Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2020 – Show and tell

5 years ago

It seems this question hasn't been asked for some time, so I'd be interested hear what new (and old) ideas have come up.

77 comments

folli

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jollofricepeas  5 years ago

Still working my day development job and now doing about $150k/month in a side project with 10 employees.

- make lists and use them!

- block lunches use them for meetings

- have day job pay your healthcare

- day job work stops on time! no meetings before 9 or after 5

- leverage your “No” to all frivolous time wasters

- focus on day job, side project, family, one hobby for exercise (4-6 hrs/ week)

- get really good at delegating and automating tasks

- hire overseas contractors to do menial, repetitive tasks that can’t be automated

- don’t sell software instead find something “real” that can be enhanced with software

- identify a customer and charge upfront; it’s the only way you’ll learn

  • weka  5 years ago

    Care to share what you are building?

    > don’t sell software instead find something “real” that can be enhanced with software

    Expand? :)

    • jollofricepeas  5 years ago

      We sell paper.

      I’d focus on anything other than software but use software development principles to make some part of the business more efficient whether it’s idea generation, product development, manufacturing or marketing.

    • blackrock  5 years ago

      I wonder if he sells printed silkscreen T-shirt’s? And found a way to automate some of the labor.

  • dhruvkar  5 years ago

    Very interesting! My day job is selling something "real" (stone slabs). What sorts of margins are you making in paper?

    • jollofricepeas  5 years ago

      Paper has the highest margins outside of software and maybe sunglasses but none of the regularly recurring revenue or growth rates

  • kim0  5 years ago

    That sounds very interesting! Care to explain a bit, what is something real? How do I tell?

    • jollofricepeas  5 years ago

      Real means a physical product where the consumer knows they have to pay upfront for the good. It really can be anything provided there’s a market.

      Locate a nice size consumer market where they hasn’t been much innovation and the consumer is passionate. Then run low-cost tests.

      Examples: - Stance with socks - Curves with women’s gyms - There are a ton of examples but what as engineers you want is a good that can be sold via the internet

jasonkester  5 years ago

I started WebRender back in the spring to scratch a personal itch. Was lucky enough to get a couple good reference customers early on so it's already bringing in enough to keep the lights on:

https://webrender.io/

Basically, it's a quick and easy way to get SSR up and running for sites that use modern frontend frameworks for their whole site. It seems that every team I work with needs to jump through the same crazy set of hoops and stand up servers just so they can serve pre-rendered pages to search engines.

Our thing solves the problem by sitting in front of your site (using Cloudflare Workers), passing regular traffic through, and showing crawlers a cached, pre-rendered version.

Best (for me), it's designed to fail open, meaning customers are unaffected if my stuff falls over. Thus, letting me have things like weekends and sleep.

milanspeaks  5 years ago

I have a revenue of around $2500 for my productized SaaS SEO business with 20% profit margin. I sell SEO, Content and Graphic design service at a fixed rate of $599/month to SME's.

In this amount I provide 4000 words of content, 6 good quality graphics and few quality backlinks. Anything on top of this is a paid add-on.

I have hired a team of SEO Specialists, Content Writers and Graphic Designers. Most of my revenue goes in paying their salaries.

I found few takers(all dentists) of my service from Australia.

The best thing is that I have not even built any website or any FB, Instagram Page and still I am making this money through my old contacts.

I guess with my website launching in next few days, I should be able to sell even more and reach to around 100 customers in next year or two.

orkj  5 years ago

Built https://violinist.io for updating php (composer) dependencies automatically to scratch my own itch. Now comfortably making a profit after server costs and so on.

Best advice I would give:

Implement features for paying or potential paying customers first. They already love the service and this will boost word of mouth reputation in a SaaS segment.

brtkdotse  5 years ago

It's probably a bit different from the usual HN side-projects, but I sell stickers on the internet. A bunch of print shops went belly up during this spring and I accidentally won an auction for the machinery for a song.

So far I've been selling by word-of-mouth, and in September I started an Etsy store. I'm also building https://egnastickers.se, but that landing page alone made me €100 in sales.

I'm close to €1k in sales for October on Etsy and I'm racing to sell as much as possible before the end of the year when Brexit wipes out more than half my current customer base.

  • Jefro118  5 years ago

    Why does Brexit wipe out your customers?

    • brtkdotse  5 years ago

      When Britain no longer is a part of EU I’d have to get an export permit and my British customers would have to pay import tariffs. It doesn’t make financial sense any more.

e9  5 years ago

Trading options on Robinhood

  • giantg2  5 years ago

    I'll upvote on the options, but I don't endorse RH for most. They are slow to react to corporate actions and have more glitches than others.

    • e9  5 years ago

      That’s fair. I use robinhood to get odds on option trades and mostly trade on Schwab, I hate Schwab interface though but I trust them to protect my money and trades more than robinhood.

  • bratak  5 years ago

    May share your strategy?

    • e9  5 years ago

      I sell puts a week out at the strike price where I have about 90% chance of winning(Robinhood provides the odds). Obviously you get it wrong sometimes so you have to buy the shares so I always trade on stocks that I don’t mind owning. If I buy the shares then I sell call option a week out at the strike price equal or higher than what I paid to buy shares and it usually comes back up within a month or so.

      6 replies →

anmolparashar  5 years ago

https://www.useCastup.com – Podcast Editing as a Productized Service.

We build and work with software that cuts the editing time by 70% which allows us to offer our sevices at (somewhat) cheap rates while keeping the quality super high.

Started with a team of freelancers, now we have both freelancers and people working full-time.

Edit: I lead product for SF based startup as my full-time job.

