2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152
Fast-forward a few weeks, I become pretty good friends with the owner at the ranch I went to. We grab tacos one night and he shares his concerns: They're not doing so well financially and are worried about whether or not they'll be able to afford feed in a month.
I got involved and we solved that problem and a few more: revamped the website (it looked and felt like it was from 2006), I whipped up a booking/reservation system to get more customers through the door, and exit surveys to make sure everything was perfect (and figure out what went wrong if it wasn't).
Bookings this month are up 490% from 2018 (according to the paper waivers they had) and that's without a single dollar spent in paid marketing. I answer a few emails every day from prospective riders and make sure everyone's happy. I get a percentage of each reservation which is cool, but the coolest part is that I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranch.
Most business' official website are a Facebook page.
In a country of 150M people and growing expat presence, there is a TON of opportunities for software businesses to enter the market.
For example: Riviera Maya has no MLS style real estate tracker/listing platform. The entire real estate industry operates on word of mouth, WhatsApp and Facebook messages.
You must get business cards made and start distributing them to friends and family whenever you get the chance. Not for marketing - to brag and to be able to be mildly annoying.
Of course our business is centered around repeat riders, it would be a very different business to organize trail rides for strangers.
Our barn is much smaller than most (7 horses at the high water) but it has been consistently profitable. A barn with more horses and a large staff could bring in more revenue but costs will be higher too. There is a barn down the road that has nice facilities but has had several managers and has only been viable with the last one. We know another troubled barn with an alcoholic owner who has a large off-farm income that has struggled economically and has a legendarily bad safety culture. (I took 10 rides there before we were in full swing and had 3 'near miss' accidents)
I did something very similar for Surfing schools. Not yet making any money off it, but I am trying to. Reaching out to other surfing schools, improving the product adding new features.
Edit: Saw the URL from another comment. Great work, simple and does exactly what’s needed.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458090/Hapland_Trilogy/
I am currently making more than $500 a month from this, although I don't necessarily expect that to continue. Games are a crowded market. It was a fun project, though.
People like the app for its ability to turn a normal boring screenshot into a beautiful one that they can share on social media instantly.
How to you keep those mini videos up to date?
Probably a Firefox bug, but it's preventing me from looking at this landing page that every one else seems to like :P
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/01/22/snapper-2-screensho... - video
How did you market this app? How did you get the traction?
How long did it take you to develop the app to where it is today?
It began in 2016 out of some frustration I was having with consulting clients who would modify their DNS records incorrectly, breaking their email and/or website until I was able to get them back online. It was frustrating digging through emails or old technical documents to find the original values before they had made their changes. I wanted a tool that could automatically backup those records to make reverting easy while at the same time notifying me of any changes so issues could be proactively fixed before their business was impacted.
So with that, ZoneWatcher was born. Depending on your plan, we check multiple times per hour and take a snapshot of each zone's records. When a change happens, we record the change and send you a notification so you can review and have the necessary data to revert if it was in error.
Making close to $500/mo now since a major relaunch / feature update back in December with a decent stream of new users every month. No major marketing done yet other than just word of mouth and the occasional reddit post on /r/msp's vendor threads.
However, APIs are insanely expensive and not very developer friendly, and running it yourself required pretty fancy hardware. The goal was to make the technology absolutely as accessible as possible.
So I launched https://computerender.com with the simplest API possible - just a URL that points to an image like: https://api.computerender.com/generate/cupcake-of-the-sky.jp... I monitor the prices on vast.ai and runpod to find the cheapest GPUs and run the service nearly at cost (as little as $0.0001 per image). No subscriptions, only pay for what you use.
Recently hit 700k images generated, and am excited to continue expanding the service.
> Feels like one of those "feature of a bigger product" things. But I wonder if there'd be a market for a service where you can get ai generated images just via url. "thingy.com/?prompt=weird picture of a cat with frog ears" or whatever and it returns the image.
Rad to see it validated in the wild & a clever approach to optimising your costs.
Is it supposed to work even without an API key?
It has an open source library that works across all browsers and allows for one-time or subscription payments. Since 2021 developers have made over $125k with ExtensionPay which makes me happy :)
so far, nope!
i appreciate that the site looks clean/barebones, but the logo is _so_ barebones -- just text -- that i thought... oh, this is just unsupported, someone thought of doing it, good idea, but then it didn't make any money, so they bailed, no harm no foul, wonder if someone else will do it b/c it's really needed.
i've had various extensions over the years that i wanted to build out, or pay someone else to build out, but there was no way to recoup my investment.
maybe i'll give it another look.
