It's the time of the year again, so I'd be interested hear what new (and old) ideas have come up.
Previously asked on: 2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38467691
2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421
2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
2019 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863
I built an interactive Music Theory course 8 years ago over a winter break and it continues to bring in enough to pay my rent each month.
I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives.
It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos.
I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that initial spike in traffic has been fairly consistent over the past 8 years.
It uses Stripe for payments and for the first few years it was only Stripe. 3 years in I decided to add PayPal support... revenue doubled overnight, mostly from international customers.
After seeing your landing page I finally understand what a landing page should be.
Thank you!
Over the years I have run a few A/B tests on the landing page. I tried some variations I thought MUST improve the conversion rate. However, this one, which is basically the original one, is still the best performer.
If it ain't broke.
Another plus for your landing page. It’s amazing how many landing pages vomit features the developer is excited about but never explain why I need their product.
For me if shows:
> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).
I'm on phone so can't check the error right now.
What browser and phone? Works on iOS and safari for me.
Agreed. Fantastic landing page.
I clicked through to the website after your comment. Landing pages are too often a wall of text, this one is a great example of how they can be done correctly.
Yeah, this is one of the most compelling landing pages I've ever clicked on. Actually dropping me straight into the first lesson before I hit the paywall is very effective.
Very nice. I'd suggest adding another deluxe bundle for non-Guitarists without the guitar theory. I'd pay extra for the ear training + the base package.
I'm impressed! Every couple of years I come across a different music theory website and I try to follow along, but inevitably after a few sentences I'm completely lost and the rest becomes incomprehensible.
I got really far along in yours, which was great, until I got to 6 (Keys): "When a song says that it is in the key of C Major or D Minor this is simply telling you which of the 12 notes are used in this song." You then give examples of Major and Minor keys, each of which contains seven notes. This threw me for a loop. Are you saying every song consists of exactly seven notes (some repeated, obviously) from only one key? Or are you saying every song uses at least some notes from a key? Also, don't some songs switch keys in the middle?
Not looking for answers here, just wanted to point out where I got stuck so maybe you can add some clarity to that section.
You have to understand that music theory is not a set of rules to follow, its a set of ideas that sound good to western ears and therefore are very commonly found in most music.
Not every song, but much western music, especially pop music and nursary rhymes, will stick to the same major or minor scale of notes for the whole song. Going outside of this scale is quite normal too and changing the scale/key multiple times in a song is also quite common.
The point of learning music theory is to give you a toolbox so that you can both recognise patterns in music you are listening to, as well as give you some ideas of what sounds good when you compose or improvise.
This is quite similar to mathematics where in school we dogmatically teach students how to do arithmetic in the base-10 euclidean system, because having deep fluency in one system is more useful than having a little understanding of many systems.
I certainly understand that in any system (not just music), some rules can be broken at certain times for various reasons (safety, aesthetics, etc.). To combine what you're saying with what I was saying, I would like to see, at least in this case, a better explanation of what exceptions are commonly made to these rules (e.g. using non-standard chords) and when they are made (e.g. in music from region XYZ).
In fact, I'd argue that such explanations are critical even when you're learning any kind of theory since it tells you when the theory breaks down, whether that's because it simply doesn't fit the task, because people like to get creative, etc.
You've missed my first point. It's not rules. There are no rules to break. The "broken rules" simply describes systems within music that you haven't been introduced to yet. For example, major and minor are also called "ionean" and "aeolean" "modes" respectively, and these sit within a set of 8 modes. There are also blues and jazz scales, names for music that break out of standard tuning. There is a style called "12 tone" (of which an example is Also Sprach Zarathustra) which uses deliberate dissonance.
You simply aren't up to that part yet, because classical western music training teaches the more common ideas which are in music that the punters listen to first. (Mainly because people generally need a few years playing music before they develope a taste for these things anyway)
The sentence you quoted is a decent simplification but you probably shouldn’t take it too literally. It’s not really that the melody uses exactly seven notes. It is that these seven notes form the harmonic context that the chords and melody sits in. Normally that also means that the notes in question will be the most common ones in both chords and melody, but you can certainly use other notes as well.
A key is really an “I know it when I hear it” thing. The notes used are just one of many clues working together.
I am aware you didn't specifically ask for answer, but I was not satisfied with the answers you got :-), so I'll add my two cents.. I have 3 points to make. (1) The first is about 'when does it make sense for a song to use more than 7 notes?' WHEN we do this, we will often say "this song uses a key change". Some keys have partial overlap - note-sequences they share, and ranges where they differ. One elegant way to exploit this, is to let the song meander into the common range of the two keys, and then meander OUT of that range into a different key that we used to get IN to that range. This can produce a cool surprise effect, a bit like looking at those optical illusion pictures that you can look at two ways. A similar trick can be used with rhythms that overlap, instead of frequencies that overlap.
(2) Where does the "rule" of 7 come from, ie what shapes it: As you know, notes have harmonic friends that they resonate well with. So when you are picking a 'colour palette' of notes that go well together, you will of course often pick such 'friends'. However, the more notes you already have in your picked pool, the harder it gets to add another note, that will still mesh nicely with all those previous choices. Your remaining choices will be more and more likely to clash; in particular it will be more and more likely to be "close" to one of your existing choices. And close notes clash. So, on a 12-note scale, 7 is about the optimal number of tones you can pick without them clashing too much. It is just a convention however, so some stubborn individual might come up with an 8-note scale. Once you start with 8 notes, you would be tempted to employ extra "OK I have 8 notes, but I try to avoid playing THOSE TWO back to back"-rules.
Then again, I often hear my 10-year old loudly playing .. sounds(music?) from tiktok and its ilk, and as an old geezer, I am starting to think that some of our youngsters have given up on scales altogether..
I have no idea what my third point was, at this point.
Cool project. I have a dream to make something like this for drawing spatially.
Came to the parent to share my current project which spell checks websites. It found a few small typos on your site. https://www.spl.ing/report-card?website=www.lightnote.co&uui...
Have you heard of carapace? Its a tool to create spatial lines for drawing
Taking a look. For the past two years I've been thinking about drawing. Why it's difficult, how its possible for people like Kim Jung Gi to draw from their imagination. My theory is that it's a learned thing (as opposed to innate ability), but that it's not taught from primitives well. For example, rotating a cube is something that you cannot really find an explanation for. I think the actual difficulty in drawing (representational-ly) boils down to preserving the identity of objects through rotation. This difficulty is preserved in the presence of perspective or not (orthographic projection).
Drawabox is based on doing exercises to improve your mark making (the accuracy of the marks you draw on the page) and eventually leads to you drawing hundreds of boxes in perspective as a consistent exercise. A lot of people swear by it. I enjoyed the first week of it but decided that drawing is not a priority right now.
It is a good resource. Drawabox doesn't actually teach you how to rotate cubes. That was pretty frustrating to me.
I created a little game which doesn't explain it, but allows you to practice and get feedback: https://cdsb.itch.io/draw-cube
Forget it. There's very little that can be taught about drawing.
Drawing from model is about being the kind of character that enjoys spending hours tweaking at tiny details and measuring measuring measuring. Anybody willing to sit 3 hours in front of the model every day can learn it, if he understands that he must measure.
Drawing from imagination like Kim Jung Gi on the other hand is about doing that every day most of the day since you were a little kid, and you probably need an innate ability to boot (and that might be some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder / autism...).
Yeah, I'm not referring to drawing which is copying.
> There's very little that can be taught about drawing.
While drawing from the imagination is largely about using the intuition. The intuition can be trained just like the more analytical side of the brain. I can teach you a few properties of rotation/space, etc, and then give you the right exercises, and then you won't need to use construction to draw.
KJG does have some innate ability, and he was clearly obsessed, but it's not actually the bulk of his method. He has a video about drawing scissors. He can articulate nearly everything he is drawing, specifically the function which guides the design. There are others who can draw like him. Look up Tom Fox.
> I built…over a winter break
This site is extremely well done. You built it, and all of its content, in a couple weeks? That’s amazing.
Ah, yeah that is misleading. Let me clarify.
The landing page is what I built over the winter break, including those first 7 lessons. Since then that page has remained largely unchanged.
However, when it started getting a lot of traffic I added a pre-order form for a full course. THAT took me 6 months to code up all the additional lessons. Building all the interactive pieces (drum synths for rhythm lessons, an ear training game for intervals, a virtual guitar, etc.) was really fun but a lot of work. For example, the interactive guitar uses samples I recorded note-by-note from my acoustic guitar in my bedroom. Afterwards I couldn't look at it for months. And then over the years I've added more.
So not quite an overnight success.
Thank you for the kind words though!
Would love it if you could go into more detail about those two weeks. Had you already played around with tone.js beforehand? Did you have an idea or a draft written up for that initial lesson so you knew what was gonna be in it, and was it your initial vision to have a picture of each waveform accompanied by the sound, and buttons for each note in the scale? Did you have to change part of your design (even small details) when you discovered that it was hard to build something a certain way and that another way would be easier?
I'm curious where you get your traffic from / if it's fairly consistent and if you have any marketing costs. Thanks!
You site is insane! I clicked the keyboard as a lark and it totally got me intrigued about the entire rest of the site. I was smiling as I read the explainations.
I sent you an email in Feb 2023 about a video that wouldn't load. I'm not sure whether you saw it, as I didn't see a reply:
One of the embedded videos on the progressions page is no longer available on YouTube. I'm not sure whether you're still maintaining lightnote, but thought I'd let you know anyway :)I’m a customer and it’s awesome. I think we’ve even exchanged emails about some questions I’ve had. When I paid for the premium version I thought it was super good for what I was getting. You must be getting a ton of traffic for it to still be paying rent after 8 years! Congrats!
Wow. I’m very impressed by the site and even more so by how you did it over a winter break. It’s definitely very intuitive and I’ve been looking for a way to learn music theory as an adult. Thank you!
This makes me want to learn music even though I'm not a musician
I've wanted to learn Music Theory for about a decade (only learned guitar tabs as a teen and to read sheet music as an adult). Love what you made and just got the premium course.
Fantastic site! Well done, beautifully executed, and very inviting.
I play the guitar (and keys) -- but I'm a bit light on the theory part of it -- and this looks very much like I could use a refresher.
Kudos!
Can this be gifted? Or will the purchase be tied to my email only?
I have not implemented this (yet).
But every year around the holidays a bunch of folks request this. I tell them to buy the course, and then email me who they'd like to gift it to. Then I just manually create a new account and send an email saying so-and-so bought you this course with the login! nathan [at] lightnote.co
> I have not implemented this (yet).
> But every year around the holidays a bunch of folks request this. I tell them to buy the course, and then email me who they'd like to gift it to.
You could add an MVP by having a "Gift a subscription" link that leads to a page saying "buy a subscription and then click this link to email me who you want to gift it to". That at least means you don't have to keep answering the question for people.
+1 for this feature
This is terrific!
On Firefox Android, in step four, I managed to get into a situation where one of the notes kept playing. It occurred when pressing too many keys on the keyboard demonstrating the chromatic scale. Pressing each key again for not "unstuck" it.
And if I'm already providing feedback, then a nice improvement for the end of step two would be an option to hear the two notes of the displayed waves, together.
This is great. I started creating something like this almost twenty years ago, but didn't finish. You're living my dream. :) Kudos to you!
When I was learning guitar a few years ago, I came across your website and really loved it. But after that, I forgot about it. Your website is great, very easy to undersand, and the UI is also great.
Hey! My son used your site! So, thanks for that. This was a couple of years ago that a music teacher recommended it to him to help boost his progress. I think you continue to sell because your prices are very good for what you are offering, and the site is designed in a way that allows anyone to pick up on things fairly quickly.
This is really cool, wishing you the best of luck!
It's been paying his rent for 8 years, I think fortune's on his side ;) The landing page got me too and I signed up
I wish I had this when I was learning. This is amazing - great work on all the interactive demos!
Btw I'm making an interactive music theory course right now.
I'm 2 months of polishing away from being HN-publishable, but I decided I'd share at least in comments.
Thank you for mentioning the effect of Paypal, that's very interesting. Did you add it as a full-on alternative to Stripe, or just activate the payment method in Stripe ?
Love it, and I very much understand the level of work that went into making it (beyond your initial landing page). Good way to test the water then build the full product.
I've been wanting this explainer my entire life!
It's awesome! It's so accessible, from now on I'm gonna send it to my non-musician friends whenever they show any interest in music.
I really like the overall design of the site! I'll probably inspire from it for some of my future projects.
Can you add keyboard shortcut handler? like when I press 1 it can play the 1st button mentioned in screen?
Awesome, do plan on having this translated in different languages? I'd buy a German version.
Firefox Android here, the page zooms in and out when I double tap on a keyboard.
I love Lightnote! I'm trying to get my kids into it as well.
Awesome work.
really cool! Can't wait to use this for my next musical learnings
aweasome!
https://FreeSolitaire.win brings around $500/mo in advertising revenue. It’s a Klondike Solitaire PWA (progressive web application).
I started making it in 2016 and I’ve been slowly iterating on it over time. It has stayed minimal & lightweight, on purpose. No framework, no cruft, no obtrusive ads.
Fun fact: because it’s so lightweight, it was included in 2020 in Moya (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nu.bi.moya), a popular messaging app in South Africa that is “data-free” for users (it does reverse-billing). Now ~40% of players are South Africans!
Discussed on HN from to time, for instance:
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42026575 (38 days ago, 19 points)
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41971887 (43 days ago, 25 points) “Quick side-note. Thank you for freesolitaire.win. It's such a beautiful implementation of solitaire. Works so well as a PWA, I can enjoy it even without proper internet connection, it's simple, does the basics, but does it perfectly. There's nothing to add to it, but more importantly... nothing to take out.” (!)
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34483398 (2023, 4 points)
Feedback always welcome, and happy to answer any question!
That's cool, even with 40% of players being from ZA, I'm guessing most of your revenue doesn't come from them? (unless the other 60% are even lower RPM countries) Curious what % of revenue they account for
ZA (South Africa) is 15–20% of revenue.
This is neat! First off, the app itself is really nicely diesigned, props. Before the Moya thing, how did you lure people to your site? I assume there are literally hundreds of places where you can play Solitaire in the browser like this?
Thanks!
Wrt attracting visitors: Word of mouth, mainly. Posted it on Reddit back then, things like that. It grew organically from that. And, although it’s far from being on top results on SERP (search engine result pages), some people do find it that way. But yes, the Moya thing was a big boost!
Just spent the last 10 minutes playing, while having my morning coffee. I can honestly not remember when I last played Solitaire. Decades I think.
Thank you for making this, it brought some joy to my day.
If it brought you joy, then you made my day <3 Indeed Solitaire is, like chess or go, a timeless game.
It’s also a good way to spend the time, like when you are commuting. Keep in mind that https://FreeSolitaire.win works offline (after the 1st visit, using a service worker: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...) ;-)
- I wish I could double-click a card to automatically move it up to its respective suit stack (if possible) - This is the first Solitaire game I've played where I was able to move a card from its suit stack back onto the board (or maybe I just didn't try before). Either way, I like that :)
> I wish I could double-click a card to automatically move it up to its respective suit stack (if possible)
Oh but you can!
But, as I said recently (in an e-mail to another player): “Someone once told me about how ‘double-click is finicky on Windows/Chrome’. But now you are two encountering the same issue, and not on the same OS/browser combo. So it looks like problem is in the game. Thanks, I shall look into it.”
> able to move a card from its suit stack back onto the board […] Either way, I like that
That’s on purpose, glad you like it! It can help you get unstuck sometimes.
Thanks for sharing. Are the revenue generated based on the ads on the website ? Are they generated per number of clicks on the ads ? How does it work with ad blockers ? Thanks
Yes, revenue is ads-based (and a few donations). I use Google AdSense. ~40% of players use an ad-blocker; I let them block ads, I don’t play cat-and-mouse.
Great app, everything seems to work well. The only thing I noticed was that the suit symbols on the cards are a little odd because they're all the same size (almost?) so a 3 looks like it has 5 symbols on it, etc. But that's minor!
“But that's minor!”: minor maybe, but that’s an issue. Yes, both the central and corner symbols (“pips”, as they are called) are almost the same size.
It’s even worse with the court cards (aka “picture cards”: jack, queen, king). Out of laziness and for space-saving, they all share the same design: their suit symbol, in big, in the center (and the two corner pips). Not easy to distinguish between them easily/quickly, especially if your sight isn’t good.
I should do something about all that, one of these days. Thank you for your feedback!
Impressive! Its well made and such a simple idea making $$$ with some innovative thinking!
How does reverse-billing work in case of data usage?
Thank you!
Regarding reverse billing: I don’t know much. I am not myself billed by Moya, although they do bill some of their partners. Please see https://datafree.tech (that’s quite specific to Moya / South Africa carriers, I guess)
That is pretty slick, and beautifully lightweight. Would love to see artwork for the royalty
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, as mentioned in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42382673), I should do something about the cards design, which is currently too rough.
I sell custom jewelry on Etsy and my Shopify website (lulimjewelry.com). I have a background in 3d printing and through that I realized that the sweet spot for 3d printed products is something that is small, high value, and custom. The jewelry industry fits this perfectly, and has already seen a large uptake in 3d printer adoption.
I built a pipeline using fabric.js, flask, and blender that lets me take my customer's customizations (fingerprints, signatures, other engravings) and place them on a ring. I ultimately generate a STL file that I send over to my casting house in LA. They 3d print the STL in wax, and then cast that wax mould with precious metals using the traditional casting process.
It's a fun side business as I get to tinker with new technologies (recently working on integrating a LLM into the ring design process). I have decent profits (enough to pay my mom and sister to help with customer support and shipping), so the workload I take on myself is relatively small.
Ornaments? Parents keep asking for my kid's to "create" an ornament. The fun of doing on paper is obviously great, but it'd be neat to convert it into something more durable too.
I've definitely taken kids handwriting/drawings and put them on rings or pendants before. Nothing as large as a standard ornament though.
Who is your casting house in LA?
Then you should use my https://commercialinvoice.app To generate, you got it, commercial invoices. To have a smooth customs clearance.
I run https://pastmaps.com as a lil' solo bootstrapped labor of love. Think Google Maps, but for OLD maps. It has 185K+ fully georeferenced high-res maps covering all of America, as well as satellite, LiDAR, and 3D layers to enable exploration through space and time.
History is cool yo. And apparently lucrative - it currently makes ~$5000/mo and is slowly but surely growing through word of mouth
Nice collection. I'd suggest adding an unsubscribe option to your initial email, particularly if people reflexively login via Google, etc.
At a guess, you probably have a very large base of genealogists on there!
Old maps are incredibly useful for genealogy because it helps you do lots of stuff. Say someone lived on "House #3 Country Road" in (county), but County Road no longer exists, and all that can be found is a brief description of "County Road is now Main Street, Bank Avenue, and Church Road" It would serve as a vital clue as to where their ancestors house used to be (or may still be!)
It also helps to give a better narrative of how the community has expanded and changed over the years. Instead of just, "It was probably all forest land, then farm land, then suburbs or something?" Instead you can see stuff like if there were spikes/declines in populations in response to various events (gold rush, mining, factory work, railroads, war, highways bringing/diverting traffic, and so on). They can also show how the land may have changed from environmental factors (mud slides, earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes). Maybe you're from a "Military family" but never knew why, only to find out that a Military Depot opened up 2 minutes from their house just as great-grandpa turned 18.
In a real sense, it describes not just the family and where they lived, but the type of place they knew, and community they grew up in. It hints at how they saw and experienced things over the years. "But why did great-great-grandpa insist on moving his entire family? He had lived in that beautiful house his entire life! Ah. They put the railroad 6 inches from his backdoor!"
You hit the nail on the head - my primary use-case is genealogy research!
> tiny husband and wife company based in Seattle, WA.
Are you in any way associated with that map shop near Pike Place? I had to look it up, I guess it's Metsker?
No but I love that shop! I actually introduced myself to the owner there and told him about how I also run an online map shop and he got immediately super duper weird. Lol. Cut-throat business I guess?
I love this site. I love browsing David Rumsey's map collection and I know that they have a georeferenceing feature, but I haven't used it.
I also love David Rumsey's collection! Check out the rumsey map center at Stanford if you ever find yourself in the area, it's ridiculously cool
Pastmaps was really born out of my desire for more advanced features, layers, and tools on rumsey's site and I'm hoping I can eventually deliver on that vision (spoilers: I'm definitely not there yet)
This is such an awesome app - great work!
Where did you acquire those scans?
Vast majority are currently from the USGS, but this is going to wildly shift and diversify soon as I've been working to bring a wider variety of sources. The next wave is coming mainly from public library systems from all across the globe (my background is in search so I literally am running a map crawler)
I stand on the shoulders of these giants that have done amazing work to digitize the paper maps and I mainly am hoping to just aid in the ease of discoverability and exploration of these assets
Possible minor bug: I searched for "New York, NY, USA" and it showed 41 maps of only Staten Island. I had to search for "Manhattan, New York, NY, USA" to get the maps I was looking for.
Thank you! It's actually a bit embarassing but my search uses the central lat,lng returned from Google's places API and then finds all intersecting maps. It's just not the right approach for a broad place based search. I'm in the process of integrating full geometry data globally from https://overturemaps.org/ as I type to fix this across the board and to use the definitive boundary geometry for the under-the-hood map lookups
Thanks for the report and for checking out the site!
