Been over 2 years since the last time this question was posed and there were a lot of interesting replies the first time around. I'd like to see what people are up to in 2022.
I'm a software developer by trade. I've had essential tremor all my life. Virtually all doctors say, "well, at least it's a benign condition." Right. And it's affected my life in countless ways, none of them good. It's gotten slowly worse over the years. It's not debilitating, but it's frustrating, and it rules out some activities completely. As I type this I randomly touch the touch pad or an unwanted key, and random things happen. :-)
Your software looks amazing for me! Your web site describes my situation exactly. It looks like it's Windows only? Any plans for a Mac version?
Edit: I accidentally posted a truncated version of this earlier (I deleted it), exactly because of my tremor!
I know how hard ET is and I really feel for you. My dad’s ET started getting worse at around 40 and when he reached 65 it got to the point where he couldn’t eat without much difficulty, couldn’t write a simple note, use his phone to text, and many things we take for granted and it stressed him out to the point where he started to isolate; he lost motivation completely. It broke my heart and in 2018 I decided to call and email pretty much every doctor around the world who knew anything about ET and after many emails and phone calls I found a surgeon in South Korea and Florida who agreed to see him. A few months later they performed a non-invasive brain operation that totally cured the ET in his dominant hand (they couldn’t do both). It saved his life.
Deep brain stimulation. Brainwave entrainment. This is technology that really should be talked about more. Look it up on Google Scholars to see the research and results it has on many things such as, sleep disorders, concentration, learning, even found to reverse Alzhiemsers. It is so simple you can treat yourself from your cell phone. Deep brain stimulation is the same only they use magnetic pulses. Please look this up.
I'm interested, too, but it might be a loose term - sometimes people say "non-invasive" to mean "minimally-invasive" or such. So something that involves opening the skull and placing electrodes on the surface of the brain can be considered "non-invasive" to the brain matter, and endoscopic endonasal surgery is much less invasive than going through the skull.
In fact, "non-invasive operation" is oxymoronic, because an operation or surgery is a medical treatment that is invasive.
Your mileage may vary, but I had the same issue and it got fixed after I started lifting and developed more muscle all over my body, especially in the core.
It’s like the nervous system can’t just jerk my hand around if there is more muscle for it to control.
Now my firearm accuracy makes everyone jealous at the range, people are like “wow, you’re such a natural”.
I'm curious. Would some sort of intentionally-activated eye tracking work? Do your eyes have tremors?
Ideally (there's a pun in there, but it's not intentional) we could use our eyes to signal where we want our "focus" to be, but only when we want that signaling to happen. So a simple button held to indicate "track my eyes and focus on where I'm looking when I lift the button" might be useful.
Same here. Mine isn't debilitating (yet, maybe). But there are definitely times it's a real pain, and nobody really seems to understand what it's like to have. And in public it gets annoying because older people will come up to me sometimes and tell me "did you know / do you know if you have Parkinson's" even though it's ET.
> It feels like a conversation that is hard for others to participate in
My dad has Parkinson's and I can relate. My take is: people feel bad for you but society doesn't have canned responses like we do for more common situations like the death of a loved one. This makes people uncomfortable since they don't know what's an appropriate reaction.
Please don't get discouraged though, I didn't even know this existed! The amount of people that will benefit from you bringing this up is >0.
My dad's not interested anymore in computers (more about the cognitive overload than the hand tremors) but this would've helped enormously during the early stages.
I don't think you're right that society doesn't have canned responses for this sort of situation. There's no canned response as brief as "my condolences" or "I'm sorry for your loss", but combine a few vague phrases of the sort "what an awful situation", "it must be horrible to lose control over your body and mind like that" and something about how brave and kind the other person is for helping his grandfather like that, and most people are going to get through the conversation without too much discomfort.
It might sound like I'm being ironic, but even if these phrases are cliched and almost contentless in a strict sense, they're very useful for signalling purposes, and when you're talking to someone whose relative is sick or dead, being able to smoothly signal that you care is actually really good for both parties -- comforting for the recipient and convenient for the sender (in the sense that they can easily make their concern and care for the recipient clear without too much hassle).
This is peak development to me: to write high quality software to solve a problem I care about and make it available for others. If this sold zero copies, it would have all been worth it.
You should consider surrounding yourself with people that can tell the story. It's common to not be able or willing to tell your own story. Others can carry or lift this weight for you, and take it where it needs to go.
Out of curiosity, did you consider creating a browser extension version of your software? As a developer of a dictation extension for Chrome [0] I see that it gets a lot of use for accessibility purposes.
I once experimented with a tremor-compensating extension and some css that hid the “natural” cursor and overlaid a cursor image instead whose position I controlled (using a basic rolling window average to make it steady). This basic test seemed to hold up.
That could potentially open up a whole new market for you…? Just curious if you’ve considered this. Don’t hesitate to reach out by email too if this sounds interesting!
I agree, these questions are part of the work that would be required to take it from a prototype to something useable.
You could maybe add one big transparent layer on top of the page which would catch all "real" clicks and generate synthetic mouse events under the layer at the stabilized position.
Browsers aren't an "ideal" environment (versus an OS where you might be able to hook into the mouse position/display at a lower level), but at the same time, they are ubiquitious, cross-platform, etc.
Might be worth a shot to expand this more. It's on my long list of side projects -- I'd love to collab with someone on it!
After seeing this on HN at some point, I bought the software for a family member -- as far as I know, they're very happy with it! It's kind of a sore thing to talk about, so I haven't heard it said directly, but last I saw the software was still installed on the machine :)
Not exactly what you're looking for, but to help populate the thread, in the mid 00s I had a big chunk of accidental income that I didn't want to talk about at the time, but can now.
I put Adsense on my blog early on and I'd make maybe $10-20 a day with no shenanigans. I wrote a post recommending a route planner I'd found (pre Google Maps). A month later my income jumped to $100-200 a day and it turned out to be due to the route planner post being #1 or #2 for the route planner's name! I assume people were clicking on my blog post, then clicking on to the real site via the ad. This state of affairs lasted for several months until the algo improved and put the real site on top for good. I can't remember the exact total but I had a good $20-40k out of it and it paid for my wedding.