Congratulations!
I'm curious because I have an Etsy shop and love to talk all things about optimising the shop front. The competition is steep nowadays over there!
https://fider.io - an open source alternative to UserVoice. I started this one 6 years ago to learn Go and React. I’ve seen thousands of instances out there being self hosted, so I started a cloud hosting to those who don’t want to manage it themselves.
https://aptakube.com - Desktop Client for Kubernetes. This is very recent, launch was 2 weeks ago, so it’s only starting to get some traction now.
I’m leaving my job to go full time indie hacker now, wish me luck!
They are pretty different target market wise/price point and that has been pretty cool to see the differences in marketing/churn/adoption/etc...
1. Mogul - Privacy focused Personal CRM (https://mogulnetworking.com/) (~$650/mo, ~6 years old)
2. Ellie - A better day planner (https://ellieplanner.com/) (~$160/mo, ~1 year old)
Honestly no game plan, I just enjoy working on both and plan on iterating for a long long time (10+ years) and just slowly growing. I am literally addicted to working on these apps.
I tweet about these projects extensively on Twitter btw if anyone is curious to see what work went into both of these (https://twitter.com/raroque)
Over several years, my image as a good friend has tarnished since I didn't keep my side of bargain in enforcing good relationships. With older age, it's bit harder to make new friends. The least I can do is, reinforce older ones.
Since then it’s grown to include other features like desk booking and PTO approvals. But at it’s all been built around the core concept of seeing when your colleagues are working and where they’re planning on working from.
---
I did a Show HN 4 months ago[1].
The reason I started KTool was to spend less time on computer screens, and more on e-ink Kindle. I was afraid of going blind.
After 4 months improving KTool, it now becomes a tool to help you combat doom-scrolling. Instead of mindlessly scrolling the web, I deliberately send interesting articles to my Kindle.
Recently, I added newsletter & RSS support, it's 100% automated now.
My favorite source of content is Hacker News RSS[2], Stratechery[3], Indie Hacker Newsletters[4] and a few other Substack newsletters.
I can enjoy reading HN latest stories or my fav authors' latest pieces on my Kindle without spending hours browsing on my computer.
I just reached $620 MRR today (Jan 23)
It was averaging around 100 purchases per month, though it's lower over the last year as I've not had time to release new updates (moving to another state is challenging).
Thanks to the sale of this software I've donated an additional $16,000 to my favorite charity (I give 10% of my income there regularly - see Giving What We Can).
https://videohubapp.com/ - Think of it like YouTube for videos on your computer. Browse, search, and organize your videos
MIT Open Source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
Around the beginning of 2022, I was having a conversation with a few friends that are working at small mobile gaming companies, and they were having a lot of trouble building their data pipelines, especially because of the infrastructure part. I took on the challenge to start hosting some Airflow instances for them to get a bit more familiar with their problems, and over time some patterns started to emerge:
- they were writing custom scripts for mundane tasks.
- they had to write Python code, even though all they needed was scheduling a few SQL tasks.
- they needed some basic transformation abilities, but didn't have the budget to pay dbt-cloud $50/month (the minimum plan is $100 these days, I believe).
- they were losing track of where their data is going through and where it is coming from.
A friend of mine and I have started building some abstractions on top of Airflow to help these businesses: no need to write any Python, automatically deploying their changes to their instances after a git push, building data quality checks, materializing their assets based on their SQL "SELECT" queries, etc. Over time, we have gathered these features into a shared UI, and moved some of these companies piece by piece.
We keep improving the platform, and we are onboarding new companies for the past 2 months throughout our closed beta period. There are still many rough edges that we are trying to cover, but in the end, it was a great feeling when people were actually using the prouct quite often in spite of all these problems. We are pretty excited about where this can go.
If anyone is interested in taking part in the beta program, the first 6 months is free during the beta period. Feel free to fill out the form on the website and I'll reach out personally.
I don't do any active work on it any longer for the past 2 years or so, other than the small bug fixes/when Twitter changes the archive format. Bracing for a shutdown to the API soon anyway.
Past submissions on how it used to bring in $7k per month and a few technical details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439606 (June 2020), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29998723 (Jan 2022).
