing?
If your purpose is cash flow, freelancing can quickly generate $2000++ with much less risk than starting a SaaS.
That’s not to say starting a SaaS is a bad idea…but if pure short-term cash production is your goal, I’d consider finding clients who trust you to pay you hourly on the side.
FWIW, I’ve started 2 SaaS companies with a collective revenue of $0, and my side freelancing currently makes more than $2k/mo.
Lastly…it’s very possible that you have lots of other goals other than cash, and if so, good luck with your SaaS! I started MoneyHabitsHQ.com and it was one of the most fun learning activities of my career, despite not producing revenue.
I’ve tried freelancing a few times, I never manage to make it work. The clients I find all end up paying less than a “normal” job so I end up going back to that.
I’m working as a Solutions Engineer now. Its basically freelancing without sourcing customers and a consistently big pay cheque every month. Any tips on starting freelancing?
in my experience, the only thing that matters is who you know.
Being connected to the right business folks seems to be the key.
I was much more successful in creating a SaaS product, I've reached almost 3 digits of profits. But I still wouldn't suggest someone to do consulting because it's a different mindset. You can only earn money if you decide to work, while having a working SaaS project has great scaling potential, but I totally agree that it's far more riskier when you factor in opportunity costs.
>almost 3 digits of profits
I hope this is a typo, because $99/mo is nice to have, but I'd honestly consider the SaaS I'm building a failure if it made less than 4 digits a month.
Not a typo, just a snarky joke on the project's total income :)
I guess it depends what level someone considers a failure. It it keeps making money and trends are improving I wouldn't consider it a failure. For example 500 EUR would pay my rent so the bar is lower for me, but sure anything more than 1000 is already nice, especially if it doesn't require constant attention.
All of the projects listed were clearly a lot of work to build, but a) have the potential to scale up a lot in revenue and b) have the potential to scale down a lot in terms of active effort. I couldn't quit my job for a $2k/month project, but if I could spend some months of hard work building it and then just have a passive income stream, that would be super cool.
I would like to consider freelancing. Any pointers on how to go about in getting freelance projects? I am a full stack developer.
I built https://www.withphoton.com that helps people overlay multiple calendars in any timezone, and quickly format a message that contains your availability to save time and eliminate typos.
It's a simple keyboard-first electron app that hooks up with your Google / Outlook cal. Target market is folks who schedule meetings outside their org like founders, CSM, biz dev, sales, EAs, etc.
E.g. Do any of these times (CT) work for you?
April 13 (Thursday) * 3:30 pm - 4:00 pm
April 14 (Friday) * 2:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Since your pricing is a one-time fee, I assume you need to keep finding new customers to hit $2k / month.
Just curious, how do you market your product?
Yep - that's correct. My hunch was that people are tired of paying for subscriptions but would drop $20 on something that makes their life slightly better.
GTM is the hardest but mostly through referrals / word of mouth. I want to do more Twitter/LI ads.
Sorry, what is GTM?
Go to market?
GPT chimes in: In this context, GTM stands for "Go-To-Market." It refers to the strategy and tactics used to introduce and promote a product or service to potential customers.
Haha sorry - yeah as the kind person above says.. "go to market" -- just your question about how I take it to market.
Hey, I had bookmarked this and finally just took a look... and now realizing it's Mac-only, but nice work regardless. I think you are really on to something here... perhaps even more so if you could also include others internal to your company (where you can see availability) and then craft a similar copy/paste block of your broader team's availability (I must do this 10+ times/week!). Do you have any plans to port over to Windows?? :)
Started AwardFares (https://awardfares.com) back in 2018. It's a search engine for finding flights to book using your airline miles. Started as a side-project, completely bootstrapped and self-funded.
We hit $2k monthly revenue after about 1.5 years. Growth completely stopped during COVID, but is now growing very well (more than 10x that).
How do you earn money? Affiliate links?
How do you source the info?
This is a good idea, I was just thinking if something like this existed the other day. Good domain name too.
I make around that with each of my side projects:
- VidCap [1]
- AI Profile Pic [2]
- Mission Control Plus [3]
- Batteries [4]
- Kay [5] (makes less, currently at $600 MRR)
[1] https://vidcap.app/
[2] https://aiprofilepic.app/
[3] https://fadel.io/missioncontrolplus
[4] https://fadel.io/batteries
[5] https://usekay.xyz/
I use both Mission Control Plus and Batteries. Very useful!
No problem if don't want to answer, but I'm curious about what rough percentage of your income from those apps comes from Setapp? How does their compensation even work for a permanently running utility? As far as I know, there's not a lot of information out there about their business model and how they compensate developers.
