Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?

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.

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).

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.

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!

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...

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.

Nintendo Switch SNES controller?

Otherwise personally my daily driver is PS5 DualSense

>> 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.

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.

Pretty sure the license means you do not have to pay royalties, not that you are disallowed from paying royalties

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.

Awesome, thanks! Glad it's working well for you :D

> 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.

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.

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/

> 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).

Does it work for apps with pinned certs?

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.

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/

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).

Not him, but probably not. They likely use HTTPS with certificate pinning

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.

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.

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.

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.

That depends on what your definition of authentic is. If it means ingredients sourced from their host countries, then that's going to make it extremely hard for any restaurant to start; considering the logistical cost and generally things not being fresh enough. The appropriate definition should be authentic methods. If I want to cook dum biryani and market it as dum biryani, I should be cooking it in the traditional method of using a bread sealed handi; but calling it unauthentic if my chicken wasn't born in Hyderabad makes no sense.

That attitude isn’t invited to the dinner party.

One of the best things about meeting people in person is that no one is rude enough to make this kind of comment to your face. Unfortunately the internet removes that barrier.

Edit: dishes authentic to a region cooked as close to authentic as the chef and ingredients allow.

If you live in a metropolitan area, finding them in local niche shops tends to not be overly difficult. Not to mention that it's possible to import as well.

It's strange how you are being downvoted when my foreign friends say the exact same thing. They say that the food at the restaurants we go to have a different smell from the food back home.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

or "just use syslog-ng"?

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!

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!)

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 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

We work with a lot of agencies/landlords mostly larger once now but making it more self serve in the upcoming months

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

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!

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.

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.

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 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.

Thanks! Even more awesome features and improvements are coming soon (:

We're on Github here btw: https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes

Obsidian seems to have all the features of that note taking app + many more and even has plugin support.

$25.8

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.

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

Thanks! More cool features coming soon.

Nope, I started it by myself 8 years ago. Now the project is getting many wonderful contributors.

> 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?

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

Competition is often a validation of there being a need for your product.

Oops, forgot rule #1.

Thanks for the shoutout. I would not disclose the macOS revenue. We used to publish it as a #buildinpulic movement, but not anymore.

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.

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.

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.

We use daily as a team

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.

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/

Thanks Dan, glad to hear it is useful. Mudmap looks very cool!

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.

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.

Thank you! Let me know if you have any questions :)

Thank you! They have been a huge source of inspiration.

> 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

> 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.

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.

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.

This made laugh :) Thank you.

That's strange. I'm sorry about that. Did it happen more than once? Did you hit the backspace key? I will investigate :)

Thank you :)

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 :)

Thank you. It's still very much a work in progress :)

> 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...

> 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.

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).

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 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.

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!

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

Good question. Here we explain, with a few simplifications, how we source our IPs: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scrap...

Actually, it’s a feature :)

Thanks! Really appreciate the positivity

https://github.com/outline/website has the source

>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.

in my experience, the only thing that matters is who you know.

Being connected to the right business folks seems to be the key.

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.

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)

Yes exactly

Yep

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

She. I don't keep all the eggs in the same basket.

*edit typos

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.

> In many places (most places)

You might benefit from looking more broadly (friendly suggestion).

(?) 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

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.

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

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.

Don't trust any numbers here blindly sir.

Without verification you don't know if any of them are marking $2k+

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

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.

You have a good idea here.. Even though I feel it already exists even on my local market.

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 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!

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.

Correct! customer buys a playstation $10 card for $9.80, I buy it for $9.20, and pocket the spread.

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.

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.

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.

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

Plenty of places, check out https://app.velodrome.finance/ for one

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

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.

Took about 5 years. Right now it's just ads but I'm trying to make revenue from certifications now.

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.

I just review the pull requests :)

Yep. We also have a subscription available https://kpopping.com/subscription/plus

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.