What do you make money from? Map sales?
It's currently 60% premium subscriptions to unlock advanced features (LiDAR layers for example) and then 40% for more traditional physical map print sales. I didn't intend to get into the physical ecommerce world with this but customers kept asking over and over again for ways to purchase the maps for display so I finally gave in last year. Figuring out the supply chain, shipping, graphics design process, etc has been a bit of a lift but fun to do. We have 2.2M unique product variants available so that's also been a bit fun to wrangle!
I haven't tested, but in addition to map sales there's a subscription option, for more features https://pastmaps.com/plus?src=header
Do you have any old maps for Panama? Perhaps the canal zone?
Soon! I currently only have coverage for the US but I am expanding globally in Q1 2025. Just not enough hours in the day
RankPic (https://www.rankpic.info) is an app to help users crowdsource their best photo.
I've been building over the past 3 years & just recently monetized and crossed the $500/m mark through a Pro subscription. It's grown into a lovely community of people who help each other pick their best pictures for dating apps, professional photos etc.
I've seen some pretty fun novel use cases, such as (multiple!) people using it to pick out glasses, wedding invites & so on
-- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rankpic-photo-ranking/id160299... (ios)
-- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.rankpic.ra... (android)
I think "raters" should be able to skip because some categories are strange.
Like I just got "Category: Monster girls" with 2 pictures of anime.
I also got "Category: Dating" with 4 family pictures of kids (I reported this one)
How does an app like this work in the beginning when you have no/few users? Were you ranking images yourself or hire people to it?
I got all my friends to go on it and spent lots of time ranking people myself.
I also started things off with "fake" tests so that people had other people to rank at the beginning, otherwise folks would just see a dead app and drop off.
It was a really big moment 9 months in when someone's test completed entirely without me ranking. It was a lot of work & I'm really glad to be at a point now where I get to watch people rank each other without me.
How did you design and build your homepage? I find that building the landing page and making it look like a professional, beautiful design is one of my biggest hurdles. I'm an experienced web developer but without a design to work off of - and especially accounting for mobile and dynamic sizing - I really struggle with this part of the work so I'm wondering what other people's workflows are for it.
I used fiverr to make assets, and then either use fiverr to make a design that I can easily build with one of the website building tools (wix, etc.) or I try to build it myself.
The easiest way is to find a landing page you think looks good and use it as inspiration with your own colors, assets, etc.
In case you're looking for a designer, I can help you with the design especially mobile as I have worked on mobile apps that are live on app store and play store. feel free to check out my work : https://monadile.framer.website/ You can also reach out via email : monadile.design(at)gmail.com
Thank you, but I probably will do this myself. For what it's worth - and I'm saying this constructively, not to offend - your website is illegible due to contrast issues. White titles and light grey text against a light blue background. I was sure it must be some kind of error but I turned off all my extensions and loaded it incognito in chrome and nothing changed, so, I don't know what conclusion to draw there. It just doesn't make a very good impression for a designer.
Out of curiosity, why did you start this?
I've always used photofeeler.
Thanks for asking! I also used photofeeler and found the way it rated me 1-10 fairly harmful to my mental health. RankPic has users rank your photos best to worst, so it's just against yourself.
Additionally it allows users to get more mileage out of each test, when you can do 2-6 photos instead of just one at a time.
Anecdotally I've also heard it is a more fun experience for the rankers.
Very smart the best to worst ranking. Well done!
Thank you! The ranking queue was a fun thing to implement.
That answer is very inspiring, thanks :)
Are you up for a digital coffee? If so, my email is in my profile.
While I haven't been an entrepreneur, I did some side projects. Would be fun to chat about it.
Thanks! Emailed :)
Without any offense to you, the creator of this app. It's obvious a lot of care went into it and you wanted to create a better product than what is out there. Even considering the mental impact such ranking could have.
However, I genuinely feel that the need for this app is what's wrong with society.
What's wrong with this? Seems like a more independent alternative to asking a friend which picture looks better.
I personally would prefer a randomly selected load of strangers to vote on, say, my best corporate headshot to display to the general public rather than my friends who are a small and biased group.
I guess the people that self-select to go on a photo ranking site may not be representative of the general public, though are probably better than the (all male) 10ish engineers and 3 accountants that I socialize with on a regular basis.
No offense taken, I also have many qualms about the role looks and photos play in our society. The destruction & gamification of social interaction by tech is a genuine harm.
Unfortunately it's what we're dealing with right now, and people need feedback to be able to play the game.
I did not like any Kubernetes UI so I built my own https://aptakube.com
It went from side project to my primary job in less than 6 months.
Everyone was saying that $99 was too much for “an API wrapper”, but here we are, 2 years later and with hundreds of small to enterprise companies using it :)
You really shouldn't listen to too many people. The only thing that counts is paying customers; everything else is just jealous people.
Dismissing disagreement as jealousy always bothered me. To think a person is jealous of you requires a lot of ego, like... narcissistic amounts of ego in my opinion. Either that or a world view so small that it can't conceive of other world views that don't align with yours.
Some folks just can't imagine buying what some folks are selling.
Sure but... what is there to "disagree" with? customers are paying for it. If you don't want it, don't pay. But why expend energy on "disagreeing"?
weird.
For me, a key point is "everybody _was_saying_". An implication is that early on, or before release, people thought the price seemed too high. Possibly some of those people no longer think so. Or possibly the price really is too high _for_them_.
Could also be that some of those people just don't expect to get enough use (or some other kind of 'enough') out of a service for a given price point. There are loads of people who have no problem paying for YouTube Premium, while others find the price too high.
Some people pay for the highest-end smartphones, getting them as soon as they come out. I think they're crazy. (-:
Any architecture advice on making receiving payments from small-to-medium businesses streamlined? Struggling on how to go from an employee trying the free demo to their company paying that employee’s subscription… like no PO request nonsense, is there a “master” account you bill and they dole out the seats?
Are you saying that you don't want to deal with Purchase Orders?
Is that because you don't want to provide a product in advance of payment or just the overhead of creation/tracking?
I want to do business, but without all that nasty business stuff
99% of my customers buy straight from the website no questions asked.
I only get PO from larger companies, and I only do it if they’re buying a lot of seats, or if it’s a strategy customer
How did you go from "I built my own" to making your first few sales?
I shared with a couple of co-workers/friends and they all liked it, I then built a simple website with screenshots and a download button for free.
Then I started sharing the progress on LinkedIn/X, my co-workers shared on their network too which also helped.
After 4 months I put a price on it and sold it with a 50% discount for early adopters. A lot of people bought it, which to me was a signal that I was into something that could become bigger if I invested more time on it.
Just wanted to say you've built an amazing product. So much so that I got my team hooked on it and am working on getting it out to the rest of the company that needs it. Well done!!
That UI looks nice, do you blog anywhere about tech you used to make it?
It uses Tauri https://tauri.app/
How does it compare to Lens?
Lens isn't all that great so I'm sure it must be better.
Lens shows me repeats of log lines when I'm trying to scroll down in a live log. It has checkboxes but no means to operate on checked boxes. If I have my Secret set to show b64 decoded, and paste in a new secret that is very clearly non b64 encoded, it tries to push it as-is and fails quietly. It shows things as Healthy whose only sub resources are not healthy, but that's par for the course in Kubernetes land. I also have to fully quit it (not just close the window) on my new MacBook whenever I make the mistake of looking at it after a gcloud auth timeout, even when simply running fresh kubectl commands in the background every time would outperform the garbage Electron tab changes.
Plus, this new thing has resource diffs, which I was surprised Lens didn't have. Frankly I was surprised how little Lens has once I started actually using it and figured there'd be easy money in building the community's new favorite editor. But I'm glad to have seen this post, here's hoping it becomes the new standard.
I built https://explorehere.app to help you learn about the history of the world around you by sending a push notification whenever you pass a new historical marker on your travels!
It’s a freemium app with a pro subscription for advanced features; our revenue is just under $1k/month.
We’re working towards ExploreHere being a passive adventure guide. As you go about your travels ExploreHere will nudge you about interesting information wherever you go; history, unique things to see, special food known only in the city you’re in, etc.
In the days before global data plans, there was an amazing offline travel companion app called Triposo that was well before its time. One of its best features was to guide you toward nearby places of interest. I remember in ~2012 visiting Paris and being led to a historic but dilapidated building that used to be a notable school, near to where I was staying but not along the walk to the metro station so I never would have seen it otherwise.
It was really one of the most unforgettable travel tech experiences. I was still free to explore at my whim, but it gave some context to what was around me. It wasn't just the over-trafficked tourist highlights, but the whole city. ExploreHere seems like it could have a similar impact.
The Triposo team briefly made a cute app called Walter that was basically a minimalist indication of nearby POIs using the device compass for orientation: https://web.archive.org/web/20170607100433/https://www.tripo...
There's a post-mortem of the company from @dosinga here: https://dosinga.medium.com/leaving-triposo-9d35f72ce28
Just a few weeks ago I was on a trip through back roads of NC and VA and saw a bunch of historical markers and wondered how to do something with them. And now I know.
My thinking was to stop and get a gps coordinate and then what? How do I get them all across the states? And that is about how far my thinking got before a SQUIRREL ran through my brain.
Glad to see some of my thoughts aren't to far out there. Now just have to work on DOING instead of THINKING.
Start small, get the GPS co-ords of those markers, and create your visualisations, etc.
Then share them with family/friends
Then they'll start collecting marker co-ords for you
THEN worry about how to get strangers involved (using/submitting/etc)
Facebook started with a single University...
Great point. Thanks for sharing.
I admit I get the cart before the horse.
I'm not looking for life changing money, but it would be nice to actually be able to submit a $500 mrr project here on HN.
These are my favorite threads
I too had this experience in Texas over the holidays. Sigh.
Many are probably already in HMDB.
Love this source, didn't know about it!
Me either.
Where you guys hiring in the past?
I remember reading a pitch for this site and the layout also looks familiar
My neighbor and I were talking a few months back and he had the same idea. He said he drove by the historical markers all the time it would be cool to know what they all said. Cool idea just sent him this app!
I'd love to use this but there appears to be no coverage of my country. Any plans to expand coverage to other regions?
I was thinking of making something along the lines of this… good execution
I find it disturbing how many people allow apps to access their location 24/7.
>I find it disturbing how many people allow apps to access their location 24/7.
Why? It doesn't effect you at all.
It's all being sold. It allows data brokers to build invasive behaviorial profiles.
It's being sold if the app you are giving access to is selling it. Don't use apps that do?
Might also want to check your phone providers ToS to see what they are doing with your location data.
Maybe he's a healthcare CEO
I've build BlueRetro [1] an universal Bluetooth controller adapter for nearly all pre-USB gaming console.
I guess I could update from my previous post in a similar thread. [2]
Long story short, my open source firmware is used by product makers and they make a voluntary contribution often base on how many unit they sell. It is also widely used by Chinese company on AliExpress.
I got one of those Chinese company to sponsor me a significant amount on GitHub sponsor since August 2022. I guess they forgot about it, still going ever since!
I still make 1000 USD a month from the various HW makers.
One new thing I made this year after 5 year of doing this hobby, is that I finally manufactured and sold one adapter base on this code myself for the OG Xbox console. [3]
Factoring all the expenses I made 7K for a batch of 300. I plan to do a 2nd batch next year, which should yield double that since I will only incur raw materials & shipping expenses.
It took me 48 hour of manual labor to assemble them and ship them. So it's doesn't make much sense TBH, but it's a good experience. Made me appreciate my desk job.
[1] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro
I've heard great things about your stuff.
Very cool. Did you source the individual components along with a printed PCB and assemble yourself?
No I got panels with multiple pcb fully assembled from china. But I still had to program them, solder the connector and assemble them into the case. A very long process.
I started a side project with my older brother called NanaGram.co that makes it easy to text message photos to a unique phone number, then once a month they get printed and shipped to your loved ones.
If you have kids, it makes a good holiday gift for the grandparents if you're stumped on what to get them.
I've since moved on from it, but my brother makes enough to work on NanaGram full-time now. It's also just been really cool to see the project grow over the years and bring happiness to thousands of grandparents all over the world.
Thanks to F5Bot I saw this comment.
Thanks for sharing brother!
I hope F5Bot is on this list. Been using for free for years. just works. Reached out a while back and owner is very responsive.
Very cool! Always wondered how solo engineers deal with physical and shipping? I suppose there is some sort of API that allows prints and shipping on behalf?
NanaGram is awesome, used it for a while back in the olden days of 2021. When I visit my grandma she still has pictures on her refrigerator delivered by this service. Cheers to you and your brother!
I’m building Sink It for Reddit (https://gosinkit.com), a Safari/Chrome/Firefox/Edge extension to make Reddit usable on the web. It’s similar to RES (Reddit enhancement suite) but supports all of Reddit’s designs and is being actively developed with around 300k users, mainly on the Apple platforms.
It was built during the Reddit API shenanigans last year and is making four figures a month. 99% of the app’s feature are free with the money coming from a premium (dark mode etc) for old Reddit and donations.
Have a few high five figure/low six figure acquisition offers already but I’m afraid it’ll be turned into malware so haven’t gone through with it.
I suspect you can increase your conversion rate to paid quite easily. I've been using the free version for sometime. And I have no idea if the paid version gives me the improvements that I care about. I'm sure a 7 day trial, or an explainer video that walks through the differences would go a long way.
For what it's worth, there's a lot of functionality that I want removed from reddit. I've never crossposted, yet often click that link because it's next to 'hide'. I hate the hide link and would rather have 'hide everything above'. On old.reddit.com many of the links are too small, so increasing their size would be nice. Just a few things off the top of my head.
Good feedback, thank you. I’ll look into how to surface the premium features (a lot) better.
Re: feature additions, almost all of them are in the backlog and in various stages of development. Should ship soon!
How did you design and build your homepage? I find that building the landing page and making it look like a professional, beautiful design is one of my biggest hurdles. I'm an experienced web developer but without a design to work off of - and especially accounting for mobile and dynamic sizing - I really struggle with this part of the work so I'm wondering what other people's workflows are for it.
It's a premade design that I edited quite a bit. The landing page is important but at the start of a project, spending a ton of time on it isn't worth it. I used to work at an Australian (unofficial) unicorn where we sold these designs so I just bought one directly.
Any chance there's an android app planned?
Also, wondering if an edge extension is in the works too. Most chrome extensions work directly on edge but some don't.
Chrome on Android, unfortunately, doesn’t support extensions. I have a Firefox version for Android and I reckon Brave should pick up and install the desktop version for Chrome too.
I do have a version for Edge too though it’s often a few versions behind as the Edge team takes too darn long to approve. If anyone on the Edge team is reading this, please DM. https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/sink-it-fo...
This is cool, I'll try it out.
Why is there only one review for the Chrome extension? Is the Apple app store version the most used version?
Pretty much. The Chrome versions are only a few months old while the Apple platform ones are much older. Plus, honestly, I don’t nag users to leave ratings/reviews within the app.
Dark mode is not working on old design. I will keep with RES for now. Looks hella buggy.
Dark mode on old reddit is gated behind premium at this moment. That's the only monetization I have.
I'm probably not explaining what's behind premium correctly though. Happy to send over a free AppStore code and chat about the onboarding experience if you're so inclined. :)
Scraper of job listings directly from company websites. I found my last day job by using a scraper that visits company websites in search of job listings. Now I've turned it into an app for others to use and access jobs that are posted on company websites (rather than paid employer ads on Indeed or wherever). This gives the job searcher an advantage to find jobs not listed on job search sites and show the company you have taken time/interest to visit their site.
Here's a bit of feedback:
* Job listings for "Quality Assurance" and "QA" are split into different listings in Job Search.
* I really like the green highlight for Salary range! Personally, I would sort by jobs that list salary first, then by location (or relevance, or whatever).
* The filter was a little confusing to use. I see you talked about it with other users in here. It needs some love, but it's getting there. :)
* If you are going to target job searchers, it would be very helpful too see metrics based on the results. Here's a few examples I came up with
Example 1: I select Help Desk -> Chicago
I see a short-term graph showing whether demand has gone: up, down, or stayed the same - included is a red/green/yellow arrow giving me an idea at a glance. This helps me understand how many Help Desk postings are in Chicago
Example 2: I select Cybersecurity -> I also select Information Security -> NYC
I see a short-term graph showing demand for Cyber vs IS in NYC. This helps me understand if which job has more postings in NYC.
Example 3: I select Python Developer -> Boston & Dallas.
I see a medium-term graph showing demand for each location for Python Developer. This helps me decide whether demand is more consistent in Boston or Dallas.
Example 4: I select Asia & Canada -> Advertising (Under Industry)
I see a long-term graph showing the overall trend for that industry in each of those countries. This helps me track whether jobs are being outsourced, what I should expect in the coming years, and/or which country is the most competitive in that industry.
Hope that helps! Good luck. :)
This is great feedback, I'm very appreciative!
Yea there is a much better version of the search bar soon-to-deploy (which accounts for aliases like QA -> Quality Assurance) and it will match by word rather than the entire phrase (currently "software engineer" will not query "software test engineer"). Appreciate the callout here
You can find a toggle switch for "has salary" under the "other" filters which will show only those w salary, but good call perhaps that should be part of a sort feature (beyond just date)
The filters do need more love for sure. I like your examples for various metrics displayed in the UI. I did think it would be cool to have a Github-like array of squares that represent units of time with colors that show how it has been changing over time, would have to figure out how heavy of calculations those would be in real-time but I really like your idea here. Or a line chart might be better.
Many thanks for all the input!
How did you design and build your homepage? I find that building the landing page and making it look like a professional, beautiful design is one of my biggest hurdles. I'm an experienced web developer but without a design to work off of - and especially accounting for mobile and dynamic sizing - I really struggle with this part of the work so I'm wondering what other people's workflows are for it.
Yea I feel ya, I’m definitely not a good designer based on how long this stuff takes me. I think we are all not that bad but once you spend 6 hours on a component you really feel your dev skills could be much better used. Anyway here are some of the things I used on the landing page:
CSS - https://tailwindcss.com/ Components - https://tailwindui.com/ Logo - https://pixlr.com/editor/ Icons - https://heroicons.com/ - https://lucide.dev/icons/ Animations - https://www.framer.com/motion/ BG patterns - https://heropatterns.com/ - https://dev.to/bybydev/top-10-svg-pattern-generators-16h
Otherwise its just React
Not OP but I have two solutions for this: 1) find an existing site and mimic their design, or 2) hire a designer
Yes, I know, that's very easy to say, but in my experience:
1.) Imitating a good design can take a lot of developer hours. Many landing pages have fancy css effects and support many screen sizes and it can take quite some time to build.
2.) Finding a good designer is not easy. I have tried hiring on most freelancer sites with very poor results. The applicant pool is typically of low quality.
So I am wondering if others have found efficient/effective ways of going about #1 or #2, either by using certain tools or templates or by having a more clever hiring method.
Certainly creating a robust design that supports multiple screen sizes is no trivial matter. There are tools to make it easier but as with anything else, no single solution fits all developers and all projects. You say you're an experienced web developer and yet you find yourself deficient in this particular skill, so I'm not sure what to think. Maybe your strength lies more in back end programming?
In any case, I suggest looking into frameworks such as Bootstrap or Tailwind. Of course, there are also high-level solutions that don't require as much coding, e.g. WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, etc. WordPress plugins can make it very easy to apply fancy CSS effects without writing any CSS.
As for finding freelancers, I agree that's also a difficult task. I don't have any magic bullet there, other than to prioritize people with good, timely communication skills, and to avoid people on the low end of the price range since they will usually be less experienced.
I've been on both sides - working with developers for the past 5 years and leading design teams, so I get the frustration. The key is finding someone who understands both design AND development constraints. Feel free to check out some of my work here: https://monadile.framer.website/ .Feel free to reach out via email: monadile.design(at)gmail.com or book a call via my website.
You could also do something in between - buy ready made templates and customize them. It is easier than mimic-ing and cheaper than hiring a designer. Something like https://tailwindui.com/
can I make feature requests?
I would love a map of job postings to see where it might make sense to move to in the future. If there's 10 jobs within 50 miles... that might be a good place to buy a house.
Additionally, if I filter by 'north america' I still get jobs from canada and india because they're remote only. I would LOVE to be able to filter out those positions. Also I would love to be able to AND 'remote' and 'north america'. I would like to work remotely, but only for US companies
love your site <3
Thank you :) I appreciate the request + feedback. I have a story in the backlog to add location-specific links to the landing page but I really like your idea of having a map (heatmap or something) to show densities of jobs.
So the inclusive vs exclusive filtering is something that I struggle to perfect here. I'm tempted to throw both in the UI (since its ready to go on the backend) but its hard to explain to users. One thing you can do that is not so obvious is add a tag for "Canada" but click on the tag again which will put a line through Canada and exclude that location from your filter (still need to have helpers to show users how to do that). The 'remote' tag is probably the toughest one to parse of a job listing because it might appear anywhere within the text, so there is some inaccuracies for sure but its improving I hope!
Ah I could probably add filters for company locations specifically too (so you can filter US companies), that's an interesting use case too.
Thanks for the compliment too, it has been really fun to build
I’ve had a similar idea over the years. You should consider exploring whether competitive companies could be customers.
