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Show HN: Profit Hunt - Get inspired by profitable online projects

profithunt.co

528 pointsandrewash95 comments

Or with more products and Stripe verified revenue:

https://www.indiehackers.com/products?revenueVerification=st...

The Stripe verification is what sets IndieHackers apart from all the other similar sites

If Indiehackers would not be such a bad website. It could be a really nice website, but somebody thought it should be an app and it sucks.

That was me. If I could go back in time 3.5 years and make a different decision, I would! Unfortunately I don't have time to do a full rewrite today. (I'm the only developer/designer on IH.) But I do try to make regular incremental improvements around performance.

Sure the tech isn't great, but you've made a really great community with great content. You shouldn't be ashamed of choices at all - tech doesn't have to be perfect to deliver on its goals.

The community and content is great. Outsource some of the work?

IndieHackers is a great resource. It serves its purpose very well and built a great community. That is all that matters.

Csallen. I love the site. I understand you’re the only dev /designer. Why not open source the GitHub repo so others can send pull requests and make it better.

FWIW. I visit your site every day and look at the top posts.

You’ve probably single handedly created a community of people who go solo and build profitable things.

I remember YC refraining from funding solo founders. It turns out there are 1000s of solo profitable businesses and you don’t need to go YC route. Thanks for giving me that confidence.

You’d probably rebuilt it from the ground up as the architecture seems to be the problem. That’s not something a community could easily do without some kind of leadership. That would still take up a lot of his time, probably more than just doing it alone.

I’d guess it’s not just merging a few pull request and it’s suddenly fast.

I really dont know what happened with the redesign, the original site was fine. Then they did this "fancy" redesign and it sucks so much that it limits my visit and time spent there despite the content which it can be pretty good. It is honestly baffling.

I wish there was a way to connect both PayPal and Stripe revenue, as we make about half our revenue through each of these payments processors. I can imagine a lot of other companies are in similar situations.

Stripe bought IndieHackers so I don't think this feature is in the roadmap.

Just need Stripe to buy Paypal.

I'll probably add PayPal eventually. Just a matter of finding the time! There's nobody at Stripe telling me not to, nor did anyone at Stripe suggest I add Stripe-verified revenue in the first place.

We recently added support to one of our projects to use Stripe out-of-band invoices, and pay these invoices using Paypal/Braintree

Happy to create such a feature for you :) Just to clarify, what exactly are you looking for, just a "revenue verified" badge, or a Baremetrics-like dashboard with Paypal support?

Revenue is not the same as profit.

If you click on the links on Profit Hunt you see that they mostly link to posts saying “revenue”.

That link is broken for me.

It does not show anything with a revenue higher than $0 by default. In order to get it working, I need to turn off "verified by stripe" and then turn it back on again.

You can also click "Sort By", then "Revenue: High to Low". That seems to refresh the result

What happens if you have revenue from other sources? Most of my large customers prefer not to use Stripe, and due to Stripe's fees, I prefer to avoid it also. My largest payments are all ACH or paper check.

I'm at a stage where I have a side project that works well for me. I'd like to open it up and allow other people to start using it, but I'm not really sure how to take it from fun project to side business. Do I need to hire a lawyer to draft a Privacy Policy and ToS? Do I need to incorporate an actual business in order to open an account with stripe to accept payments? Anyone have resources on the legal/operational part of this process?

I'd advise getting other users to use it for free first before you dive into any paperwork. Basically, make sure you're solving a problem worth money for others first.

I am in a similar situation, but we are already open for free (that is a must i think at first) I was thinking selling support, offering consulting with the setup etc. but what would be the strategy for having paid support and open github issues at the same time?

Yours is an open source project? The revenue logic there could be very different from a conventional web business.

I don't have any first hand experience with such a situation myself, but perhaps studying some successful cases could get you to the next step: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-charging-money-fo...

If there's some element of open source in your business, you can start here [0] for various ideas on how to monetize.

0: https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand#table-of-contents

If you're already looking into Stripe for payments, you should check out Stripe Atlas: https://stripe.com/atlas It might be too much for what you're looking for, but could give you an idea

Go to https://IndieHackers.com, copy paste the story you explained here, give a brief description of your product, ask for a few people to try it out. The crowd there is helpful and is willing to spend the time with you.

I've been thinking about joining the site but wasn't sure how helpful it would be; thanks I'll give it a shot.