Believe it or not, our ticket queue did not have an auto refresh feature - and manually refreshing my dashboard webpage drove me crazy. As a die-hard macOS user, I’ve always used Safari as my primary browser, but unfortunately no auto-refresh web extensions were available on the App Store at the time. So I learned how to package web extensions for Safari and sell them on the App Store.
Fast-forward to today, and I now have a collection of Web Extensions that net me ~$750 a month. Feel free to check out Simple Refresh for Safari here:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simple-refresh-for-safari/id14...
I feel doubly blessed that it worked out with no ads or micropayment sinks of any sort, just a demo and a single $5 purchase.
What I came up with worked pretty well for me, so I created a site that allows users to upload custom models and run Stable Diffusion “in the cloud”.
I launched in early December and it ended up being more successful than I expected. I just got to $700 MRR, which I’m definitely happy about after years of side projects making exactly $0.
The site in question: https://stadio.ai
If I go to a service designed around images and it's taking 5 seconds on a SOLID fiber connection to fully download, it doesn't give me confidence that I'm going to get a fast experience in the rest of your site (even if it's not directly related).
<a class="font-semibold hover:text-red-700" href="/verify-email">Click here to verify your email.</a>
Created using a mix of automation (TTS, machine translation, etc.) and human reviews.
Built it with a friend, making around $500 a month, very stable over the last couple of years. Spend 1 or 2 hours a month on it, mostly customer support.
Front: I'm not happy.
Back: No soy feliz.
I'm not happy (right now) => No estoy feliz.
No soy feliz means something like "I'm not a happy person".
EDIT: I should have mentioned that I'm not a native Spanish speaker. It turns out I'm wrong here, and that either estoy or soy would work in this case.
LPT: use "affordable" instead of cheap, it basically means the same thing but has a totally different connotation
1/ Started a niche dating app in 2017. Revenue ranges form 700-1,100/mo. Hosting is about $50/mo.
2/ Bought a house and rent our spare rooms for $3,100/mo.
3/ Contracting projects for a small dev shop earned $3-10k/mo (depending on how many hours I worked).
If I buy it, I'm wondering how to grow it though. How do you solve the chicken-egg problem?
I do not do any advertising for it, but as it is played in groups, it nicely advertises itself.
I write short focused how-to ebooks that on the different Python concurrency APIs in stdlib. Content marketing leads to email marketing to one-off sales. Doing about $2K/mo. Might expand into third party libs this year.
I see that you are mostly focused in processes/threads/etc., which is quite an interesting niche (for me, I teach those things in a Operating Systems class). It seems rather risky to pursue a niche as it may be too small! Do you have any tips, like why did you decide to focus on multiprocessing/multithreading? Also, any other Python niches that you think are valuable to focus (for courses, ebooks and tutorials like you do)?
I'm really interested in establishing myself an an online "educator", but I still do not know which kind of topics I should aim to. If I focus on introductory topics there's too much competition. If I focus on a too small niche, I may have no "spectators". Any tips would be greatly welcomed! :)
This time I’d like to show you the progress of my last year’s project, https://lowtechguys.com.
It’s a small macOS app studio and here are my App Store sales for the last month: https://f.alinpanaitiu.com/gjxBpg/Image.png
You can see trends in red because December is a slow month for app sales, not sure why exactly.
But even with just 4 small macOS apps I manage to make ~1k/month with close to zero maintenance.
I have a lot more ideas for small non expensive apps that could add to the revenue but less and less time for them.
Right now I have to rebuild an old wooden house and finally move out of my rented apartment. I’m grateful to have a source of income on the side that can support me this year so I can pause tech while I do field work.
I read your piece on window switching -- would AppleScript work? This works:
tell application "Safari"
tell item 4 of windows
set the current tab to item 3 of the tabs
set the index to 1
end tell
activate
end tellI generate amazing profile photos for users using dream booth and a custom stable diffusion model.
Our quality of output is the best that I’ve seen compared to competitors.
My secret to much higher quality: I rank images, and then only show the best images.
All other competitors that I’ve seen dump all the images to the user. Instead, my process means that the output images are consistently very high quality.
If you don’t know what remote browser isolation is, it’s basically a security product to keep browser. Content executing on a remote computer away from your local device and Netwerk but turns out people use it for a lot more than that: an embedded multiplayer browser for live streaming educational lessons; a human in the loop intervention console to investigate and unstick stalled web automation tasks; as well as the more traditional security or reverse proxy use cases. A large part of my nontraditional marketing came through my source available GitHub version, which is now languishing well behind the paid pro version in terms of features and quality: https://GitHub.com/dosyago/BrowserBox
The idea is you use the digital artboard to visualize your tools on the wall and then buy the holders to mount it on your workshop wall.
