My side project [1] became my full-time job. I decided to quit my well-paid full-time job which got me bored (comparing to my own project). I am nowhere near making as much money. Though, we have early traction with a decent growth rate (2x month over month).
Just curious how many of you made it to generating revenue for your side-project.
[1] https://newscatcherapi.com/
At the same time I was working on an app to compare grocery prices in stores in the area. So I set up a system to input recipes, generate a shopping list, and compare prices or generate an algorithm which supermarkets to buy at.
The grocery price comparison app was a flop - gov didn't like it and the result was that most stores were about the same prices, because some would sell different prices expensive and cheap, and some things like fruit might seem really cheap but were also low quality. I released the recipe app to Facebook, and it really took off.
It turned into a startup, where we'd monetize by selling ingredients for the recipes. It got lots of users, at about 3 cents per paying user, and after a year, we sold it off as a marketing channel for someone whose main focus was selling weight loss ingredients.
I'm very curious about this part. Could you elaborate?
Government has to balance both sides - the customers trying to get cheap products and the shopkeepers trying to make money. An app that compares prices of everything, will make it difficult for small businesses to compete. It wasn't exactly illegal, but it could be made illegal, and violated the spirit of the Anti-Profiteering Act, especially as the nature of something being an unfair advantage is being determined by ministry that we talked to.
It was also somewhat illegal to display the prices of another place without the consent of that store. Stores didn't exactly like giving out their prices either, because it's meant to be a competitive advantage for some items to be loss leaders and some others are secretly expensive.
Illegal or not, it would have benefited one side and screwed another, and in the long term this would likely not go well.
I would say that it's really difficult. For the first year, it made less than 1k/month, which was not sustainable, so I had to stick with my remote fulltime job at Toggl.com. Spend 4 hours per day at night and entire weekend days to implement the app. And now, after 2 years, I quit my job and dedicate myself to Proxyman. Aiming to ship iOS build and move to Window. It's still a long journey I guess.
I built an on-demand remote browser and safe link opener[1], and I made it open source[2] but paid license and no one paid.
I know people are using it because of the binary, npm CLI downloads, and use of the demos, and I had some inbound interest but mainly people who seemed to want to not pay, or were just prospecting tools for future possible features.
I think an issue is that these products are mostly for enterprise and big orgs, who mostly want to buy from established brands or connected people. I tried posting on gum-road and using my linked in premium trial to message possible customers, as well as cold email, but I guess this "product" is not meant to be.
That's OK since I was only releasing it to fund me as a layer of a larger product I'm building.
[2]: https://github.com/cris691/OuterShell.git
I know this is supposed to be about generating revenue but some others posted without revenue so I thought it's OK to share :)
How does your platform compare with it? Do you consider than a competitor or the focus is different?
Edit: formatting
iOS - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/word-hookup/id1467012830 Android - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wordhookup...
It didn't amount to anything for some time. Luckily it got featured by Apple as Game of the Day. That changed everything, and it continues to provide residual income a year hence. The money is not yet enough or close to a full time job, but I am now working full time churning out and about to launch more games!
Now I'm just focusing on building my side project[1] for fun without paying too much attention on how it will generate revenue. Hopefully this will make the project last longer since I won't get demotivated if I don't generate any revenue.
Interestingly one US company relied on the compiler, needed an updated stable version and could pay much more than in automotive. So for a while my side project became my main job. But I stopped doing that a while ago, and I'm back to normal.
And was this a Perl to x86/x64 compiler ?
Automotive having huge Corona, Dieselgate and Tesla troubles currently.
Last year I gave up my internship to dedicate full time to PyJobs, and the company that I maitain: RecrutaDev.
I've lived for a year with its money, and now I'm trying to expand its coverage with more customers.
If you don't mind my feedback I think it has a lot of potential for growth. You should invest more on it. Trying marketing it more on events, and online groups. Your product creates value, so don't be ashamed of spreading the word.
Threads like this were very motivating to me when I was getting started, and I encourage anyone looking for inspiration to read through HN's previous "side project" discussions! [1]
If you are Google scale, then you can get away with something like YouTube and digital rights, because you have the money and the lawyers to disrupt the market and push your solution through the legal battles ahead rather easily.
Now, an API such as this should either would use APIs or scrape online news sites for content, which is illegal. Sure, many businesses do scrape illegally, there's a cat and mouse game going on. But isn't the possible ROI questionable for such businesses?
[0] www.fineworclocks.com
In month 4 and already more profitable than old dayjob but obviously anything could happen still.
[0] https://ritza.co
Do you have anything you could share on your writing process?