The good news about ToS and Privacy Policies is that every company you do business with makes theirs publicly available. So find a couple companies that are similar to yours in terms of business model and/or size, and read theirs. Then put together something of your own. If you have a friend who is a lawyer or has worked on these sorts of issues at a startup (as a non-lawyer), have him/her review it. But don't stress out about this part too much, since you're not much of a target for enforcement actions when you're very small.

[not a lawyer but] Also you don't legally need a ToS—It's fine to go without it for a while (especially while you have 0-100 customers)

Hiya, I've written some stuff about this. Hope it's helpful.

Don’t Form a Company https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/dont-form-a-company/

Debunking Some Conventional Startup Wisdom https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/thanks-for-the-advice-grandp...

“Don’t form a company” means you are personally legally exposed. I’m not a lawyer, I may be wrong, but this seems risky.

I think it's more up to a person's accepted risk and the nature of their business concept. One thing mentioned in the linked article is the advice that you use an existing entity if you've previously formed one for consulting or some other business. I'm 100% in favor of that since the early stages of a startup are often full of non-starts.

Sure. I can agree with that part. One doesn’t have to form corporations for each idea, but if you are taking payments and offering a service or product that may impact another person or business then being protected is important.

Agreed - the risk/reward seems off here. It will probably be fine, but you could potentially end up in legal hell and risk your family assets.

Why not a "parent" company you keep going indefinitely, spin off other entities as needed?

This all varies by jurisdiction of course, but last time I did something like this I filled out the paperwork myself and it cost a couple hundred only. Gets more complicated with more structure, etc. and any legal work you need - but you don't need to pay for that before it's justified.

Hmmm, regarding " https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/dont-form-a-company/"

you can set up your corp once, then present it as "doing-business-as" (DBA), depending on the jurisdiction, many times. I am not convinced that the above is good advice.

In fact, talking to a lawyer is probably better idea than picking up ideas from some blog.

you can sell it to my team then you won't have to

open to potentially doing a profit-sharing deal as well if it's good.

grantschiller18 at [google's email service] dot com

Just curious, without any other information presented at all, you just buy up people's side projects? How does this work?

We want to work on something cool and this is one way to jump in.

I think it's really case by case if it works or not.

You have a “team”, yet Gmail is your primary email? Ok

Let me guess, his LinkedIn bio is just "Entrepreneur".

Good god, is this real? https://karmabot.chat/

Am I wearing enough pieces of flair?

Somebody monetised karma bots. Wow. I remember making one of those in mIRC script twenty years ago.

Reward your high-karma team members with Amazon gift cards or a day off ... guess that could never be exploited?

Saddest part is that in their marketing, right next to that is dinner for one!

So basically, companies are supposed to reward people for being gregarious/outgoing/funny/popular on Slack, rather than for getting their work done?

Some of the most valuable team members just quietly get things done, without making a song and dance about it and drawing everyone's attention. Sucks to be them, I guess.

My former employer did this until the most popular person and post was the one who complained about the lack of COLA raises after the CEO received a ten million dollar bonus. They tried hard to squash the whole discussion without being heavy handed but that failed miserably so they eventually told everyone to shut up and deleted the post. They've since changed the social media platform to something that allows them to approve all posts before they're seen by anyone else. I'm told now no one bothers to use it except HR and senior management for making announcement.

And any Slack interaction you do have is incentivised to be a fake (or at least shallow) happy-clappy karma-driven demonstration of Core Values and Team Spirit.

We use this at work and don't have any of the issues you are talking about. The only time I've seen the karma bot used is when an individual goes above and beyond for another individual. I have yet to see any other use of it, such as what you described. We are a remote-ish team (we have people in a centralized office but also have workers throughout the country) and all of our communications go through Slack. The use of karma bot for our department is to recognize hard work to all, even those who aren't in the office.

> So basically, companies are supposed to reward people for being gregarious/outgoing/funny/popular on Slack, rather than for getting their work done?

I just took a quick glance at their page, but don't see this, can you be more specific?

The example they give is rewarding a specific individual and rewarding a whole channel. As someone who like to quietly get things done, I have multiple time helped people around me and I'm pretty sure that active or not on the Slack, many of them would have given me the reward. A project channel contains people related to a project, them being active or not on that channel wouldn't affect the reward.