I follow you on twitter. It seems you've been super successful over the years with side gigs. You're an inspiration to me for when it comes to newsletters.
I sell an excel add-in that integrates with some popular trading software. It makes life easier for traders. It has a couple thousand users paying around $10 a month. That's about as specific as I want to get.
It required a little domain specific knowledge to create, and a recognized name among trading forums to initially market. Otherwise it's super simple and I'm continually surprised that there are no real competitors.
That is the exact niche type of side project that I dream about. Though, with "a couple thousand users paying around $10 a month" that is hardly a side project anymore, given the annual revenue north of $200K.
I've tried this with Google Sheets add-ons. It can be hard since there is no built in payment method so I end up using lots of API calls to Stripe to check for current subscription status. However, you have to get the user to subscribe on one site and install the add-on on another.
It is still outrageous because those two big ones make a huge economy of scale. They did not develop a payment method for a single app but for millions.
I don't know much about this ecosystem but do you see an opportunity for a business to supply these tools (or be the app store) for excel/google sheets addons?
There definitely is for excel. Both for consumer add-ins and internal business add-ins. I've thought about it, and even started on the idea a few times, but have given up. There are just so many components of the system that are outside of your control as a developer. Someone with the appropriate resources might be able to do something neat.
I've thought about selling my code snippet for handling payments on something like Gumroad or similar. However, it's not a great solution since people still need to sign up somewhere and then install add-on. Plus they need to subscribe on stripe with their same email that the add-on will use (since the code grabs their email programmatically). As I'm thinking through this, there could be ways to mitigate some of these issues but who knows!
There is someone that built something similar but for browser extensions (https://extensionpay.com/).
I had spent years building a reputation in various forums, chat rooms, etc. I had released some free software that a bunch of people used. So it wasn't hard to get users when I released a paid product.
I'm not sure this side project could be achieved any other way.
I created an online market for a game that sold in-game items with revenue at its peak of over $300k USD per month. Initially it just used eBay affiliate links, but since I would track the sellers in my database, I reached out to the big wholesalers and encouraged them to go nearly exclusive on my market for a similar cut. It was all built over a few years and it runs mostly on autopilot, all marketing, hosting, and code built by me. Never discussed it on any forum before.
To answer with a little more in depth, yes it was an mmo, but everything was above board - no gold selling or similar shenanigans.
Sometimes the profit margin was above 50% because I could source the product myself - but then it became an issue of what was my time worth and did I feel like quitting my day job which wasn't in any way stressful? I also had to consider the lifetime of an mmo, who could say how long the game would remain popular?
In hindsight, I should have gone all in and captured the whole market vertically, but then again it wouldn't have remained a side-gig that was on autopilot.
I'll probably write about it all some day, I think some people would find it interesting. I had to put a lot of hats on to make it work: developer, designer, marketer, customer support, accountant, security, ops, affiliate manager, ...
So the marketplace you're describing is not RMT then? You're facilitating in-game trades with in-game currencies, and making money some other way? (ads?)
I've been working on a 3d first person creative writing RPG where you're a Tentacle Monster with a magic mechanical typewriter. You learn ritual magic based on what you write and it can export .txt files. It even has printer "support". It's called Tentacle Typer.
My goal is to make people more prolific and creative writers.
It's not released yet, but I've gotten enough wish lists that I'm confident I will make some money when I do. It's also led to some freelance/consulting work that's kept me afloat while I shamble forth.
A little discouraged by some gambits that didn't yield results I wanted has me not talking about it as much as I was last year. Ah well I bet the hype energy will come back. There's a lot cool here.
I think I personally fueled the PSD2HTML craze by launching designslicer.com back in late 2006 and heavily undercut the competition by charging just $70 per 'sliced' page. I had no portfolio, just a dumb typical web2.0 era styled website and a very cheap price. I easily made $5000 with that website in the short 9 month period that it lived, then sold the domain for $1300. Also I noticed that $70 per page became the new price around all competitors after I launched, it was lovely to see.
The old version is actually still in the Wayback Machine [1]
I staked $15k, bought season tickets for my favourite baseball team, wrote an electron app to auto-price and market those tickets under face value.
We ended up going to 6-7 games for free, sat in MUCH better seats than we ever could have afforded to, and had access to playoff tickets at face value. Further, my friends had access to great seats at reasonable prices and I avoided having to buy from resale sites (who I detest). 90% of the process was automated.
The way I think of it is more of taking advantage of an arbitrage (~20% discount on season tickets to face value). Instead of selling all the tickets to earn ~$2k each year, we kept and used the tickets to our benefit.
Generally, the electron app would pull face value prices and availability from [baseballteam].com, current resale prices from hubstub.com (<- changing name) and stick them into a mini database (object store). From there, I could use these snapshots to track sales across the resale site, determine a fair value for my tickets, and estimate the probability of it selling (by comparing ticket availability between days on the resale site).
Next, I had collected a list of email addresses from friends and a few posts on Facebook and Craigslist. The app had a button create/update a Google sheet with games/prices, pull in the emails, and batch email people (in groups of <50) the information along with the games. The manual part was marking the games as sold in the sheet, tracking etransfers and sending tickets, but it was little work.
If you're thinking about doing this I would recommend doing it by hand for a while to understand the intricacies of the market and pricing dynamics. Only after that can you think about automating some of the stuff. It still may not be worth it because the cost of mistakes is high, development time could be long and honestly it might just be easier to eyeball and keep track of prices and inventory than putting in all that upfront work. In my experience you have to be very confident and experienced to automate something like that with real money at stake.
Nor is OP if you take their 20% discount into account.
Scalping tickets designed to be heavily discounted for fans, then re-selling them to anyone for profit is scummy even if the price still comes under the non-fan price.
At best you're just denying other fans the chance to get discounts for your own profit.
