(1) https://pasteboard.co/JbPKJRs.png
Right now I'm working on a dog treat business - I make a treat mix that you add water to and freeze for a meat-based frozen treat. I feel really good about the product and the packaging design (and this is the first time I've ever worked on any kind of a physical product, so it's really cool to see the boxes), and I've sold a few boxes so far. Trying out some advertising now and working on building a presence on Instagram, since that seems like a great place to reach dog people, and the product is pretty photogenic.
Google Ads are pretty straightforward, so at this point I'm just running a couple and watching conversion rates - you basically just need to look at how much you're spending vs. how much revenue they're bringing in to figure out if they're worth it.
IG advertising is new to me - I'm planning to reach out to some dog accounts to see if I can offer free samples and possibly money for them to promote. No idea about what the going rate for that sort of thing is or how effective it'll be, but I'll find out soon :)
I just thought she really captured the feel I was looking for - it's an upscale product, but it's for dogs so I still wanted it to feel fun.
The designer gave me image files that were formatted correctly, so I just sent them in and had boxes at my door a few days later. They look great: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-srBIsJgND/
I'd certainly be a customer if I lived in the US.
In the mean time you can always just skip the Starter Kit and buy the mix directly (https://coopersdogtreats.com/collections/frontpage/products/... and https://coopersdogtreats.com/collections/frontpage/products/...), then use any ice cube mold/tray you happen to have around.
Once we get low on my current supply of cheese powder, I'm going to look into getting a food dehydrator to make my own cheese powder.
I think the most informative one I read was on something like shtf fourms. It stayed tame, other than everyone wanting to buy the dehydrator after the author was done.
As opposed to say someone who keeps a month of food, water, fuel, meds, entertainment on hand, which looks pretty normal now.
"The FDA’s regulation of pet food is similar to that for other animal food. There is no requirement that pet food products have premarket approval by the FDA. However, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA) requires that pet foods, like human foods, be safe to eat, produced under sanitary conditions, contain no harmful substances, and be truthfully labeled."
On the legal side, I've got business insurance, which thankfully isn't that expensive. I've been holding off on forming an LLC since that's gonna run me about a grand here in CA including the cost of setting it up and LLC tax, but if there's continued interest in the product, I'll do that soon.
Edit: Also AAFCO is a group that has standards for this sort of thing that are pretty straightforward: https://petfood.aafco.org/Portals/1/pdf/eight_required_labei...
https://www.lobbplewe.com/blog/2019/09/rules-for-out-of-stat...
Why an LLC instead of an S-corp?
For the most part my margins are pretty decent and at this point I'm more interested in proving that there's product-market fit than optimizing for profit, so I don't mind losing some money when my shipping charges don't cover it or people hit the free shipping threshold. Definitely something I'm going to need to get a better handle on long term, though.
That said, when you're taking freeze dried meats and putting them in a food processor to turn them into powder, it stinks to high heaven and you end up with a light dusting of meat powder all over your kitchen. I don't recommend trying it :P
Something I'm very familiar with for treating older woofs in pain, and spazzy "I hate the vet" woofs, haha! Hope to hear from you.
It's been done:
https://www.carolinahempcompany.com/products/lalas-cbd-dog-t...
When hemp was still in the grey area they got hit with shut down by CDPHE at the behest of an undisclosed pharma giant. The creator of those treats was a friend of my co-founder and a regular at our parent company's events in CO where she sold her products. She might have gotten an award at the hemp awards, I'm not sure.
The efficacy of CBD is well understood, what isn't is the standardization and practices for effective administration be it in Humans or animals. My guess is you'd get into issues with freezing the hemp oil/extract infused cbd effectively. I mean you could use shatter, if you were really motivated.
Also, this could subject you to bank account shutdowns and business license delays if your bank(s) find out.
Source: Ex fintech founder with hemp farmers, and ex biodynamic farmer that studied hemp and its various properties during apprenticeship and biologist.
I use burners on social media, so, no info in my bio.
My dog loves the frozen bones with marrow, which I dub frobos.
I’m sure he would love these!
For example:
https://www.purina.com/frosty-paws
And:
Might be a geographical/climate thing. I'm in San Diego, so frozen treats are good year round here.
In hot weather, I imagine a lot of dogs would go for something cold to consume if it was made available.
Might as well put the info to good use, so if correct: happy birthday!
(I suspect this was around the time a year or two ago that I was testing out my HN tagger extension/server)
Edit: I see now that your comments indicate that you're US only. Just to make sure you're aware, your site calculates and suggests shipping to Europe.
Interesting, I'm a chef (ex?) and a friend of mine wanted to start a dog food company in 2016-17 but never got around to it. Your approach looks pretty straight forward, for some reason I thought you'd have to be at a commissary kitchen and have food handlers paperwork on top off all the stuff you mentioned.
I'll share your link with them and maybe they get re-interested, do you have any interest in a collaboration for dog food in the future? Provided it met your standards etc...
I actually wanted to see if we could do it entirely upcycling the loss in food waste in the supply chain and restaurants as I know that Industry well and have made efforts to try and reduce as much as possible. I honestly would take home multiple 3 pans full of high grade sashimi grade salmon from saute's prep, and at least 5 lbs of blood lined yellow fin tuna from my station every week.
I still have a bunch of it sitting in my freezer and I know tons of restaurants and farms are sitting on the same or more.
I'm happy to chat with anybody in the space - I'm very early on, so it may be too early for any kind of collaboration, but definitely never hurts to talk to other folks who are interested in this kind of thing.
I'll see what they say and reach out if they still have the motivation.
I'll refer to this post and drop you a line to your gmail account listed on your site of this materializes an take it from there.
After that, I thought folks might want to buy these, so I had packaging and logo designs done on 99designs, set up a Shopify site, and here we are.
I worked on a paid tier (learnt a tremendous amount about actually selling an app, integration with payment processors, licensing, more legal stuff than I wanted to etc.)
Almost from the get go, it started making +$3k/mo. With more changes and offering a Mac version along a Windows version, it averages around +$7k/mo of revenue consistently. I'm the only person on it and have a full time job. Barely need to make code changes and it requires minimal effort for customer support.