There seems to be a growing overlap between programming and woodworking for whatever reason. I could go on about the similarities, but after hours of staring at the screen, we sometimes want to make things with our hands and woodworking helps me do that. If you're looking to get started, I can't recommend visiting a local makerspace enough.
PS also on Etsy if that's your thing: https://www.etsy.com/shop/ToolWall
Also, the subtitle "Use the world's first and only digital artboard to organize your physical tools." - I'd probably put the physical tool wall elements first, and maybe only mention a digital planner next. Or maybe have an image on top?
Saved up, quit my job and went all in...on a todo app. Needless to say that idea didn't go far, but it taught me how to code.
When I was close to broke I pivoted to this product and finally gained traction and now it's doing well enough to be my main source of income.
I'm kind of following the "1000 true fans" ethos that pops up here occasionally. There's a dedicated group of customers who benefit from the ease and speed of the tool and they're like my product team.
I check in with them often, make sure they're happy and build features for them. Turns out, what they value other people value too, and so the product slowly but surely grows.
Learning to code was definitely one of the best decisions I've made. Felt like gaining wings.
Link: https://bit.ly/3H9Gkpb
Follow on twitter for twice-a-day insights about High Overlap Beta ETFS: https://twitter.com/optimizetaxes
I ask as I've built a similar tool that supports portfolio rebalancing and helps generally understand portfolio health. I found the niche of "DIY" investors willing to pay for software somewhere between fully automated and hands-off is small and although I've never pushed towards aggressive monitization, it always seemed like most self-service investors are conditioned to only pay for data (which I suppose in part your application presents).
About a year and a half ago I posted about it on HN [2] and back then our revenue was $2,500/mo. We recently passed the $6,000/mo.
At this point we have a few very happy customers who make up the bulk of our revenue. We have been trying to grow more, but our challenge is that we haven't been able to figure out a cost-effective way of reaching potential customers. We target the landscaping market, and most landscaping companies are either too small, or they don't have tech-savvy owners/staff who are motivated to learn and leverage a software solution effectively in order to grow their sales. Phone and email outreach haven't worked well.
If anyone has experience in this market or similar, please drop me a line! ege@pricetable.io
[1] - https://pricetable.io [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26855726
This is interesting, I don't know anything about your business but I feel like it might be worth having a landing page that is focused on landscaping. I don't really understand what the business does or how it can be helpful to a landscaping company.
Your website does not scream out to me that you are targeting the landscaping market and is a micro-startup going for the same market that the big companies cover so it might be a big hurdle to get the next client.
the genericness of the first few sentences are kinda not idea because they don't capture the "clickbait" nature of your product. you want to enthrall them into checking you out more. "The Perfect Mix of Sales Automation and Operations Management." doesn't really tell me much. "Create quotes in 30 seconds from your phone" or "control your business from anywhere" or whatever does capture my attention more. the headline doesn't have to encompass everything your business does but the subheading should have something like "complete business automation on the go"
getting customers is a hard problem® if it wasn't one of the biggest companies in the world wouldn't be an ad selling company with a swath of ways to deliver ads to you.
- Flipon (https://flipon.net) an arcade puzzle/match-3 inspired by Tetris attack on PC mobiles and switch
- Steredenn (https://Steredenn.pixelnest.io) a roguelike shoot them up, pc, iOS, switch.
I’ve been lucky to have an extra income with those two games for a few year.
If I can ask a question, was there an initial design decision to build the game in Unity, or was that just your preferred tool out of experience?
(asking because I am fool-heartedly going in pure libsdl2 and C++)
Thanks again!
I have had a blast building it and it is hard to market - but the people that do stumble across and use it, the visual way of planning really resonates with them.
https://www.munkle.it - Think Anki, but optimized for speed, and will be focused on content creators. First sale this month (>$500_ from manual outreach to a big content creator Individual purchases will be turned on eventually, but we're not focused on that right now. This is a labor of love as through college and 20+ professional certifications I wanted something faster and easier than what was available.
https://www.skullsplitterdice.com - I spend around 4 hours a week on this, but I used to do this full time. Currently it runs high four to low five figures 100% organically, but can easily do more if I ran ads. It 100% wouldn't be worth my time if I weren't using it to teach my kids things like customer service, product design, how to make content valuable to people so you get search traffic, single piece flow, etc.