I have less of a problem with the product itself than the way it's marketed, with completely unsubstantiated claims about improving employee retention. The message I get here is "your employees are like small children that need to be managed with Slack trinkets", which is too bad, because I think the bot itself looks kinda neat.

I suppose if you're an engineer out of touch with humans that wants to automate the motivation of your team...

I have no idea.

I'm very confused. Can someone explain what this does?

As I understand it, it's like HN voting, but where the guidelines say you must work hard & espouse Core Values, and the points do matter.

And these appraisals are weekly, shared with your colleagues, and administered by a Slackbot. Welcome to 2020.

We actually use this at work and it seems to be ok. I don't know anything about it other than your able to use a command in slack to give somebody karma and there is a running total that the individual has.

Bad idea. I prefer a big gong in the office we ring when someone has merged in 1000 LoC. With a trip to the Bahamas on 100KLoC. Our LoC OKR is being crushed!

It seems a little perverse to reward the most verbose devs, unless clients pay by LoC?

I forgot the /s

And the \n

The mobile UI is horrible. It’s impossible to tell when one starts and another begins. You could solve this very easily by wrapping the list items in a card component and using different font weights and sizes for different pieces of information. Hint: business name should be the largest. Good luck.

Thank you! Really appreciate the suggestions and pointers. Will improve the mobile layout within the next 2 days

I love this. In literally less than five minutes it's already given me some really valuable insights and inspiration.

Feedback: make the table sortable and filterable, everyone's going to want to sort by revenue and people might want to filter by source.

On mobile the list items are really hard to differentiate

Favorited this post. Wow this was really eye-opening for me. I think this is proof I've been thinking about implementing ideas that are too complicated in the tech space. Thank you for posting.

I guess this is the time for a friendly reminder to read your employment contracts and agreements carefully and exercise caution before launching an online side project business whilst being employed.

Failure to do can have serious consequences and the laws/enforceability vary greatly depending on your country of residence and the company.

That being said, great website OP!

> serious consequences

Any citations? If you're not launching a competitor, using your employers IP or doing some nefarious, why would they care?

How many employers would want some side project generating 20k/year, what would they do with it? Would they sue the employee? What for?

Genuine question.

First row entry has the link to the second row entry.

Do you have a threshold for how much a project should make each month?

My project has $30 in profit a month, but hey, that’s more successful than most! (And more successful than any other project I’ve launched!)

The Makerpad data is incorrect. The source: https://www.makerpad.co/blog/building-without-code-and-reach... is referring to a different company generating 55k/mo revenue, not Makerpad.

Thank you! Corrected.

I just submitted mine -> https://remoteleaf.com

Thank you! Added to the top :)

This is awesome! Thank you!

Great UI / UX of getting visitors to pick & choose a paid plan right on the homepage.

I m just in love with the simplicity of the website ! Good Job !

It's very difficult to read on mobile..

In Firefox / Chrome, tick "view desktop site" from three dot menu, and view in landscape mode.

Agreed - it takes a lot of restraint to get a website this simple and clear. Great job!

Interesting...is this a Notion page?

Link to Eastros is missing.

http://c2x.eastros.com

Thanks! Fixed

awesome job, a real great resource for bootstrapped companies

Nothing about capitalism is "inspiring". I'm inspired by projects that lift humanity, not ones that worship money.

What are some good examples of that?

I'm personally a fan of MusicBrainz (and related projects). It takes a lot of work to build a completely free and open database like that. I wish it could be expanded to other areas, but that would require more people.

I mean I love my work and I love getting paid. "Worship" seems overly pejorative.

this is cool

Honestly I think the IndieHackers website looks nice. I need to get Webase [1] added to IndieHackers!

I get a strong "spartan" vibe from Profit Hunt ... or maybe just sparse! :-)

[1] https://www.webase.com

It looks ok, but for me the loading times are awful, sometimes it takes 10s+ to load a page.

If you look at the network tab and the web sockets you know why. It's crazy what they are doing in the background to get this simple interface to load.

Maybe we need an indie hacker to help them understand caching over at IndieHackers. :-)

JS files served by IndieHackers do have caching headers. But there's 4MB of JS.

Compare to HN, a single 2KB script for submitting votes without page reload, and that's it.

Agreed. It's terribly slow and has crashed my browser a few times.

The content is good but their tech is terrible.

Webase is great. Love the name.

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