XCSme  5 years ago

Currently I'm making around $1k-$2k/month with a self-hosted analytics platform https://www.usertrack.net , but I recently switched to working on it full-time so I hope to be able to grow it enough to make a living out of it.

amzans  5 years ago

I’m building a private analytics suite for websites. It aims to be a more complete toolset than alternatives like Plausible, Fathom or Simple Analytics (great products too BTW). Feeling super lucky as I just launched and already handling millions of page views per month for 200+ customers.

Not yet at $500 MRR but I’m focusing on providing a lot of value in a simple package, and automating as much as possible to reduce daily operations and move fast.

The stack mainly consists of Python, React, Postgres, Clickhouse, and Redis running on Kubernetes (deployment configured via Terraform and Kustomize). Was running on DO + Linode and just moved to AWS.

https://panelbear.com

Happy to answer any questions!

  • hodgesrm  5 years ago

    Hey, that's cool! I run the SF Bay Area ClickHouse Meetup. We like hearing about new analytic apps. Let me know if you want to do a talk about how you are using ClickHouse. Our next meetup going to be in early December.

    My email is on my profile if you want to contact me directly.

    • amzans  5 years ago

      Hey thanks for considering me! I do intend to write a few blog posts about how I use Clickhouse, but I'll get in touch if anything.

  • XCSme  5 years ago

    Your landing page looks cool!

    > It aims to be a more complete toolset

    I tried clicking the "Features" page but I didn't see any features listed, in what sense is it more complete than the mentioned alternatives?

    • amzans  5 years ago

      Thanks for the feedback! I have to improve the feature section.

      As I just launched the MVP, I don't offer yet some of the more advanced features, but I will focus on them for the coming months.

      Here are some ideas I've been bouncing around with some customers:

      - Filter by any dimension on the dashboards.

      - More performance metrics (like time to first paint and Apdex scores).

      - Automated insights and anomaly detection (i.e. "XYZ page has a higher bounce rate than normal this week" or "Visitors coming from Y spend 50% more time on your website.").

      As it's an early stage product, I'm still pivoting the direction constantly to find my niche.

      2 replies →

m1guelpf  5 years ago

I started Sitesauce[1] to provide an easy way to make your website/blog static, without worrying about plugins and finding an alternative for your specific stack.

It allows you to enter an URL and deploy a static clone to Vercel in seconds. You can also configure it so that it updates your static side as soon as you change something on the dynamic one.

[1]: https://sitesauce.app

merkul204  5 years ago

built https://buyfunnyaprons.com/ - would love to get feedback and suggestions on what we can do to improve. POD store thats fully online. Thanks

  • ir123  5 years ago

    Small nitpick: the prices shown in Rupees which got me excited and lead me to believe that the product ships to India. But it doesn't seem so after visiting /pages/shipping. (btw you should probably make this page more easy to find)

    • merkul204  5 years ago

      hi thanks for the feedback really appreciate it! The currency converter automatically changes to the website visitors' region. TBH, we haven't had a huge amount of enquiries from Indian customers but we actually do ship it there, for the trouble here is a 15% off coupon (FUNNY15%!). I've set up shipping to India so pls let me know if you would still like to purchase. Thanks

  • solution-finder  5 years ago

    Just stopping by to say this is an excellent idea with beautiful execution. If there is a product with ‘geek humor’ I’ll buy right away!

jwho82  5 years ago

https://logmyhours.com - Time Tracking & Invoicing Software. Floating around the 1K mark. Been stuck here for a bit, struggling to get any more traction.

  • solution-finder  5 years ago

    Awesome, the UX is beautiful.

    I’ve got a couple Saas ideas for building as side projects but as the common startup advice goes - I need to validate the idea first. Would you like to share how did you validate the idea, or was it a project for a customer which was later productised? thanks!

    • jwho82  5 years ago

      Thanks.

      I originally created the site back in 2011 mostly just freshen up my PHP skills, and I needed a way to keep track of my work hours. It was just a basic free to use timesheet tool for for around 4 years. It was super ugly but it was still getting people signing up but only a handful would stick around.

      I decided rebuild it all and launch it was a proper SaaS in 2015.

      If I had to start over today, I'm not sure what I would do. I just like to build things I would use. I'd try to find an existing tool and see if I it's something I feel I could do better.

  • the_arun  5 years ago

    Have you added a way to integrate the data to accounting applications like QBO ?

    • jwho82  5 years ago

      It's been something I've been wanting do but it keeps getting pushed back. Our App needs a major update first I think and then support for QB would be next.

farseer  5 years ago

No one would tell you their niche money making idea.

  • quietthrow  5 years ago

    Why??

    Dosnt the tech community believe ideas are dime a dozen?

    • tjchear  5 years ago

      Reminds me of Headlime's founder, who was kind enough to share his journey, but instead people copied his work/content (and had the audacity to ask for his advice) and then launched their own competing services that are downright identical.

      That said, I don't know what else can be done differently, since Headlime seems to lack a protective technical moat. His story is certainly inspiring though.

      1 reply →

    • malux85  5 years ago

      Ideas are a dime a dozen.

      Of that enormous set of potential is a much smaller set that satisfies the criteria:

      - Is small enough to be done in spare time by a single developer - Is not so complex it can be automated to run mostly by itself - Is a service someone is willing to pay for - Has real customers

      ^ those filter criteria make the set of “profitable side projects” much smaller than the set of “dime a dozen” ideas

      Profitable side projects have a low barrier to entry and are much more easily exploitable / copyable, hence my reluctance to share and probably many others reluctance to share

    • VoodooJuJu  5 years ago

      This meme is thrown around a lot, except by the people who've actually found a lucrative little niche. These people understand that one of the major reasons why there's so many coconuts for them is because they're the only one on the island.