OP bought one set of season tickets to their favorite baseball team, went to the games they wanted to see, and sold tickets to the games they didn’t want to attend to other fans for less than face value and (presumably) without the outrageous fees that you’d pay at Ticketmaster, et al.
Every casual season ticket holder does this, but most of us don’t systematize it - we just send messages to our group chats, and if nobody wants the tickets for that game then the seats stay empty. There’s absolutely nothing scummy or untoward about OP’s approach.
Perhaps I'm mis-reading the plural here, but how many season tickets do you consider a "set"?
Given OP bragged about seeing "6-7 games for FREE", it implies a lot of profit was made on the rest of the re-sold tickets.
There's a big difference between being a season ticket holder and buying multiple season tickets for the purpose of reselling and subsidising your own ticket.
I see your point. I'm not sure you're objectively wrong. But it feels wrong. :)
Where there is sufficient demand for things to sell out to people who want the product, but are unable to get it because someone has used a bot to scoop them up at superhuman speeds... that doesn't feel exactly like the moral equivalent of other forms of arbitrage.
_Especially_ when the sellers themselves would prefer that not happen. The bands want the tickets to go to the fans at no higher than the price the venue sets. Sony wants more gamers to have PS5s at the price they set.
It feels like the marketplace would function perfectly fine, and the true seller and the final buyer want it to work one way, but third party interlopers are taking advantage of other aspects of the scale and technological basis of our marketplace.
Market makers provide value; scalpers rent seek. I think that's a valid moral distinction.
I can see where you're coming from, but I have pretty bad news, which is that the last line just doesn't match reality, at least not in the United States. It might make sense in theory, but it just isn't true:
> Market makers provide value; scalpers rent seek.
In the United States, event tickets are functionally a monopoly. In practice, Ticketmaster/Live Nation is a rent-seeking market maker which crushes small events and blocks value from being created.
Here's a deep dive on that, just under 20 minutes:
This doesn't mean that scalpers can't also be rent-seekers, but given that scalpers are highly competitive and Ticketmaster is a monopoly, I think the scalpers aren't in a position to seek rent.
This part has a similar flaw:
> someone has used a bot to scoop them up at superhuman speeds... that doesn't feel exactly like the moral equivalent of other forms of arbitrage.
High-speed trading is all about bots and arbitrage. This isn't the first time those two things have been combined. There are corners of New York where they're practically synonymous.
This one has factual issues also:
> The bands want the tickets to go to the fans at no higher than the price the venue sets.
It's only true of _some_ bands. There's evidence (in that deep dive video) that Justin Bieber has probably scalped tickets to his own shows, at scale.
I'm not saying that if Justin Bieber does it, it automatically can't be scummy. That seems like a very very hard argument to make. I'm a musician and I would not want to have that kind of relationship with my fans (if I had any, beyond a few repeat listeners on Spotify).
I'm just saying, there's a lot in this comment which makes intuitive sense but doesn't actually line up with the reality of the situation.
They sell if for the market price, and often times they get burned and sell below face value. If you see concert tickets available through the official venue, you should look at resale prices and you could often get cheaper prices as scalpers misjudged the demand or supply
Scalping is necessary for a lot of events. For instance, a few years back concert sales used to sell a year ahead of time. Who decides they want to go to a concert a year from now? So after a few days they're all sold out to scalpers. Maybe without scalpers they would get sold out by maybe 6 months. But who plans to go to a concert 6 months from now? It's unreasonable. So the alternative is to never get to go to concerts unless you're a fastidious planner.
The other side is even if you want to go to a concert and buy tickets a year ahead of time. What happens if something comes up? You can't resell them. Having the ability to resell your tickets is a huge value to people intending to go to the concert.
You can argue that there should be a better distribution mechanism and I agree, but scalpers are not the problem
>>[Scalpers] are effectively rent seeking parasites that distort the market and make things worst for regular people.>>
I'm trying to understand this sentiment from a totally unsentimental, mechanical view of economics. I've always had a problem with the negative sentiment towards what people refer to as "price gouging" and it strikes me that scalping is similar.
>>if you buy up bulk tickets to flip them for profit that is scummy behavior.>>
For me to relate to this, the "buy up bulk" part would have to be qualified. Does that mean buying so many that the market is cornered - hence forming a monopoly? If that's the case yes - I can ethically map monopolies and anti-competitive behavior to "scummy behavior".
But if, for whatever reason, I have some statistically non-significant amount of tickets - say 10 or 15 for a 50k-100k stadium event - and standing on the sidewalk outside, there is plenty of demand for those tickets at say double the original price, it's not clear to me how that is ethically problematic any more than the buying any other asset that you expect to appreciate.
But maybe what I'm describing does not fit the definition of "scalping"?
You didn't address any of my points as to why they exist. You're just using charged language to describe people working in a system that is kind of shitty for event goers. They're providing a service for people like me that may not want to buy tickets a year ahead of time, but rather keep that optionality to go open closer to the date of the event even if it means a higher price
The system would work fine if there weren’t rent-seeking parasites who offer no service other than taking tickets off of the market that would go to regular people.
I told you the service that they offer, you're just choosing to ignore it. They buy and hold the tickets a year ahead of time and allow me to buy tickets to a concert or show up to the day the date of the show. If they misprice the tickets or get unlucky, they're stuck losing 100% of the amount they paid for it.
I wish artists sold tickets in batches starting a month or two out, but they don't. So this is the system we're stuck with.
Most tickets are "scalped" these days, either by credit card companies, the artist themselves, the venue, etc... A minority of tickets are sold through the normal retail channel these days.
IMO "scalping" is OK and is just selling for what the market will bear. There is demand for something with limited supply (aka scarcity) so prices will go up. I also don't buy that it is unfair to the artist because if their tickets are being "scalped" they could just as easily add more dates to each venue to provide more supply to the market. Some artists do this but many just want to breeze through town in one show.
If tickets were sold for "market price" then the vast majority of people would be priced out of many events because the wealthy are so much wealthier than the average person that they'd simply monopolise a whole lot of entertainment.
Not entirely unlike what has happened to the housing market in cities like London or Vancouver.