As a competitor, getting alerts about roles another company is hiring for can be very interesting. Combine it with trends of postings over time…
Oh that's a really interesting idea. Yea I dislike the idea of charging the job seeker but have not found a good way to monetize companies (not that they even know about me anyway)
What are you using to for the scraping? Playwright…selenium? I wanted to do something as a hobby but my IP kept getting reported lol. Also when you say companies…where are you getting the information from? Data brokers? Anyway, it is an interesting topic to me.
Selenium, although I'm using a wrapper library that uses it. I only query each company every few days or so which probably helps to not get banned IP-wise but also rotate them. But many of the company job links are through external sources too (lever, greenhouse, etc.) which don't seem to mind
The company data was gathered online for a long time until I found https://www.thecompaniesapi.com/ (which now is the source for much of that data)
I tried to use my own desktop machine to process some of these tasks. I can see my fans go jet mode when the scraping was being done lol. Do you have discord or any way to connect? Would love to chat around this topic. Feel free to drop any social media handles. I’ll ping you.
Ohhh yea I run into this memory issue very quickly when scraping (especially if you have a large URL dataset then it will inevitably find a website with a giant bit of markup). So I have to set timeouts and blacklist timely requests but also completely reset the (headless) browser on 2-3 requests (which is overkill but I am restricted on memory for those workers). Feel free to drop me an email sometime (should be on my HN profile)
Great site. Small feedback: There's a category 'Closure'-- I'm not sure if that's something I don't know about, but it definitely isn't for jobs using 'Clojure'.
Oh wow that’s not good, thank you so much for pointing that out!
Cool site - very clean lightweight interface which is great. Have a few friends that are looking that would for sure have checked it out had there been a free trial.
Thank you. Currently working on promo code functionality to give away to all the postings in Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42297422
I've tried searching for C++ but the search bar straight up refuses it
The search bar is for job title only at the moment. Under the "Tech" filter you can find "C++" and add it as a filter
thanks
I see C++ and C#. Why no C?
Yea that one is still a WIP (along with "R", "Rust", maybe a few more) because parsing out some of these tags is a little more difficult than others.
This is really cool. Do you have any interest in helping people auto apply to them? We can help you set it up with a really simple API call via Skyvern (https://github.com/Skyvern-AI/skyvern)
Thank you, appreciate this. I'm not certain about expanding this in that direction but that is certainly an interesting thought.
Yep. Makes a lot of sense. Your side project is super noble -- thank you for that
I built custom electric cars, and now I am sharing my knowledge for free in a knowledge base and in a YouTube series:
https://youtube.com/@foxev-content
I hope this helps someone :)
My knowledge is EV and renewable energy knowledge from first principles and for an open source tool.
https://openinverter.org lets you re-purpose the drivetrain from any EV, like Toyota Prius or Tesla Model S and put it into another car.
For this I offer paid support at $200/call and have about 2 of them per month.
I am trying to turn this trickle of revenue into a more predictable stream, suggestions welcome. The videos are meant to give free help and at the same time serve as lead-gen.
I think you need more how-to video content vs theoretical explanation. How to source motors, how to source batteries, what batteries are best, what is a converter, etc. I think if you ramp up the video production, maybe find a local shop or other local youtube content creators working on cars to collaborate on a project car. Essentially you need to prove to the audience that you can help them on an EV conversion project.
To make it scale, do what other content creators do and create a private, paid content area with more detailed videos or create a paid course people can go through that steps them through a conversion process.
Are these custom cars and cars with re-purposed drivetrain ok to drive on the road from an NTSB perspective?
Safety and legality of this kind of work comes down to the owner and the jurisdiction. This guy is providing support for getting the drivetrain running, not auditing the safety of the vehicle.
Besides, people probably aren't buying brand new 2025 cars and converting them to EVs, they're generally older cars which already don't meet modern safety standards, so it's a bit of a moot point.
Nice work!
Thank you!
I play Texas Holdem.
It's not enough $$$ to be a full time role, especially considering the costs of purchasing health insurance w/o a traditional W2 employer, but it's perfectly possible to buy in for the the table max (500) and leave with between between three hundred and a thousand dollars in profit in ~8 hours of play.
(Real life, not online. "Caro's Book of Poker Tells"[1] will aid you more than fancy math, though knowing the basics of what is a good hand, what a check raise is, that sort of thing will help -- the biggest thing to remember is to play less hands, and be aggressive when you do. Fold or raise -- no calls!)
wrote a lengthy paragraph on the perils of online poker then i realized you were doing it offline!
are you playing in the casinos? US I assume? tell me where the fishes are young man!
There are plenty of states were poker rooms or private poker is legal (California, for instance), here's a map of poker rooms:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTyeLgf...
Also, many people, who play poker semi-professionally, travel and play poker rooms in places like Mexico, Austria, Czechia, etc.
>tell me where the fishes are young man!
It's hard, because the bad players tend to play what is termed "loose aggressive" -- so you have to play less hands, and often they get lucky with crap like catching a flush draw or three of a kind, and they only play 1/2 or 1/3.
For privacy reasons I cannot give my specific location, but I've had good experiences at the Golden Nugget's 1/2.
(Unfortunately there's not much of a wall from the casino and I'm sensitive to smoke, so I didn't last long before getting a migraine -- maybe they'l outfit themselves like a dutch hostel with one of those big air sucking machines oneday)
How is it not enough $$$ for a full-time role if you make 1300/2 = 650 per 8 hour session? Is it because of CA?
OP may be highly skilled and disciplined, but the implication here is probably a bit exaggerated.
Assuming he is talking about buying in a full $500 at a $3/5 table, that's 16 big blinds an hour (16bb/hr x 5usd/bb * 8hr = $640), which is a god-tier rate in the long run.
For mere mortals with less skill and patience, it's also possible to lose the same amount the next 8hr session, resulting in a net zero for two days of work. Or, to sit break even for 8hrs with crappy unplayable hands, because you do need to play less hands to win as he mentioned.
Also, you get fatigued after ~5 hours, it's hard to play well for long stretches and if you make a bad all in it takes a while to make up for it.
My guess: events are not frequent, at least not in the above commenters neck of the woods. Travelling costs money, so they stick locally.
I play cash games, sit and go. Tournaments are much harder and become shove fests towards the end.
sit and go meaning sit and go tournaments vs organized tournaments?
Variance can suck out any profit from cash games and can get you deeply stuck for months on end (see: any full time poker youtuber). Tournaments are even higher variance.
And if you switch to doing this full time, you become self-employed, which drastically increases the cost of taxes, healthcare, social security, etc. Medicare tax doubles. Social Security tax doubles. You must buy your own healthcare, which drastically increases in premiums (unless you have a spouse who can add you as a dependent on their W-2 sponsored plan).
This really goes for any self-prop business/freelancing. In exchange for freedom of being your own boss, you pay in stress, variance, and taxes.
To make this work, you'd probably have to make double that per 8 hour session. Which is insanely difficult to do as a poker pro and sustain as a "full time job".
It’s not really MMR but I have a side business when I provide software for online and in-person festival payments (entry/food/drinks). If you take the total revenue (or profit) for the year and divide by 12 I’m well over the $500/mo limit.
I currently do 3 festivals a year which all pretty much fell in my lap, I’ve yet to start any sort of sales/marketing due to being busy with my day job/life and not wanting to grow too fast.
I started back in 2021 when a local company I’ve worked with to make apps came to me looking for a solution for their food/music festival that didn’t require handing out and (almost as importantly) counting all the tickets/tokens that people bought to spend at the vendors. I did a quick turn around of a couple months to get a v1 out and working in time for the event. In the next year I essentially rewrote 90% of it and added in-person payment support (previously had just supported recording in-person payments made through a CC terminal.
Each new festival has new needs but I’m starting to get fewer feature requests and less I need to build for each new client which is nice.
Did you decide the vendors do the scanning so you could enable customers who aren't using connected smartphones? On the surface it sends like the digital version of here's my wallet, take what I owe you if I'm just presenting a QR code that links to my event "wallet" to a vendor and they are set the amount to be deducted and confirm the transaction without my input. Is there a customer confirmation step, overcharging just hasn't been an issue, or you've figured something else out to 'prevent' that type of fraud?
I keyed on this because I've only ever really seen the reverse in the wild, where a vendor presents a bill with a QR code, and then there's either a confirmation or record of some sort that can be easily checked. Though I don't actually make these types of purchases myself, so I'm just going by cursory observations.
Interesting. Are you comfortable sharing any architecture details? Im half wanting to do the same for a local fair that had a high friction ticket system. I wasnt happy with any designs I came up with though
Sure!
It's QR-based, so customers create an account, load money onto their account, then show their QR code to vendors who scan it to charge their account. We also provide plastic cards (think: gift card) for people who don't want to use their phone but we see 80%+ of people interact completely on their phone/online. We have an app and website (same codebase, Quasar framework) and for in-person payment (entry, bar) we provide iPads with connected CC readers.
My best advice is this: your hardest challenges will not be technical in nature. The hardest part is the equipment, dealing with customers, hand-holding the festival organizers. I don't say any of that as some gross thing or bad thing, just reality. In fact, I think I've succeeded larged based on the in-person aspect (We travel to the event and are on-site for the event) and being the "I have all the answers for your festival payments"-person. Rolling with the punches is a huge part of it.
The whole thing runs on AWS Lambda with a postgres DB from Neon.tech. I'll be honest, it's incredibly over-architected, the whole thing could run a a couple (or even 1) servers as a traditional NodeJS app without issue (and with less complexity) but I used this project as learning experience and a chance to try our some technology I was interested in. Lambda is incredibly cool and I think I might have one of the best use-cases for it (incredibly spikey load: no traffic for 9 mo, tiny traffic for presales for 1-2 months, 1 month with higher sales, then 1-2 days of the event with crazy sales) but the debugging story isn't the best. SST makes it 10000x better than anything else I've tried and the developer experience is bar-none for writing lambdas but all the other crap (CloudFormation, logs, monitoring, etc) is so much overhead. If I was writing this again today I'd probably look at something like NestJS but I won't let myself re-write the code (again) without a pressing reason and if I need to spend time anywhere it's sales/marketing.
Here is my, crappy, "marketing" website: https://grubbux.com/
Festival-goers can just pay for their food direct as well?
Sorry, I don't understand your offering at all and the questions just sort of keep coming!
I see you combine payments, but I'm struggling to see the real-terms benefit over a tap-payment (card, watch or phone)? For a food stand, it would seem, not taking the money directly is a relatively large potential liability. Is the point to enforce a contract between vendors and the festival?
Does the festival pay the food stands [something] up front?
How's your liability insurance? Or do the festivals underwrite you for when Amazon/wifi is down and no-one can pay for their meals? (I did see you tout live updates, so transactions must be networked)
Sounds easy to abuse (show someone else's code?), have you had much fraud?
You're in USA? Did you need a banking license?
Small festivals in UK would be 4-8000 people, say; average food spend is probably £20+ per day -- are you carrying a debt to food providers for £500,000+ over a long weekend (consolidating payments)?
Fascinating.
Do you do non-food transactions too - souvenir stands, onsite shops, [festival] activities? Like some festivals include a number of tokens and you can buy activities with them at the festival.
Happy to answer!
> Festival-goers can just pay for their food direct as well?
In a word? Data. Festivals normally charge vendors a percentage of sales to be at the festival and they need a way to track sales. "Trust me bro" doesn't quite work since restaurants/vendors will lie or shave their sales numbers so they pay out less. One festival told me about a time they had a vendor steal another vendor's tickets they had collected and try to turn them in as their own. I don't think all or even most vendors are dishonest but the ones who are mess it up for everyone. So instead the festival requires all payment to go through their festival currency (1 to 1 with USD). This gives them realtime data of all vendors and they use that data to decide which vendors to invite back and how much to pay out at the end.
> I see you combine payments, but I'm struggling to see the real-terms benefit over a tap-payment (card, watch or phone)? For a food stand, it would seem, not taking the money directly is a relatively large potential liability. Is the point to enforce a contract between vendors and the festival?
Yes, the point is to enforce the contract between the two. For a lot of festivals the food price is low (think $3-5) since it's meant to be a way to sample a lot of things. The $0.30/transaction (that Stripe charges) eats into total percentage quickly at lower price points. Also this lets all vendors take payment without needing any special equipment (other than their smartphone). Yes, some/most of them have their own POS but this lets the festival and festival-goers keep all their transactions in one place. Also the vendors have access to reports as well.
> How's your liability insurance? Or do the festivals underwrite you for when Amazon/wifi is down and no-one can pay for their meals? (I did see you tout live updates, so transactions must be networked)
All our contracts state that we cannot be held liable for internet issues, we operate completely on LTE/5G and do not provide WiFi at the events (that's a huge PITA if you've ever looked into it) and very often there isn't even an ISP we could work with to provide the internet service so if we are going to rely on LTE anyways might as well have each iPad talk directly to the towers instead of through extra infrastructure we need to manage. So far this has no been an issue but we do a cellular survey of the area when we take on a new festival to check how good the signal is.
> Does the festival pay the food stands [something] up front?
No, in fact often the vendors pay a small amount to reserve the space (mostly to make them have some skin in the game and show up, the number of no-shows always surprises me a bit). Vendors in general are very hard to wrangle. You can send them all the info ahead of time multiple times, in multiple forms, etc and at least 20%+ will show up and have no idea what's going on. Thankfully we can train someone on the system in well under 5min and they rarely need follow-up help.
> Sounds easy to abuse (show someone else's code?), have you had much fraud?
This was a huge concern of mine up front but in practice it's been non-existent or at least non-reported (and trust me, I've dealt with every other type of support ticket), In fact couples/families will often just load 1 account and share the QR between them. We also offer in-system transfers which isn't used as much as I would have expected but people do it that way as well.
> You're in USA? Did you need a banking license?
Yes, thankfully no license needed. I've worked/founded startups that needed Money Transmitter Licenses and I wouldn't touch those businesses with a 10ft pole (so much insurance and each state is done differently, no thanks). No, the money never touches my accounts, I use Stripe Connect so I help the festival get their own account setup and all the money dumps directly into their Stripe account (and then their bank account). I don't handle payouts to vendors because every festival has a different formula so it's easier to just give them all the money, give them the reports, and let them sort it out.
> Small festivals in UK would be 4-8000 people, say; average food spend is probably £20+ per day -- are you carrying a debt to food providers for £500,000+ over a long weekend (consolidating payments)?
I can't share exact numbers but 4-8K customers is the range we see as well but our numbers are low because people share accounts. The average spend is about $30-40 depending on the festival. My answer to the previous question probably answered this for you but no, I don't carry the debt or deal with that, the festival does.
> Do you do non-food transactions too - souvenir stands, onsite shops, [festival] activities? Like some festivals include a number of tokens and you can buy activities with them at the festival.
Sometimes. We have special support for bars (to track stock) and you can put anyone on the system if you want. We have done entry ticketing, event ticketing (bourbon tasting for extra at the festival), and one festival ran all their T-shirts/stickers through the system as well. We support multiple ticket types so you can create a ticket type for anything you want. One festival didn't use the "festival currency" at all and instead wanted everyone to get 15 tasting tickets (we support packages/bundles as well) who bought the "Tasting package" and they redeemed those at the vendors.
I hope that answers some of your questions!
Omg, thank you for such open and clear answers. My inquisition-organ is replete with such satisfying answers!
Thanks for the explanation. I had a lot of similar questions.
> show their QR code to vendors who scan it to charge their account.
That sounds _brilliant_ -- being able to show a physical QR code card rather than dig out the phone sounds like it would help a lot with preventing damage/loss of phones.
Yep, because everything is QR-based I can provide almost the same experience for people on their phones or those who opt for a card. The card even has a URL on it you can go to to claim the card (convert to a user account in the system) or a page you can go to and see the balance without needing to create an account.
I think I might just have downvoted you because I‘m a clumsy idiot.
So let me just say I love these honest no-bullshit posts!
Thank you! I appreciate you saying that.
I love geeking out over my "stack" or talking about the business stuff, it's been rollercoaster and a huge learning experience for me. Really upended a ton of preconceptions I had about a number of things.
Good for you man, happy to hear about your success and pains. A sign of maturity is realizing the tech is always the easy part.
Awesome, thanks for sharing
You've done a lot of work, and this seems like an excellent way to ensure events run smoothly! Great work in building a useful service for festivals & vendors and reduce the transaction fees to ... well ... as low as they can realistically go given the payment rails :)
Can I suggest you add a marketing video or some graphics to explain how easy it is for the festival company and the vendors?
Thank you for the kind words. Yeah, a video and/or graphics are on my list for sure, I just keep procrastinating tackling that because it's not something I'm strong in, which is a bad excuse but it's the truth.
In 2015, I wrote the backend for a registration/ticketing/admission system for our (the company I work for) non-profit. They put on yearly galas in a far-off US state. The system utilized QR codes from printed and electronic tickets. The system was used once and royally failed due to connectivity issues. We relied on the venue's wi-fi and had cellular backup. It worked during on-site testing but failed once the crowds formed. Attendee's couldn't load their e-tickets and we couldn't get a response from the servers as tickets were scanned.
Props to you for getting everything working!
This is pretty interesting! What hardware are you using for vendors? Kinda curious how you deal with the network aspect of it. Sometimes venues have low cell reception or flaky venue networks.
Vendors just use their own smartphones and use our app to scan customer’s QR code to charge them.
As for the network we rely completely on the cellular network. We use an extremely small amount of data (a tiny fraction of what an image a user might be posting to FB/IG/SC/etc would be) so unless the networks are completely down we can manage without issue.
We check out venues/grounds/etc for cellular reception/speed ahead of time to make sure we are a good fit for a festival to try and avoid internet connection issues.
I'm making photography software: https://heliographe.net
Right now my work is Apple platforms only (revenue through App Store), but I'm actively looking into ways to expand to other platforms.
As a long time photographer, my philosophy is to make tools that are useful to me first and foremost, and to build smaller scope things that compose well (UNIX philosophy). I've got some exciting new things planned for 2025.
These are all side projects right now, as my official full time occupation is Japanese language school student (I moved to Japan at the end of 2023 year after almost 15 years in SF Bay Area tech companies/startups, becoming a full time student at 34 surrounded by 21 year olds from a very different background has been an interesting experience on its own).
Since the revenue has been increasing the last few months, I incorporated to keep things organized, but for now these projects are still "side projects". It'd be cool if I could justify financially to do this full time after I finish language school in 2026.
These are great.
Always a pleasure discovering a portfolio of apps from an indie developer that genuinely do one thing well, are well designed, and all have the coveted “Data Not Collected” app privacy card to boot.
Trichromy reminds me of Prokudin-Gorsky's color photographs from the 19th century. Except of course he tried to get rid of the effect. Clever!
Yes, it’s directly based on the trichromatic photographic process, which I learned about reading an article about Gorsky.
And yeah, it’s super interesting how when a new recording technology is created, we seek to avoid its limitations; but later on, those limitations get embraced on their own merits for aesthetic value!
I'm a user of the 65×24 app, I didn't know that the same person made the trichrome app, what amazing work!
I'm happy for you. You are so smart and capable, so I hope you won't have bad luck in the end.
I made SmoothTrack, a no-equipment head tracking app for iOS and Android which lets you control the game camera in sim games (like MSFS 2024 for example) with your head - basically like TrackIR, just without any equipment and for $15 instead of $150. I originally made the app just for myself to save myself the money of buying a TrackIR system, but then /r/flightsim begged me to release it as a full app.
Last month, I released SmoothTrack 2.0 which includes basic eye tracking and camera control gestures.
I remember building my own track ir with ir leds and a floppy in front of an old webcam. This was more than a decade ago, but I would have assumed there is no more demand for this since VR headsets are a thing(I completely left gaming and everything about it since then). Anyway, great work!
> and a floppy in front of an old webcam
I think you meant to write 'an artisanal and bespoke infra-red bandpass filter in front of an old webcam'.
Do you know about vtubers? In case you don't, they are people that record or livestream themselves playing games and whatnot. Instead of using a regular face camera to put themselves onto the video feed, they use a 2D or 3D animated model.
Most people use a desktop webcam which can do decent tracking or an iPhone which does really good tracking through ARkit, but there isn't really a decent solution on Android.
It could be a good new market opportunity for you on desktop, iPhone, or Android - but especially for Android users since there isn't really any alternatives. There is a steady stream of new people getting into being a vtuber and I think a $15 app might be an easy sell considering people can end up spending up to a five-digit amount getting custom character models commissioned. If you are able to improve the eye/face tracking past the basic level you mentioned the 2.0 version having, it would be even more appealing.
Thanks! Yeah, I've been asked about this a few times - however, it does look like this is basically exactly that (using ARKit and ARCore) and exists already: https://denchisoft.com Have you heard of this tool?
VtubeStudio plus an iPhone for mocap is the standard for the big-time vtubers that use 2D avatars, however 2D avatars actually have quite a high barrier to entry because pretty much your only option is to have something commissioned. 3D avatars tend to be what nearly everyone starts out with because there are several free programs out there that can help you make a decent starter avatar.
VtubeStudio only supports the nicer 2D avatars and as far as I know has no intention of getting into the 3D side of things. There are a few decent programs people use with 3D avatars(links below), but it seems they aren't really as high quality as VtubeStudio so they don't have the market cornered like VtubeStudio does for 2D.