Anyways, thanks for the useful apps.
Setapp income accounts between 10% and 30% depending on the app.
The Setapp SDK tracks usage time and the app makes a fraction of user monthly payments (factored by app price and user time spent on the app)
I built a Charades-game [1] for both iOS [2] and Android [3]. Launched last year and just recently got to around 2k a month, some months like December are of course better than let's say September because of holidays like New Year etc.
It took about 10-12 months reaching those numbers, and I'd say we still have lot's of room for improvement. It's also very low maintenance, but highly scalable. What I do is basically localise the game to as many big languages as I can, and then throw some ASO on it and hold my fingers. Haven't spent any dollars at all on the marketing otherwise.
[1] https://yangmeistudios.com/games-and-apps/charades [2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/charades-what-am-i/id159211843... [3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yangmeistu...
Try adding some 320x50, 300x250 ad inventory! It can be very profitable.
Thanks for the advise, we do have some full screen ads, but use it conservatively. It is always more satisfying getting revenues through in app purchases since it’s a sign that people value what I’ve created
ASO is like SEO for appstores?
Yep
Yes exactly
I launched DamnInteresting.com in 2005, and just last year it started consistently earning $2k/month. That's gross revenue, a goodly chunk of that goes out for hosting costs, research expenses, paying writers/editors, licensing fees, etc.
It's been interesting to see the changes in the audience over time. In 2005, 100% of our audience was desktop browser readers. Somewhere around 2011, mobile readers became the dominant group. Today, our biggest audience by far is podcast listeners. We'll probably need to start creating videos soon if we don't want to get left behind. And what comes next? AI-enhanced immersive binaural VR experiences? The future is weird.
What's your business model?
Mostly it is asking for reader/listener donations in a non-aggressive way. For example, if one is reading on the site, the request for donations appears only if one reaches the end of the text. If listening, the request comes after the story. This is supplemented by licensing our work occasionally to magazines, other websites, etc., and a wee bit of merchandising.
I've been a fan for over 15 years, just wanted to say thank you! Great content, super cool domain name too :)
I'm building Pirsch Analytics [0], a privacy-friendly web analytics tool. I think it took the two of us ~1.5 years to get to $2000 MRR. Currently we're setting just above $4000 MRR.
It started as an experiment for my personal website and I was in the same position as you're right now. We were already working on a Notion like app to take notes, but didn't make any money and probably went into the wrong direction. As my prototype seemed to work quite well, we decided to turn it into a product.
My initial goal was to do server-side analytics without the downsides of parsing access logs, but of course we now also have a "regular" JS snippet integration.
You can learn more about our journey here [1] and on our blog [2]. Let me know if you have any questions!
[0] https://pirsch.io
[1] https://pirsch.io/about-us
[2] https://pirsch.io/blog
Love it. That's great. Been looking for something like this. If you don't mind me asking -- did you do the landing page yourself? It looks really, really good.
Thanks! Yes we did that ourselfes :) We'll be adding a lot more content soon, it's nice but there is not much text, so no good for SEO.
A paying customer of pirsch with feature request for the dashboard: for page views stats, could you make more space for urls?
My urls aren't even that long but get truncated because they get only 30% of the space.
Make more space for links: allow me to hide some columns and persist that across sessions. I really don't care about bounce rate or percentages.
Also, a deadly sin of arrogant designers: in your infinite wisdom you decided to to limit the width of that page so even if I go fullscreen I don't see the full URL but a lot of unused space. Why do you hate me?
Hey thanks for your suggestions! I think we can most of that work. A full-width dashboard is on our list already, so we can include that in the next bigger update, which will also have the option to white label your dashboard.
I don't know if that counts, but I see it as a tech side project.
Last year I've built for my gf, a custom D2C (direct to client) ecommerce webapp [0] for her handmade products.
Then I started looking into PPC, tracking, social advertisement & marketing etc.. Now we are profitable avg ~8k / month only on retail.
[0] https://yuma.gr
Why not use something like shopify?
Because I want 100% control and flexibility. It would take me more time to do this in shopify as it holds a lot of custom behavior and it has many automations on the backend.
Also with a custom admin dashboard we were able to scale a lot in our & employee's productivity
[edit]
I would use shopify for bootstraping temporary viral campaigns for niche products.
Tbh, it makes complete sense.
I always wonder who "owns" the property such as this in the event of a breakup
She. I don't keep all the eggs in the same basket.