I was wondering about any resources you have to learn about licensing and legal stuff, or any common caveats that you ran into.
Second will be dealing with sales tax and it's a nightmare. If you sell to customers in Europe you need to pay VAT to different countries at different rates. Same goes for US states that tax very differently. We moved recently to paddle.com which acts as a reseller and so they take care of all sales tax collection and remittance (they are the one selling the app after all). We moved away from PayPal and so far it's been very smooth.
On a practical level, no foreign government is going to bother you until your sales are in the millions, at least. They don’t have the ability to know your sales in the first place, and you’re way too small to bother trying to go after. Especially since there’s no real enforcement mechanism for, say, France to try and collect $200 from some random American online software business.
Philosophically, I vehemently disagree with the premise that a foreign jurisdiction can tax my business because their citizens choose to visit my website and buy things. Should German websites pay a 200% tax if citizens of Eritrea buy things from their website, just because Eritrea passes a law that says that? I have zero representation or connection to these jurisdictions, and if they want tax money or to stop their citizens from using my website, that’s between the citizens and their government. Until there’s some enforcement mechanism, I’ll just keep ignoring them like I always have.
And sure enough Mac users account for 30% for the revenue today.
Another advantage is that it runs completely on the user's computer. So I have no database or back-end to maintain. There is only a small server to generate licenses + handle some analytics the app emits both built on ASP.NET. The only data I store is in a Microsoft Azure table. I pay around $2 a month for all azure costs.
So basically a license is public info, the app enforces that the logged in user must match the user in the license.
So congratulations for finding a niche which did actually result in paying users.
Congrats on a product successful from the beginning!
Question - Does something like this exist for Facebook?
Do I have to pay every year to keep using the app?
My code is open source by the way, and I wrote about it here: https://snir.dev/blog/apartments-bot/
Do other people here in the US have this experience as well? I was thinking it'd be Facebook marketplace, craigslist, and apartment sites (like apartments.com)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/235368102105
I listed my rental flat a bunch of places before using the group, since I started using it I'd not look elsewhere.
1. It allows for "team search". My friends knew I'm looking, so they tagged me in relevant posts they saw. Can't do it anywhere else (including marketplace by facebook themselves)
2. It allows for group communication with the publisher of the post. One asks - everybody sees.
3. It gives a sense of power to those who seek to rent. Many posts with high prices have comments like "You are crazy", "You are a pig", "whoever pays this much is as sucker". It almost warms the heart, we fight the greedy landlords. It almost make it fun, like a witch hunt.
I’ve only seen posts of apartments for rent in Facebook groups that are aimed at college students. (In the US)
Otherwise, Craigslist is basically king.
So if your apartments target young couples or room mates, facebook is your place. For families we have craiglist-like solutions.
1) any illegal technicalities 2) is it a dick move to the website owner
FB gets more user engagement out of this, which is their goal. No harm, no foul.
Then, of course, the way you go about it is important, too. Sapping the resources and bandwidth of a small site by sending it thousands of requests a minute is very different from automatically checking a public index once an hour.
In short about legality - it depends on the country. But most will define user content as owned by the user, not the platform, therefore legal to scrape and use, as the user intents for the data to be public.
But sites will fight you on this. Amazon specifically give up a really good fight.
Ofcourse, this talks about user content in an "open" platform. If the content is owned by a business that has no intentions for it to be open for everyone in every medium, its probably illegal.
In regard to being a dick move, it depends. If someone posted an ad in facebook, he intended for it to be seen. He doesn't care how. I just tunnel it to myself in easier way for me to consume.
2) I ask the owner first (perhaps they even want to send me the data directly). If they don't respond, I go ahead and scrape, spreading the requests over a long time so as not hit their website too hard.
You'll find various subreddits where people are buying around 5-10spools a month. Imagine how much virgin plastic is being added like that to the environment.
I've been creating filament and selling it:
https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho...
This activity also help recycle waste plastic.
Production cost of filament is $7.5 per 5kg and filament roll has 850 gram filament and can be sold for $20-30 per spool
It's trivial to get the quality right.
You can sell rolls on Amazon, eBay and Etsy or your own Shopify store and use Facebook ads/Google Ads to advertise your website.
That said I didn't use any ads to sell filament! Only few days ago I started Shopify store and paid $5-10 in Facebook ads. Since we accept credit card, it's not too much of a risk for buyer to buy it from us (even when are new)
I work from home so I take 5 minute break and walk to my garage and check if the filament machine successfully is running on auto pilot
Thing is filament doesn't have huge demand, neither it has very less demand. So you can dominate local demand by creating quality filament.
I focus on fulfilling local demand, I've gained customers who need large supply of filament of ABS, TPU and Nylon12.
If people do actually come to compete with me, it's a win win. More plastic recycled = less plastic entering landfill.
How about recycling plastic waste ground on the beach?
Well, picking up beach plastic is too much work - I am not that involved, I need easy automated work haha.
There are already companies who pick and sort, shred and wash plastic for you and even convert it into granules - so it's much better to give them more business so the are able to pick more of the waste.
If you are interested in plastic recycling: https://preciousplastic.com/
Here they report improved ABS properties on recycling
Interesting findings though.
Right now I do nothing for emissions.
It happens inside a barrel that reduces a lot of emissions.
The emission will appear near the nozzle and the hopper. As those are the only opening in the barrel.
Once filament exists the nozzle, after 10inches, it goes into a water bath.
In future tho, I'll add HEPA+Activated charcoal filter lid on the hopper and use same for nozzle but with an extraction fan.
as someone who has 3d printed nearly 100kg with FDM machines in the past year, I can't disagree more.
Filament extrusion foaming coefficients are all over the place, even only looking at 'cheap' PLA, let alone PETG. This leads to excess oozing and inconsistent extrusion widths, leading to failed or out-of-tolerance parts.
Color is all over the place for anything but the darkest or lightest colors for the cheap stuff.
Filament widths are wildly inconsistent even within the same companies products -- this leads to extruder jams on the cold side.
Cheap filament spools are commonly fused or spliced together mid-roll, leading to a bump at the splice that has to be shaved -- often it isn't, again leading to extruder jams.
Spools that are spliced together often have poor circularity near the splice -- another chance for a jam.