As far as tracking goes, on the camera side of things there isn't really any difference between 2D and 3D that might limit you to one or the other.
There is a pretty large demand for tracking apps on Android because there are no widely used apps currently available. Big-time vtubers usually get iPhones so they can use the ARkit tracking that is Apple only, but a lot of people just starting out have Android and are currently forced to use a regular PC webcam that tends not to be as accurate and also doesn't allow people to offload the computing resources needed for face tracking to their phones.
Vroid Studio(the main app people use with 3D avatars): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1486350/VRoid_Studio_v201...
Warudo(this one is a lot newer than Vroid Studio so it has a lot less users, but is probably the second most popular 3D app): https://store.steampowered.com/app/2079120/Warudo/
As a long time simmer, I'm buying this tonight after work, especially now that my Pixel 4a 5G is sitting on my desk, propping up the 9 Pro XL that replaced it last week.
Also, FS2024. Wow.
Tried it on my lunch hour (WFH FTW!) and wow that is disorienting. Going to take some getting used to after 30+ years without it!
Awesome! Hope you enjoy it - I recommend turning the sensitivity down to start with, also bind “toggle” in OpenTrack to turn it off when you don’t need it.
Thanks! I was just playing with it, and for the FIRST TIME EVER I was able to fly a proper pattern without using an external view or the mouse to see where the airport/runway was. Wow. A whole new level of immersion, for $12. Money well spent.
How does this work without a virtual headset (don't you just end up looking off-screen)? Are you moving your head far less than the camera moves on the screen?
> moving your head far less than the camera moves on the screen
Precisely this. You keep your eyes on the screen and just nudge your head in the direction you want. Your brain “gets” it real quickly and it feels very intuitive.
your phone watches your face move. It can be off to the side, as the neutral position need not be dead center.
As a flight simmer, definitely going to check this out.
Made an account just to say thanks for sharing this, just bought it and it seems super cool. I'm looking forward to trying it out tonight!
Awesome, thank you. Please let me know how it goes for you!
This is really cool, I think this may be the first time I watch one of these threads and be tempted to get something
I'm definitely going to check this out for MSFS. Thanks for sharing!
The site's cert expired yesterday.
Thanks, fixed.
I love SmoothTrack!
Well, that's awesome to run into a SmoothTrack user here! Thanks for the kind words, all three of them. :)
I released this fairly simple ChatGPT/Claude wrapper a few months ago. Currently it’s doing about 15K/month. It’s an invisible Electron app that can be used to cheat in coding interviews / OA’s.
I love this.
I honestly want everyone to cheat on these leetcode style interviews. I want that process to be broken and for the whole system to become completely ineffective, so that companies are forced to go back to actually putting some thought into hiring.
I doubt it'll happen and instead surveillance during these interviews will probably just increase instead, but perhaps you've kicked off a game of cat and mouse here, which may make some hiring managers reconsider leetcode.
Thanks for echoing my thoughts. This is what I feel about the process to, and at the point in my life where I'm at I couldn't care less about this being unethical.
How did you market this?
What a great idea! Honestly probably one of the better uses of LLMs that I’ve seen. Wishing you continued success.
The Greatest Books https://thegreatestbooks.org
I created it in 2008 and have maintained and improved it over the years. I am trying to figure out how to monetize it more. I currently make around $2k a month. I just use adsense and have a paid membership feature through buymeacoffee. I get massive traffic and I'm pretty much the #1 result for anything related to best/greatest books.
It's built with Rails and Postgresql and hosted on 3 linode servers. I get around 250k page visits a day.
Can you go into more details, when was it built and how much time have you spent (approx) on creating the content? or is it all generated? And the traffic's gradual organic increase?
Interesting to see Adsense revenue still being so high, I imagined this category being so competitive and diluted the CPM would be very low!
I noticed your purchase modal only shows Amazon pricing, are you using their API to get prices or its scraped data. If its scraped/stale data, I would look into the pricing display guidelines for affiliates.
And why is it just Amazon and not other online bookstores too?
I built it in 2008, and have rewritten it twice now since them. I have spent quite a bit of time adding new lists. It's definitely a labor of love and I do spend quite a bit of time on it.
I do use Gen AI now to generate genres, descriptions, and to grab other data. Previously years ago i would just scrape it or manually set it.
Amazon has a nice product API with up to date prices.
I am working on bookshop.org integration. I used to also do barnes & noble. The problem is neither of them have APIs to programmatically search for books, so i have to do complicated scraping. example: https://github.com/ssherman/bookshop-search
Thank you for replying. I am (on and off) building a regional price comparison website for various regional online bookstores. I do want to build a more fairer and honest monthly/yearly list something like yours and the price comparison as the main USP but more so I really like reading and enjoy exploring books even if I don't read all of the ones I wan to.
Your website is quite inspiring to me and have given me more ideas to explore. Thank you for sharing your ranking algorithm, very fascinating (and still understanding the intricacies of it).
I asked you about Amazon API because I noticed some of your prices are stale which is against their Pricing Display guidelines.
Its been a challenge for me to work with Amazon as their API is not easy to get access to, I mean I have an affiliate tag for A website but from what I've read as per their TOS I am only allowed to use it for A website and not for B. And for B I have to apply again for a new tag with a new website (which is still under development!)
I will end up working on a scraper or a few workers anyway as most online bookstores do not have an API, none have replied back to my emails inquiring the same.
yeah the amazon product API has some severe limitations. I have 25,000~ books on my site, and I just don't have enough API calls in a day to keep the prices 100% updated. It's on my todo list to revisit this, but it's low on my priority list. I don't make that much from amazon refs(couple hundred a month)
I will say that I don't think they really defend their TOS too much from my experience. I used to have a cookbooks site for years that used the same affiliate tag i use for my greatest books site, and never had any issues.
Thank you for sharing your experience. This has been helpful.
not making anything with amazon affiliate program?
oh wow, ive actually come across this organically before. good job on seo!
same here!
I've built https://cophone.io - your online smartphone, complete with a phone number. It is an Android system running in the cloud that you can access via a browser, even on mobiles. Things like microphone and webcam work nicely, so you can even have meetings on cophone.
After iterating on it for a while, customers seem very happy and now growing day by day.
No marketing so far, just being out there and posting on various channels once in a while.
A small feedback: The poster image on your homepage (https://cophone.io/assets/images/virtual-smartphone-cophone....) is unnecessarily big (1.7MB). You can compress it into a much smaller JPEG without any visible defect. Maybe you don't need it at all as video will start playing soon anyway.
Here is a way smaller (only 97K) .webp version: https://files.littlebird.com.au/virtual-smartphone-cophone.w...
You mention national and international phone calls. Do these virtual devices appear local to the customers region, to where your servers are located or are there options?
Could someone use your service to run an Android device that behaves as if in the United States, for example, to use Android apps or web services that are region blocked and restrict use of VPN/Proxy?
US for now, but without any guarantee.
Wow, I've been looking for something like this. Can I bring my own esim?
Not yet, but something that I really would like to offer.
I would love a local-run version of this on my windows machine! Same subscription price is fine.
On my TODO list! Might take a while though!
Who'd have thought that a CMS could still make money in 2024, but this one is around £500 a month.
It obviously doesn't pay the bills or the mortgage, but it works. All my clients are word of mouth, I do not advertise at all (a combination of costs and insanely opaque / fractured advertising models by Facebook and co...I don't have time to get a phd in your ad platform to see if any of my money is actually doing anything)
I build it originally because I was fed up with Wordpress / Squarespace / Weebly / Wix, because all of their interfaces are slow and don't work on mobile.
This CMS is fast and works on mobile.
It's also pretty cheap nowadays, as I've not been raising prices like everyone else.
It won't do super-flashy websites. It's mostly about having low-JS, good SEO, easy access to information, which can be managed by very inexperienced users (I live rurally and we have a fair few pensioners as clients, they all get along with the system very well).
There are just about a billion things I want to do with it, but it never made enough money to become my full-time job, so it mostly just sits there and does its job.
> It's mostly about having low-JS, good SEO, easy access to information, which can be managed by very inexperienced users
Nice!
I shared in the parent thread about my tool which spell checks sites, it found a few small issues: https://www.spl.ing/report-card?website=pinkpigeon.co.uk&uui...
This is a brilliant tool, thank you very much for showing me. Bookmarked.
The “Lea Hill Holiday Cottages” link is broken!
Thank you for pointing that out, fixed!
Thank you for deliberately not cooperating with Satan!
One can but try, but it feels like that's getting harder and harder to do these days...
Still running https://hackernewsletter.com/ after 15 years and 60k+ subscribers. It has been hard to put a lot of focus on it the past couple years, but been finally getting some time to spend on some improvements there. Income here has always been simple sponsors which I'm very grateful for.
Congrats! Time to update the © years? It may look abandoned to the newbies.
Also, maybe update the "recent issue" to be more recent than 2021! Just subscribed though; I'm looking forward to receiving it wherever I read my emails.
Yeah, redoing this site is on my list.
Ha, good call.
Another thing I've noticed is that the logo for this thing in Curpress is broken.
This is one of the few newsletters that are worth reading so thanks for your service for all these years.
BTW, 15 years is really impressive!
Thanks for the kind words and being a subscriber!
I love your newsletter and created https://www.thegamingpub.com/ heavily inspired by it. It's basically the hacker newsletter but for the gaming world.
Any tips on how to acquire more subs? I have been slowwwwly getting subs organically. I even have some patreons now.
I landed on this page thanks to the newsletter.
I also use Raycast HackerNews aggregation but I appreciate your email every time it lands.
I remember when you launched this, and I signed up for it right away. I still read it every day. I can't believe it's been 15 years already! Thanks for this awesome service.
Yeah! Me too! Been an avid reader of this newsletter for quite some years now!
Thanks @duck !
Don't change anything.
I have built https://audiala.com which creates audioguides for historical and touristic places in cities all over the world. It brings a bit over $500/month in in-app purchases.
I got the idea in 2023 as I was solo traveling Florence, Italy and thought it would be much nicer to listen to stories about the monuments around me instead of having to read a guide. There is also so much more to be done: next, my plan is to create personalised itineraries based on your preferences, starting point, etc.
I tried paid marketing but found much more effective the SEO I have done on the website, and users seem to share with their friends and come back, which makes me happy.
Super cool! I had a very similar idea recently: I wanted to have on-demand podcasts about one's surroundings as you explore a new place (also taking into account a small list of user interests). I did a prototype [1] with the OpenAI APIs but the generated results were too shallow and not as interesting. It seems you prepared it with more carefully curated content, smart. My city is covered by Audiala, will give it a try!
Nice, I will check your solution too. I would also love to have NotebookLM available via API, it could be nice to generate podcast-like guides.
Cool I had this idea about 10 years ago. I was walking around a city alone with headphones on while Google maps told me how to get to my destination. Thought how nice it would be to combine gps and audio to let me explore and learn. Glad to see someone executing on it!
Yes, it's definitely a cool project! Sometimes it's hard to stop reading and listening at all there is to learn and instead code... I hope to have the itineraries with directions done by end of January.
Will definitely check this out. Our go-to guide whenever travelling Europe has always been Rick Steve's books and audio guide app. Those are like having a personal guide with you as he will tell cool things like "take few steps to the left, now the point you are standing is where Hitler stood and made a painting of this church (in Vienna)" or "Leonardo da Vinci used to stare at this artistic metal door for inspiration (in Florence)". Those audio tours are one of the most fun things we remember from our trips as he is a great storyteller.
Thanks for sharing. This type of storytelling is what I want to achieve, even if I am not there yet. But I am confident this is achievable already.
How is the content created and curated?
I just noticed that you run https://allaboutberlin.com. My first website was https://toutsurprague.fr in 2008, similar ideas :)
It’s a RAG pipeline based on content from wikipedia and relevant websites. Getting the list of relevant places might the trickiest part of the pipeline but for this I settled with a not-perfect solution where users can manually request missing places.
Interesting - how heavily are you utilizing AI generated content? Pages like this for example: https://audiala.com/en/germany
We rely on AI for most of the content and correct if mistakes are spotted, but they seem quite rare. 99% of the content is directly coming from our AI pipeline.
I built https://check.supply with a friend - it’s an iOS app that is like a cash app experience for mailing a check.
Old school landlords, paying gardeners, or other people still only accepting checks. We use plaid to connect your account, then press send, then track the printing, mailing and delivery of the check.
Only iOS App here:
This is awesome, I built this exact same thing back around 2008. However, I didn’t use plaid or any verification. I’d print whatever you wanted on the account and routing number lines. I just bought a stack of mailer checks and printed it from my laser printer and mail them out. MICR line ink is supposed to be magnetic but I think all the scanners are optical as I never had any complaints or issues as I personally was probably the biggest volume user.
How did you design and build your homepage? I find that building the landing page and making it look like a professional, beautiful design is one of my biggest hurdles. I'm an experienced web developer but without a design to work off of - and especially accounting for mobile and dynamic sizing - I really struggle with this part of the work so I'm wondering what other people's workflows are for it.
As someone who has struggled with this before, your fastest way is to look for pre-built templates on github or buy one's you like.
Looks like GP is using the pocket template from tailwindui - https://pocket.tailwindui.com/
There are hundreds of people selling pre-built components, landing pages, templates etc. This at least gets you up and running and not stressing over design. As a dev who lacks design sense, this was immensely helpful.
Other option as sibling points out is to use bolt or lovable and give it explicit instructions on what kind of design to use. For example, with lovable, try this prompt "use neo brutalist design."
This is a massive insight for me. That entire landing page is a template with small edits. No wonder it looks so good. You nailed it. Thanks for this. I think the last time I looked into templates I wasn't impressed with what I found, and I think I underestimated what was available now in 2024.
Try bolt.new or similar
Do you have risk loss / fraud issues?
Not really. We don’t touch customer money- we just print and mail checks on their behalf.
We do require bank verification via Plaid, which proves the user has a valid username and login to their bank.
We perform further KYC checks for suspicious payments.
Brilliant idea! I recently had a difficult time trying to get a cashiers check at a few nearby banks/credit unions I wasn’t a member of. It’s incomprehensible to me they weren’t willing to accept a fee in order to charge my debit card for the amount of the check + fee ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Probably regulations, KYC requirements, etc.
are you using lob to print/mail everything?
Nope. Lob doesn’t have instant bank verification which was a deal breaker for us.
In fact there are several providers that offer checks via api but none of them worked for us, so we rolled our own :)
I make between $3k to $6k from putting a log cabin on Airbnb. This started during period of boredom during the pandemic. I operate remotely with smart home devices and with a local cleaning team/handyman.
I had a project to completely automate this with an AI agent but Airbnb doesn't offer a publicly available API.
$3k seems high but the costs add up and the time as well (details here https://studiozenkai.com/post/airbnb-the-good-the-bad-the-pr... ). I always have a bit of profit at the end of year and the mortgage costs are entirely paid so no complaints here
If I ever get fed up from tech projects, I can see myself getting a bigger vacation property and making this my own version of Barista FIRE
We should be able to claim our landlords as dependents on taxes.
That's not really a side project. It's an income, but not a project.
Definitely a side project. Did you read the post?
I maintain https://mockoon.com, an API mocking tool for developers. I created it in 2017 and initially worked on it during my free time. I started focusing on it full-time three years ago and introduced cloud options to make the project sustainable alongside donations. Revenue is growing slowly but steadily, and I’m proud to 1) start making a living from it, and 2) ensure the project’s open-source future.
That tool is nice. It saved my ass during covid where i had a customer with an API which could not be reached from home.
My intern somehow managed to get it running inside docker for our dev systems.
omg, i have used mockoon in the past. Thank you for creating the app, it's very intuitive to use and useful. Incredible work
In 2023, I started selling solid wood rolling trays designed by my little sister and I on Etsy (The Stoned Craftsmen).
Almost immediately I was making $1200-2000 per month. Some months can be big months (especially around Thanksgiving/Christmas) where I'm getting $75-200 a day in sales, but some months can be dogs (July and August this year were literally $0 months - the only 2 on record - I think an algorithm changed on Etsy and we got punished or something). When the sales were growing, the work was fun, when they plateaued then dipped, it made it hard to feel energized to do the work.
The first year I spent a lot of time optimizing everything on the manufacturing side. Better tool paths, less tool changes, better speeds to not break everything, better use of materials, better use of disposables. I tried optimizing my Etsy store, but I couldn't get anything to increase sales, and moving to my own Shopify was a waste of $40/mo for 6 months because driving my own paid traffic from social media (which has rules against paraphernalia) was hard, so eventually I dropped that and stuck with Etsy and tried to wholesale to dispensaries and headshops around me, but my wholesale price is too high, and I don't want to offshore my manufacturing to get my price low enough.
I had grand plans on growing the brand. I was in talk with major brands in the space for collaboration, but our wholesale price point was too high, and 1 celebrity brand said the gap was too large, the other never got back in touch after sending them our wholesale sheet.
So I think I'm just going to have a nice side biz as a niche maker of solid wood rolling trays.
TIL a "rolling tray" is a tray designed specifically to aid in rolling joints.
Took me a couple of minutes, a google search, and then another couple of minutes to understand what a "rolling joint" is. (not native English speaker)
I'm not sure you got it, because you referenced it as a noun, not a verb.
Rolling is the verb, the joint is the noun.
Rolling a joint is rolling a cigarette, except with marijuana.
I did write the comment using it as noun, incorrectly, on purpose, to convey my confusion :)
As a CNC enthusiast I wondered what this was and what the market was like (I don't partake so hadn't heard of a rolling tray).
A quick look on Etsy and it seemed super saturated, do you push through the noise somehow?
The niche I went into was making rolling trays I wouldn't mind my grandma seeing, because they don't look like the cheap steel Rick and Morty trays that they sell at head shops.
I don't know why I'm able to make so many sales. A lot of the other shops that are in this space don't sell as many, so maybe it is design + price point? At crafts shows (which I haven't sold at), similar sized but much "trashier" trays sell for double what I sell for on Etsy, but I'm not able to increase my price at all on Etsy (fucks the algorithm up).
How much of your woodworking is CNC? I’ve been thinking about selling a slightly different take on fountain pen trays, but I’m just routing by hand and/or with jigs.
When I started selling them, 50% was CNC, 40% was me and a bandsaw, 10% was me and a sander.
After a 20 months of optimizations, its now 80% CNC, 20% sander. There is a specific product that my CNC barfs on 100% of the time, so I have to do a batch of like 30 at once so the failures don't have any real impact. My next big purchase will be a small drum sander ($1500) so that I can leave an onion skin (1/16" - 1/8" thick) on the bottom of my stock and let the sander remove it. But I need a good Christmas season to make that happen.
What CNC do you use if you don't mind me asking? I do some hobby and small sales woodworking but run into requests where a CNC would make it easier. Would love recommendations.
6 months ago, I would have recommended my Carbide 3D Pro line, but starting 6 months ago, parts started failing one by one, it is now a CNC of Theseus. I had to buy a new controller board because sensors kept failing and Support would send me new sensors gratis, but I'd be down for a week while I waited and then attached the new one. After a handful of those, they guessed (still don't know how correct that guess is) that it was the controller board, but they didn't send that gratis, I had to buy that. When waiting for that to arrive, I received my most recent replacement sensor that was DOA. So I had to do some wire splicing and create a few Frankenstein's Sensors to get me through the holiday. So far my splices are holding up, but I don't have faith they will for long. After the Christmas Season, I need to decide if I'm going to keep repairing or go for a much better machine. In the $5k price range, they are all SO MUCH BETTER than what I have, and I paid nearly $4k in 2022.
Hmm yea I appreciate the insight. I was looking at the Nomad 3 as a good price point for me to do some of the size projects I'm thinking of and getting my feet wet but this makes for one of the more expensive investments in the shop so I'd like it to be somewhat reliable. I don't see myself sticking with that machine if I received any kind of volume work like it sounds you receive. Would be interested to see where you settle for the upgrade when that happens!
I was tired of coming home after networking events and shift through pile of business cards, so I made an app to just scan cards and export them to csv. Pretty much just for fun app for myself, friends, and friends of friends, but other people started using it too.
https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/krane-build-relationships/id67...
Have you ever looked at previous apps in that space? Esp. Simson Garfinkel's sbook?
https://simson.net/ref/sbook5/
which was _way_ ahead of the whole "AI" thing... Still regretting not keeping a copy of the Windows binary...
I am running a web scraping API ScrapeNinja https://scrapeninja.net. 10K+ subscribers.
It is a (rather messy) node.js codebase. Two rendering engines, including a hacked puppeteer package with stealth mode for better success rate. A big set of proxy providers under the hood. Bootstrapped.
What does "stealth mode" mean?
Quite curious, I have been scraping some websites for my girlfriend with nodejs/puppeteer and put the content on an .epub file (she likes to read on her e-reader) and it can be quite annoying to bypass some anti-scraping techniques.
Small piece of feedback, the main text "Smart Web Scraping API" looks pretty off-center to me. Using latest Chrome on Mac on a 4k screen.