*edit typos
This is not a large company or a fully established business. The value could be derived from both, or only from one side. If the value is derived from the metrics setup that OP has implemented, he can re-produce this with another creator. Think about it as two partners (one developer and one designer) starting a freelancing business. There is no "business" to own.
This.
I'm already doing kinda the same work with 2 established ecommerce B2B industry businesses, one in US and one in my country, and I'm getting payed a percentage of the gross profit from online sales & leads.
We have a competitive advantage because no competitor on these sectors has an "in-house" dev for ecommerce ops.
This is great. Curious, have you scaled the "making" operation, as in have you hired people to make products, or does your gf still make all the products?
Thank you!
Yes she still makes all the products (with help though now) as she finds a lot of enjoyment doing it and as we're trying to find shortcuts for our work, she found her ways on becoming more productive on the making process. At some point this whole thing became unmanageable, especially on Christmas.
Now the business operates with 3 people on board, me for the digital part, she for the art behind the brand and another one person full time for order management, client support, helping on the making etc..
And very soon we'll hire one more and move out of the house to a bigger space because we'll enable B2B as there is demand on these kind of products.
Sounds really cool. Best of luck moving forward and scaling out.
If I got my side project to generate $2k/month it would no longer be my side project!
In many places (most places), it would be hard for 2k/month be your full income.
I think the point is it would probably be well worth spending more time on. Either tapering off employed work, or being underpaid/using savings for a little bit while you push to increase it.
At least, that was my reaction too, and it seems echoed by many of the people sharing their ('no longer a side') projects.
(?) That's higher than min wage (post taxes) in most western countries, for most small saas/web projects/apps with small operating costs that's plenty
Not many people would be able to give up their day job for a saas that has a revenue of slightly more than minimum wage.
> In many places (most places)
You might benefit from looking more broadly (friendly suggestion).
Your "friendly suggestion" is extremely rude.
Stating that 2k/month is not enough income for "most places" is ridiculous and rude in a way too. Was an unnecessary comment.
No offense intended. I was merely pointing out that it’s not much for many places and many would not be able to leave a full-time job for that. Keep in mind that this is approximately the poverty line for the United States so it might be hard for most people to leave a full-time gig for that.
It’s a nice start though!
I run a service that lets browser extension developers easily take payments in their extensions: https://extensionpay.com
Started making $0.15 a day and has taken a couple years to make decent monthly revenue. One cool thing is that it's also helped developers make a lot of money — over $200k so far and growing!
I built prop_odds [1]. It's an API offering live (and historical) sports betting odds from different sites.
I've been working on it for about 2 months. While not quite at 2k/month yet, it's nearly there and progressing in that direction. Revenue is coming from several customers who are using the data to build Discord bots that alert them (and their own paying users) about good odds, arbitrage opportunities, etc.
[1] https://www.prop-odds.com
I guess you scrape odds from bookmakers' websites (I expecxt a fair bit of headless Selenium). Is there any legal implication of scraping data this way and reselling re-packaged as an API?
Some books we're able to partner with and they give us an API to access the data through. Other we do need to scrape, given that there is no explicit "you can't do that" in their Terms & Conditions. Some books do have such a statement, so we aren't able to offer those.
Nice! I been looking for this last week actually. But would help if you list which sites you actually have. I have no idea if you have the sites im looking for and would love to know that before signing up.
Hey, sorry for a late reply! I've just updated our website's Features page [0]. It lists all the sportsbooks and sports we currently support, and what will be added next.
[0] https://www.prop-odds.com/features
$0 still, and haven't launched.
But since I literally just deployed my new landing page for the Early Access, and looking to launch by the end of the month, I figure I might talk about it.
I'm working on Bernard (https://bernard.app), a link checker service for website owners. Since the job market is tight, I figured I might go all in into what I hope will become a profitable, lean, one-person business.
Hoping to reach ramen profitability within the next 12 months.
GPT Gmail and GPT Workspace, using GPT in the google docs, slides, sheets and auto responder for Gmail.
https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/gpt_for_gma...
https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/gpt_for_doc...
https://gpt.space
The best part is not even about the money but about having a lot of users, democratising GPT and saving a lot of human hours everyday!
When did you launch? Seems like very good revenue if you launched recently and already reached 2000/month considering the low price and high cost of the OpenAI API.
Edit: Your T&C says it was written in 2019, you can't possibly been running the project since then right? https://gpt.space/terms-of-service
Don't trust any numbers here blindly sir.
Without verification you don't know if any of them are marking $2k+
Hence the additional questions :) Making $2k+ in just a month (GPT4 API access opened for invite-only) would mean a ton of users quickly, which is hard to believe.