I've received dusty spools that were vacuum packed, and spools that were vacuum packed with condensation visible on the inside of the packaging (humidity and moisture can damage many filaments, leading to lengthy rebake procedures if the filament survives at all.).
I appreciate your effort, and i'm glad you're doing well in business -- but the quality of your product must come from efforts you don't realize, because the quality on the market for cheap filament is , in HN parlance, a dumpster fire.
If you run into problems, feel free to reach out to me. My telegram is in the medium article - I'll help you solve all your problem while extruding filament.
>even only looking at 'cheap' PLA, let alone PETG.
I don't extrude PLA or PETG at all, buying these special resins is difficult and costs 3x or 5x the ABS. I ask for the lowest wrappage and viscosity blend specially made for extrusion.
I buy general purpose polymers like extrusion grade granules of TPU, Nylon12 (it absorbs the least moisture in all nylons) and ABS - buy them from reputable companies they come in membrane sealed bags of 25kg. These polymers are mass produced and finding them for cheap around $1.4-$3 is easy.
>Filament widths are wildly inconsistent even within the same companies products -- this leads to extruder jams on the cold side.
Before jumping into making filament I researched on Amazon and found most filament being sold is within plus minus 0.05 to 0.02mm tolerance. Upon further research I found that these tolerances are trivial to achieve with sufficiently powered extruder and the industrial machines used for making medical grade silicone tubes can achieve plus minus 0.001mm tolerance using dual axis laser and feedback loop controlling pulling speed at high frequency.
You extrude fast, you lose tolerance. Companies might want more througput if their customers don't care about the dimensions and only want ultra cheap stuff.
I don't splice, all my filament is continuous length.
>I've received dusty spools that were vacuum packed, and spools that were vacuum packed with condensation visible on the inside of the packaging (humidity and moisture can damage many filaments, leading to lengthy rebake procedures if the filament survives at all.).
You need to seal the filament spool right after it's ready with a 10-20grams of dessicant. There are special vaccume seal bags and handheld vaccum sealer for low volumes like I am doing it's good enough.
>but the quality of your product must come from efforts you don't realize, because the quality on the market for cheap filament is
You'll have to troubleshoot the issues with your filament yes but once you've figured it out - it becomes easy.
I've written several part articles on my medium blog with many more to come where I'll write about common issues and their solutions.
I have had more difficulty in shooting down bugs in production code than building extruder. Just saying that skill level of a programmer and some random guy off the street might have difference. With some guidance anyone can do it.
My wife is now tuning extruder, filling the hopper and extruding filament as good as me. She doesn't have technical education background. Arguably, I find baking to more difficult than extruding filament, but it could be just that baking doesn't exite me.
I appreciate you concerns but quality of filament has lots of parameters but most common problems appear when:
1. Seller has bought the filament like PLA in bulk from china for $3-4 a spool. They buy a full container load at once to make it as cheap as possible. After a year on shelf even when placed in vaccum sealed bags, PLA becomes brittle. And you'll have very hard time printing with it - it will snap at different places randomly and your prints will fail.
2. Inconsistent diameter - these are extruding too fast or using low quality resin with no good operator on machine available for tuning. For example if I want to extrude 1kg filament and I add 200gram resin of A company, I ran out then I add 200gram resin or B company, you'll have to tune extruder again. Better create filament in large batches from the resin from same batch.
People can start with extruding clay or Noddles to start
Together they almost covered the Apple Developer fee :-)
Things continued like this for years, until one day Apple started getting harsher on gambling. While my game has no other players, and the "money" you win doesn't save anywhere or get you anything, it was still gambly enough that I could no longer have it in the store as an individual developer. Then the Japanese name app was also removed because it wasn't substantive enough (I don't disagree).
I don't mention them usually, because the loss didn't mean much to me and I'm still fine with developing for iOS in the future. But here you asked especially for projects that made money but that we wouldn't usually talk about.
At least my domain registrar and hosting provider probably won't remove my website.
When I think that Apple would allow that, but not an honest paid app that transliterates a name into another language, I start questioning whether I should get into that ecosystem, or rather focus on Mac apps only and distribute them outside of the store.
"We noticed that your app has not been updated in a significant amount of time... To keep your app on the App Store, submit an updated version for review and make sure it follows the latest App Review Guidelines. If you are unable to submit an update within 30 days, your app will be removed from the App Store until you submit an update and it is approved."
Uh oh. I am developing a single player game that's somewhat similar to yours and was planning to release it on iOS. It doesn't involve money, just points, but it is push your luck. Do you know what I should be looking for to see Apple's new guidelines for this?
"In order to reduce fraudulent activity on the App Store and comply with government requests to address illegal online gambling activity, we are no longer allowing gambling apps submitted by individual developers. This includes both real money gambling apps as well as apps that simulate a gambling experience."
That being said, I do have a board game design where you do bet chips that I would have liked to make a software version of. Guess I'm not releasing that one on iOS.
Spent 5 minutes to make the video and upload it.
Was making $2-3/month, which is a great ROI for 5 minutes of work.
All positive comments and upvotes because the video is useful.
Then YouTube demonetized all small publishers because they can somehow block spam, but not identify “offensive” content.
Fuck you Youtube.
It consistently brings in around £100-300 per month and if I put any time at all into marketing it could probably do a lot better.
I also maintain a directory of UX tools, resources and information [1]. It currently doesn’t bring in anything but it’s more of a repository for stuff I find interesting than a commercial venture.
I’m also working on a Jekyll-based site that uses the Etsy API to build a stand-alone e-commerce site from all my Etsy store listings.
There’s a form on the site, but if you’ve got anything else you want to share just send it to uxlift@kevan.tv.
I’m really interested in self-hosted, privacy-respecting alternatives to the big tracking platforms so this is right up my street. (Having said that, I do use GA, but I’m not happy about it.)
And did you automate the print/production initially or do it only after you'd been around for a while? If you don't mind me asking, what print/production company are you using, how did you find them and why did you settle on them (vs. someone else, say)?
Any more information would be welcome.
I knew I wanted to do something with public domain art prints, so I researched other sellers to find the types of things that were popular. Lots of places like the Library of Congress, NYPL and the Rijksmuseum have open access policies, so I regularly hunt through their collections to find interesting stuff. The problem is always finding something in the public domain that’s also very high resolution.