Started selling pasture raised eggs last summer. First we had a flock of 150 but soon we ordered 150 more. We kept them in the Susckovich style chicken tractors[1] and sold directly to customers through Reko-rings (Facebook based farmers market). We gross around 3k€ per month with around 2000 euros profit per month. The chores take 1-2h per day and the deliverys around 3h per week. Our web page is at www.paivarinne.farm It's in Finnish but at least the pictures are nice :)
1: https://farmmarketingsolutions.com/stress-free-chicken-tract...
but how much does it cost to feed 300 chickens?
I built a web app that extracts data from documents, like PDFs, Word, etc. I've seen people say "GPT wrapper", but it consistently outperforms similar tools in the space. My main customer is a private equity fund that randomly reached out. I didn't know much at all about fintech, but it works and gets the job done.
I don't have a proper marketing site yet since I've been focused on building the app, but it's coming soon (hopefully...)
How do you reduce errors or hallucinations? I recently uploaded a very clear PDF to meta.ai and asked it a few, very simple questions. It completely made up quotes, including page numbers, section numbers etc.
I don't feed documents directly to an LLM. First, extract and process the data in a structured way that maintains the hierarchy and metadata of the content (this is important!). Then convert this into a scheme that you can control — it doesn’t really matter what it is (JSON, XML, markdown). From there, feed this to the LLM in chunks. This will get you most of the way there.
There's different ways to validate, but that's why maintaining hierarchy and metadata is so important. If you track this information properly, you can cross-check responses across different LLMs!
I'd like to learn more -- please email me (link in profile).
I'm interested, can you email me (address in profile)
Could you please link your website?
Sure, you can try the demo at:
I laser cut wall art and sell over Facebook marketplace. Making $2000-5000/month.
I have a website, but most sales are done over FB and customers pick up at my house. I either purchase designs on Etsy, pay a designer to create dxf file or do it myself (if it's easy). To be honest, I don't like the position I'm in with this. It makes too much to give up, but not enough to be a "real thing". Plus, I'm still trading time for dollars.
Have you considered selling at a bulk discount to local merchants? They have the physical presence and would remove the hassle/danger of people coming to your house. Keep your digital presence and just point people to the local shops or accept orders for the shops and send them there.
I've done this a few times, both local shops and one further away (driveable, but I shipped to them instead). They take quite large margins (50-60% or monthly shelf fees) and for it to be profitable for both of us, they would have to price the pieces quite high. I need to find a product that has higher value that's not already done.
As for people coming to my house, I've completed nearly 1000 orders (most have done local pick up) and have never had an issue. Most often I leave the order at the front door and they either leave cash in mailbox or they e-transfer at pick up. Knock on wood, but I've never had anyone not pay.
Makes sense, thanks for sharing. My folks were artists and it brings me joy to see you making some money from your art.
Hey I sell jewelry online as well (mostly Etsy and Shopify), and have been considering selling on fb marketplace.
Do you pay for ads, or just make for sale posts? How often do you need to manage the posts? I know there are a ton of people who message sellers and then just waste their time. How do you handle customer support?
Feel free to shoot me a message at jack at minardi dot org
Sent you an email with some info.
I have essentially the same question!
Mind sharing your website? Genuinely curious.
I can message it privately, don't really want to post publicly. 99% of orders are local pick up, shipping is just a hassle as most pieces don't fit in regular box (plus Canada Post is on strike right now). EDIT - messaged you on your IG.
Depending on where you live in Canada, get on Stallion Express or Chitchats Express, which will be cheaper than Canada Post. They’ll either get you better rates through Canada Post, or access to the 3rd-party couriers like Amazon uses (FleetOptics, UniUni, ICS & others).
It's not always the cost that is prohibitive (although sometimes the shipping is the same price as the piece of wall art). What stops me from really exploring shipping is finding packaging for each, the time it takes to package and drive to CanadaPost etc. It probably sounds like I'm just making excuses, and you'd be right :)
I'd love to see it too if possible - based in Aus here, contact on bio
Sent an email.
Ditto, I’m curious to see the art.
Please do! My email is on my profile.
What laser setup are you using?
Thunder Nova 51. It's a big, fairly expensive laser, but it's owned by a makerspace I'm part of.
Just launched Story Treasure a way to create illustrated children's books, motivated by the fact that I'm a portuguese dad raising two bilingual girls in Germany... very hard to find portuguese books around here!
This is impressive. I'm working in an adjacent space and one thing that has been a challenge is character consistency -- having characters in AI-generated art appear reasonably similar across different image generations. Your implementation looks to do a solid job -- any learnings that you're willing to share?
Can you provide some figures, in terms of profitability? How much did it cost to put together, what are the monthly costs to keep it afloat?
I write a book and give it away for free on https://book.railean.net, but it wouldn't hurt to turn it into a revenue stream.
How do you monetize?
I have a margin on the credits for the models. So it's a credit model and I sell them for more than I buy them.
German speaker in Portugal. :-)
That's awesome. Just did one.
haha, it's the ultimate uno reverse card. Did it work? There are some known issues with German titles on the Cover page, sorry if you've encountered that. I'm trying to improve it.
I built the frontend for https://rigged.ai
We do statistical processing and breakdown of options sweep data, and generate realtime alerts that people can use to copy trade big Wall Street traders. We also have a strategy playground you can use to test different strategies that could be used for a trading bot.
Do you have a tutorial on how this tool can be used? Any backtest on how such alerts worked? Asking as a potential customer?
Check out the docs section or any of the YouTube videos.
And yes, I'm pretty proud of our backtesting tool (it's called strategy playground) that lets you set some bot parameters and filters for what alerts you want to trade based on (it has access to all the alerts we've generated historically, as well as symbol and option prices for all tracked options) and then does a full tick by tick simulation run and generates charts
The docs seem to be locked behind sign-up. The only option I see is "Get Started" which leads to sign up. :/
It seems you can access this directly through the link: https://docs.rigged.ai/
My side project is managing several clients websites on a subscription based service. My buddy and I started a web design agency for small companies. It was just us two and we bootstrapped everything and were in the process of building several apps for the dozen or so architectural firms we were working with when he died suddenly of an aortic aneurism. It was such a shock to me and so I just shut the company down.
Several clients begged me to keep going because we did such a good job doing the SEO, their sites were generating a ton of great leads and we had built a way to track the leads and send out first response emails with a phone call follow-up with 2 hours of the firm getting the email. Because of the fast turn around, they were beating other firms to the punch and we unknowingly had created a significant business advantage for them.
Those 4 clients pay me for 8 hours of work a month at $65.00/hour. If you do the math, I'm clearing about 2K/month just to manage their sites, send out analytics and make content suggestions. It was a nice side hustle to have a few years back when I was laid off and was able to lean on this income until I got hired again.
Can you clarify what you mean by “leads” here - is this the sort of “we found fifty names and emails that might be interested”, or is it a landing page that collects a email and phone number for when someone enters them?
I am not trying to accuse you of something weird - it’s I hear a lot of lead generation as a basic business need and I never quite understood the real mechanisms - I only get the slightly passive landing site approach or cold calling
>> Can you clarify what you mean by “leads” here
They were what sales people would refer to as "qualified leads". We had two simple questions they would answer before submitting the contact form. It really helped to define what clients were looking for and their expectations. This made first contact a lot more productive, and allowed the firms to get clients into their design process and get a commitment a lot faster. For many of the firms we were working with, this meant better leads than the ones they getting on various other platforms like Houzz and then they started investing more in their content as a marketing approach then they did before.
> Can you clarify what you mean by “leads” here
Not GP but leads in this case were people that found their websites on Google and showed interest in buying their product.
> I only get the slightly passive landing site approach or cold calling
what would you expect to be a lead that would be different than that? A lead goes through steps of qualification until it becomes a customer.
Clicky:
Earlier in 2024 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194
2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38467691
2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421
2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
2019 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863
thanks
Unsexy tech business making roughly $6-7k/mo. I partnered with a local janitorial company that targets industrial clients with recurring nightly cleaning needs and I make roughly 7% of gross revenue as a recurring weekly payment as long as the client stays on w/o much work. I help do some client support, SEO, and pay for things like Apollo.AI to reach out to customers but other than that it is pretty hands off. I feel very fortunate.
Very interesting. I thought about a lot of projects over the same lines, providing similar services to various professions like the barbers, lawn mowers, painters etc. As I am not physically in the US, marketing and support has to be done virtually which seems bit of a blocker at this point.
But what does the business actually do?
Yes, it is a leads driven business. I have focused on improving SEO in three of their core markets. Any new customer that signs up as a result of my marketing efforts, as long as their base margin is met, I get paid for the lifetime of that account.
I love everything about what you're doing here. There's a lot of opportunity in a lot of different niches and it's all just being slept on.
Did you already have a relationship with this company somehow or did you have to go and sell them?
I was introduced to them via a friend. I know the market well enough to recognize that there was potential to find clients and take a "scrape" off the new business. I know the qualms customers have with their existing service providers so whenever there are any concerns I curate very specific messages during the sales process to reel them in. Once they are signed up, getting it right 100% of the time is impossible, so I also step in on the "support" side and help solve issues, provide proposed solutions to challenges, etc. I do agree with you. Many other types of "sticky" and "unsexy" businesses out-there that are very easy to rank highly in SEO locally in dense urban environments.
> Once they are signed up, getting it right 100% of the time is impossible, so I also step in on the "support" side and help solve issues, provide proposed solutions to challenges, etc.
Maybe I'm reaching here, but as a guess, are you able to offer your partner's services out the cut you take to smooth over issues? I'm just thinking that you have fantastic incentives to do stuff like that (prioritize long-term money) that a support person working as an employee of the company directly would not have real incentives to offer...
I think I am following your question but can you clarify if what you mean is if: I take a portion of the proceeds to send customers gifts, take them out to dinners, etc to ensure the relationship remains strong? If so, then not really. Usually these clients just want smooth problem free services. I am working with him on holiday gifting ideas but that's really the extent of it. I also incur some expenses such as marketing costs, software, etc but it is pretty nominal. In summary, clients just want the teams to show up, do a good job, not break anything, listen to special requests, execute those special requests, and rinse wash repeat.
No, I meant if you need to discount or give them service gratis to smooth over an unhappy customer.
In a former life I was a support drone. Days were full of us taking calls from abusive a-holes who just wanted to get over on someone and also people who had legitimate grievances and deserved relief. We typically weren't empowered to do anything about either of them.
Ah, no, never had to do that. There are cases sometimes when the janitorial staff breaks say a light fixture. What we've found is that immediate and direct communication about what happened, how it happened, what will be done to prevent it from happening again, and how we're going to fix is usually is well received and the partner compensates/credits them for the damage. Of course the invoice amount is smaller for the "repair" so therefore my scrape is less. I've tried to explain to my partner that there is a very select type of client he wants and he for the most part has received it well. The larger industrial type facilities are better than the smaller in my experience.
Sounds like brings leads to the janitorial company
But also saves the janitorial company from having to hire people to do customer management/support.
Correct
My 2 Mac Apps bring about $700/mo each:
Tubbie [1] is a simple and clean Mac YouTube downloader.
Mission Control Plus [2] fixes something stupidly simple: it adds closing, minimizing and quitting apps functionality to macOS' Mission Control.
> it adds closing, minimizing and quitting
How is that not a thing is beyond me. I tried to do exactly what your app does multiple times and didn't understood how it's not a thing.
Recently I'm trying to start using an old mac. Never used it before and almost none of my friends and colleagues did.
It's a journey of multiple awe and teeth grinding moments, one after another.
Right? and the app has existed for 5 years already. Plenty of time for Apple to Sherlock it.
we sell coffee from the terminal
ssh terminal.shop
will do 6 figures in revenue the first year - not bad for a side thing!
This is wild. Using SSH like a web browser, wonderful concept
Edit: Oh wow, and people don't even have to make an account because their SSH user is their account!
I love the concept and the implementation. Do you have a write-up on the implementation anywhere, blog posts, anything?
It's a pleasure to see an online store implementation that doesn't use the Web or rely on some mobile app.
Might be using something like https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish
This is absolutely beautiful. I love it so much, and I want the rest of the world to be like this.
That's wild. I saw this when you(?) posted it a while back and assumed no one would want this. No offense, but it doesn't make the coffee taste any better...... unless it does............?
Anyway, glad you're seeing success.
The people behind it are quite popular SWE YouTubers, so that might explain the reach :-)
it is like belle delphine's bath water, but for nerds
Considering I hadn't heard of Belle Delphine until she came up in an LTT video, I'd venture a guess that her bath water was also for nerds.
is the certificate right?
mmmmm someone might want to steal my coffee...
I built a Figma to Bubble.io converter, basically Figma to code but for a nocode platform. Niche, but something that I personally needed so figured others may find value as well. I charge a flat $25/mo, and based on the Figma design it significantly speeds up my development in bubble.
Been hovering around $1.4K MRR, only real spend is ~$15/day google ads which has yet to pay for itself, but I keep telling myself its a good excuse to learn google ads.
I used to work for a company that did Bubble.io development including custom plugins. A very... cheap community of devs haha. No one wanted to spend money on much of anything in our experience.
How did you market this?
Twitter/X, bubble forum, bubblecon, etc. Bubble has a strong community, so I had a lot of support from other devs sharing it when I launched.
I started designing and building websites for locally-owned small businesses in my town, and have grown it to 45+ clients with a current MRR around $11k. I still work full-time and have built an awesome team over the years!
Do you mind going into what web stack you use? What about businesses that want online payments?
Sure! When I started 5 years ago, I had a single Django + Wagtail app that hosted all websites on a single monorepo/deployable. For the few sites that needed interactivity I just used vanilla JS. We actually do have a few sites that we've done some custom Stripe integrations for so they can accept payments online, but it's very minimal/simple.
About a year and a half ago I began moving everything to Next.js, and have migrated 30 sites from the Django platform and have built 20+ on the Next.js platform since building that out.
Next has allowed us to create reusable but heavily-themeable functional components that we couldn't do with Django's templating language (without a lot of boilerplate and pain), and I'm extremely happy with the move (even though I might not reach for Next on my next side project).
I do however wish I had given more attention to Astro when I was evaluating frameworks, because in hindsight it looks like a perfect fit for what we're doing. Not worth migrating now, though. Haha.
Not sure how everything works on your project, but CSS vars should allow to make almost any HTML "themable".
I've used that method with twig (php), vue and static html templates.
interesting. i love wagtail + django. sounds like you like your choice to switch to next?
Wagtail is amazing! It did everything we needed and more. My primary frustration was in building reusable server-side rendered components and "interactive islands" (as popularized by Astro). The Django/Jinja templating language can be pretty verbose and difficult to parameterize reusable functionality. I found myself constantly doing this:
``` {% with field|contact_label as label %} <div class="relative mt-5 my-3 md:my-5"> <label class="{% if placeholders %}hidden{% endif %} bg-white absolute -top-[9px] block ml-2 px-2 text-black text-sm rounded" for="{{ form_name }}_{{ field }}" id="{{ form_name }}_{{ field }}_label"> {{ label }} </label> ```
(the "with" templatetag)
Over time these templates just became very difficult to work with. Part of that is likely also because I've been a full-time React dev for the better part of a decade, and I'm just faster with it.
nice. yeah wagtail is great and so is django, but like any tech stack there are limits. i'm also skilled at react and have found a way to use react within django but it feels weird sometimes.
Cool! Kudos for finding success in a competitive market. How do you promote yourself?
Thanks! Mostly Facebook honestly. Small business owners hang out there a ton because of all the community pages where folks ask for recommendations for certain types of businesses in the area.
My SaaS Cronitor.io started here in 2014 as a side project. Left my job at Zillow 4 years ago and we are still going strong.
Here’s my reply from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15150205
Hey i love cronitor! Happy user here , it has saved me from multiple disasters. Thank you for building it.
oh hey, love cronitor! it is a killer tool for my personal and work stuff both!
Thank you!!!! As a founder and developer I usually look at our product with a critical eye. Encouragement like this is really nourishing.
Excellent job and idea.
I made an AI chatbot for OnlyFans models. Their fans can speak to "them" via a third party messaging app. It's currently pulling ~15k USD MRR. I built my own GPU infra for inference and I run Llama 3 with a fewshot prompting to get the model to respond like a given OF model, typically using their actual DMs with fans.
I don't have a website for obvious reasons, but if you're in the biz you've no doubt heard about my tool :)
I don't mean this in a critical way to you but, man, this makes me so sad to think about. Models making money from lonely people so desperate for a connection that they pay to chat with someone and then they don't even end up chatting with a human at all.
25% of US college students on antidepressants. Up 64% from 2020. People staring at screens 3/4 of their life. Probably nothing. Technology making the world a better place.
It's not really that sad. Young guys with a bit of disposable income could do a lot worse than subscribing to someone's onlyfans and chatting with a bot. I don't charge subscribers directly and don't do any pay-per-message scheme, it's free for the user (provided they're subscribed to my client's page).
The conversations aren't even overtly sexual in nature, mostly just guys sending "hey hope you're having a good day" during work hours. Llama is good, but honestly I think anyone would probably know they're talking to a bot after a few days, but they still keep talking to it anyways.
> The conversations aren't even overtly sexual in nature, mostly just guys sending "hey hope you're having a good day" during work hours.
I actually think that's worse.
Ed: but props to you for filling a technology niche.
I think it's worse too.
They aren't even getting any sexual gratification from it. Just lonely little unrequited missives. Hoping and failing to make a connection and not even realizing they haven't.
How much are you saving running your own GPU infra? What are the total monthly costs for the service?
Running costs are about 30% of what an equivalent AWS GPU setup would be
Can you describe your GPU setup? I have been super interested to get some coloc space, but have a ton of questions.
Nothing fancy, just bought a motherboard from SM, and a 4U case. I have a couple of boxes with 6 NVIDIA 3080s and recently upgraded to a used super micro with 8 A100s
Colocation wise, you pretty much buy the space, show up with the server and rack it yourself into a locked cabinet, not much else
That is sick, I wanna build out something of a similar size (sans gpus). How much does colocation cost in your area?
I am always in awe of people that simply solve a problem (instead of having to get all esoteric about it) but I cannot understand what problem chat solves when the subject is more interesting to look at than speak to. :)
[edit] 20 jpegs into a 150MB LoRA
For chat, I'd say 70% of the messages are non-sexual in nature. People just want to have someone to talk to during their work day. Not all, but quite a few models have been open about how their chat during the day is AI generated.
Please forgive my ignorance, but what are the obvious reasons for you not having a website?
Never really needed one, I started the business because a few friends asked if a solution existed and all the marketing has been word of mouth. We send out a weekly analytics email to clients breaking down subscriber usage and some topics analysis, but nothing too complicated.
Interesting! How it works? I am a bit confused.
Your GPU infra is a local server?
not local, it's colocated, but I specced and built it specifically to do inference at scale
Shame on you.
I could see why'd you say that, but I think it's a case of hate the game, not the player. We have crafted a society that has a dearth of compassion and companionship, that's the unfortunate reality.
There are lots of sad, lonely guys out there and that's not GaryNumanVevo's fault, he's just catering to them.
Willing players are what create the game.
I do feel like "Don't hate the player, hate the game" is used to shield folks from criticism about actively participating in a societal ill in exchange for money. I realize that sex work and its presence in society goes all the way back to antiquity, and technology is only going to make it more prevalent. Some folks with compartmentalized morality may as well think "Life is short. Why work a crappy 9-5 when I can make a ton of money doing this other stuff instead?" I get the appeal.
That said, if shame were brought back into the mix on a large scale, a lot of this profiteering would evaporate away, and push this industry underground.
Whether or not GaryNumanVevo runs his service there are going to be lonely men out there. I don't know how we'd even begin to fix that.
You can moralize and pearl clutch as much as you'd like
https://blog.labsbell.com/blog/SkippiesPart2 selling 4.99$ shoes, strangely fun to see the inner workings of ecommerce. I dont understand how amazon sellers make any money.
I love this and want to order a couple pairs!
1. Are the branded/not branded models the same cut? Since the angle on the pictures are different it's hard to judge.
2. Why do you not have more pictures of the shoes? Since those are probably impossible to try/return I want to try and avoid a wasted purchase.
3. What import taxes can one expect ordering to the EU?
Amazon is ruthless for some product categories, with a lot of competition and thin margins.
For you a healthy margin might be 3$-6$, for others they're happy with 1$... and Amazon puts pressure for cheaper and cheaper prices to make their users happy, but they refuse to cut their margins :P
damn my wide feet. nice shoes tho. wish they'd fit me
Same here: I need like 3XW shoes
Hey there! I built a learning-by-doing platform for DevOps, SRE, and all other types of infra engineers - https://labs.iximiuz.com. Started working on the project exactly two years ago, and about 12 months ago added a Premium membership, which immediately took off! Still mind-blown by the results, and it's something I build only in my free (from the main job) time. The labs were making ~$3K MRR for a few months before the Black Friday sale and then doubled the annual revenue in a week by making another ~25K at the end of this November.
I've worked on and run https://tressless.com and the related subreddit and forum for 15+ years. The goal is to help people going through hair loss.
I've generally done everything alone as an exercise in scaling utility for others with constrained time on my part.
Have used AI heavily in the last few years, which has been the greatest force multiplier of my career for sure: scraping, evaluating, summarizing, organizing, indexing, moderating, writing, ... I've coded so much alopecia related tech at this point it could probably be patented.
I can recommend giving yourselves big, sprawling projects like this and working on it a few hours every weekend. It adds up!