The apps have over 250k installs you can see on the Marketplace listings
I run an iOS app on the side thats at ~$2500 MRR. It lets you generate music playlists from a prompt, like "make me a playlist for music to listen to while coding". I launched in January and it took 2 weeks to get the first $2k in revenue.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/playlistai-playlist-maker/id16...
How did you market the app? Or did people just find it in the App Store?
Twitter mostly - https://twitter.com/brettunhandled/status/161317951121827840...
It was also picked up by FastCompany, TechCrunch, some others, which has helped people continue to find it
Is the business model in-app purchases? For what do the users pay?
I made Dynobase [1], an alternative GUI for DynamoDB. Passed 2k/mo few years ago. Runs 100% automatically now, I spend ~2h/week mostly responding to customer inquiries. I could leave my full time job but I just like it (and money) too much.
[1] https://dynobase.dev
You made Dynobase? Dude such a needed product - the DDB GUI is awful inside AWS and painfully slow to work with.
Been trying to convince my manager to buy personal licenses for everyone on my team - glad to support this excellent product.
Do you mind sharing what UI / component framework you use? It looks great!
Please! Give me some breadcrumbs here. Do you just hook into the AWS API/CLI?
Some really interesting projects here! I've been working on my own SaaS project called CorOpera (https://www.coropera.com) for almost a year now. It's a cap table management solution for early-stage startups, helping them manage their cap table, do some bookkeeping, stay legally compliant, and potentially retain employees by offering them stock options. While not quite at the $2k/month mark yet, we're steadily approaching it.
I have an engineering background so breaking into the marketing and sales domain has been quite a journey. It's been a roller coaster of ups and downs, but I remain hopeful.
One of the things I've enjoyed most about building your own thing is just talking to other founders and learning about their experiences. While the dataset has not been large enough to make quantity compensate for quality, I've still learned quite a bit.
It's been fascinating to read about everyone's side projects, and I'm curious to know if any other founders here have faced challenges with fundraising bookkeeping or cap table in general. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
My "side project" makes ~$5K/month but I am constantly worried about it not continuing to bring that in, so I keep my day job which is WFH and very easy.
I also never share it because I am concerned about a competitor coming in.
Took me about 6 months from publishing my app to hit $2k and another 3 months to hit $5k.
Edit: to clarify, I sell a physical product, so there are added costs in terms of manufacturing, shipping, stock keeping, etc...
Talk about a teaser!
I made Cleavr as a desktop app first and gave it away for free. I got lots of downloads as well as lots of support requests. To keep support tickets away I put a small price tag on it. People still kept downloading and reaching out for support (not necessarily bugs but eben if they have their app issues). I then decided to go the path of a cloud SAAS app. The desktop app didn't hit $2k mostly be ause the price tag was small and I just wanted to do good and give it away. Once I went cloud, it took only about 4 months to hit $2k per month.
[1] https://cleavr.io
I have two: (it's 50% just ship something, 50% luck) but in my humble opinion few ppl are lucky enough to make it big with their first 5 or 10 projects. Just figure out how can you ship many things per year !
[0] fibretiger.co.za - Price comparison for fibre internet services in South Africa. It's an extremely fragmented market, we have about 10 fibre networks (10 that matters) and twice as many ISPs
[1] littlebigstats.com - Corrective Maintenance and Planned Maintenance for Restaurants or anything with assets and 10+ branches (KFC Kenya) is one our clients. You will be surprised how many org are trying todo PPM and CM with a whatsapp group and spreadsheet. We even implemented a version (you have to squint a little) of SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) methods so you just have to define the "rules and boundaries" for a good and efficient maintenance process. Example: any new tickets logged by branches should be assigned within 1 hour. Or no more than 20% of your corrective maintenance tickets can have a "AWAITING PARTS" status. etc.
Open source GPS tracking platform - Traccar (https://www.traccar.org/). I think picking a small B2B niche is the best way to become successful. You're not going to be super rich, but you can have a good stable lifestyle business.
Technical books.
I started writing in 2011. After a few books I was able to do look during launches but sales fell dramatically after.
Now I have a couple books doing $2k / month.
Since I do corporate training I have probably made dramatically more than this from the marketing from my books but don't really have a way to track that.
https://store.metasnake.com/
I run Bear Blog [1] an opinionated, simple, and speedy blogging platform.
It runs as a freemium SaaS and is turning a healthy profit. There area about 15k blogs running on the platform right now.
I ran it completely free for about 2 and a half years. When I added the "upgrade" with some add-ons it jumped to $2k a month in a matter of weeks.
[1] https://bearblog.dev
What do you find your customers are looking for that other blogging platforms don't provide?