For a long time I produced the pieces myself as buying top quality paper and a decent printer worked out cheaper than using a print company - and I quite enjoyed it. However I’ve decided now that the convenience is worth the extra cost.
I’ve also automated creating listing images by using Cloudinary and a few shell scripts. This has been a massive time-saver.
As for print companies, it’s a balance between cost, quality and price. The big ones like Printful or Gooten are cheaper and do everything from t-shirts to phone cases, but have a limited range of paper and sizes. Specialist fine art places have a huge range of paper and produce better prints but are much more expensive.
Edit Never mind, I see your response to another question.
Have you thought about padding your collection for the sake of exposure?
People had a hard time combining the image of a nerd in the basement with that of a flashy sales guy surrounded by models. So I usually didn't mention the bikinis to allow me to charge full nerd pricing for my coding.
This site project brought in roughly €500 monthly with almost no work, because I was renting space in a fulfillment center combined with shopify and a marketing contractor.
What he did was mostly to reply to whatsapp messages and to grant free bikinis to Instagram influencers.
One particularly good angle was yoga teachers. They'd usually be doing retreats at exotic locations and posting inspirational photos multiple times per day. Plus the yoga teachers that are popular on Instagram tend to be extremely attractive girls doing slightly suggestive poses. So that was a great fit for my bikinis.
And you'd be surprised how cheap Instagram influencers are. There's so many people who want to be famous that it's 100% a buyer's market.
The marketing contractor organized a list of Instagram handles, follower counts, and email addresses. I don't really know from where, but my guess would be that it was from his marketing buddies. I mean it wouldn't make sense for an agency to just grant us direct access to all of their members.
He then initially emailed some of them manually. After our brand became more popular, we sometimes received offers via email or pm. He would then determine the value for us and reply accordingly.
How did you charge the marketing contractor?
I wanted to reached out to marketing contractor but haven’t had much information
Thank you!
As one example of the kind of tasks he handled:
Prospective customers could send in their measurements via WhatsApp and he would then look up into our internal measurement tables to determine which bikini size to order.
Or we would get collaboration invites from Instagram Influencers via PM or E-Mail. He would check their follower counts, bot ratio, etc. and then use an (internal secret) Google Docs to calculate the estimated value for us. He'd then use that to either decline or determine how generous our promotional gift would be.
Nowadays, the concept is called VA = Virtual Assistant, for example like what https://timesvr.com/ offers.
All the best with your side business (and all)!
I got started with my endeavors from people explaining things to me on programming IRC channels, so despite its bad reputation, advice from random strangers on the internet can be good advice.
As for this particular project, I stopped it when I ran out of bikinis and couldn't buy more at the same conditions anymore. At the same time, competition from China was also arriving in the form of dropshipping. I could have switched suppliers to reduce my purchase costs and remain competitive, but selling a high volume of cheap products is a lot more work than selling a low volume of high priced items.
But that was a pity later on when I ran out of bikinis and didn't manage to hire him again.
Plus screen printing tends to have much stronger colors and feel more valuable than the offset printing used in on-demand production.
I'd suggest a Kickstarter to finance a 100+ shirt bulk order at $15 per shirt. That way, you have good profit margins and good quality.
I knew him through a shared friend. I lived in Asia for some years, and that's where most westerners go if they want to create a manufacturing business.
As in: now he's a dead firemoose.
I would stay awake some nights and jot down every product mentioned in overnight infomercials (before I knew what TiVo was). then write a review on them the next day.
Thousands of people would search for “X review” in the days after watching those infomercials and I would rank #1 because some of them were brand new products.
BTW, writing fictional reviews for money is not only unethical, it can be illegal too
For what it’s worth, i am no longer involved with this today.
Bit of background - lots of Amazon sellers use a software called tactical arbitrage that scrapes retailers to get prices and compares prices to Amazon. It comes with a couple hundred sites built in, and the ability to add new sites using custom xpaths. I made a chrome extension that lets you point and click on arbitrary sites to automatically create an xpath file that would be compatible with this software. Charged $199 for it, although I had some launch specials at $149 and above.
Still have a handful of organic sales a year, although it's not really worth the time spent in support anymore. In retrospect I should have made it $99 upfront plus $10/month or something and provided ongoing support.
Thanks.
Primarily have yoga instructors using this as a better way to collect payment for Zoom classes compared to collecting payment on Venmo or using another tool they’re not comfortable with such as Gumroad.
Only charging .6% on top of Stripe’s fees and no monthly. Only making a little money at the moment but it’s scaling and seeing interest from lots of random online instructors.
ClassUp - https://www.classup.io
For now it's very basic, but I'm working on a few features that are specifically geared to helping live class creators sell more easily, primarily calendar integration, support for multiple classes being sold, and support for monthly subscriptions to all classes from an instructor.
It's fairly simple: 1) Commission Russian 3D artist to make model of aircraft -$1000 2) Commission Audio Engineer to do sound - $500 3) Tweak model to work well with simulator + animation - 12 hours 4) Paint model in Substance - 12 hours 5) Set up flight model in X-Plane's "Plane Maker" - 8 hours 6) Coding - 12 hours 7) Misc loose ends & testing - 12 hours
I don't talk about it because I don't want too much competition figuring out what an easy way this is to make money.
How can you be reassured that the outsourcers won’t steal your idea?
This is interesting and sounds like it could be applied to game plugins in general.
I serve developer-focused ads with CodeFund (and Carbon as a backup when CodeFund doesn't have an ad available). I get about $45 in revenue per month. Hosting costs are $0 because it's just a static site served from Netlify, so the only cost is the domain.
I never intended to make any money off of it, and I care much more that it's hopefully a helpful resource for some people. But it is nice to get a little bit of passive income.