If you're okay with huge swathes of the population going without whole sectors of entertainment because "it's a free market" then you're entitled to that opinion. That isn't a society I value.
> If you're okay with huge swathes of the population going without whole sectors of entertainment because "it's a free market" then you're entitled to that opinion. That isn't a society I value.
What I don't think you realize is that rules against scalping help create a mono-culture. Sure huge swathes may be barred from a Bieber concert or whatever is popular today but if that happened the dearth of access to that content will lead to its decline in popularity.
If we let that happen it would open up room in the market for smaller artists and artists at every other level to thrive and build audiences that would otherwise be glued to whatever the corporate record companies are hocking.
A similar way to think about it is that most people would love to have their own yacht but scarcity makes that very difficult. Does everyone deserve a yacht? Instead, with a market, a few super rich get to have a yacht (woopty doo) and the rest of us who want a boat own something smaller and more reasonable.
Yachts aren't inherently scarce, they're just expensive to build and maintain. With more money, more yachts can be built.
With more money, you can't build more Biebers.
And given that music is especially easy to copy with the internet, it doesn't follow that their popularity will decline, it simply means that fans will be limited to only watching via TV or the internet rather than being able to attend concerts.
Yachts aren't scarce? I've never seen one just lying around! Sorry I am missing your point there.
Money is the means to prioritize needs in a world of scarcity. If everyone just had more money it would instantly become worth less (not worthless).
You are conflating the live entertainment market and the recorded entertainment market. People will still want to see live music even if it is not some blockbuster name.
Besides, when the rubber meets the road every big name concert I've been to at a stadium size venue is essentially the same as watching a recording because you just watch the big screen anyways.
If you really want the best live experience you just book the artist for your birthday gala. Do you think we should all be able to do that too?
No, yachts aren't scarce. If there was greater demand for yachts then people could build more yachts and increase supply.
They are expensive, but that is different to scarce.
They especially aren't inherently scarce, which is what I actually said. You missed out the most important word.
There is a natural scarcity to top sports teams or top music artists. Artists can't be cloned and there can only be one champions league final each year.
The scenario you're outlining seems to favor the consumers of art over the creators. Am I understanding you correctly?
It's my opinion that tickets should be sold for as much as the market will handle assuming the additional proceeds go directly to the artist. Any other approach is charity at cost to the artist.
I think that's a very naive perspective, it encourages a romantic view of entertainment where an artist is selling their own trade themselves.
That isn't the reality of the world.
Maximising the profit of the entertainment "artist" is in reality maximising the profits of the rights holder which in many cases is itself a large corporation such as the NFL.
Do I value the consumers of football over the NFL? Heck yes I do!
It's why for instance Germany has their 50%+1 rule, to help make sure that fans rather than corporate owners benefit from the sport.
Even in the case of things like solo artists, I don't want to live in a world where only the super rich can see an artist live, and everyone else has to suck it up because it maximises the money for the artist.
I was wondering why I had a sudden bit of traffic coming from HN this morning... for anybody interested in the dog treat business I answered some questions about in the original thread (https://coopersdogtreats.com/), I did about 150k in revenue last year and roughly broke even on that. This year I expect to do a bit better and turn a bit of a profit.
That said, I've got manufacturing and fulfillment mostly outsourced, so my day-to-day is really marketing emails, managing FB ad spend and sending product to the warehouse when I run low on inventory. Given that, it's looking like this is going to get relegated back to a side project while I find myself a real job.
While I'd obviously prefer to be making a boatload of cash, it has been really enjoyable so far, and I have learned a ton. The most painful thing has been Apple's privacy changes - before those, I was running FB ads that were effective enough to be immediately profitable from customers' first purchases. Now the cost of acquiring a customer is greater than the profit I make on the first purchase but less than the lifetime profit I make from a customer, so I can still do it profitably but it requires investing cash up front.
Hi! Your comment about managing ad spend on facebook caught my eye. I've worked on AdTech before, especially reducing acquisition cost by using the Conversions API from Facebook. Just wondering if you've already tried that? If not, and you want someone to set it up for you, feel free to email me at support at difflens.com. I have some time and am willing to help out :)
I built a tool for educators ~7 years ago at my previous employer. That employer shut down and I bought the tool then sold it to my current employer. This year, my employer decided to pivot and we are no longer serving software services. I now have ownership again with multiple clients paying $5k a year for the tool. I was restricted on my time spent on the tool while it belonged to my employer, but now that it's mine again, I can start working on needed improvements and seeking out more clients.
I also have a fairly large YouTube back catalogue of ~1,650 videos. While most of my videos get less than 50 views, I still generate ~$500 a year in AdSense.
I got my BlueRetro [1] project which is a universal BT controller adapter for retro console.
I'm making a pretty bad job monetizing this TBH. I originally wanted to sell the HW myself but turn out that with real job + young family with the little energy and time left I can't do more than "here's the code".
Turn out a few makers pick it up and are nice enough to give me a cut on their sales. Adding user donation I maybe made 2K out of it this year, not much but better than nothing I guess.
I wrote a retrospective about the last three year working in this if you like more detail [2]
Over a weekend during the height of the pandemic, I made a digital school material website that has a "donate" button on it. Totally unexpectedly, it was making $1k/mo via donations. The original hope was to just pay for the hosting costs.
My wife is a teacher and I built the materials so that she could use them in her remote lessons. She shared with her colleagues, and growth was purely through word of mouth.
Do you have insights to share about working in this domain or documentation (blog or otherwise) for this project?
I'm working on an e-learning platform that aims to solve a few pain points my sister encounters in her job as a teacher. I'd be curious to hear about your experience.
Well, I've spoken about this before, and on here no less, but only really in response to posts like this. I don't do any advertising or speak about mine except in interviews, since it's usually indicative of the kind of requirements they're looking for.