As a paying customer, the combination of dead simple MD and the ability to run with my own domain. It’s easier to get a blog up than to make a sandwich.
How do you compare it with superblog? It is run by a Linkedin connection and I keep hearing about it.
Related ongoing thread:
Ask HN: Side projects making less than $2k MRR, what's your project? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35571486
Not really $2K/mo but I run a SaaS for pest control businesses that brings in $100K/mo and started this business during the pandemic.
Can you share your company's website?
Is this an on demand platform like uber?
You have a good idea here.. Even though I feel it already exists even on my local market.
Don't let "already exists in my local market" stop you. Look at how many pizza places exist in your local market! In almost any market, there's room for competition, especially with an eye toward lifestyle business (as opposed to dominating a market).
Is it a platform to connect providers and customers? What's the business model?
What geographic region?
So it's a "business management platform", but for pest control businesses ?
We AirBnB the spare bedroom in our basement and it brings in about $2k/month.
If in the US, major metro?
That's a relevant question. We're in Toronto, Canada, so the revenue is also in CAD and is net of expenses and AirBnB fees.
Even in USD, $2k/month has vastly different buying power depending on location. It doesn't go far in SF or NYC but would get you a lot more in rural locations or smaller cities.
$2k/month CAD in Toronto is decent but still a long way from "ramen profitable".
I've thought about doing this from time to time. We have a horse farm and a "tiny home" type building out in the back, with a port-a-potty and views of horses and the sunrise could probably make a few thousand a month on AirBnB and pay for itself pretty quickly.
But then we'd have to deal with people :-(
I am a gift card reseller. Pretty much, there are marketplaces where you can sell gift cards and cd keys for games and when a customer places an order, I make an API call to procure that item and deliver it.
Currently at 70k Euros a month. It took me about 3 years to get here. And it took a few months to get to 2k monthly revenue.. However, the first two months I was at break even and it took me about a year before I could figure out how to get this system running profitably. Currently profit margins are about 7%
Have you had any issues with the authorities or law enforcement? Are you planning on shutting it down once you reach a certain figure? (I ask, since this seems very risky!)
I only go to authorized distributors, where the brand themselves has approved the vendor to resell the cards. For game keys, I haven't done anything in bulk, but the best route is going directly to the publisher and getting permission, but this requires large order commitments and game prices fluctuate too much and can be super risky.
My real biggest risk though is when I open up my own store is chargebacks. Digital goods have a very very high chargeback risk, and I need to be clever on how I mitigate that!
How does this work exactly? Are you doing arbitrage?
Often left unsaid in the "gift card" (or, "game key reseller" market) is that the items are acquired illegally and resold for a profit. This is money laundering territory, and is very easy to run afoul of the law.
Fraudulently obtained inventory is actually something I actively want to avoid. I don't want to go to jail, or risk getting banned from marketplaces - among ethical considerations.... I only go to authorized distributors where there is legal permission to resell these types of items. Incomm being the largest. Blackhawknetwork being another large player.
Do you have to deal with gift cards legally obtained but obtained anonymously using illegal money?
E.g. https://news.cybersixgill.com/how-gift-cards-are-used-to-lau...
What happened to Cardpool was pretty messed up! I knew some people in the industry who knew the people in charge and mentioned that one day they just started getting a bunch of complaints, and then bam - out of business.
But yes! especially in b2b sells. I always try to be super anal about kyc with selling to business buyers in bulk, and avoid buying from them. I straight up stick to institutional suppliers to avoid this issue :(
Correct! customer buys a playstation $10 card for $9.80, I buy it for $9.20, and pocket the spread.
What is the wholesale source for the gift cards and CD keys?
There's a bunch of shady ones that I avoid, and the really big legal ones are blackhawk networks and incomm. Becoming an official distributor requires a lot of vetting from their side though, so it isn't like any joe blow can apply and get approval.
We need a thread on projects making <20$ a month and what went wrong, and maybe HN's comments can right that ship.
I started building Requestly (https://requestly.io) as a side-project back in 2014 and It took me pretty much every Saturday for 7y to hit ~$2K revenue and to get few companies paying for the product. It was slightly hard to monetize chrome extension due to lack of payments APIs support in chrome ecosystem. I actually went full time in Sep'21 and was fortunate enough to get into YC(W22). Now we are a small team based in India building Requestly.
Requestly is an open-source [1] Chrome & Firefox extension [2] that I started to help me in faster web development by capturing & modifying network requests directly in the browser without using any external tools. It eventually replaced Charles & Fiddler for many companies but now we are building a desktop version[3] too.