Really, though, your site is awesome. I just emailed you about sponsoring it, if you're interested :)
After the success of one of our interviews on HN [1], someone contacted me and suggest that I interview a highly successful value investor. We had a great 'Taaalk' [2] and he then put me in touch with an investing friend of his in London who runs a fund. We met for lunch and he taught me all about how he invests in shares, it was very straight forward, so I started following his guidance and made 50% on my money last year [nothing magical, just solid and practical value investing advice] - meaning I could take the year off and do a masters in Psychology of Mental Health - which is (slowly) helping change my career into a direction I love.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9300017)[the link to our site wont work, to see the interview go here: https://taaalk.co/t/how-to-think-about-chess]
[2] https://taaalk.co/t/value-investing
P.S. Anyone can make their own interview, so if you have a friend you think should be interviewed - please keep Taaalk in mind :)
They're either too naive to realise it was luck, or trying to scam you.
This allows you change the start time of a Strava (Garmin, etc.) activity. Useful for WFH situations where you really just want a nice midday run or bike, but don't want to deal with the potential judgement from coworkers who follow you. Might be overthinking things, but oh well :)
- intellectually stimulating
- excuse to acquire toys (cnc, miter saw, linoblocks and inking supplies, etc)
- can be used a fun projects/learning experiences for my kids.
My project that has generated the most revenues has been selling (in very low quantities) a limited edition wordclock that I designed and build. Except for the Qlock2 all the wordclocks I’ve seen are diy or compete on cost. Mine is (imho) a high quality art piece. And I price it similarLy to Qlock2 but with a totally different aesthetic. My wordclock making started as presents for friends and family then evolved to a workshop I taught at a local maker space. Some discussion on my Show HN a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18950130
Website: finewordclocks.com
Etsy: finewordclocks.etsy.com
I bought a cnc machine for the clocks but most of my cnc work currently is making projects with the kids. Some of them have been refined into other products (Like custom engraved magic marker holders) on my Etsy site.
Lately As a side project to my side project I’ve been making wooden sneeze guard stands. These started by my neighbor who’s a dentist asking me to help him make some. Then I made a few for friends that own a local bakery. Last week I received an order for $1000 worth from an urgent care provider. Feels good to help small businesses reopen post lockdown. Even cooler if they are willing to pay me to help. It also serves as a teaching moment with my kids.
Next is to figure out how to use my maker skills to help BLM movement. I’m still trying to figure that out. Ideas welcome!
I'm always curious about the limited run, higher-quality, higher-cost items because it's so outside the typical buying habits I see and I imagine would be closer almost to art dealing than the usual business paths we see on HN.
I’ve paid for the cnc I bought and all the other miscellaneous tools so far. I’m not yet accounting for My time spent. But currently that’s still intellectually interesting since I’m learning how to fabricate things better and still experimenting. I’d say that if I sell 2 more I’d be at break even even if including my time.
More importantly my kids 4 and 7 are really excited about making things and are constantly coming up with projects that use the cnc machine (I obviously design the thing and run the machine) but my oldest “helps” me set up and even made a video explaining to their kindergarten class how the machine works. I found that ad a big win.
I also REALY like making various presents for family and friends as I wrote in this blog post: https://www.finewordclocks.com/blog/2019/10/10/what-is-the-m.... To me that is worth a lot and nearly all kids birthday party presents for the last 2 years have been home made and VERY highly received.
I agree this is very different that what most side projects posted here are. Atm I’m not really focused on making money as I am doing something interesting. If I was optimizing on money, I’d have a different day job. Though I’d certainly love to have more money, I don’t need it and my quality of life would likely be much different (worse).
It has grown organically to 1,000 visits per day and ~$1,000/month. I have a couple of additional materials in the pipeline. Of course, I've already seen everything from the site shamelessly copied and posted elsewhere. That's fine; I never built it for the money (I built it for my wife, who is a teacher).
More recently, I've started making adult videogames, one of which being an interactive fiction that had a lot of traction, but is now on hiatus due to Covid related reasons. One unintended effect of this, is that I learned personally how much both Apple and credit card providers have a chilling effect on freedom of nudity in entertainment - it's appalling.
As in good or bad? they're blocking/enabling?
On the indiest side, there's an /interactivefiction subreddit as well.
For about 18 months, I was making $2-10k a month from people typing in "whatever route planner", reaching my blog post, then clicking straight out to the real planner on the AdSense unit. It died off after a while as the real route planners improved their SEO but it paid for my wedding and more besides, so I couldn't complain :-)
Strangely not because of the content, rather because there are lots of inconsistencies/imperfections in the design and it doesn't make enough to justify fixing them.
I've made $250 in a single year on a single consultation.
The first iteration was a service that listened to build and repository actions. I switched it up to generate static reports. It queries github at a point in time for raw PR data. Then it generates a basic PR report based on that data. It generates CSV so visualization falls on the end user :p
- https://github.com/ImpactInsights/valuestream
- https://medium.com/valuestream-by-operational-analytics-inc/...
Most of the growth has been organic but I post it in forums when it seems relevant. I haven't had much luck with ads but writing articles has been worthwhile.
However, I built Pixmap for Android to learn Android dev. It makes a couple dollars a month... :)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.winricklab...
I built FastComments as a tool for myself, but it's starting to gather bigger and bigger customers.
Consider some sort of tag for that, by the way, even if small.
I'm looking into one, and I had to dig into the source to find out which one you were using!
...and even then, I had to dig back in to find the URL, because your search ranking is nonexistent from my perspective.
Your services are inspiring as hell, from a minimalism/productivity perspective!
I love to build fast software! It's so hard to get that to be a high priority in a day job at most companies (in my experience).
Could you explain a little on how you do limiting of page loads? I've been trying to add this kind of functionality to my own projects but can't think of a way to track it without storing in a db which seems like a bottleneck process if every page load is a write
FastComments doesn't depend on Watch.ly - it's just there for some UI stuff. Also, Watch.ly sends me a daily email saying what pages (or app screens on native apps) were visited most, for how long, etc, so we can see daily if all the sudden people stop spending time on an important page.
It also gives me a realtime traffic graph. I can see people going from one page, to another, and where they drop off.
Like four months of work there...
For example an object like {tenant, month, year, count}. Then you can reuse this for reporting etc which is what I do. We also track other metrics per customer + month like commenter sign ups, votes, etc.
Also - I'm open to new opportunities right now if anyone's interested in hiring me. :)
My web app [3] earned only 50€ since 2016. My other projects (ex: mockrest.com [4]) don’t make me any money at all. I have to use other strategy.. :/
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flatangle....