I created a SaaS bootstrap for Javascript called Nodewood [1]. It actually started as just a template for me, because there's a lot of setup for each new JS web project that I kept skipping to get to the "fun" stuff, like I'd just hard-coded the user as ID #1 instead of writing user registration/login code. Since then, it's grown to also have form validation, a starter UI, teams support, subscription support with Stripe, an admin panel, a CLI tool, and I'm currently adding a deploy option via Pulumi [2].
I've sold a few licenses, but also it offers me a platform to "scratch my own itches", which then become available to the people who bought a license.
I've considered purchasing an application boilerplate like nodewood, but can never bring myself to drop a couple hundred dollars on code of unknown quality using methods or conventions I may or may not like.
Do you offer any way to view the source before purchase?
Yup! I've already happily made a couple refunds because folks thought it worked a different way or didn't end up having time to build their project or whatever. I've improved the documentation since then to help give a better idea of how everything works, as well, so there are fewer surprises.
This is cool! Great to see you've had some success here!
I've built something similar for my favorite tech stack but haven't had any sales yet. I find it useful in my own projects and I've seen other similar projects make some money (like JumpStart Pro for Rails) so thinking it's something around my positioning / offerings rather than full lack of a need.
Some things I think you're doing really well:
* Great sales copy and documentation
* Great aesthetics -> adds to "trust"
* Message bot for feedback
Qs:
* Q1: Did you do any customer research to help determine what features to build?
* Q2: What did you find (if anything) is the biggest reason people choose to use boilerplate rather than rolling their own?
For those interested -> CloudSeeed - SaaS boilerplate for Sveltekit + .NET + Postgres - https://cloudseed.xyz/
Mission Control Plus [1] and Batteries for Mac [2] make about $3k per month and need little maintenance. Thankfully Apple hasn’t Sherlocked them (yet).
Wow, Mission Control Plus is one of those "super-obvious" once you are shown the idea, ideas. On an iPad you can close windows in the app switcher by swiping, the Mac does nearly the same thing but has no way to close windows. And I had to check for Batteries as well, seems so obvious that it exists on Mac coming from an iPad...but it just isn't there. Well done.
Circa 2006-07, I made around $4k by selling Adsense coupons. I saw people selling these on SEO forums and thought that there must be a way to get them. A little googling and I found a way to get these $50, $75, $100 adsense vouchers. These would sell sell for anywhere between $5-$20. It literally was free money till it lasted.
I funded life over the pandemic selling bots for MMO's. Made way more than I expected. Enough it became a full time job for a while. Died down a little after people started returning to work after Covid.
Not OP but I used to make bots for MMOs for personal use (never sold them). I used Sikuli to write Python scripts to repeat automated tasks for me to basically grind 24/7. Sikuli was pretty great because it makes it easy to do image recognition on the screen and click on specific buttons.
I could have my bots play minigames as long as I could write a basic AI to do it based on the the objects on screen. It also won't flag any anti-cheat software because it doesn't hook into the game at all, just watches the screen and emulates a mouse+keyboard.
I created a web app that extracts transaction data from PDF bank statements. I talk about it with friends, but often a lot of people think I'm running some sort of data hoarding scam.
I tried a few different things:
1. Google Ads - Got users, but was losing money on every click
2. Cold email marketing - Got banned from Gmail
3. Writing blog posts - This helped me jump up the rankings
Where does your domain name come from?
How do you get people to trust that install?
What's keeping you out of an app store?
How do you source update material?
I expected to see pr0n related stuff in this thread, but your post struck me as super curious-inducing. Thanks.
Two years ago, my cofounder and I built and launched a tool that turns Google Drive folders into a wiki (https://kbee.app). It's making about $1.5K/month and growing organically on it's own...
I'm really curious how you go about getting users for something that's this niche - specifically, people who need to build a knowledge base for their company and already have something like it in Google Drive - but you obviously are doing so pretty well. Could you share how you did that?
We started off by launching Kbee in 100s of different internet directories, communities, and subreddits (i found a list of "places to post your startup that listed all of these places). Our first set of users actually came from r/mysideproject.
From there, we tried our hand at a few failed experiments (Lifetime deal platforms...Avoid like the plague) and ultimately settled on optimizing for SEO as we realized most of our paying subscribers are finding us organically on Google. Decision makers for Kbee tend to range from single-person teams to government organizations so we think optimizing for SEO is the best way for us to continue attracting the right type of customer for Kbee.
Happy to share the list I mentioned above if you're interested!
Thanks for the compliment! The best example we usually share is our help center: https://help.kbee.app
Every article in our help center is a Google Doc in a folder within our Google Drive. We simply pointed Kbee to this folder and it rendered all of the content in a standalone, external wiki that our users can access.
Would love to get your feedback on it if you get a chance to check it out :)
If you wanted to start expanding features look at macabacus. It's a darling for finance folks on Windows but has no Mac support. The way it handles stored formats and keyboard access is a wonderful feature for productivity as is the formula auditing features.
Thank you for this. I’ve been toying with this idea - there is a technical path to this with Microsoft’s JavaScript office API, since vba isn’t available on Macs. But the limited market size is what’s giving me pause.
Sure thing. I'd have the same concern. Their feature set is robust but I think there is a pareto effect in play. I think just the features I mentioned are 80% of the tool's value, you could probably charge >=2x what they do, and those feature have "broader than finance" appeal. However, back to your point, I've never seen finance folks use a Mac for actual work so the market is probably tiny.
wow, this is actually awesome! I had this exact problem at one point and would have loved this. Pretty weird market, though. I suspect you have two segments and the overall user base may be smaller than you think:
1. People in school (MBAs, late college undergrads mainly) who have past experience with windows excel. You might be overpriced for them.
2. People at work (tech/consulting/finance mainly, mostly analysts) who have past experience with windows excel and currently use Macs. You may be underpriced here
This is incisive. I share the view that I could charge more on #2, particularly when businesses are the ones paying rather than individuals. Agree this is probably a pretty small market.
But I’m not sure how to do price differentiation when the scope for product differentiation seems limited (it’s a fixed feature set replicating alt shortcuts). I’ve mainly given discounts to students who write in.
Appreciate the other comment suggesting expanding this beyond Alt shortcuts - that could be one avenue.