On a side note, Side Projects are a long-term game but the good part is you can do multiple along with your job and pick the one getting more traction. For example - I did many other side projects but continued with Requestly for 2 reasons - I was using it myself almost everyday and It was gaining organic traction.
Good luck in finding the project of your calling.
[1]: https://github.com/requestly/requestly
[2]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/requestly-redirect...
[3]: https://requestly.io/desktop
Built https://remoteleaf.com to help remote job seekers.
We hand-pick remote jobs from all over the internet and send you the personalised list of remote jobs that are fit for you.
It took 2 years to reach $2k revenue and I lost interest in this project due to a lot of manual work. With the advancements in AI, I'm planning to focus on it again.
You've invested a lot of time on this! I doing something similar (completely automated) for another niche, let me know if you wanna exchange ideas (twitter in bio).
I made an online course over a 6 month period and then did a little over $40k in revenue the first year. It’s slowed down quite a bit now. Haven’t decided if I’ll do it again or not. It was quite a bit of work, and having a full time job and young family, not sure the money is worth it.
What was the course?
https://www.monoclesecurity.com
High performance AI video streaming server and clients for a variety of platforms.
Took several years before the product was in an acceptable state to begin selling, it's been about 10 years since I began.
Cool. I made one of these too. Open source though... github.com/dicroce/revere
My friend and I built https://apitude.co/ around 4 years ago as a side project. It consists of a group of REST APIs like this: https://apitude.co/en/docs/services/renapo-mx/
The site did: - $200 a month the first year. - $900 a month the second year. - $2K a month the third year. - $5K a month the third year. (We started working full time). - $9K a month this year.
Even when it was only a side project it demanded a lot of work, but we love the space so it was ok.
I've built a software called Mino that creates a frontend for managing enterprise accesspoint deployments in student housings. Super niche. It allows the students to set up their own WiFi and it offers a backend system for the janitors that typically do the support out in the field.
I charge around between $20-30k everytime a new setup is created and for each customer I charge around $650 per month for the SLA. Additional development is offered at $155 per hour. Currently I have three different installations that net me around $2100 per month in addition to extra features here and there.
It took around 2-3 years before I hit $2k.
I've been building Zigpoll [1] over the past 4-5 years as a solo project. It's a micro survey platform (Saas) that can live on any website and can be triggered at key moments during your customer journey. I found a niche in post-purchase surveys for Shopify which helped get me over the 2K mark and build a meaningful customer feedback loop I could iterate on to find a tighter product market fit (very meta for a survey platform I know). This took about three years to hit and it helped greatly to be on an app store since it's a full service marketing channel which 1. is my weakest skillset and 2. you want all the leverage you can get if it's a part time project.
The post purchase survey angle is growing steadily but the platform was built to be flexible so I'm looking for other use-cases to focus on what competitors don't currently service for a phase 2.
Also recently it's been a great way to experiment with OpenAI and see what all the buzz is about. So far the ChatGPT API has been very impressive at spotting trends in user-provided data to share with our customers. Honestly this feature alone makes me consider focusing on it full time; but it would be a bit of a leap financially given current circumstances.
TLDR: I recommend building something, keeping your head on a swivel, getting feedback (being on an app store or marketplace makes this easier) and adjusting as rapidly as possible if you want to get paid and have a shot at bootstrapping bigger.
[1] https://www.zigpoll.com
I've been working on https://webtoapp.design since December 2019. I cracked $2k/month after around 2 years.
Could've probably done it quicker if I did more things that don't scale (as people often say). Should've focused less on SEO and more on outreach or other growth channels.
I've since got my CS degree and I'm working on it full time now :)
How does it work? Do you upload an SPA and then you download something that can be uploaded to the appstore?
How can your customers be sure you do not inject any faulty or malicious stuff into their apps?
The apps work similar to a browser, so we don't need access to the website's source code. And yes, for Android you get the aab file you can upload to Google Play. For iOS, we upload the app to your developer account for you, since that's the easiest way there.
We obviously don't inject malicious stuff since that'd ruin our reputation immediately (& open us up to lawsuits). I could see that happening with free app builders, but we make our money from subscription fees, so we have no need to turn to such illegal stuff to monetize the apps.
Even going open source wouldn't solve the issue, since most customers wouldn't be able (due to lack of technical knowledge) to compile the app themselves.
I built and run UXWizz (https://uxwizz.com), the revenue varies, but averages around $2k per month in a year.
It is not a service, but has one-time payments, so there is no stable MRR figure. It was initially sold through CodeCanyon, here's a graph with my earnings there: https://i.snipboard.io/7lubPE.jpg
Being a one-man-team, I tried to keep operation as simple as possible and automate the processes that could be automated.