It's also cool because I can geek out on a new thing in the area and apply it to something to see if I make any money on it or just have fun making art. Things I've done in the past is includes making a book for the game these are used for, a "choose your own adventure" style Facebook messenger adventure linked from hidden inserts in products, and working with visual and voice over artists to make stories around different products. My latest was using midjourney to create a character that I animated to say a script talking about a product.
Did I make money from that? No, was I entertained? Heck yes.
I started making this PWA in 2016 and I’ve been slowly adding to it over time. I intend it to stay minimal & lightweight. No framework, etc.
Fun fact: because it is so lightweight, it was included in the Moya app (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 half the players are South Africans!
Feedback is welcome ;-)
How did you start getting traffic to your game and how is it getting traffic nowadays? Apart from the South African app.
I started doing some monetization experiment recently, and already got $500+ now.
I’ll admit that going in I talked to a few other authors and the common wisdom is that you don’t write a book for the money. I wrote the book because I thought there was room for a more practical industry focused Haskell book that didn’t assume any particular math or FP background, and showed readers how to apply the ideas in the context of real world problems. It’s been very well received so far as it’s been in beta and I made a decent amount on royalties in 2022. Going into 2023 I’m hopeful that I’ll see that continue as the book has its final release, and I’m planning to follow up with some additional materials like videos and interactive training that I hope will get more people excited about Haskell and will generate enough revenue to keep me motivated during the times when it all feels like a lot of extra work.
I'm making some money on SaaS and some on consultation and customization. In many cases people pay for something I can later include in the open source, which always feels nice.
this whole process used to take like 20 to 30 minutes easily. so i built an app https://pika.style to do all of that for me quickly
it started as a hobby, open-source and free to use project which i was building in public on my twitter(@thelifeofrishi). in a matter of time i started getting DMs on Twitter for feature requests
i remember a founder of a company wanted to have a certain feature, we discussed that and in the end i asked whether he would be happy paying for that feature, to which he said yes. i added the requested feature in 2 days and got back to him, he instantly purchased annual subscription and started using Pika. that was in February, 2022
fast forward to today, almost an year later, Pika now has 150+ paid users and makes $1,500+ in revenue each month. i’ve turned it from just a screenshot beautifying tool to a tool to design very customisable mockups and images. you can use it to generate images for your website, app, code, tweet etc. and to keep it more accessible, it has a free tier which doesn’t even require registration to use
i’ve also added a plan just for students and teachers so they can use Pika’s paid fearures at a very discounted subscription fee
if you’re a programmer, marketer, designer, no coder or work in the tech industry, i think you’ll definitely find Pika useful :)
It's an open-source data visualization and reporting platform that I started in 2018, I abandoned in 2019, then resumed working on it more seriously in 2020.
Currently, the platform is doing $1,138 in MRR from then managed hosting service and has made over $11k in revenue so far. It's been growing steadily in the last few months but going through a rough Dec-Jan period at the moment. You can see the open page at https://chartbrew.com/open
Onwards and great job everyone at working to make side projects work for you!
Keeping the link for later, thanks :)
You can check out the game here: https://online-solitaire.com/.
I wrote a post about my journey on Indie Hackers if someone is curious about it: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-a-simple-solita....
Did you start having only the game at first above the fold and then added more content below? How did it evolve over time?
It looks like SEO drives most of your traffic.
Making about 1200/month right now. It's a weekly list of companies that were funded in the last 7 days with founder/ceo contact information.
I use a mix of scraping and manual validation to make the list and currently doing cold emails to sell. I'm not truly a developer or a marketer, so learning a lot while attempting to make this work.
It seems to be valuable to different types of agencies -- recruiting, design, web etc.
Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942558 - Dec 2022 (211 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32806068 - Sept 2022 (91 comments)
Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31764696 - June 2022 (265 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152 - Jan 2022 (613 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095 - Dec 2021 (841 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2020 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167 - Oct 2020 (76 comments)
Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438930 - June 2020 (461 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2019 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863 - Sept 2019 (61 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306 - Aug 2018 (151 comments)
Ask HN: Sideprojects/passive income businesses with little or no own coding? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806208 - Nov 2017 (50 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804 - Sept 2017 (239 comments)
Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14752196 - July 2017 (27 comments)
Ask HN: How do you make money from your side projects? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13980274 - March 2017 (106 comments)
Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514093 - Jan 2017 (130 comments)
Ask HN: Those making over $1K/month on side projects, what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12670731 - Oct 2016 (245 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12145137 - July 2016 (58 comments)
Ask HN: What revenue generating side projects do full-time employees here have? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12123055 - July 2016 (117 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11214497 - March 2016 (44 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9508528 - May 2015 (31 comments)
Ask HN: How to get started with paying side projects? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867035 - Jan 2015 (39 comments)
Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects - what did you make? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6884552 - Dec 2013 (163 comments)
Ask HN: Are you working on any side projects that make "small/passive" income? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358111 - March 2011 (167 comments)
It started as an useful app for myself. Releasing it publicly was an afterthought, and it has been six months since I introduced a subscription model.
I learned about marketing and working on this project contradicted my assumptions as a software engineer - making it educational.
Pretty amazing. It’s fully OSS, just developed by me. Somewhat non-replicable as it’s just been a passion project in some for or another for 7 years now, reborn several times.
For the moment Sponsors don’t really get much, but there’s some in development features that will make that much more valuable. Goal is to double it at least this year!
Not 500+$/month by any means, but 100$/month. I got 2 subscribers who are older clients that I had to convince -hurray for hallway testing- and I hope to get more soon. Having an actual pricing page and payment funnel might help haha.
It's a dead-simple data exploration and prediction micro-saas, but with a lot of nice pixels and state-of the art AI/ML explainability algorithms. Users come with their prepared excel files, upload them, and they get an 'explanation' as to the relations their data has within itself. It can also work as a prediction service.
For example: It can help a marketer know which prospects are likely to buy (prediction), but when said marketer has too actually talk to these prospects we can help with tailoring the message with the right knowledge (this one will buy because he/she buys like clockwork, whereas this one will buy because we saw them several times on our webpages)
Related - Startups.fyi has hundreds of examples of profitable online businesses and side-projects, how much $$$ they earn and more info.
Last year I noticed its user sign-ups are ticking up quickly, acquiring hundreds of users in a few months, so I decided to redesign the app and add more language supports (now supporting Typescript, Javsacript, Python, Ruby, and Go.
It's a combination of a desktop app (to parse your local codebase) and a web app (to visualize the graph). Users pay a small price to unlock the full graph, otherwise the graph is capped at 100 nodes, which allows users to fully try out the product before committing to pay for it.
Dreambooth is a powerful algorithm which can generate images of any concept you train it on. Users use it to generate images of person, e-commerce products, different artistic styles etc.
It has two main parts: 1. Webapp for individuals 2. API for other app developers https://app.aipaintr.com/api/v1/docs/
Its been 4 months since launch and it has gotten low 10s of thousand in revenue. Competition is fierce. Lot of apps launched in this domain.
It's taught me a lot about the non-technical side of building a product. Very fulfilling from a personal growth perspective.
So my question is genuine and not meant to take away from what you have created or accomplished:
How are products like this still making money when there are tons of alternatives and some of them free?
https://mathlegame.com/ mostly via ads) - made this one when wordle got popular (
https://reversle.net/ (mostly via ads) - made a few weeks after mathle
https://slashdreamer.com/ (subscription) - wanted to do something with stable diffusion - this was the most useful one for me (since I am using Notion a lot)
Working on https://ogtester.com/ now.
So since I love Space I decided to build an alternative. To get started, I built a web scraper for more than 50 different space companies, including NASA, Space X, JPL etc. And the traffic grew month after month
Now it has become one of the popular job boards in this niche and starts to rank first on google for keywords like "space jobs"! https://rocketcrew.space/
The next 1.5 years were intense. I learned to have better and more conversations with users (we'd crash and burn if I hadn't come across a book called The Mom Test) and we went through several positioning pivots.
As I was running out of money, I launched on ProductHunt and got decent initial traction and a group of angels who found us there and invested ~$300k.
Then we started making revenue... Then, after almost 3 years of work, we reached $100k ARR... Then we went from $100k to $200k ARR in less than 3 months!
We've signed up ~20,000 new users in January so far and I'm projecting $300k ARR in a month! We're growing ARR 30-50% month over month.
I have a team now who are doing a ton of the hard work. I still have to spend time on every part of the business, but I've been trying to focus my energy on certain parts that I'm better at.