[2] https://github.com/joaoventura/pybridge
Putting out a real product has been an insane amount of work, from getting the brand designed to finding somebody to actually help with production, but it’s been a fantastic learning experience. I’m really hoping that we’ll get the product out with no further delays, as it’s full of, amongst other good things, antioxidants which are great immune boosters.
I mean the following constructively:
Why the focus on ditching alcohol? It's a big turn-off and I'm not even a regular drinker.
Seems like the wrong messaging immediately.
Sell your product on its own merit, not with an up-front negative message that judges people's alcohol intake.
Thanks for pointing this out, I'll do some thinking.
It's very common to market these sorts of drinks as non/low alcohol as that's part of the appeal.
I misspelled the celeb's name and my site was the 3rd result on Altavista when other people made the same spelling error. I put a counter and saw a lot of visits, so I added some banner ads.
A few weeks later I got a nice paper check that I converted from French Francs to Belgian Francs in the bank. It was before the EUR!
It was nice to have some pocket money, but I've always been ashamed of this site. 20 years later, I'm starting to think that it was kind of cool... It's still on archive.org!
Search YouTube for askjud to see how it works. It’s been the subject of a few viral videos.
That said, I get it. You get some financial freedom, you get to explore a project that interests you for you, you get to learn something new, and this is from the perspective of someone who's got a job he's happy with.
I won't make more money by dedicating more time or energy at my day job. It's fixed.
I'll pass on this one, but just wanted to say thank you to everyone who shares a project. It really does help others to see what is possible.
Sidequestion: Does anyone have any recommendations on simple guides to SEO? I'm realizing the power of search traffic to bring in visitors to sideprojects.
I run a Chrome extension that will crawl your site and give on-page/technical SEO suggestions: https://www.checkbot.io/.
The SEO best practices it checks for are explained + justified in a simple fashion here: https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/
I know a lot of developers are skeptical about SEO advice (e.g. keyword density stuff, experiments that try to reverse engineer how Google does ranking), but the rules from the guide above are linked to things Google have directly recommended. Most on-page SEO best practices align with what would benefit a regular user also.
Because good SEO is indistinguishable from good UX. :)
The best SEO advice you can give someone is "make the page easy for a blind person to read".
Just doing that one thing will get you about 99% of the way there.
Yep, makes sense when you consider most search bots "see" webpages in the same way a screen reader will. Anything that helps a screen reader understand the content of a page better is going to help a search bot and vice versa - they're both bots. :)
You can sign up for a 7-day challenge to publish one excellent, SEO-optimized blog post:
(Oh, and if I need to qualify myself, I grew traffic on one of my side projects (a content website) to over 100k per month primarily via SEO)
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In terms of sources for SEO information and just getting started, I'd check out Brian Dean's guide (I haven't read through it thoroughly myself, but he's very known in the SEO world):
https://backlinko.com/seo-this-year
Another useful way of looking at this is to see the factors Google actually use to rank your content:
https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/ranking-factors
The Ahrefs blog (a tool for doing keyword research and competitor analysis) is also chock full of resources:
SEO changes all the time, I'd also recommend plugging into some communities or following SEO professionals on Twitter. Barry Schwartz is a great example of this:
https://twitter.com/rustybrick
These are just a few things off the top of my head.
Its a very narrow use case, maybe others will find it useful. I'm no designer. Would love some feedback.
Shows the grade distributions per class and if you add in your prior coursework we can predict the workload and grades per class.
Haven’t updated it in 5 years (recently updated the data). Still pulls in slightly more than it costs to host with thousands of students adding grades a year. Probably a thousand a year.
Currently supports UIUC, UT-Austin, university of Washington and quite a few others.
I don’t really talk about it because it was built for a few friends over a weekend right before I left school. The advisors for CS at UIUC we’re always swamped so I figured I’d make a basic one with some data science. Turns out everyone liked it and participated in making it way better
I've talked a little about the technical details, but not much of the game itself. It makes about $40/month - not exactly motivating money. It's been very difficult to market so I have lost most motivation to acquire more users.
I dream to open source the level editor and allow community made maps, but I can't really judge the demand for such a large feature investment.
Since October 2019 it's made $200 in the form of 1 episode having a sponsor.
As a side topic, I would be very happy to have anyone on who wants to talk about their tech stack for their side projects.
Subscribed in pocket casts and will tune in later!
Because I was sitting on about 220k in cash I decided to look into other ways to put my money to use. I realized I could probably buy massive positions in large cap stocks and scalp small 20 to 50 cents moves that happen all the time and make about $100-$300 on each trade fairly quickly.
What has also helped kicked this off for me was 0 commissions on trades. Before I would have to pay like 7 bucks per trade and even though I can still profit it’s amazing how that small cost each time created resistance in my mind.
Since March, I’ve had $12540 in winning trades and -$4476 in losses, for a total profit of $8063.77, however, probably like 90% of that has been made in the past month alone since I started out cautiously with small trades to see how my win/loss ratio was, and in the past week alone I made a $2620 profit. I am now making bigger trades with $100k+ size positions. On top of that, I’ve already reinvested my $220k cash into long term holdings so I borrow that $100k from my broker (I only have to pay interest if I hold overnight which I never do), this gives me the best of both worlds.
To be honest it all seems too easy. If I just make about $400 dollars profit a day, which is like maybe 2 or 3 successful trades, 5 days a week, that’s $2000k a week, about $96k a year, for something that only takes an hour of my time (I only focus on the first hour the market opens)
For now, I just keep reinvesting these profits into buying more stocks and as my account builds more capital I’ll feel comfortable gradually increasing my position size for day trades to make either quicker more successful trades off of smaller spreads or more profitable ones with the same size spread. We’ll see.
I don’t talk about this because no one would believe it and all the advice I find out there is stuff like “it works until it doesn’t” or “you’ll lose it all...” etc. Fuck it. When I die put my money in the grave.
For example, on Friday I made good money on FB with several 50 cent moves. I buy 500 shares at a time, so a profit target of about $250.
I would use a sequential order to buy at a certain entry point and then it immediately submits a sell order for 50 cents higher when it fills.
My strategy is basically the poor man’s HFT.