I wonder if the new medicines are a factor on your project (from sponsorship to new treatments)
very cool — I assume you've monetized this past 500/mo?
I've got a bit of a meta game going where I try to just break even and cover hosting/compute costs.
I'm a huge fan, proponent and dependent on Supabase by the way, I don't know what I'd do without you guys.
Probably not exactly what OP means by "side project" but in 2006 I started working towards getting FreeBSD running on EC2, and I got it working in 2011; I've been the maintainer of the FreeBSD/EC2 platform ever since.
This started because I wanted to use FreeBSD in EC2 for Tarsnap, but I'm now getting sponsorship from Amazon for my work on FreeBSD (EC2 and release engineering) as well as a much smaller amount from a Patreon I set up a few years ago.
I built Digest, which allows you to create a personalized daily digest containing all of the content you already read. Add content sources like Reddit, Google Calendar, Instagram, X, TikTok, Stripe, Hacker News, Weather, YouTube, Product Hunt, RSS, Google News, Stocks, Crypto and more. Content is summarized from sources using AI. Each day (week or month) you will get a newsletter containing updates from all of the sources that you added to your digest. I also recently added a newsletter reader to it, so you can get an email address that you use to signup to all newsletters with, and then Digest becomes your newsletter reader (and even emails you a list of all your new newsletters). https://usedigest.com
We wrote a zine on System evals for LLM-driven apps. Lots of people building impressive demos with AIs, but to get it working well in production over time (maintainable), you need some kind of system eval. It's like some kind of open secret, since lots of people are still floating on vibes-based engineering and looks-good-to-me@K metrics.
Sri and I wrote it as a way to collaborate after doing a podcast together, which made no money. Picked a topic that people seemed to be interested in. Did the whole customer dev thing, and honestly, we were unsure if it'd make any money at all. Representing the AI as a shoggoth is from that meme, and we merely thought juxtaposing it with some furry animals was funny.
But it turns out people like it. It introduces system evals without jargon, and frames how to get started with evals for AI engineers that moved into the space from other kinds of engineering. It feels pretty good when people buy it and say they like it.
Awesome - subscribed!
I created a site (https://zwemindex.nl) with all the pools and open water places in The Netherlands (it's in Dutch). It started off with the idea that I wanted to do a places search but without Google Places. I learned about GIS, build a lookup array with placenames, slugs and latlon. Just simple PHP and autocomplete.js.
I started out with some Open Data from the Dutch governent on all open water swimpots. I thought the current site (still is) not user-friendly on mobile. I also added all the public pools.
I got some traction because I got interviewed as an example project and I reached out to news sites.
Actually my backend is a Google sheet, which I sync to MongoDB (works nice with geo). Did a write up on that: https://www.kasperkamperman.com/blog/web/import-csv-in-mongo...
Rest is all vanilla PHP, cached to HTML, Bulma css. Running on shared hosting, with Cloudflare cache in front.
I really worked on accessibility too, allowing keyboard navigation (press TAB) and making sure everything is readable and with good contrast (Bulma 2.0 fixed that).
I make about $500 with some affiliate links (waterparks with hotels, wellness) which really fit with the search intent of the user. The last thing I want is stuffing the site full with Google ads.
I made News Minimalist — a news aggregator where all news is ranked by significance on a scale from 0 to 10.
The ranking lets readers select a "significance threshold" and ignore all news below it.
It's making close to $1000 MRR now with all money coming from premium subscriptions: users can personalize their feed with category/country filters, block topics and get access to news summaries.
I still make about ~$1000/month with my 5/3/1 app : https://fivethreeone.app/
Managed to raise some money from friends to work full-time on a successor that allows you to write your own workout programs with formulas.
I've been using your app for the last 3-4 months very successfully. There are a few niggles here and there but overall it's been exactly what I needed, and I'm very grateful for it!
This app looks great! I'll definitely try it out when I move onto 5/3/1.
I've finally made it to the $500/month mark! I built https://wolftickets.ai , it is a collection of AI predictions for upcoming UFC fights. The predictions for the future events are private but all past results are public.
I get to keep iterating on new models, new approaches for using gen-ai tech to write better analysis of fights and fighters, along with exploring stats and tendencies that matter.
A good example of the writeups: https://wolftickets.ai/events/ufc-310-pantoja-vs-asakura/139...
This project isn't yet allowing me to retire but I'm passionate about the AIML space and combat sports, I get to explore whatever ideas I find interesting, and get a ton of feedback and ideas from members without having to do advertising.
VoiceType: Mac Dictation tool. Running locally with WhisperLarge Turbo. So its fast accurate and can get a lot of Rust Library names correctly when I use with Cursor.
Why I Built It?
I ended up getting RSI over the last year and half. Despite lifting 3x a week and physio-therapy, circumstances had me working >12-15hours 6-7days a week for a few months straight. I’d read about folks using diction but never worked well for me or was pricey software.
At the same time I started using ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor etc quite a bit. When the Whisper Large turbo model was released by OpenAI, I tried transcribing some technical terms and it got transcribed quite well. ( still makes errors, but its within tolerance of what ChatGPT et.all can understand). I mostly talk type to my Mac now.
I had similar RSI issues a couple years ago and explored text to speech as an option, but the solutions at the time were clunky and inaccurate. I gave up and went with more practical solutions (yoga, working less, using a split keyboard). I’m sure with the recent developments in LLMs and speech models the situation is much different now. I’ll have to check this out
I write a newsletter on cybersecurity every week. Usually a summary of interesting articles and a list of known breaches and software issues.
It's been going for seven years now I think? It makes about 25k in sponsorships each year, although it could be more if I actually got myself to sell a bit more.
Either way, it's been a great way for me to keep learning. Nothing beats having to summarize a thing to thousands of people to make sure you really understand it :-)
Awesome! I love news-related ideas like this since I'm interested in several industries. Had an idea similar to this a few years ago (in a different industry though) but didn't follow-through because I got bogged down in hosting/email infrastructure decisions. Keep it up!
Thanks! If it helps, I ended up using Curated for hosting and email infrastructure. Been meaning to self-host something for ages but until then I'm happy to use them.
Cool site. I'll probably check it out every now and then.
How do you source all of the articles? And have you done any marketing for it?
Thanks :-)
I have a bunch of news websites bookmarked over the years that I scour through every week. And once and a while I pick something up through social media or friends and colleagues.
Marketing: I tried. I did some cross-promotion with other newsletters, some paid marketing, but that was ages ago. I don't take to marketing well so it tends to fall by the wayside ^^
My wife built https://www.jummbo.ai but she doesn't have an HN account so I'll share for her.
Jummbo takes the "umm" out of prospecting in B2B sales.
It makes it really quick to find and prospect new customers, as it googles them, researches them, and writes custom emails and call scripts that are highly targeted to each of them.
The app is in the $hundreds per month, getting a lot of interest in a niche vertical which is quite promising so a lot of extra features will be added in the new year.
We're always up for feedback on how to make it better so if you set up a trial don't be shy with any suggestions you might have :)
I am interested in learning more. Is it available in the US?
I have built a managed platform automating HTTP API testing, at https://www.skybear.net. The core basis is to run your Hurl files. Automatic report persistence, scheduled runs, and multiple files supported with hundreds of requests per "run/execution".
Soon, I will be adding analytics, insights, and automatic test generation features.
I have been working for a year on it, and will keep working on it for many years to come, since I am using it myself a lot anyway.
I have two!
https://gifmemes.io, haven't touched the code for years, makes between 100-300$ a month, depending on the season.
https://vocabuo.com - a side project I hope to turn into a business, so I work on it around two days a week, made around $3.5k in revenue last month but most of it went back into ads.
Wow! So both projects revenue come from ads?
Neither is.
Gifmemes - you can buy a 10 USD watermark removal Vocabuo - freemium and you can buy classic Appstore/Playstore subscription to unlock the other 80% of the features
The vocabulary tool is from pay as you go on App Store.
I made PortDroid, an Android Port Scanner and networking toolkit back in 2014 because I was learning programming and was curious to what was possible. I mainly wrote it for myself and I've done no marketing so have been quite surprised how popular it has become (~800k downloads).
It's been a consistent passion project for me now over the years and I love getting feedback and suggestions from people using it. It'll never have ads (I hate them) and only data collection is optional crash reports.
Wow... happy to see portdroid :) Had used your app for debugging an android app that I built some 6-7 years ago
It sure has a way of making you feel old right? Thanks for using PortDroid :)
Tunnelmole - https://tunnelmole.com/. This is an open source tunneling tool in the same category as ngrok. I have turned this into an actual company, it's just a one person one for now.
While it is open source, I am trying to build a sustainable business around it. It is bootstrapped and there is no VC funding as of yet.
Currently there are several thousand monthly users and just enough paid subscriptions to be making ~$500 (AUD) per month. Promoting it so far has not been too difficult with different strategies, but the conversion rate is quite low, so i'm planning to start doing some data science type analytics to find ways to optimise that.
I made https://konfig.xyz/ after making about 6500 images for a product configurator. Instead of using images, we use 3d models. Initially quite simple and for use with relatively flat scenes (ie - no tree like structure for options / scenes) but grown over time to sort of support those too.
The main use case are fixed-in-size products that can be customize-able. So colours and materials, but also swapping one object for another, or turning one on or off (imagine rims on a car, or a bow thruster on a boat).
We tried saas’in it completely, but the onboarding is proving to be quite hands-on. So we’ve partnered with a 3d firm that does the 3d work so we can focus ok building software
Very cool, since there's no pricing, what's the ballpark cost of some of the demos on the website?
We so have pricing https://konfig.xyz/pricing (perhaps I need to make it more visible). There is some upfront cost in the modeling, but we don’t really make / want to make money there. So everything essentially goes to the 3d party. We’ve partnered with a great company in the Ukraine but you can always also do it yourself
We have some basic docs at docs.konfig.xyz - which need some love, but happy to help anyone get up and running :)
Ballpark is around 2k for the boat ones - give we have some cad models to work with. Depending on the complexity of the scene and options we usually have something online within a month after signing off
reminds me of the Sims 3!
I built https://vpzen.io - dedicated VPN servers that are pay as you go. 79c per day and 10c per Gb. Great if you only need a VPN occasionally. Plus there's no VPN client to download... it works with the native VPN client on Windows, iOS, macOS and Android.
What about legal stuff? Are you not worries of someone doing illegal stuff?
VPN space has so many players. Did you use any advertising at the start to get first base of users?
Really cool approach to running a VPN company
I built a service that makes sure your forms are always working — no more lost leads due to something breaking. Currently bringing in over 1k/mo: https://formtester365.com
It fills out the form as a human would (daily or on whatever weekly schedule you want) and then confirms it was received. It currently supports Gravity Forms on Wordpress due to their API for confirming submissions, but a new version that supports all web forms is nearly ready.
One of the main use cases is for agencies that want to make sure clients sites are always working.
Does this spam their inbox? How do you mitigate that?
The input data is predictable, so it can easily be filtered out by a rule.
I've been running a Japanese green tea-of-the-month club on the side, with a friend and a (very part-time) employee in Japan [1]. It's bringing about $2000/month gross, and slightly under $500/month net.
I'm making a fiction podcast (that actually launched on HN) that is now earning ~$1100 USD monthly. I just wrote the latest report documenting how I got there, which you can find and discuss at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42380474
wait you just talk about fiction? do you interview writers? i'm trying to understand how you built that audience, i've seen a lot of podcasts about fiction struggle to break past like 1k streams
No, it's an audio drama in a podcast format. Think radio dramas of the old but made for modern audiences! Here, hopefully https://programaudioseries.com/ paints a better picture.
I made a website to alert people about inside trading and congress trading, https://tradeinsight.info (updated)
Not $500/month yet, but towards it, the work flow is quite simple, the infrastructure is a bit complicated, need quite amount of time to maintain.
https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/home/
for any commercial purpose, other than by news and communications media for dissemination to the general public
Is your use case covered by this?
Tradesinsight? Plural? Because tradesinsight is a DNS not found, but tradeinsight.info will notify me when Nancy pelosi and other Congress members trade.
Always make sure you get that name right.
My bad, TradeInsight without s. :(
Maybe this is why I didn't get customers, keeping typing it wrongly. :(
The plural version is still available. Might be worth it to buy that one.
:) Yeah
Building https://canine.sh, which is a platform to make any Kubernetes cluster as easy to use as Heroku for deploying web apps, cron jobs, etc.
The >$500 is basically by offering it for free to everyone and having support to 3 small corporate customers.
I found this is a really great way to get feedback and bootstrap the roadmap of a project. Little usability / quality of life features, that I never would've worked on myself, turned out to be sizable pain points for others.
And since they're paying at least something for it, the few beta customers are a lot more committed to making the thing work.
Did you fix the reported security issues yet?
Created a simple and cute iOS app for tracking baby teeth — makes about 1-2k EUR (after Apple’s cut) per month since five years.
getbabyteeth.app
Last year a couple of copy cats showed up, but they missed the part that people actually value in the app: the visuals.
It‘s a simple webapp, wrapped in Expo, but highly polished to make it look and feel native to iOS.
Last year we added a second app, written in Swift and SwiftUI (great dev experience!): wobblyteeth.app
What still makes me wonder: most sales are made in Germany, even though there is an English translation and the American market is huge. \o/
Do you have an idea why it‘s not interesting abroad?
> Do you have an idea why it‘s not interesting abroad?
Is keeping kid’s baby teeth considered normal behavior in Germany? It’s considered a bit bizarre in US. I have a 6 year old and very much in this market but simply have zero interest in the entire premise of logging and keeping this info and the teeth themselves. The tooth fairy is our main tradition and I think most people are happy to dispose of the biohazard waste that’s collected
Isn't it for tracking baby teeth development? Nothing about physically collecting the teeth.
Maybe. The first line of the site says “Keep hold of your babies' first teeth.” Which to me sounds like storing them somewhere physically. Maybe the problem is how it’s worded?
I've built a SMS to Slack which enables two-way SMS messaging from your Slack channels.
I had an annoying use case where when trying to login to a shared work account, the 2FA code was being sent to a colleague's phone number. Now being able to receive that code in Slack solved the problem.
Customers now use it for their own customer support. End users really like SMS as a messaging platform, nobody wants to send an email or talk to a chatbot.
It uses Elixir, Fly, GCP, Stripe, and a couple carriers.
In Brazil WhatsApp for Business completely ate this space. SMS is dying (granted, a very slow death) so milk it while you can :)
Cool project! Which carriers are you using and how do you get around things like A2P 10DLC?
I really recommend adding WhatsApp as an option besides SMS
I made dividend tracking website. I am a backend engineer, so the UI is simple bootstrap and I focus on having data I find valuable. I've been working on it since I finished University, so it's like 7 years, and current MRR at $740 isn't great, but at least I don't have to pay for hosting (and financial data sources are expensive). I believe that spare money should be invested in stocks, so I like that I work on something I use, and will be using in the following decades. The website is DIGRIN.com (DIvidend GRowth INvesting), good value for free users as well IMHO.
What service do you use to get financial data?
BrainDump: Apple Notes + VoiceMemos + ChatGpt in 1.
What is it? - Apple Eco-system based voice note taking/journal. - Tried various note taking apps. Nothing stuck like Apple Notes. - Writing by hand was the best way to get clarity but seemed high friction. Talking about ideas with friends/colleagues was the second best to thought clarity. - Basically combined it. Voice -> Transcribe (whisper accuracy locally) -> Rewrite with COT LLMs. - Helped me maintain journal now ( life events, ideas, anxiety days etc ). Added some prompts to help me. ( researched what experts in the field recommend; as an example - How do I start? And what do i say if i want to gratitude journal ).
Since launch, more than 50% end up using it for meeting notes.
Can I make this listen to a zoom call and have it transcribed and summarized
A lot of folks use it for this. But its not very straightforward like the tools that join calls and listen in.
It only transcribes what it can listen to. So if you are on a zoom call on your computer it can listen to both the audio from the PC and you speaking and transcribe.
Ive been looking into tapping in directly to both the audio out and mic in on apple devices. Im making progress but its not stable yet. Hoping to get it done during the holidays.
Why not... Let it join meetings?
Great job on this!
Thank you. Hope you try it and find it useful!
The gist I get from this thread is that if you have something on the cards you should just commit to it?
How much is just survivorship bias?
I have like 4-5 side hustles being worked on at any one time, but I rarely ship for various reasons.
Lots of people in this thread seem to have just gone and done it without thinking. How often does that pay off?
I guess it is survivorship bias, but I’d never be one of the survivors if I don’t even try.
I have an Etsy product, Christmas tree ornament, has made about $600 gross last year and another $400 or so this year…
It’s not much but now I have an Etsy shop with 5 start reviews all across. Planning to make a few more non-seasonal products and see where I can take it.
But, I also have a graveyard on my GitHub!
I guess the stats are like 9/10 entrepreneurial projects fail… so if I try 20 things…
Makes sense. One of my projects is bound for etsy. How do you find selling there?
I also have the distinction of publishing a halloween item on cults, but a month after halloween ended, so I am waiting 10 more months to see if theres any interest.
I quite enjoy selling stuff n Etsy. The products and buyers there are not on a race to the bottom for the absolute cheapest thing (maybe it is so in things like shirts or mug or whatever) but instead I see the buyers as people expecting and unique thing that resonates with them.
So I think the key is unique and then using keywords, videos and Etsy ads are not bad to get some traction, even for a brand new store
Less than 10% of my projects ever made anything. Check out indiehackers.com - tons of old posts of people starting things, but the domain is dead when you click through.
> How much is just survivorship bias?
100%. The topic is to post side projects making $500/month. Not to post failed side projects, projects that generate little to no money, or that cost money.
> How much is just survivorship bias?
It's all pure survivorship bias.
Honestly more than you'd expect. Even my less successful ideas paid off at least a few hundred bucks. The more successful ones tens of thousands/yr.
I'm making a physical product with my wife: an illustrated narrative puzzle magazine. It's similar to escape games, but it's more story driven and easy to do in short sessions and at your own pace. It started with my wife making the first magazine pretty much by herself. Since then we've made more magazines together and the business is slowly growing.
We're selling them mainly on our custom lightweight online store. It's done with minimal JS and Node as backend, Stripe as payment provider. We have a Meta pixel to help us track our advertising conversion, but we've disabled cookies, they just felt somehow dirty... It's nice to have power over these things when running your own business. As a next step for the website I'm thinking of including a templating language in the workflow, now I'm still doing edits with search and replace, sometimes missing things... but I do enjoy the simplicity.
The actual business has two main challenges: First is discoverability. It's a pretty unique product, an adventure escape game in a magazine. It doesn't sell well in physical game shops since it doesn't look like a game. We sell well in conventions where we get to explain what the product is, but we also want some weekends for ourselves! Meta ads for our online shop are working surprisingly well though.
The second and bigger challenge is shipping. Our flat is filled with boxes, and the time I spend sorting magazines, enveloping them, printing address labels, carrying them to the post office... it's really not worth my hourly rate as an engineer (Nor my wife's, but I do it since my schedule is more flexible, and I've automated some parts of the process with a string of incredibly user hostile shell scripts). And the shipping costs are downputting to many, we're quite cornered here in Finland. We are slowly gaining some distribution partners in Europe, but we should also be looking into better shipping options, like perhaps some kind of shipping warehouse exist? Our volume is slowly getting big enough so that it might be feasible. I've only done some cursory googling on this but don't exactly know what I'm even looking for, and there's only so many hours in a day.
A lot of work, small margins (ads+printing+misc takes a big slice), but around $500 profit per month. Feels absolutely fantastic to have an actual concrete business we own!
Just bought a set for my kids who are currently obsessed with escape games and puzzles in general. Looks like a huge win for long car rides/airplane trips!
Thank you so much! I'll post it tomorrow, hopefully it'll arrive before the holidays!
Such a cool idea. Just bought a set for my sister and her family! Thanks for making this!
Awesome! Thank you so much! Hopefully the shipment will make it before the holidays!
Dude this looks awesome! When I was a kid I used to read a lot of these "puzzle magazines", the ones we had were like:
- Start on page 1, read the story and decide if you want to take path A or B
- A = go to page 2, B = page 3
- then there was another decision making, and the story goes on...
Until you either escape the dungeon, or die (different ways of dying lol).
It was so cool!
Those were called "choose your own adventure" books.
On an early version of my personal website, I created one of these, but as the reader, you could reach an unwritten section. Your reward was that you got to write that page of the book, and the choices (or ending) that the character received.
I seeded a few pages to set a story, and then let the readers go wild. It was pretty fun.
Thank you! That's the sort of game that springs to mind for many when we explain the concept, and they were definitely an inspiration for us. This however is a more linear adventure, focused around solving enigmas. No choices and no way to lose. Once you know the answer to the puzzle, like "whose fingerprints are on the gun", you turn the next page and the story continues.
Sounds a /bit/ like the Agent Arthur[0] books that I loved as a kid!
Def interested in these! Thanks for posting!
[0] https://usborne.com/gb/agent-arthur-s-arctic-adventure-97818...
Oh wow! I've never heard of these, seems very much like what we're doing. Thank you for linking it!