I created a SaaS CRM/DMS for manufactured housing retailers ("mobile home" dealerships.) Monthly gross is about $4,000. Expenses other than my own time are $400 per month for the server. So about $3,600 a month net.
The MH industry contracted drastically after the 2008/2009 financial crisis, and the handful of dealership software companies still in the industry went under. So I basically have the market to myself right now. The total market is not very big, though - maybe 1,500 independent manufactured housing "street dealerships" in the USA at this point.
I have 15-ish paying customers right now. I'd love to be able to spend all my time on growing the business, but I've been too afraid to quit the other freelance dev work I do. Also, I unwisely took on a big contract that I haven't been able to finish in a timely manner, which is dragging me down. I wish I'd spent that time growing the MH SaaS instead.
how did you even find this niche?
My father owned a successful mobile home dealership for about 40 years. As a teenager, and later in college, I did grunt work (mostly manual labor) at the business in the summers.
Later, in my mid-thirties, I left corporate software development for six or seven years, and managed the business for my dad. While I was there I wrote software to help me manage things, which, after I left the business to return to software development, I turned into the SaaS product which I've sold to other dealerships.
I run Ekofi Nova (https://nova.ekofi.capital). We are building & validating your dream SaaS product, as an MVP.
Plans are: $1500/mo, $2000/mo, $2500/mo. The difference is the effort - we're more into the highest priced projects. Currently have 2 customers.
We currently make about $3K per month with https://www.hiyodel.com - ChatGPT-powered copywriting for Shopify stores. The Shopify ecosystem is a toughie and it's been a difficult road so far, but it's great having the "passive" income!
I'm looking forward to learning more about why the shopify ecosystem is toughie? I had considered launching a data analytics system that we're using to monitor shopify site.
We are also launching our product now. It will be available for trial on a free introductory. I don't think about monetization. Just want to make a useful product. I have created many different websites for myself. But I was always apprehensive that my sites could be hacked at any moment, and data and money from projects could be stolen. Therefore, I decided to assemble a team of experienced enthusiastic engineers and develop a scanner that protects against site destruction, theft of personal information, and implementation of data that changes the database and its content. Hope this will be helpful.
We built pepchecker.com (Saas) as a weekend side project back in 2019 and have been slowly adding functionality over the course of a few years. It's now profitable and growing pretty rapidly. If we had put more effort into it, I think we could have crossed the $2k mrr threshold in a year.
I made exactly $2 (two) dollars on my expense tracking app this month
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/logs-pure-expense-tracker/id64...
I run Loopz Gift Cards (https://www.loopz.io). First line of code in 2012, pivoted in 2016, launched in 2019 and took about a year and half to get to $2k/month. At $18k atm. Switched to full-time a year ago.
Yield farming crypto currency, make well over $2k per month. Some farms pay 50 to 70% interest
Still?
Plenty of places, check out https://app.velodrome.finance/ for one
I found the high yields were always on shitcoins (where projects occasionally rug), or lost due to impermanent loss.
I'd love to be able to find more than 10% consistently on something like USDC
There are places to get > 10% on stables. But always the risk of rugs / hacks, you need to diversify. This is a crazy game, but if you are a software engineer it's a good side hustle / hobby to earn more money. I'm always mentally ready to lose 100%, it's about growing your stack and siphoning off some amount from the interest every week. I enjoy it
Technically you can lose more than 100% because you owe taxes on your staking rewards.
Where's a good place to learn about this stuff
Not knowing what your technical abilities are, a potential place to start going down the rabbit hole is https://www.coinbase.com/learn
The Bitcoin Standard explains the philosophical underpinnings of why this isn’t a big Ponzi and there is real material value to stateless money:
The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking https://a.co/d/bC6XZqm
I am building Polotno SDK (https://polotno.com/). It a mix of SaaS and paid javascript library and react components. It is a design editor that you can integrate into your web app. From the first paying customer it took around 1 year to get 2000 MRR. And I spent around 9 months on making first version before the first paying customer.
It took me a very long time to find the idea of SDK. Previously I was thinking only about B2C cases. B2C market is already VERY crowded with Canva and million of its competitors. But B2B market was almost empty when I started.
How did you market it?
* Wide Angle Analytics https://wideangle.co – to go beyond simple web analytics alternatives to Google Analytics (paid); SaaS; web with mobile-friendly dashboards
* Not Robot https://notrobot.eu – online CAPTCHA; beta live; GA coming soon :) (free); SaaS;
We support open start-ups https://wideangle.co/open, but we are not publishing our numbers :)
thanks for sharing. How does Not Robot generate revenue?