The key is picking a good entry point. I generally watch the price action for a bit and try to spot where there’s good support and the price keeps bouncing off of. I then set my orders for that price and get as many wins as I can.
No need to take my word for it, with commission free brokers you can try it out with a single share and see how you do. Avoid paper trading IMO except for learning your trading platform UI. The fills are not realistic.
Also, avoid options. They’re garbage, low liquidity and everything is usually priced in making it more difficult to make profits. If you want to trade with leverage just throw down money in your account and use the margin power your broker gives you. In theory I can trade with up to $500k in borrowed money but I stick to about $110k or so to keep about 77% equity in my account at all times.
One thing I haven’t mastered is how to set useful stop losses. There’s time the price dips and I sell too early but if I had waiting maybe 30 minutes for things to calm down I would have made profit. Not sure what to do, I just use my best judgement. And at the end of the day, worst case I have to hold for a while at least I’m holding stock in a decent company like FB and not some worthless penny stock. That’s why I maintain the 77% equity, to avoid margin calls.
I was thinking about trading options since your losses are capped, it seems like your strategy of trading quality stocks caps your losses
Nobody uses it and probably that's why it doesn't exist.
Shame really, because I liked the service and it was quick/simple to build.
Bit brazen, but the idea isn't entirely unique.
Edit: P.s email me at adam@adamfallon.com if you would like a promo code to get the app for free :).
I got tired of many of my un-used domain names and this was the best way for me to make use of them without spending much time on them.
Spending nights and weekends, we scaled enough that we banked about $67k on the side in the first 8 months and then took used that as seed to go full time. 3 years later we’re still at it with a decent team and a ton of fun and cool tech
https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/~hello-world/
it was something to do after i left AWS, and also a way to test a model for computing i wanted to build.
Unfortunately with Covid 19 few people need a poster for their office at the moment, so focusing on tooling etc using the underlying model.
My latest project (un-monetized) is an attempt to raise the bar in the business opportunities vertical; I aim to research and lay out (in non-promotional terms) paths to earning a living wage in the gig economy. There's a lot of bad advice pushing courses / e-books / etc with a high rate of failure. Most of these gig economy roles are fairly simple businesses to manage; the idea is if you can instill some self-employment literacy, you can even the odds for new freelancers and side hustlers.
I'm working on a publishing model which delivers legitimate advice with a decent chance of success (for the reader) and a fair return for the publisher. https://highestpayinggigs.com/
Definitely not passive income but I enjoy it as a different work from normal programming where I can explore stuff I am interested or even just practice talking through interview questions out loud.
It's interesting to see which videos get traction. My most viewed video (https://youtu.be/8eyfmp7dtYk) is one that I just made on a whim, like many of my videos, and has a bad like/dislike ratio but I've gotten constructive feedback on it in case I decide to redo it.
I've learned a ton from having this channel and have made about $2k from contracting a handful of videos so far this year.
You can put arbitrary equations into the URL, e.g.
Are they precomputed to save resources or something? Pretty neat
I guess as an aside did you write the plotting part or used some library?
type:0 just means a regular y=f(x) function
I did a similar thing to what you're saying, buying (not textbooks) on amazon, selling elsewhere.
And then another app that converts play store balance to 1/2 bitcoin but I actually like to talk about this one, if I can find anyone interested https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pseudozach...
hmm... interesting though, it does work haha
that's so interesting, I mean I remember when I didn't have a phone, not even a burner, sometimes you have to deal with those "get code texted" and use those online sites that allow free sms... interesting being able to make that stuff now vs. using them
I built a 'hookup' website and have monetized it with a single affiliate offer/link.
It's made a few thousand in the last 18 months or so, with almost no promotion (posted something about it on reddit once).
Like someone else in this post commented, the way that the 'adult' industry is pushed out of the banking/credit card world makes it pretty tough to monetize sites of this nature.
Specific affiliate offers that are relevent to the audience are far more profitable.
Still have a bunch of features in the works but hoping it will make some money eventually.
Guess that counts as a side project? I’ve got some scripts to manage my eBay store like auto relisting to help boost the items once the fall off of the eBay algorithm. Been thinking about packaging the scripts up as a product but I don’t really want to support it.
https://blog.modsly.com/how-i-made-my-first-sale-after-2-day...
My ideal customer is has a good command of the English language and is trying to pass the Japanese Language Proficiency Test on the level N1 or N2.
Since it's such a niche, I don't talk too much about it.
But, now that you've asked... I always wanted to have an app that can help me creating short films of my kids with my iPhone. I searched the App Store and found many, but they were all so complicated to use. I wanted simplicity. After all, I have kids, and thus no time to fiddle around with a complicated and long process to create the films. Since I could not find the app I was looking for, I decided to create it myself :-)
But it plods along, earning enough to cover the bills for my second project, Simplescraper (https://simplescraper.io).
With Wunderlist shut down this year it was the perfect time to relaunch Lanes 2.0 to try capture some of those task-manager migrants. But if there's a single thing building side-projects has taught me it's that if you try and chase two rabbits, you'll catch neither.
> FirebaseError: Messaging: This browser doesn't support the API's required to use the firebase SDK. (messaging/unsupported-browser).
More than 800 users per day, on average. Continuously growing user base. Profit through Met-Art affiliation.
this is the first time i've actually made something to solve my problem though. i started using kettlebells due to covid lockdowns, etc, and thought the apps out there were way too bloated and shitty.
From most recent to oldest:
Https://brand-kit.net
Have not made money yet but just launched last month. Basically it is starter business branding at a very affordable price wrapped into a service.
Https://scrape.email
Launched at the beginning of the year and making around 100/month now. I used common crawl to index emails across the web monthly making it easy to find all emails for a given website.
Https://appdoctor.io
My most ambitious project from 2 years ago. Appdoctor is an app monitoring platform with automated tests, status page and a bunch of extra stuff..makes around 150/m now.
For now, it is completely free, not even registration required. I am thinking of making a paid professional version, as I see that it is useful and used by other teams despite the lack of marketing. But still, need to work on better marketing as well as adding more features...
More details about the technology side:
https://teonite.com/blog/deep-image-thanks-to-machine-learni...
Now we’ve just launched payments - so we have to see some time about the results.