For side projects intended to generate income, base it on market research.
- Ensure there's demand. Go on google and type in your problem or solution, are there a lot of results and ads? If yes, there is demand. If the top results are poorly made blogs with only adsense for monetization, there might be a problem. If there are literally no competitors, drop the idea immediately.
- No moat. For solos your priorities are inverted to VCs, pick a market that's easy to attack with lots of competitors where you can be the 50th. Ideally the market is somewhat niche, so it will be overlooked by larger companies.
- It's hard to compete with big companies as one person, but you can turn weakness into strength by offering a product that is simpler and easier to use (ie. fewer features) unbundle instead of bundle.
> If there are literally no competitors, drop the idea immediately.
Just wanted to note that I make >50k/month, and this is the opposite of the approach that I've taken for about half my projects. I look for niches that I think will grow a lot, but which have no competition at the moment because the niche is so small. I build the site, SEO-optimise it, and then just leave it. I do this for lots of little niches that I think will grow, and about 1 in 5 take off. Some of my biggest sites didn't take off for years.
> No moat.
For my strategy building a moat is critical because I have way too many projects to keep on top of them and fight off competition that have a 1% better feature-set. The product should ideally get more useful "automatically" as it grows (e.g. user-contributed content, or something like that).
---
My general advice: Learn basics of SEO, look around at what people want, build niche tools/things to help them get what they want. Keep repeating that and you'll eventually hit upon an idea that gets really big. Keep it simple (and cheap!) - a bunch of my projects that serve thousands of users per day run on Glitch and Replit (yes, really). Try to stick to project ideas that don't require much ongoing maintenance. There are likely many other good strategies - this is just my approach.
I’ve put together lists of ideas before, here’s a few ways I’ve done it:
1. Any idea that comes in your head, jot down in a card or list. This is just to get in the habit.
You may sometimes write a full page about the idea, sometimes it’s a sentence.
2. Quick triage, is this for “fame” (it’s just a small, time bound, scoped, fun project with no explicit objective or plan to earn money), or “fortune” (you’d only want it to be a business, prepared for months and years of work), both are fine
3. For “fame” tasks, pick ones that scratch an itch where you want to learn something or solve a problem (simple website, VS Code plug-in, OSS repo on GitHub, a tool/script you wrote and use locally you want to offer to others as a website, etc) something that’s time bound and has a very simple and complete scope.
4. For “fortune” tasks, decide which ones you feel are interesting, you have knowledge about the problem personally, you see revenue generation possibility, you can do it on your own or with minimal resources to start, you know it’s going to take years, but you’ve got something encouraging/progress to show yourself within 1-2 months
Would you consider projects that solve your own problems or that are for "personal aesthetic fulfillment" (i.e. you think it's cool, regardless of what others would think) as a separate category?
I've started a handful of side projects over the years, usually trying to fill a niche for small businesses, but none really took off because I grew uninterested. Once I started a project that was a) related to a hobby I already had and b) something I actually needed to use in real life, building it became a hobby in itself, I looked forward to working on it every night before bed, and eventually shipped a real product.
Work on whatever you're interested in or motivated to do.
It doesn't matter if one idea could be the next big thing if you aren't motivated to complete it and make it well. You'll execute better on the ideas you are interested in.
One aspect that I see recurring in successful side-project stories is that someone pairs their development skills with some domain-specific knowledge. So you could do an inventory of what domain-specific knowledge you do have, and think about projects that would leverage that.
If your goal is to generate money, an analytical approach (like a spreadsheet) makes sense.
I choose my side projects more emotionally; generally based on things I'm excited about, think will be fun to make, or involve things I'm curious to learn. Happy to share more if interested.
I have a web app that caters to the adult live video chatting industry. It makes about 4 or 5k a month completely passively. Unfortunately I’m too embarrassed to talk about it with anyone.
Don't worry about it. I was engineer #2 at an accidental porn empire where five guys in a room "building the future of adult entertainment" with spicy videos and pictures we licensed for a song to use on this new fangled thing called the internet where nobody makes any money, where we had to write our own credit card processing software, and we went from "we've drained our $100k family & friends funding and not sure if our company CC will be declined when we order yet more takeout" to "we're making $60,000/day, let's buy another $100K SGI and a T3 to serve up more salacious pictures faster!" That company got acquired (reverse acquired), rebranded, acquired again, rebranded, and is now one of the popular destinations on the internet for young men with too much time on their hands.
In high school I made a site to help students view their AP scores early. It ballooned in popularity over the past 8 years. At it’s peak in 2020 and 2021 it was getting over 1.5 million students in 2 hours on the day of release. It was quite profitable for a side project I started in high school. Sadly I was never able to turn it into anything more than an early scores site on the day of score release, but now all AP scores come out at the same time and the site is fading away to being forgotten.
You must run earlyscores.com! That site was a life saver for me. Sadly anything aimed towards tech savvy high schoolers is probably going to be pretty difficult to monetize.
Not too difficult! Monetized with ads, the project was making a significant profit (>$15k per year; all of it came in on one day) - the difficult part was trying to do anything else with all of those users.
I got really into daily fantasy at the height of the boom: you make a fantasy football lineup and enter it into paid contests. For big leagues like the NFL you can potentially win millions of dollars (but there are tons and tons of players and lots of 'pros' that do it full-time).
But for the past several years, I have been only playing niche sports: specifically Canadian football (CFL). It's way smaller stakes but the competition is much easier and I've written my own analytics tools so I have a nice edge compared to NFL where there is tons and tons of high quality content and analysis. I've profited over $20k during the past three seasons.
I run the infrastructure (k8s+helm on GCP) for a PoS validator of a top 50 crypto project. My client is a big whale who bonded ~$15.6M at the projects all-time high. It’s about 1-2 hours of work per month and my 10% cut of the rewards nets me anywhere from $4k-$40k/mo. depending on the price. Given the fact that crypto is in the gutter now I haven’t been selling any to USD, but it’s a nice way to stack an asset with high upside potential while doing very little work.