I develop a basketball coaching app called Elite Hoops, it makes $3.5k/month and thankfully growing:
I wrote a book series over iOS development, self-published, made over $120k:
--> https://bestinclassiosapp.com
I do one sponsored ad a year, which translates to over $500/month (i.e. your criteria):
--> https://www.swiftjectivec.com
And launching another app soon to follow D2/D3 collegiate scores, hoping to get that up and over $500 MRR quickly:
I have created https://pikuma.com to teach computer science, retro programming, and mathematics.
I've taken already four of your courses and they are not "one of" the best, but THE best programming educational content I've ever seen. Thank you!!!! And keep drinking mate. :DDD
Thank you for the kind words. Also, I just want to clarify to others reading the thread that I'm drinking "mate" in the lectures (as in the south american herb drink), and I'm not just a drinking mate (as in the british expression).
On my wish list, maybe for christmas! (I think I added another recent course too, compilers?). Obrigado!
I buy & sell pixels (hats) in a video-game - Team Fortress 2.
I'm currently making $10k-15k per month; I'm one of the largest sellers on the game's main third-party marketplace (https://marketplace.tf).
Less of a side project and more of a part-time job, since it's ~4-6 hours of work per day.
Only TF2? Or do you also do other markets like CS?
I'm curious to know how much actual knowledge about the game makes compared to just being a good "trader"?
Some CS, but TF2 is my main focus. Items are less liquid and the cash trading scene isn't as established. For example, my average margin on TF2 items is 6x higher than CS (~25% vs. ~4-5%). I'm able to buy for less & sell for more than I could in CS.
Knowledge about the game isn't necessary at all - it's just the market itself. Understanding what people are interested in, what items can sell at, how long they take, etc.
Really curious about what kind of alphas exist in this space, if you don't mind divulging.
The market is incredibly small & illiquid - the main alpha comes from:
- a better knowledge & understanding of the market. What items are desirable? What will take a long time? How do you price them? etc.
- trust/reputation, which takes form through cash trading (directly buying items from people at a discount).
I also have a few automated trading bots & scripts that save time on buying items, but that's easily replicable.
I just launched a website for buying organic Mississippi sweet potatoes online: https://sweetclay.net.
I've made $910 in revenue in the first three weeks. Does that count?
I think it does.
How did you get your farmer network set up?
Reminds me of https://www.vidaliaonions.com/. The guy who started that bought the domain before he knew what he was going to do with it.
I copied him. His HN post from 2019 is what planted the seed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132
I'm from Mississippi and know some small farmers but none of the big sweet potato producers. "Mississippi Sweet Potatoes" coming from the "Sweet Potato Capital of the World" has always been a strong branding in my head growing up, just being near the influence of that. It's not hard to get their wholesale but I wanted to have some orders before finding a partner.
I have read of other people getting customers/orders before actually having the product in place.
But my doomsday mind has a hard time shaking what happens if you can't follow through? Is it as simple as refunding the money?
A simple, stupid question with probably a single answer but that is where my mind goes when I hear people doing things this way.
Sounds lovely!
Just fyi I tried clicking the link, and my work laptop flagged it as "malware". I'm not sure why, but thought I would let you know
thank you for the heads up!!! hmmm...
I went to it on my Android phone and it worked fine.
Yeah, mine was via a corporate policy. God knows how it decides such things, but it's not a message I've ever seen before, so there could be something wrong with the site that other security software might flag
I'm convinced that the corporate web filter does this to make itself look like it actually does something.
Built this back during COVID, still chugging along at a few hundred $/month. Sales tend to pick up around the holidays, it makes for a nice xmas gift.
https://cadenceprints.com Use your strava / fitness data to create beautiful wall art
I've come across this before. It's a beautiful site/concept.
I began creating art a few years ago which is beginning to ramp up: https://matthew.bajor.art/
In April of this year my fabrication business switched from side to primary and I traded Jenkins infra (https://cicd.life) for small manufacturing: https://bostondigitalfab.com
I’ll would prefer to never go back, but I do miss some aspects of the old job.
I just about qualify! My first side project that actually delivered anything: Reminder Sync for Obsidian! https://turquoisehexagon.co.uk/remindersync/
I built it for myself after I began using Obsidian for day to day note making. A simple idea: get reminders for tasks you create in Obsidian. People seem to like it.
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39764919
I was laid off at the start of 2024 and built https://interviewsolver.com which is an AI copilot for helping you with your leetcode interviews. Doing about 6k/month, though the space is becoming fairly crowded.
This is functionally identical to having someone off-screen feeding you the answers.
Things like this will only make the interview process worse for applicants with even a shred of integrity. We need a "black book" for unethical developers.
Eh, I fed our whole question bank to ChatGPT a while back, and it solves the leetcode-like problems better than any real candidates have. Maybe it's time we stopped interviewing people this way...
Wow, incredible. I recently interviewed (as hiring manager) for 3 separate positions of varying seniority. Cheating is rampant now. I'd say at least 80% were using ChatGPT to lookup answers. One candidate had a 3rd party operate ChatGPT for her.
Do you support Codility?
Yes, the nice thing about it being a desktop app is that all interview platforms are supported - browsers are unable to detect these desktop apps due to inherent limitations. There's a bunch of competing services so it's likely your candidates were running something.
Dude, that's cheating!
I built a tool called Canyon to help jobseekers land their dream job by helping them perfect their resume, be much faster at applying to jobs, and practicing with our mock interview tool.
My last name is Canyon -- do I get free access? :-)
Haha please check out the product and if it'd be very helpful for you, we can do it!
I built a personal finance app (https://tender.run) in the style of mailbox (swiping, keyboard shortcut, inbox-based workflow for reviewing transactions).
It's built on the automerge CRDT and sqlite running in the browser, which has been really fun to work with. I'd like to keep going, though honestly I've struggled with the marketing side (growth has been slow) and it's a pretty competitive space.
I started a mini-SaaS focused on identifying what content/scripts are blocked on websites by AdBlockers, Firefox Tracking Protection, and similar tools.
I initially aimed for an cheap monthly pricing plan and many clients, but that strategy hasn't been successful so far.
However, in the process of finding clients, I found two 'enterprise' customers. I built a custom on-premise version for them and charging $300 per month for each, which technically sums to over $500. Not sure it is what I wanted )
Totally counts though!
I'm making a little by sharing all my nonfiction book summaries/notes on https://littlerbooks.com.
Thank you for sharing, that is a neat side project and was actually just looking for something like this. Can you share how your summarisation process works and if you use any specific tools or approaches to generate them?
I have developed about 20 mobile apps for the KaiOS ecosystem, which does around $500-$750 a month.
I also run https://monitorprices.org, which is just a list of available monitors on Amazon, but provides a bit more filters. Does about $125 a month, maybe double if there’s a creator reward campaign running.
Nothing splashy or exciting really, but it gives me motivation to keep trying things.
This is interesting. Why did you pick KaiOS? If money was the goal, I guess iOS and Android would make more, isn't it?
How does the development process feel like?
I did some work for a client who wanted to build an app for it. After that I ended up building a few apps just for fun, and once they started bringing in some ad money, I just ended up building more.
I think their ecosystem is still small enough that good apps do well, whereas with iOS/Android you really have to build super polished apps and market them to thrive.
KaiOS is just HTML/JavaScript, I ended up using Vue and building my own component library that I could re-use in every app.
It is work work not passive, but I write dev docs for $80/h. But it is simple work, you just go research and write. No Racoon calling out to Wingman to get user info provider services.
I am also very interested in this kind of work.
How does one even find tech writing jobs?
do you have examples i can refer to? i’d love to learn to write better docs
I write documentation for a living (a different, non-tech kind). The best resources in my opinion are the writing guides of various governments. Gov.uk leads the way, but the Australian government puts out great guides too.
Steve Krug's "Don't make me think" is old but still applies to the modern web.
I'm a bit late to the game, but I still want to share my side project Olympiad Math Exercises for Kids https://mathclub.ai/math-exercises.
For $50 a month, students get two sets of problems from past math contests every week. We've added nice features like an AI helper that can check answers and answer questions about the problems. Plus, for those looking to put their skills to the test, we host both online and in-person math olympiads in the Bay Area.
We made a couple apps to work better with Davinci Resolve after finding things it did or did inefficiently. One (SparkFX) is still a work in progress
Hi, I love your YouTube channel! I watched a bunch of videos from it last year! Thank you!
Thanks! That's my business partner who makes the videos
I founded [Marin Labs](https://www.marinlabs.io), a studio where I get to develop whatever comes to mind. Last Friday, I launched a mobile game on iOS and Android, it's a popular trivia game but tropicalized for Latin America. I'm currently sitting on a juicy $14.00 MRR. Gotta start somewhere, I guess.
We launched a Markdown resume builder called ResumeyPro (https://resumey.pro/) as a side project in 2020. It has been consistently generating revenue with barely any active marketing from our side. Most of the revenue is via organic search.
I built a Google Sheets Add-on that imports bank transactions via Plaid into Google Sheets.
It formats transactions, auto-categorizes them, has custom category rules, and can automate data imports nightly.
It's called BudgetSheet ( https://www.budgetsheet.com ) and has been my side hustle for almost 5 years now.
Revenue is just over $5,000/month. Growing well. Targeting $9k MRR for 2025. Expenses are high because Plaid is expensive (last invoice was over $1,600), but still good margins and will get better with scale.
It's good software and I've put a lot into it, but the user experience really just comes down to how well Plaid supports your bank. Folks with really well supported banks love it, and folks with banks not well supported by Plaid tend to churn quickly.
This is great. Just paid for a year of Copilot Money, but if I'd seen this would have subscribed.
Its a service where users can create comics using AI generated artwork. Love creating art and writing software so it's a passion project for me. Haven't done any marketing yet, its mostly organic search traffic.
Running https://minute-master.com as a side project, landed a couple of clients this year and a good pipeline of new clients for next year.
It's a board governance and minutes generation tool for fund administrators, trust companies etc. The types of firms that need to have regular meetings with directors and need those minutes formally captured.
But isn't there co-pilot for that? Yes, but no. Copilot can summarize a meeting - this is more regulatory orientated. So the agenda is set out, participants sent a pack before the meeting, and then minutes generated almost in real time to draft level of 80% accuracy. Ultimately means the process for managing and minuting a meeting is reduced from hours to minutes.
If we carry on doing well I suspect this will become more than a side project in 2025...
Made https://www.pdf.to since one day I had an issue with a PDF and figured why not since the domain was available. But because previous owner had it as a book torrent site, only gets traffic via Bing as it seems to be blackballed in Google
I believe this saved my ass once. Thanks!
Maybe buy pdfto.com if its not already taken
And move the site over? Or buy it and 301 it to pdf.to in hopes it works?
I would personally rather rebrand as competing service under better name and copy
I think you may have in fact the best solution. Just launch another one, and keep pdf.to up in case the perma ban ever gets lifted. Thanks
It would be great if these questions also included a sub-question on distribution strategy, that's one of the hardest things to visualize as a developer from $0 to $500.
I built a Home Inventory software back in 2006 called Attic Manager:
In the first few years it only sold a couple of copies per quarter, but then Intuit decided to discontinue support for their Quicken Home Inventory programs and users got stuck. I added the ability to import that data and then the sales started doing well. It has tapered off in the past three years but I still get some months over $500 during the year. I haven't really done any marketing, as it's just a Home Inventory program I made for myself, to keep track of stuff when we were moving to a new home.
As far as I know, Attic Manager is still the only program which can load QHI data.
I sell bike parts on the side (https://bike-parts.cc and a few others). Plugs into my cousin’s ERP system with a middleware that I wrote. Everything is hosted at home, integration, DB on a 500mbps home internet :).
I made a simple service that lets you read Substack newsletters on your Kindle.
Brilliant idea!
I've built a custom planner/calendar generator targeting e-ink tablets like the reMarkable, Supernote, and Kindle Scribe. Revenue is highly seasonal, but now consistently over the $500/mo threshold :)
FWIW it took at least 30 seconds for the images to show up, first I thought it's a collection of white papers before it populated.
Thanks for the heads up! That page is normally very fast but I can reproduce those images loading slowly. Will investigate...
Could be getting a little hug of death. I've been clicking through to check almost all of these projects out :)
lol I bought this back in 2022 !
OP said old ideas were allowed :P
I started Ketalon Gear (ketalon.com) to design, manufacture and sell cool, tough products that I like to use and carry daily. Average monthly income is $2K–3K. This is thanks to repeat buyers as much as first-timers. Although some months are slow with no more than 15 orders, the bigger months when a Kickstarter campaign pays out a lump sum (followed by an influx of orders from being new on the KS page) help raise the average. Sales also pick up before Christmas, and whenever I run a promotion. Occasional wholesale partnerships with online retailers (in Japan, USA) also bring in a lump sum payout. 70% orders are from the USA. For shipping I use Australia Post (terrible) and NextSmartShip China (superb).
I should mention that the first couple products I designed did not work at all. Hardly anyone placed orders and I didn't recover my investment... at a time when I didn't have money to 'waste' (I had quit my PhD in the USA and moved to Australia, I was broke so first had to get a full-time job). But of course the experience wasn't a waste, it taught me couple things I really needed to know for this journey. Things only picked up when I discovered Kickstarter. The hit product that changed things (now sold out and discontinued) was a bolt action tactical pen priced at AUD45 (USD~30) and made of reinforced polymer instead of metal. The metal ones at the time cost 3X–7X my price, were heavy, plain-looking, sharp and slippery for tactical use as a glass-breaker. Additionally, I provide the kind of customer service I wish I could get : First, I provide lifetime guarantees on all my products (there are only two products in stock now but I had a dozen; planning more in future). Second, if there's any issue — even if your cousin sneezes on your pen and you therefore want a different one — I'll ship a free pen. The rare issue has been a package getting lost in transit, I try to fix that quickly by shipping a second package and then providing a refund for the disappointing experience. I don't ask for returns and it's a hassle anyway, so nobody has ever returned a product. Only one person asked for a refund in six years which I provided in about ten seconds. Among loads of positive feedback and sometimes multi-page emails that I'm very grateful for, customers also sometimes email me to say their pens were stolen after they showed it off to curious coworkers or something — when I hear this, I send them free replacement pens because it makes me happy to flip their memory of the incident from negative to positive.
I have been working on Heuristica for the last 1.5 years, which pays for my rent. It is a subscription-based, AI-powered concept mapping tool that helps visualize learning and research.
As I started to make money, I was able to start hiring freelancers to help with certain aspects of the site, like the design, SEO, and some independent coding tasks. It is rewarding, but due to the pace of developments in the AI space, it feels like I need to improve the product constantly to remain competitive, which can get a bit burdensome.
Looks cool! Have any SEO / dev freelancers with extra capacity you've liked working with that you can recommend?
I'm making and selling a couple of LED pin badges on my site https://hortus.dev.
I wrote about my experience doing these last year (previous hn post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38904255) and since then it has really taken off! Not enough to live off, but certainly enough to sustain itself and fund some more projects in the future.
I never expected it to turn into anything more serious than a novelty and I've learned a tonne about running a small business as a result. I'm really looking forward to (hopefully) learning how to grow this into something bigger over 2025!
How will you address the product safety issues related to coin cell batteries?
We also manufacture STEM/edu electronics and have encountered product safety regulations concerning coin cell batteries in Australia. Similar laws were introduced in the US and Europe in 2023.
What are the regulations about exactly?
I made a dating/meetup app exclusively for Indians and for the NRI Indians (Non-resident Indians).
Available on IOS and Android.
Gets me around $250 per month. I've not done much marketing either. Started as a hobby project after Covid and continued after.
I also built an Indian Version of Neighborhood app (like Nextdoor). But I am not making any money from it. https://neighar.com
PS: I am planning to scale up and also planning to spend some money on marketing. Investors are welcome!
Still not hitting $500 consistently but...
Wavekit https://wavekit.app/
It's an audio hosting service with high quality audio and a customizable unbranded player.
Embeds are done with iframes but we're starting to offer web components which offer some cool opportunities like interaction between components.
Most of our customers are selling some kind of audio product or service. Think plugin developers, sound designers, media composers, etc.
Currently working on a B2B integration with an API so that it would be trivial to add audio to any web app. Think chats, marketplaces, etc.
I guess if you spread this over 12 months it counts? https://www.esp32rainbow.com/
I’d really like to build on this and start a hardware company.
That’s a great project, there seems to be a small but persistent market for well crafted retro systems.
I own an escape room business with one, two-part, room and it does about this or much more in some months.
The problem is, unlike so many examples in these threads, this business requires every available minute of my time so it’s a little more than I bargained for. Plus there is a brick and mortar location, city regulations, etc.
You gotta REALLY love the hell out of this business to do it at all, let alone as a side project.
I'm building Virtual Graph Paper (https://virtual-graph-paper.com) which is a web app for sketching on a grid.
Basically a (limited) vector graphics editor that's trying to be very approachable, aimed at use-cases where something like Illustrator or a CAD package wouldn't be a great fit. I keep hearing about new things people use it for, which is something I truly enjoy.
It's free and ad-free, but there's also a paid version in the form of a downloadable Electron app or a subscription.
This is awesome. How is Excalidraw so huge in this space and you aren’t?
I wrote these two books based on work I had done in/with startups over the years.
Why Now: How Good Timing Makes Great Products: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Now-Timing-Makes-Products/dp/B0CY...
Growth Units: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GJVV8RJ/
I wrote scrapers to scrape data from Google, Bing, Walmart, eBay... I work with clients, support them to integrate all data into their workflows. Basically, I'll provide private APIs, specific to their use-cases. Not many clients, only 2, about 600 USD/month cause clients are testing the market. It's fun cause I can debug and get feedback directly, in real-time, from clients about the results.
I have been making youtube videos for a long time on many different accounts. I don't know what else to say except try to choose topics that youtube won't give you trouble over so avoid things like privacy, crypto, politics. Then you just keep making videos and one day you win the lottery when the algorithm finally shines the light on you.
I built https://gadabout.ai through experimentation with multimodal LLMs / computer use to reduce the burden of user testing side projects. I can't recall the last time I was this excited by a new technology.
Following conversations with others, I've since positioned the tool for marketing teams to run deep competitor analysis and monitoring. Two pilot customers through word of mouth expected to double next month. Invite-only building in tandem with customer feedback, I haven't even put together a landing page yet.
I'm currently designing a ranking algorithm, working name UAC (Usability, Accessibility, Conversion) score.
I run clearpayments.ca completely word of mouth and referrals only payment processing services and sytescope.com
I give all clients the best rates possible because it doesn't matter as its not my primary source of income. However, business owners hate change so its hard to convince them lower fees and better products are better for them in the long run.
I make between $3500/m - $5000/m maybe 10 support emails a month.
I also build apps on the side for sytescope.com integrations.
I make macOS apps [0], the revenue is irregular but on average it fits the $500/m. The main driver is [1] ScreenMemory, which records your screens and allows you to navigate a timeline / calendar. Sort of a Rewind.ai alternative.
More like $400 a month the past couple months. Maybe that counts.
www.chesscraft.ca
I started this chess variant AI sandbox 5 years ago for myself to help with a brutal commute. Still working on it now and then. I've learned so much building and releasing a commercial product with a community, on Google Play and Steam. It's great to see the flexibility of the "good enough" AI I made has still held up after 5 years.
I saw you present this many years ago at MariHacks! Stuck with me as a really cool idea and project. Awesome to see it still going strong!
Neat! Hope you're doing well. As I recall, that was a nicely run hackathon.
I built an online course catalog / aggregator many years ago. It's my first web project after learning how to code using courses from edX and Treehouse. My goal was to build something that I'd want to use myself. It's undergone a few iterations since then.
The site gained initial traction on Reddit where I shared my experience learning and building in the r/learnprogramming subreddit. That was enough momentum to get me ranking on search engines. I eventually set up affiliate relationships with several of the major online course platforms.
Although I've built a handful of apps using React, Vue, etc. this one's a classic Flask app using Jinja templating. There's just a few tiny JS scripts I wrote for basic interactivity (like updating the state of the "Save" button). Feedback is most welcome!
I built ClickConnector - a customer support platform for SaaS products.
Customer support and customer success are interconnected functions, especially for SaaS products. We took it upon ourselves to build a platform with HelpDesk, Knowledge Base Portals, Feature Requests, Bug Reports, Changelogs, Email Drip Campaigns, Product Tours, NPS, Testimonial Collection, Checklists, and everything a SaaS team needs to win over their customers.
Initially, my focus was on travel agencies. I then started building tools that I needed to support my customers (since I couldn't use another product to assist them—it would have been a shame to use an external product if we were marketing our solution as a customer support platform for travel agencies). Fast forward, with all the tools that we built, it was a no-brainer for me to pivot our product. I thought this would be a great fit since this niche has a better founder fit for me.
I’ve built two AI based apps. Earlier this year, I wanted clarity on some issues. I knew several of my books held keys to the answers I was seeking, but finding those felt impossible. I wanted an AI based tool I could use to talk to my books. I built https://www.asklibrary.ai to enable this, implementing tons of RAG tech like query fanout, query understanding and breakdown, multi step retrieval, reranking, etc., and I pull in dozens of pages of text for each answer.
Secondly I love Claude and also use TypingMind but missed the memory feature from ChatGPT. I made MemoryPlugin (https://www.memoryplugin.com) that adds long-term memory to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, TypingMind, and LibreChat on desktop and mobile browsers. This got me really interested in AI memory in general, I’ve played around with fine tuning AI models with memories (results = some data learned, way more hallucinations).