The hardest challenge for me throughout these years has been figuring out if I should persist and work harder on the same path, or switch to something else or pivot. I went through a pre-accelerator program and an accelerator and I had some mentors through them. Some were super helpful and gave me the confidence I needed to keep going.
In general, specially if you're a solo (technical) founder like me, I recommend having mentors that have been through what you're going through and talking to them at least once a month. It's too easy to focus on the wrong things and waste the precious early capital and time. I know I would be 2 years ahead if I had sought mentorship early on.
I'd be happy to chat if you're working on a self-service SaaS. Message me on LinkedIn or Twitter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ardalann/ https://twitter.com/ardalanme
Building it was one of the best decisions I made in my life since it enabled me to make hard decisions at work that were not skewed by the fear of losing my job and not being able to provide for my family - I'm in engineering/product leadership.
But, do not be fooled, this also means I've had two jobs (albeit of unequal urgency) and that, obviously, equates to long work hours.
Fast forward a few years and a coworker joined me and we made a cloud version of it. It is doing ok but yet pay for two of us full time. However, we looooove working on it and helping customers esp. with their deployment issues. It is seriously more fun than our jobs that pay handsomely.
Login as guest directly at https://app.erdlab.io No registration required to test. No email confirmation needed to register either if you choose to do so.
Here is a 1 minute video of ERDLab in action. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VaBRPAtX08
Maybe consider including a table highlighting the differences in features/pricing from other similar tools on the homepage (after the list of features) or a separate page entirely highlighting this information? For example, Render.com has a page specifically highlighting how their product is a better PaaS solution compared to Heroku [0]. This is just a thought.
Personally, I'm not familiar enough with DB design editors to know what I should be looking for in such a tool. Moreover, about ~1 year ago, I was looking for a solution that solved this exact problem, so I am genuinely curious about this.
Finally, just wanted to mention that while I don't need this at the moment, I did bookmark it to consider using in the future.
Otherwise, great job, and I wish you the best!
I'm dual-licensing it. It may be surprising that people would buy a codec for a 34-year-old format, but GIF is a popular medium, and I've created a solid implementation (in Rust, of course).
I really like the licensing model. Unlike a SaaS, it doesn't require me to stay up all night worrying about uptime. The types of companies that buy the licenses know what they're doing.
I like your website a lot, though the use of serif text is a bit jarring on the web in this context.
All of these have no marketing and terrible landing pages since they are mostly built for me (although I like to think they are pretty ploished) but hit $500+ a few weeks ago. It took 5-10 years but interesting to see either way (payments were only available about a year ago though, before it was all free).
The funny thing (to me) is that the URL shortener is doing the big bucks since apparently there is still a place for new ones in the market which I did not expect, I mostly built it to be able to easily redirect a hostname.
I've been a long time self development enthusiast, regularly trying out new health/mediation/workout routines and wanted a tool to keep track of my routines, help me schedule everything automatically and where i could share my routines and explore other users routines too.
2). We started another side project recently that manage large deployments of a popular OTDR manufacturer. System reports damage to dark fiber which alerts with with exact location info displayed on a map. Notifications are sent to staff via Slack/Email with photos and driving directions. We made a portal to manage all OTDRs from one interface.
Both of these are side projects but we will likely go full time on these projects soon.
1). www.realmhelm.com 2). No name yet but we will probably brand it under the realmhelm product above.
It is a relatively lightweight web app that tracks food in your pantry. It gives you an estimate on how long you could survive on it. It is intended as a tool for preppers but also works for anyone with OCD about their pantry contents.
Business has picked some this last year. I'm working on expanding the product data, general usability, and some actual marketing.
I hope you don't mind a few unsolicited thoughts. Expiration dates wasn't an obvious feature from the website. I was about to ask about it here until I watched the video. Maybe put some screenshots from the app onto the page with a more verbose feature list so it's more easily scannable?
If the app could break down calories by food group or macronutrient it would help keep inventory balanced.
Would you mind emailing me? I may have encountered a bug. giegs.hn@proton.me
[1]: https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-kit
I got mad, so I built a service that snapshot tested the API response every 60 seconds, and sent a Slack alert whenever it failed. I called it OnlineOrNot.
I spent a year trying to sell that MVP to startups around Sydney, but there were maybe a handful of other companies using GraphQL at that time, and they weren't willing to take a chance on a part-time business solving this problem.