I tried to launch a SaaS to do automated QA of email sends (check them for broken links before sending, mis-sized images, etc.) which was a big failure as the pain wasn't strong enough.
But to try and promote it I created a free automated email subject line checker which people loved -> https://sendcheckit.com
A couple years in and we've checked around 5 million subject lines for people.
There's an embed API that I originally let people use for free, but after it started being really abused I now charge a small annual fee for access. It's not enough for a full time income and I don't really talk about the site that much as it doesn't fit in the "portfolio" of my other professional interests which are mostly cybersecurity related.
There is a fun story of a guy who was making several thousand $ a month for a couple of years from a side project, a bunch of fan websites about reality TV show. Unfortunately in Russian, but Google translated version is tolerable:
Not sure if it fits here but I run an onlyfans account with my wife as a side project. We were already into taking arty/classy pictures and sharing them for fun, so we figured why not.
I wrote a simple UI where she can drop an imgur link, select tags specific to the pic/vid, and then it generates a list of subreddits to post to and suggests a time and a title.
I made another tool where you can drop in a bunch of pictures and select a date range and it will schedule them to onlyfans and fansly at the same times. We make 500-1.5k a month which just about covers lingerie and occasional weekends away. Could probably make more but neither of can be bothered with all the baiting tactics others use to try and keep/extort fans.
It's not something we talk to anyone about for obvious reasons.
I won't get super into the details, but... A friend and I co-founded a small startup / lifestyle business in a niche hardware / hobby market. Built a platform around it. It's now inching close to 6 figures in 6 years. Not earth shattering, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's more than paid for itself and our time investment. Especially considering that my time investment as the primary developer is somewhere around 10 hours a year for maintenance purposes.
We grow the user base slowly, organically, deliberately. Our quite reasonable cost can be a barrier to entry for some users but our particular solution to this particular problem can save people many thousands of dollars over the course of a few years.
Huh. I recently realized I might like cleaning and transforming data (and staring at the inputs and outputs and intermediary results of the pipeline to see the peculiarities of the data and what can be improved.) I didn't realize this was an activity that could make money, especially on its own.
I made an app last year that lets the user track virtually anything. Most notably, it is possible to track prices from any website.
The app has made me a fair amount of money, but I don't really mention it to my friends or family. The thing is, I am Norwegian, and most people here use iPhones. Since the app is only available for Android, the conversation usually ends in an -oh, anyway.
Judging from many of your most recent reviews which claim that the product is buggy to the point of not working as describe, do you think it's possible a lot of that revenue might be due to the fact you're making it from in-app purchases which (at least, from the perspective of the user) appear to be non-refundable?
I don't think so. The user can test the app for free as much as he/she wants. The user only has to pay if he/she wants to track from more than one website at a time. Also, all Google Play purchases are refundable within 48 hours (everyone might not be aware of this though).
The bad reviews usually come when people try to track from websites that are JavaScript heavy, where the app does not work so well. Maybe I should have been more precise; it works on most websites, not all.
Hi, the parsing is done with Jsoup. So it parses the Html content of the website, without opening a browser. Also it has a neat feature that lets you select the number you want to track by simply highlighting it.
Thanks. So far (8 months in) 30,000 have downloaded it, so I think the potential is there. It is more convenient to have an app, as it provides widgets and notifications.
I did a deep dive into history of Social Security Numbers (SSN) in the united states from available information and wrote a poorly executed static site generated from the information with google adds. Does a few hundred USD a month. http://numchk.com/
For the past year, I've been building a simulator for personal finance called ProjectionLab (projectionlab.com)
It goes pretty far beyond the standard retirement calculators, and is finally at the point where I'm seeing better than minimum wage on all the time I've invested on nights/weekends.
Perhaps this doesn't quite fit with the "not talk about them" part of your question though. Past feedback from the HN community has been a huge part of shaping the development roadmap and keeping me energized about the project.
Three years ago I started a side hustle in the golf industry to pay for my obsessive love for the game.
Never really talked about it in my software circles (until now), but it’s probably time, as we’re doing mid 7-figures/yr, growing rapidly, and have three ft employees (sales and shipping). It’s become my ft gig as well and I couldn’t be happier.
Currently I’m considering hiring another dev with a similar passion for the game, ideally someone with computer vision experience. Austin location preferred but would consider remote.
Very interesting! I once had the idea to build a training bot to suggest optimal swing direction and strength as well as feedback on how you did. Since you mentioned computer vision - is there some similarity to your product?
90% there - buy ya - I don't trust the recommendation engine to fly solo yet. Maybe if I can stop my day job and work on it 100% - but I am not there yet.
Yea - the customers get an email with the choice 15 days in advance. They don't get a list to pick from. Just one where they say yay/nay - if nay, then a new item gets pick and new email is generated.
In the late '80s I created version of Augment [1]. Takeaway was a hierarchical menu that saved all of your places. So a menu of average of 7 choices, which went 7 layers deep, would address 7^7 end points, or about 823,543 items. The number of auto-bookmarks would be 7^6 (117,649). Because the bookmarks would save your place, the average number of gestures to reach any item is about half that, or 3.5 clicks.
Am now playing with that idea for a Heads up Display for AR glasses, using SwiftUI [2]
The first use case is to port a visual synth, I created in the early Naughts, which used a static template on a Wacom Tablet[3]. The interface controlled > 2000 parameters.
The question is: how to control thousands of real-time parameters with virtual touch?
I'm a bit late to the game on this thread, but here goes.
For the longest time I had a solitaire app for Mac that I ran as a side-hustle. A couple of years ago I programmed solitaire from scratch for the web. Fast-forward a few years and the site starts to generate some actual traffic. I then decide to put ads on it even though I thought you couldn't really earn money on ads anymore. It didn't generate a lot of money, but enough that I wanted to keep working on the site.
Today the site is earning $10.000/month from ads. It wasn't until the site started to earn $5.000/month or so that I actually started to talk to people about it.