It does not.
It is a project I use for other projects of mine. Furthermore, it has very little overhead, i.e.: it is cheap to operate to the point I am happy to do it and make a dent in reCAPTCHA land grab.
It is still backed by real business with SLA and operational support. It is free, but it is not a toy.
I am considering adding analytics (hit/miss) for a symbolic fee. But time will show if there is interest.
I have build Psono, an open source password manager. The company was founded about 2.5 years ago (during the high times of COVID) and it was generating $4k on average directly from start. One should mention that I developed the product for a couple of years before I started the company and already had customers alined before I founded the company. I was running it then for 1.5 years as a side project and then beginning of this year decided to quit my cozy WFH, well paid, not stressfull day job to work full time on it (with recession and mass layoffs in the news).
I built Newsy. It's a tool that automatically generates content-aggregators. I focus on people who have domain names that are unused.
https://www.newsy.co
Isn't the revenue per generated site super low? How can domain owners put in all the work to bring their own monetization and still pay you?
Not sure having a service that generates spammy websites is a good thing.
Quite a long time ago, I had some success with finding things that were custom made and making tools to better model/simulate what the end product would look like. So, for example, some place that sells custom pendants/necklaces with a name on it. A front-end that lets people enter the name and produces a photo-realistic rendering of the necklace can drive sales they wouldn't otherwise get. I got past $1k/mo in revenue, but then had to put it aside for reasons unrelated to the work.
I'm at about $700/mth but I don't see why I can't make it to $2k monthly. It's a Slackbot [1,2] that assists user story refinement for Jira. If you're a SWE that uses agile methodology this may be interesting to you.
[1] https://slack.com/apps/A01EL1SR7V4-groomba [2] https://groomba.ai
Payment processing [1]
Website builder / development [2]
Both are side and I'm currently ramping them both up now that they are self sustaining and I can focus on hiring sales agents and app devs.
[1] https://clearpayments.ca or US https://clearmerchantsol.com
[2] https://sytescope.com
Typo on https://clearpayments.ca/
> Making it easy for owner to fine apps to streamline their processes.
learnpython.org
Generates ~10k/month. Plus, teaches a bunch of people how to code for free :)
Where’s the money coming from? Subscription?
Also how much time it took to reach that point?
Probably from ads. I just wonder whether those 10k are coming from learn python alone or all 'learn' websites combined. I'm actually developing a Codecademy 'clone' for Brazil and have looked at these sites for reference.
Took about 5 years. Right now it's just ads but I'm trying to make revenue from certifications now.
That's super nice, mate! I love teaching and am building a website to teach programming myself. Now, if its ok for you to disclose, how do you manage the evaluation/testing of user submitted code in the backend? Thanks and congratS!
I just review the pull requests :)
I built https://kpopping.com, a platform for international fans of Korean music. It's been six grueling years (what they say about b2c is completely true) but these days we bounce around from $3k-5k in monthly revenue.
I estimate we have another two-three years before we are finished... +_+
Via ads?
Yep. We also have a subscription available https://kpopping.com/subscription/plus
The subscription costs money? I don't see any info about pricing.
Yeah, it's $30 a year, you need to sign in to be able to subscribe for it though
I run https://pricetable.io on a part-time/side-project basis. We are currently hovering around $6k/mo.
I think it took us a couple of years to break the $2k/mo threshold.
Doing about 5k/mo passive income on my addon for a popular children's game. Took about 4years to get here though, COVID was massive for the genre. Only costs are time and file hosting, which comes out at about $50/mo.
roblox?
I run a bookmarking site https://backtoit.io I haven't gotten to 2k yet but getting very close.
I don't really see any links to your site. How are you getting traffic?
Sorry for spamming my blog but maybe you'll find it useful. https://pawelurbanek.com/anonymous-slack-bot-income this post describes my journey to total 50k profit from my bootstrapped side-project. TLDR it took 5 years. Current MRR is at ~3k USD.
This is cool, thanks for sharing. How did you find or form the mastermind group you mentioned in the post?
Friends from local IT communities that are also into "indie" stuff. But I believe it should be possible to reach out to people from online communities like indiehackers to form a group. There's also YC startup school https://www.startupschool.org/ that does matchmaking for founders.
You Exec started as a side project, ARR at $2.2m now — but decreasing
I don't recommend starting a profit-oriented side project. Money comes with it's hussle. It will eventually take the fun part of the process.
My entire life is side projects
I am trading micro contracts. And been able to make money