I develop a modular media center compatible with Stremio addons for Apple platforms. It's called [Vidi](https://vidi.plomo.se/).
I've done zero marketing and have a few thousand users from organic growth alone since August. It's a one-time purchase type of deal and I'm overwhelmed by positive feedback.
https://SerpentineGame.com brings in close to that with advertisements and premium subscriptions. It is a clone of a game called Tangleword that is itself a clone of Boggle. I originally wrote it in 2008 and am currently re-writing it from scratch because the technology stack is so old and cumbersome to maintain.
What ad platforms do you like and dislike?
I built FIXParser https://fixparser.dev initially because I wanted to learn HFT. This was over 10 years ago, but I still maintain and build it to this day. Turns out several companies find it useful too! It doesn’t make much money, but I’m more stubborn than smart so I’m quitting my day job and will work full-time on FIXParser next year.
As someone who has been using APIs for automated retail trading the last few years now, this is highly interesting to me. I've heard of FIX protocol before, but never thought to use it as a retail trader - would this be practical for someone like me?
APIs from the popular brokerages have done the job, but I've experienced more than my fair share of request failures. This sometimes can be the trades themselves, which includes opening/closing higher risk < 1 DTE option positions. This doesn't give the warm and fuzzies if you know what I mean. I have quite a bit of coding experience and feel good about the limit/failure checks in my code, but there is no walking away from the trading terminal when the code is running.
I realize your software is a parser and I may have went on a bit of a tangent, but I'm always open to new ideas and ways to make my project more efficient.
Edit: Also, nice use of the linear gradient on a couple of your buttons in dark mode. I feel like I remember that css trick on HN one day and thought it was clever.
Last August I bought 6 small work platforms/mast lifts at an equipment auction and sold them in FB Marketplace for an extra $1000 each after expenses. Cleaned them up a bit, but that was it! I’m bidding on 5 more this week, should be an easy $5k arbitrage.
I made an invoice maker app. Available for iOS and macOS. It's a document-based app with custom file format for invoices: https://apps.apple.com/app/invoice-maker-quote-builder/id153...
Solo Developed VR starfighter combat sim for Quest, PCVR, and soon the PICO4
Meta, send me a free Quest 3, please.
Would not recommend doing a game, let alone a VR game as a sideproject for anyone
My day job is Machine Learning engineer, so I really should've picked an AI sideproject facepalm
Looks very cool. Will definitely give it a try.
I opened a board game/trading card store in May. We host events and sell products. Takes up a lot of my time but ultimately it's a passion project that actually makes money.
I dunno if it's in your wheelhouse, but I recently discovered a "game cafe" locally that allows folks to check out games by the hour (like a very specialized library), but they also sell beer/wine/coffee/pastries plus running the events like you said. I am so incredibly sad I didn't think of that first - that forehead slapping moment is my definition of a "good idea"
We've let people rent on and off - the issue with renting is there's not much we can do scalably about verifying missing components, rules, good working condition (when non-board game people are running the store) - I charge about $10/wk for a game rented but it's definitely not a service we advertise actively.
Earlier this year, NYT launched a new puzzle game called Strands, which gained a lot of popularity. I created a website, https://strands.today, monetized with AdSense. It allows users to check daily puzzle answers and play previous games in the https://www.strands.today/strands-archive/ . It generates about $600 per month.
How do you get the data and how do you publish the content? Is it automated?
I wrote a small application for a Customer which enables File Transfer, Notifies Users about files that they should have uploaded and displays some progress. The Customer is a law firm. No Recurring Renevue, But yielded 10000€ in 6 months. Is More of a second Job than a side project tho
I built a service that tells you whether your team's website/API or cron jobs are online, or not.
It's called OnlineOrNot: https://onlineornot.com
Coming close to 4 years of operation!
Started using this to check Namecheap hosting uptime claims, has worked well for me. Keep up the good work!
SpaceShout (https://spaceshout.com) is Social Mapping Platform focused on our user's content and interaction.
Project is in active development since 2 years, 10+ ppl engaged, iOS and Android apps published in the stores. We're not yet into making money but we're on the way to start with profits.
iOS - https://apps.apple.com/app/spaceshout/id6475599807 Android - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spaceshout
I sell 3D laser manufactured maps - themapsguy.com
What laser cutter do you use to make these? I assume you're just cutting out wood.
I built Filestash (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash), an open source Dropbox like frontend for any cloud storage / protocols (S3, SFTP, FTP, SMB, NFS, etc...). This was made as a reflection of the Dropbox launch top comment with the infamous FTP guy as I was wondering what was missing from the FTP specs to be able to make a great interface to a protocol like FTP.
The money come from customisation and enterprise plugins (SSO, audit plugins, etc..). The entire product was made so you can quickly build custom file management solution by assembling a bunch of lego blocks (aka plugins)
I created this course about Data Integration around 2 years back following delivering some complex integrations https://www.udemy.com/course/data-integration-guide/?couponC... (Link with coupon code) It brings around 300€/month, and is very much appreciated by professionals despite it not being very conventional. The reason to put it was to share some lessons learned in such projects I also published a book on Amazon (with some more detailed content) and it sells handful (sometimes more) copies every month.
I'm building a better calorie/macro tracker called FitBee: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fitbee-calorie-counter/id64439...
Tracking my food has helped me get into much better shape but the leading apps in this space IMO are all quite clunky. I wanted to built something that was fast and lets you get on with your life.
A few stand out features:
- Nutrition label scanning if I don't have the food you're looking for - Photo Logging for restaurant meals or complex meals you don't want to manually track - It's light weight & fast - Interactive widgets for things like water tracking.
Feels weird that you hype up its ad free in the description, when you need to pay to have the app work (monthly, annually, or permanent). I'd not expect a paid application to have ads.
Silly related question...
How much gross taxable do you need to make from your side gig to take home 500/m net from a side gig? Here, that's about 1360/m if itemising expenses, or 900€/m with the standard deduction for side income and doing your own taxes.
Among some related tools, I run Batch Compress (https://batchcompress.com/en), an online image compressor. It converts images to WebP or JPEG with a lot of compression applied in order to shrink file size by a lot.
There is a lot of competitors, but usually they have limits requiring accounts & payment if the images are too large to begin with or if you want to compress a lot of images. Batch Compress is free for unlimited use. The concept of Batch Compress is to be a batch version of Google's Squoosh tool.
Always very open to feedback or feature requests.
How do you make money with this? I tried disabling uBlock Origin and didn't even see any ads on the landing page.
There is ads. Perhaps they didn't load or uBlock Origin isn't actually disabled?
I know that some people find ads distasteful, but I think they're the best way to make a tool like this sustainable without being annoying; limits, accounts, payments, etc. I figure that anyone who dislikes ads enough will be running an ad blocker anyway.
I build simple speech shadowing exercises that help people train for IELTS Speaking. The project makes more than $500/month.
My side project is about market making in a very particular way / or niched between decentralised exchanges and centralised one. The good thing is that this industry is so big that even as a small competitor I can do a lot. I don't have a product, just a basic page that's broken here and there https://asset.plus/, my actual revenue comes from my bots trading. I am currently expanding my infrastructure, but I really have to take care of costs because servers for low latency are expensive.
Building this on the side with a few ex colleagues. I’m making the $500/month but it’s obviously not via revenue.
https://blymp.ca is about $600/mo with two clients.
Building an MVP took two weeks, and getting the first paying customers another two.
I wrote about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42344002
It’s a B2B SaaS in out-of-home advertising. We found that buying ads outside the digital realm is hard and the only alternative are marketplaces that take away control over media owner’s inventory. So we did for those companies what Shopify did for small businesses — we gave them the tools to sell and to market.
.ca! very cool
having a hard time figuring out what you do from your website, do you allow businesses to rent billboards?
I’m building an Open Source (AGPLv3) email marketing platform with Elixir/Phoenix and it's only just crossed that MRR threshold - three years since the first version.
I have been working on Audjust (https://www.audjust.com/) on and off in my spare time. It's a service to manipulate (shorten/lengthen/loop) audio for video editors and music producers.
I had a Show HN a while back that was well-received and kicked things off (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36480687). Since launching I have changed the name and added paid accounts which have brought in enough money to cover costs and make some profit!
I built this for my personal usecase to estimate savings by prepayments done during my home loan tenure. I didn’t find this feature where you can select choice to reduce emi or tenure for each prepayment. Not making any revenue but hopefully trying to make it helpful
I have made https://mytestament.io/
To describe it: “Ever wondered what happens to all our digital memories, important information, and personal messages when we're gone? That's exactly the challenge I wanted to solve. MyTestament.io lets you securely store and designate digital inheritances - from heartfelt messages to important account information - to be shared with loved ones when the time comes.”
It’s just been released, so technically it’s not yet made $500 , but the projections so far are for about that amount the first month.
I run CodeApprove (https://codeapprove.com) which is a better code review interface for teams that work on GitHub. Know when it's your turn to review, what discussions/files need your attention, and do it all in a lightning-fast single-page interface with keyboard shortcuts. The UX and workflows are inspired by the excellent tool Critique which Googlers/Xooglers know and love.
Doesn't make enough money to be my full-time job, but enough to keep me interested over the past 3+ years.
https://achromatic.dev - Next.js SaaS starter kit that is not crap. That's it in a nutshell haha
It become the #3 selling one (after Shipfast and Makerkit) in under 3 month.
I know the website itself is not the most descriptive, but I do prio feature and customer requests over website/marketing. Soon the starter kit will also have multi-organization support :)
2025 is gonna be interesting since I plan to add multiple boilerplates to the same package deal. Realized I'm not a business that needs to be greedy and grow, just helping others is enough.
I am currently running an application in Korea that analyzes the results of sports Toto matches. I earn approximately $500–550 per month through in-app purchases.
This business model is somewhat limited, so I am considering other services.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tistory.dd...
I'm currently making about $1K a month on my book/course Atomic Note-Taking which has sold in 69 countries—something I didn't anticipate!
Along side this I'm build a note-taking app—flowtelic that aims to help you get into flow and have an autotelic experience. It's to put into software the goals of my note-taking book where I feel other apps are missing the mark.
I have a waitlist if anyone is interested
I don‘t know if I should really say it, but here I go.
You can order certain pills that are meant for men for like 50c a piece online from India and sell them for 10€ a piece face to face to normies. Handing out a few freebies ALWAYS leads to the guys becoming frequent future customers. Because those damn pills, while not considered addictive, make things so, so much better. And not every country already has easy, cheap and low effort ways to order them normally…
(I am talking about vitamin pills aimed at men and nothing else and I am not doing this, I heard someone tell me this story.)
How many guns do you own to protect your territory and vitamin empire, and ensure the riches gained aren't taken by anyone? Do you have vitamin groupies? Do you recruit vitamin runners to distribute the small quantities and take most of the risk? Do you move vitamins by the kilo?
Off-label Viagra or something else?
All of this is „open label“ and „on label“.
Viagra/Cialis or something else?
The pde5 menagerie has a few more now but I feel like there is little difference between them.
Permanent tadalafil if you can stand the side effects, any of the others if you are suffering and want them to be over faster.
Interesting I never heard of ED meds of that nature described like more addictive drugs where "you take one freebie and you're coming back for more." Why don't people get them OTC instead of on the black market? Are you from a place where they're more illicit?
https://produktly.com/ - a suite of tools to improve onboarding, product adoption, and retention. Things like product tours, checklists, feedback widgets, changelogs etc. that help you proactively guide your users, listen to their feedback, and communicate progress and upcoming features.
All manageable without any coding (after the initial copy-paste script integration), so e.g. product managers or customer success can build and add these from the web dashboard.
Inbox Zero - https://getinboxzero.com - your ai personal assistant for email. Spend 50% less time on email.
I created https://reddit-saved.com to search and organize reddit saves that I wanted to come back later. 10K+ sign ups, mainly through word of mouth and Google search. Still not monetized but hoping to in the near future.
I have been building a few apps, combined (+ with my saas sites/games) I manage to reach 500$:
WhatDinner[0]: Basically Tinder to decide what to eat
FleuntRead[1]: A new app I am working on to learn languages by learning sentences by heart
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fluentread-language-learning/i...
https://reqres.in/ - roughly that much in ads revenue. Would love to add a paid plan for more features, but....time.
I built https://runjs.app because I wanted an easy way to run JavaScript and test out ideas. It turned out that a lot of other people wanted the same thing.
The first version was free and very basic. After getting a lot of suggestions and feedback from the people using it, I added more features and introduced a freemium pricing model.
I built a Figma plugin that makes it easier to upload and host and manage images from Figma.
Pretty basic 3d printing. Right now I'm focusing on the usual kinds of products (either commercial-compatible CC licenses or models of those I've purchased licenses to), but I'm working towards learning Autodesk Fusion and creating my own products. (Probably focus more on functional items, since I'm definitely not artistic). Netting around $500-1000 a month (eBay, Etsy, Mercari, some FB marketplace)
I believe Amazon has price rules such that you cannot price gouge on Amazon. Do the vendors you list have any rules like that? Or do you just not care?
Everything I list is at fair market price, with fairly conservative margins if you consider materials, capital expenses, and labor time.
No, I mean like one price on one platform and another price on a different platform…
The combination of https://hostedgitea.com and https://dopeloop.ai brings in over $500 per month. In 2025 I'm going to focus on shipping a bunch of new online music apps on dopeloop.
I'm building an AI web agent to fetch detailed information. Looks up and browses sites just like you.
Have just over 500 developers signed up and releasing our client library soon.
https://postalagent.com is my side project that lets you building mailing lists and send postcards online
https://checkanyvin.com is a slightly older project that lets you run vehicle history reports cheaper than other services
Postalagent seems like it's mostly targeting real estate agents? Seems like you have quite a few competitors there. I played around with editing the template graphic, it's a little hard to use but like the idea!
PostgalAgent seems cheap, 0.72$ per card? Maybe I am wrong, I would've thought it might cost more!
Where do you get the data from? census.gov?
BTW, the demo link seems broken - https://checkanyvin.com/free-report/sample/1N4DL01AXYC165358
The data comes from a few different sources, like MelissaData.
Thanks for noticing the broken link, I fixed it
I built my language learning app, which is helps learners to study common Chinese idioms. The website (https://everydaychengyu.com/) has the content for free and a kid friendly app teaching the material with flash cards and spaced repetition is available on the app store
Same as last year - still making between $500 and $1k on SnipCSS. Didn't work on it for 6 months, but recently added Tailwind conversion:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/snipcss/hbdnoadcmap...
This was a terrific back and forth between the community with a lot of genuine insights. Kudos!
Launched ZenMic: AI Podcast Generator few months ago. Crossed 400 free users so far.
Zero MRR but it makes money indirectly.
We still have to add pricing and paid plans but it attracted enough freelancing client who need related custom solution.
I created a website spellchecker/proofreader (https://spl.ing). We use aws step functions for the actual processing, it's very cool tech! Reply with your websites, and I'll run a few checks!
> Reply with your websites, and I'll run a few checks!
Or your could go with the "triplechecker spam" approach and just reply to every comment that contains a URL to shill your wares https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TripleChecker
In some sense I'm being /s but the other side of that coin is I'm sure for every 8 people that it makes angry there are 2 who actually convert so :shrug:
https://rockyai.me/ - a chrome extension that lets you chat with any webpage using LLMs. Just a simple side project that I wanted to build for me and my friends. Don't intent to monetize it
If you have not monetized it how does it have a $500/mo revenue?
LinkedIn Profile Optimizer is an AI-driven service designed to enhance your LinkedIn profile, making it more appealing to recruiters and expanding your professional network. By analyzing each section of your profile, it provides personalized recommendations to help you stand out.
Key Features: • AI-Powered Analysis: Thorough examination of your profile to identify areas for improvement.
• Tailored Content Suggestions: Customized advice for posts and updates to engage your audience.
• Optimized Headline and About Sections: Creation of compelling summaries that highlight your expertise.
• Profile Visibility Boost: Strategies to increase your profile’s reach and attractiveness to recruiters.
• CV Generation: Development of resumes tailored to specific LinkedIn job postings.
• Content Strategy Development: Formulation of plans to effectively engage your network.
By comparing your profile to industry leaders and staying updated with LinkedIn’s latest trends, LinkedIn Profile Optimizer offers actionable, prioritized recommendations to elevate your professional presence.
I made a plant care app for iOS and macOS. Making few hundreds $$$ on it - https://apps.apple.com/app/plant-care-identify-flowers/id161...
I made a Resume Builder app for iOS and macOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/professional-resume-builder/id135...
I run https://getloaf.io/ an app which lets you customise SVG animations that are built into the app. Constantly plugging away for 4ish years now!
Not exactly a new idea, but as a fun side project, I built an AI photo generator (i.e., an SD/FLUX wrapper) https://www.photovortex.com which has crossed $500MRR last month.
I also just launched a spin-off of it, https://www.portrayya.com which is more focused on generating a set of portraits of a single person (i.e. headshots for linkedin etc.) instead of prompting individual images.
Overall this is a very crowded space now because it's so easy to build, but there is still a learning curve around landing page design, conversion, ads etc. and potentially some niches to explore.
Built https://sendbroadcast.net for myself and started selling it too. Made about $1500 usd so far over the past 2 months and a bit.
Not even halfway there with mine. Gonna make a reminder and look for this post in 2026!
Built https://violinist.io, a PHP / composer update service in 2017 and it passed that figure probably something like 2021?
Not quite 500$/month, but my book https://www.handsonscala.com/ is still making 300-400/month 4.5 years after releasing it. Not a lot of money compared to silicon valley FAANG salaries, especially given the amount of effort that went in, but it's a nice feeling to see the dollars trickling after so long
Li Haoyi! Thank you for developing your scala ecosystem and Hands On Scala. I just started using Scala again after a few years' break, using Mill, thanks to your recent blog post on the last 12 years. I forgot how easy Scala can be if you don't make it hard, and how just darn pleasant it is to code in. Would love to see Scala rise from the ashes of the FP flame wars and become Python devs' second language. Or even their first. Thanks for leading the charge!
Made https://meeteffective.com/ for useful 1 on 1 meetings. Not charging for it though right now
Sorry if this is unsolicited feedback, but reading:
> Conduct your most crispest and productive 1 : 1s
Feels awkward to me.
> Conduct the most crisp and productive 1:1s
Could be more organic?
https://kenyanlist.net local Kenyan forum
I built an agentic marketplace where people create agents which get a cut of the task price if their agents take part in doing something in the chain.
Making more than $500 but it is a side project.
My side project is not spending money. For every 100k i dont spend i can generate 500 to 1500 a month just by buying an s&p 500 tracking etf.
Can't really call it a side project, though, as I'm working on it full-time.
Mac/iOS apps https://loshadki.app
Stable between 1000-1500 monthly, depends on the month.
I built thatsexquiz.com - a quiz for couples to improve their intimacy. Changed the pricing model and went from $5 to $50 per day
what did you change about the pricing model that improved sales so much?
I've got a SQL card game
it's not consistent on a monthly basis but so far i have made $10k from my open source side project and I wrote about that in detail: https://gourav.io/blog/notion-boost
I do a couple of bucks on digital marketing
ㄹㄹ
Thanksgiving last year, after GPT-4 was released, I realized large language models were finally good enough to bring my idea to life: an AI book generator. Over the holiday weekend, I built the prototype for https://instabooks.ai, to allow anyone to instantly generate 200+ page books on any topic. I sell them in pdf, epub and print form and they take about 30 minutes to complete.
Since launch, over 10,000 books have been generated on topics ranging from niche hobbies to advanced research. The system runs almost entirely on its own, requiring only occasional updates and customer support. The best part of it: as new LLM models come out, the books get better written as well, so each year it improves without much effort on my end.
So you are the guy that poisons people with this generated cookbooks.
I assume you're referring to this issue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwp_WEdJaEk , yes?
What LLM are you currently using? And how do you prevent against hallucinations/drift when generating content of this length? Do you start by asking the model to generate an outline of a book, and then have it expand on each chapter with more detail? Awesome project
Currently using GTP-4o combined with Perplexity API context infusion for real-time knowledge (this also reduces hallucination for the most part). And yes, starting with outline and then writing chapter by chapter while doing real time research. After initial completion there’s another editing round to make everything more coherent.
I am a little unsure of how it works, but it is very intriguing. Can I order a book on Writing Effective HN Comments from you? Who would be listed as its author? If I wanted to be the author, would I have to pay you? Is there an option not to have the book listed on your page? Do you have an FAQ? : - )
Yes, I do offer a premium “Becoming the Author” option that allows you to publish the book under your own name, with full copyright, and the book will be taken offline from the website.
This sounds cool, but why? Why would anyone generate a book ?
Think of it as deep diving into a topic that you want to know everything about. For example quantum computing, you can generate a book that goes in depth in yesterday’s quantum chip announcement (https://instabooks.ai/products/df1ae367-e0c1-b749-9898-2744b...). Or if you’re preparing for a job interview and need to brush up on your knowledge in that specific field (https://instabooks.ai/products/041ced4c-efed-92e4-7ae6-9ad2b...)
Why wouldn't you buy a real book written by a real person who actually knows what they're talking about and is less likely to have hallucinated it all?
Write a few dozens chat gpt powered books, and during your next interview you might say: "actually I wrote a book on xxxx, you can buy it on Amazon"