Fast-forward 2 years, and several other failed projects, I decide to rebuild it from scratch, but this time as a general uptime monitoring service.
The URL is https://onlineornot.com, I've been iteratively working on it for around 2 hours per workday since early 2020 (I ruthlessly cut features down into 2 hour blocks, and use feature flags to deploy safely).
These days it's more of a status page, with built-in uptime monitoring (and has integrations to other monitors).
---
Folks tend to ask what makes OnlineOrNot special, trying to figure out what the moat is - it's me.
I've worked on the web for Atlassian and Cloudflare, I've seen what works and doesn't work for self-serve web apps. So OnlineOrNot has:
- a business model that won't suddenly fail (I'm full-time employed so that I can work on OnlineOrNot, I'm not going to shut it down for not making enough money)
- docs written in clear English that load fast, and are up to date
- a modern, responsive web UI with errors that don't make you feel dumb
- uptime monitoring for websites, web apps, and APIs that Just Works
Working to add genres and age-groups now :)
Been super fun! I've asked 7,000 authors to share 5 books around a topic, theme, and mood. :)
Also helps job boards founders to get traffic as the website last month got 48K unique sessions.
On average since included paid options it made $1.3K/mo
I made this because every time when I start a project and bough a domain and setup email. first thing. So I scratch my own itch :).
Logistic is brutal in what is starting to look like a post globalization world: shipping fees are through the roof, delays are long, regulation (especially in the EU) is ever more stringent. COVID-19 pretty much killed bemmu's Candy Japan (https://www.candyjapan.com), and EU regulation just killed Candysan (https://candysan.com): they threw in the towel one week ago.
And yet we keep going... gross margin is around $800~$1000 per month.
NoisyCamp is a platform for music studios to manage their reservations. It also helps musicians to find place to rehearse.
(I suppose it’s relevant as, at its core, the books are made via one-off programs I write for each kind of puzzle. In addition to the LaTeX crap that turns the output of the program into a nicely formatted puzzle.)
Shameless plug, but if you are brick and mortar store or restaurant / bar. Contact me.
I'm launched closed beta for a very very niche product to help gateways get payments into quickbooks as sale receipts. No need to create invoice and mark it as paid.
I'll be making a post about it when it works with most payment gateways. And I have basic pricing.
I make roughly $2500 - $5000 a month.
its 3 years old and still making 2-3k a month but i've gone from happy to guilty - i havent had any time to make updates to the book but i really want to and every single month that goes by that I don't I lose credibility. I'll still do it but its so hard to go back to something when I have a day job and my interests keep shifting.
- https://www.partly.ai - AI profile picture/art generator. - https://tayl.app - convert all text to audio and listen as a podcast. - https://www.podopi.com - similar to the one above, but marketed towards website owners.
Basically WireGuard as a service but we give a dedicated IPv4 and IPv6 with Reverse DNS.
Currently doing on and off in the vicinity of a grand a month.
Free blog setup service to help people star their own blog → https://startablog.com
Meal Planning web app & service → https://ultimatemealplans.com
Mobility training and exercises → https://movewellapp.com
I’m averaging about $600.00 MRR which is down from the $1200.00 MRR I was making for a better part of last year.
The beauty of it though is it only requires about 1-2 hours tops of my time each month though.
Combining both some additional contract work with this MRR outside of my FT job I’m doing about $1500.00 to $2,000.00 month.
Working on a few ways to increase this.
A modern take on domain parking. I have ~50 un-used domains. I wanted to make some good use out of them instead of just parking them. So I built Newsy to convert them into automated content aggregators.
The app makes ~$1000/mo.
I’m still building https://www.ieltsielts.com/ which offers original resources and coaching for an English language proficiency exam called the IELTS. It makes over $500 USD per month.
You can tldr my philosophy as “business results trump technical excellence”
No MRR but made about $40k in sales last year. Biggest challenge is figuring out how to turn that into stable revenue. Biggest opportunity is that unlike my previous (technical) infoproducts, this one doesn’t expire in 6 months.
Display ads make the bulk of the income. Affiliate links are a distant second.
Built a simple analytics tool to show dozens of correlations & analytics between a wide variety of financial data points, and bootstrapped it to $120k/month! We grew from 0 to 54k users in two years, all organic. Has completely changed my life.
tradytics.com
Social Link Pages (sociallinkpages.com) - a WordPress plugin to add link-in-bio pages to a WordPress install.