I will, however, give you an idea for another product. Don't know if it has an audience, but it is along the lines of what you are doing.
When large dogs are small you can buy pre-made treats and they'll spend a good amount of time working on them. Past a certain age/size they'll instantly crack them into pieces and it's the end of the story.
It would be interesting to have healthy protein-based edible treats of different sizes (2 to 12 inches?) that are hard or resilient enough to keep a dog busy for a while while they grind away while providing nutritional treat.
One of the options for dogs like ours seems to be to buy cooked bones like this one:
https://www.petco.com/shop/en/petcostore/product/good-lovin-...
They will work on something like this for days. The problem is that they are not really nutritious and they will eventually fracture them and they will splinter. The dogs won't get hurt but it's always of concern having bone fragments on the floor. Also, I don't think you necessarily need something that will last weeks. If it's good for a day or a few days (depending on cost) it's probably OK.
There's are other options in the market:
https://www.petco.com/shop/en/petcostore/product/dog/dog-tre...
Read the ingredients and think about whether or not dogs evolved to eat this stuff. I don't think so. They can get sick and have intestinal problems from these kinds of treats.
Also, read some of the comments on that particular product for a view into what I am generally talking about.
Good luck.
They'll gnaw on them for hours. Wonder if there would be a market for it.
So, yeah, it doesn't surprise me that they would eat horse hoof trimmings.
If you were to productize something like that you'd have to make sure you run through some testing to ensure dogs won't be harmed. The product liability element in products that people and pets eat should not be ignored, particularly in a litigious society like the US.
Later I found someone with a similar need but for Postgres databases. It's been pulling in a decent side income.
I am embarrassed by the amateur UI. There is so much I want to do around "smart" visualization, but haven't had time.
So far it’s made $25. All from iOS
1. Degiro is sort of Robinhood counterpart, but it's more expensive, does not have (documented) API and lacks access to US exchanges (for options).
2. Interactive Brokers is a heavyweight that provides API and all the bells & whistles you could ask, but it clearly expects larger accounts. I have < $100k invested right now which makes their commissions rather expensive for daytrading and there is effectively no support from them (which they don't state clearly, but none of my queries have been answered by a human).
3. ChoiceTrade is available in EU as well, but they refused to provide me API access. Their commissions (for US options) are lower than IB (for < $100k accounts at least), but the service itself has shadier reputation.
I have tried all three of these and decided to use IB. They provide two types of API. I am using a simpler one - "TWS API". It is widely used, so there is plenty of documentation and libraries. Protocol is pretty archaic and you need to run GUI Java-based app which acts as a gateway between your code and their servers, but there are documented ways to hack it for running in headless mode and performance is fine for my use case, so I didn't bother looking any ways around it. Additionally there is a second API, which is using FIX protocol that's "industry standard", but I'm not working in fintech and am not familiar with it / didn't need it so far. My understanding is that you still need to run the same local Java app if going FIX route.
That said, assuming most people here are from US, I would recommend to try starting out with either 1) Alpaca.markets (free, but only supports trading stocks) or 2) TD Ameritrade (both stocks and options). Both have modern REST API that you would expect in 21st century. Might be too limiting for professionals and definitely isn't meant for HFT, but IMO they should be sufficient for people algotrading as a hobby.
I know that there are other services as well, some specifically targeted for algotraders and some people even use reverse-engineered Robinhood API, but I can't vouch for any of these.
If you have purely technical questions, reddit has a few communities that can help and you can find more people on Discord.
Understanding stocks, options and all the financial stuff was the hardest part (for me as a non-fintech guy) as it's filled with their own lingo and large part of information available online is useless or even harmful (either coming from noobs/gamblers or "financial gurus willing to disclose their secrets for in a private webinar" or even legitimate traders that operate through textbook "cargo cult" rituals). Investopedia is a good start, but if your goal is to have profitable algorithm that does not require your attention, you will need to read and understand the rules and regulations that apply to your jurisdiction and exchanges you use. There are many somewhat obscure events that happen fairly rarely (during normal times - low volatility period, right now everything is accelerated 5x) so you might not hear about them at all until they affect you, but once they do occur you will either lose money or lose opportunity. I am going for sources (sec.gov, nasdaq.com, nyse.com - I trade US options exclusively), there might be some shortcuts (probably trainings), but I haven't tried any.
If you are just starting, try paper trading but also get a real account with real money as soon as you can (< $500 is fine and it's not like you're losing that money [outright] either), because paper trading is really just an approximation and you won't catch all the special cases through it.
If you want to be above the average algotrader - start by collecting detailed data (per minute or so) and storing it for future use. Many brokers give you access to historical data but it is very basic and good quality historical data is very expensive. Use this dataset to backtest your algorithms, but try to make distinction between features that have real-world causes, the ones that are just product of chance and the ones that are caused by market makers or other traders. Most of the trades are happening fully automatically and everybody uses basically the same few sets of approaches, so you should be aware of them to either make or avoid losing money on those somewhat predictable components.
Oh, also make sure you understand the way your broker calculates all the fees and commissions as with algotrading that can make or break the whole profitability for you.
what is your opinion on technical analysis and does it need to be used in algotrading? I've seen some of the basic indicators but wondering if I need something more than RSI and MACD
1. by having insider knowledge
2. by market manipulation
3. by getting lucky
Basically there was a company that cleared out defunct call centers and such, who would call us up to offload monitors for $5 a piece. These would sell consistently on Amazon for $40. Not much effort involved, and made a few thousand that way to supply our other hobbies.
I also have a mobility/coaching app that I've actually done an interview or two about but it's started to take off this year - https://movewellapp.com
I don’t like talking about it with friends anymore because it sucks to talk about failing. I wish I could learn from this failure... but covid + Google Shopping really aren’t things in my control.
www.mendskin.co
It's not a "luxury" item like a latte. It has enough nutrition for people to justify buying it whenever they're too lazy to cook for their kids. It's not something everyone's mom knows how to cook. It can be done with cheap ingredients. It probably wouldn't be the case in a Western country.
Received lots of feedback initially, and the project is roughly feature complete.
Should invest in marketing but haven't been doing that at all ...Does that qualify as not talking about it? :)