A guy I worked with a guy in a utility company who had, somehow or other, full control/ownership of a significant proportion of the customer meter data under his consulting company. I have absolutely no idea how he acquired it, but it paid him a six figure salary for five or ten hours work per month just patching a MySQL database. And he could basically name his price, as the company didn't have any other source of meter data for those customers.
I've built streaming videochat software in 2000s. Got a few thousand out of it, which for a student in a poor Eastern European country was great at the time.
Pulls funny photos from a Flickr group. People write funny captions and vote for their favourite. Some of today's active users have been on the site for more than a decade.
I used to pay the £50 monthly prize out of my own pocket, but some generous users offered to fund the prize themselves via a whip-round.
So the small amount of money from paid link advertising on my sites (approx £45/month) now covers the hosting. In my head, that means I can justify spending my free time modernising and grow the site. I'm slowly upgrading it from PHP to http4s+ReactJS
There are some fun tech things I enjoyed inventing on the site - real-time collaborative mind-mapping to help people think of caption ideas; bots that identify bad user behaviour and create forum topics to start a private discussion with the admin team; real-time updates using websockets; a system that automatically identifies the best voters and rewards them with a quota of "super-votes" they can use to vote more than once on the best captions.
We're hoping we'll be part of future threads like this one with DiffLens (https://github.com/marketplace/difflens) for language aware diffs on GitHub :) The next step for DiffLens is potentially a VSCode extension to make it easier for developers to use
As a kid I had a YouTube to MP3 converter. The conversion was ripped from other services which weren't as careful with iframes.
It went on for a few years. Ads revenue peaked at 700£ per day, (200£-300£ being more normal) which was nice money, even if I wasted it all on a failed startup.
Eventually Google banned us from AdSense removing half of the revenues and I quit the project.
Around 2006 - 2008 I was playing around with SecondLife and found the only thing that interested me there was coding objects with their LSL scripting language. I happened to fall in with a content creator (eg. a really good artist that could create cool looking things from the in world primitive object tools) that sold "campers" which were objects on which you could basically park your avatar in some kind of pose and your account would be sent a small amount of money each hour. This was useful because the discoverability of locations in the world was substantially increased by the presence of avatars. A lot of people at your place meant your place was popular. So the typical implementation of campers was that a place would build a bar with 10 or so barstools and embed a camper script in them, so people could come up, choose to camp on a stool, and get their couple of bucks a day. But these implementations were pretty lame because without any kind of activity by the real life user, avatars would timeout and just slump forward over the bar. So these places, while technically having a higher presence of people, looked like a terribly depressing place with a bunch of passed out drunks.
So this content creator I met had the idea of working a little hard on the product by creating a little scene of things (as opposed to just dropping a script in a barstool) and then also writing the code to animate the avatar in some kind of loop. So for example, she created a little patch of garden and a wheel barrow, and when someone chose to camp on it, their avatar got on all fours and appeared to be working on the garden, like weeding or whatever. Another one was a ladder that could be placed by a window and the avatar would climb up it and appear to be washing the windows. We had 5 or 6 different campers like this. For obvious reasons this product blew up. I don't remember what she sold them for but at the peak I was pulling in $100 a day and my cut was only a fraction of the total cost. This continued for at least a year before we had a falling out about another product and she dumped me from the cut.
I built PDFEncrypt (https://pdfencrypt.net) a couple years ago based on a very simple need from a client: to encrypt PDF files via a native Windows app, for free, without needing to upload files to a sketchy website or buy expensive software. I have been amazed at the number of visitors (4000/mo), emails, downloads, and donations the project has received. I released it as open source software, and I'm now working on V2 (almost done!) which is a complete rewrite based on user requests, as well as a bunch of new features I've dreamed up. This has been a very fun side project and good practice coding in C#.
I pivoted to algorithmic trading crypto a couple of years ago. Now have some really good live results nearly a year and a half long, beat the market massively with a 300% return since start of 2021. Have been working on a pitch and sent to a few angels and VCs but not heard anything back yet. Have some private clients and one trading firm and also had a call with a quant related company last week about a credit-line.
Never intended to pitch for seed or anything it's just happened naturally and as a result of the live performance.
It sells around 20+ copies a month, usually to published or self-published authors of fiction. It's been selling at that level for about 8 years now. 1 in 3 sales is for the Pro version, which constantly surprises me.
I haven't updated it in a couple of years. The last substantial work was back in 2018. It never gets mentioned on writing websites anymore, but sales still trickle in.
I've moved on to other things, but it's nice to see those emails come in during the month.
A couple of years ago I built a mobile reminder app that sends your reminders via text message. I haven’t done a good job marketing / promoting it. I’ve tried a couple of times in the past, but just have not cared enough to actually learn how to market it.
It really helps me in my everyday needs.
It currents helps about 4K+ users a month. Still blows my mind.
I built https://feedmail.org because I wasn't satisfied with the existing RSS-to-Email services available.
I figured I would really just be making it for myself but decided to make it a product and have made a few hundred dollars in the first months. It pays for the hosting costs and gives me some motivation to work on it. It's also been surprisingly stable and my monitoring is good, so if I am not actively working on it I can just walk away and forget.
Got a few hundreds euros by building a poker helping app using neural networks. Since I love poker and I wanted to sharpen my skills in ML.
It involved me working all weekends and 4 to five hours after work, and also spending nights playing poker in Poker Stars.
Basically, if I wouldn't have built the app and just played poker without using the app suggestions I would have made more money.
I am still convinced that given some hundred man year of work and a lot of money to buy GPUs, I can make some millions with it. Not sure those millions would be worth. :)
I built MoneyHabitsHQ.com for simplified personal finance.
The hardest thing about it is that talking about budgeting is really personal. People are more than willing to talk about their process but things get awkward when it gets specific.
I can’t screenshare with someone to onboard them because that would involve seeing every bank account they have. Im curious if anyone has thoughts on how to solve that problem?
It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer.
It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough.
I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It feels like a conversation that is hard for others to participate in.
Do other founders feel this way? I wish I understood it better.
[1] https://steadymouse.com