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Comment by deedubaya | Hacker News Reader

I've got two cash flow positive side-projects while maintaining full-time employment, having a life, wife, and kid.

BreezyPDF - https://breezypdf.com - Dead simple PDF generation from URLs. Comes with a rails middleware so all you have to do is add .pdf to the end of a URL to download a PDF of that URL.

HOALife - https://hoalife.com - A CC&R Inspection and Enforcement tool for property managers.

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I love how one of the Breezy testimonials is from HOALife. Way to dog-food!

Ha, I should probably update those to customers that are less biased

You are not the first, you won't be the last :-)

Don't worry OP, your secret is safe with us

I'm impressed at the HOALife being a side project. I've worked at companies doing something similar (different country) and it's a full time job maintaining and adding features to apps like that. If you are doing all the coding, marketing, web design, payment processing and support (and in my experience people want stuff fixed quick because they have inspections to do or they get kinda angry) in your spare time I really don't know how you do it, unless you are teaming up, employing people or just ridiculously efficient.

I do all the coding design and support, and some marketing and sales. I have a co-founder for HOALife that does a lot of the day-to-day work (his side-gig too)!

Damn, I spent all night last night trying to get jspdf to work for me and gave up. Breezy looks like exactly what I needed! Serendipity.

whoa. huge props for HOALife. any interest in selling? I'm interested in acquiring =) we're a growing player in the property services niche looking at different entry points into hoa's

Was it difficult to get the early users? What did you do to get them to use your websites?

The first users were insanely hard to get. Getting new users never gets easy, but less-hard as you go.

First users were usually contacts that I had made within the spaces prior to building. Then old-fashioned marketing and sales pipelines.

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