Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2020 – Show and tell
It seems this question hasn't been asked for some time, so I'd be interested hear what new (and old) ideas have come up.
- make lists and use them!
- block lunches use them for meetings
- have day job pay your healthcare
- day job work stops on time! no meetings before 9 or after 5
- leverage your “No” to all frivolous time wasters
- focus on day job, side project, family, one hobby for exercise (4-6 hrs/ week)
- get really good at delegating and automating tasks
- hire overseas contractors to do menial, repetitive tasks that can’t be automated
- don’t sell software instead find something “real” that can be enhanced with software
- identify a customer and charge upfront; it’s the only way you’ll learn
> don’t sell software instead find something “real” that can be enhanced with software
Expand? :)
I’d focus on anything other than software but use software development principles to make some part of the business more efficient whether it’s idea generation, product development, manufacturing or marketing.
Locate a nice size consumer market where they hasn’t been much innovation and the consumer is passionate. Then run low-cost tests.
Examples: - Stance with socks - Curves with women’s gyms - There are a ton of examples but what as engineers you want is a good that can be sold via the internet
Basically, it's a quick and easy way to get SSR up and running for sites that use modern frontend frameworks for their whole site. It seems that every team I work with needs to jump through the same crazy set of hoops and stand up servers just so they can serve pre-rendered pages to search engines.
Our thing solves the problem by sitting in front of your site (using Cloudflare Workers), passing regular traffic through, and showing crawlers a cached, pre-rendered version.
Best (for me), it's designed to fail open, meaning customers are unaffected if my stuff falls over. Thus, letting me have things like weekends and sleep.
You mean since last week?
In this amount I provide 4000 words of content, 6 good quality graphics and few quality backlinks. Anything on top of this is a paid add-on.
I have hired a team of SEO Specialists, Content Writers and Graphic Designers. Most of my revenue goes in paying their salaries.
I found few takers(all dentists) of my service from Australia.
The best thing is that I have not even built any website or any FB, Instagram Page and still I am making this money through my old contacts.
I guess with my website launching in next few days, I should be able to sell even more and reach to around 100 customers in next year or two.
Fiver hasn't provided any real skilled candidates :(
Thank you!
I am currently trying to build a standalone website (https://goog.io) and moving the service away from RapidAPI.
Best advice I would give:
Implement features for paying or potential paying customers first. They already love the service and this will boost word of mouth reputation in a SaaS segment.
So far I've been selling by word-of-mouth, and in September I started an Etsy store. I'm also building https://egnastickers.se, but that landing page alone made me €100 in sales.
I'm close to €1k in sales for October on Etsy and I'm racing to sell as much as possible before the end of the year when Brexit wipes out more than half my current customer base.
Sell puts, get assigned, sell calls.
What’s the wheel?
Recently wrote about hitting 3k MRR at https://algodaily.com/blog/what-i-didnt-expect-to-learn-from...
We build and work with software that cuts the editing time by 70% which allows us to offer our sevices at (somewhat) cheap rates while keeping the quality super high.
Started with a team of freelancers, now we have both freelancers and people working full-time.
Edit: I lead product for SF based startup as my full-time job.
Not yet at $500 MRR but I’m focusing on providing a lot of value in a simple package, and automating as much as possible to reduce daily operations and move fast.
The stack mainly consists of Python, React, Postgres, Clickhouse, and Redis running on Kubernetes (deployment configured via Terraform and Kustomize). Was running on DO + Linode and just moved to AWS.
Happy to answer any questions!
My email is on my profile if you want to contact me directly.
> It aims to be a more complete toolset
I tried clicking the "Features" page but I didn't see any features listed, in what sense is it more complete than the mentioned alternatives?
As I just launched the MVP, I don't offer yet some of the more advanced features, but I will focus on them for the coming months.
Here are some ideas I've been bouncing around with some customers:
- Filter by any dimension on the dashboards.
- More performance metrics (like time to first paint and Apdex scores).
- Automated insights and anomaly detection (i.e. "XYZ page has a higher bounce rate than normal this week" or "Visitors coming from Y spend 50% more time on your website.").
As it's an early stage product, I'm still pivoting the direction constantly to find my niche.
Panelbear already offers some of the additional features such as reports and dashboard filters is being released this week. It's not really years away what I'm talking about.
The intention is to gather interest/feedback, then build and repeat, not the other way around. This is how I know I'm investing my time on features that my customers actually want.
I failed miserably in past products by working for a year on a "feature-complete" service, only to realize there was no product-market fit. That's why I'm turning things around this time.
And thanks for sharing your thoughts, this is valuable feedback for me and I now know the landing pages need more work :)
Accidentally ranked high on some slow down mp3 keywords and make a small bit of cash each month with no time spent.
It allows you to enter an URL and deploy a static clone to Vercel in seconds. You can also configure it so that it updates your static side as soon as you change something on the dynamic one.
Built it during the lockdown in spring and its a enhancement for Quickbooks Online. Allows companies to ask request for quotations from their suppliers.
I’ve got a couple Saas ideas for building as side projects but as the common startup advice goes - I need to validate the idea first. Would you like to share how did you validate the idea, or was it a project for a customer which was later productised? thanks!
I originally created the site back in 2011 mostly just freshen up my PHP skills, and I needed a way to keep track of my work hours. It was just a basic free to use timesheet tool for for around 4 years. It was super ugly but it was still getting people signing up but only a handful would stick around.
I decided rebuild it all and launch it was a proper SaaS in 2015.
If I had to start over today, I'm not sure what I would do. I just like to build things I would use. I'd try to find an existing tool and see if I it's something I feel I could do better.
Dosnt the tech community believe ideas are dime a dozen?
That said, I don't know what else can be done differently, since Headlime seems to lack a protective technical moat. His story is certainly inspiring though.
Within 24 hours all the other entrants copied it. That was my last foray into sharing my work. Of course, I knew this was the game, but I summarily bounced from playing that game ever again.
Don’t share your stuff until you are literally done getting what you intended to get (a job, money, credit, etc). It’s not a small community anymore, and people will copy everything.
Of that enormous set of potential is a much smaller set that satisfies the criteria:
- Is small enough to be done in spare time by a single developer - Is not so complex it can be automated to run mostly by itself - Is a service someone is willing to pay for - Has real customers
^ those filter criteria make the set of “profitable side projects” much smaller than the set of “dime a dozen” ideas
Profitable side projects have a low barrier to entry and are much more easily exploitable / copyable, hence my reluctance to share and probably many others reluctance to share
The ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s the market demand that’s the unknown. Once you identify that, then you can build your product to fulfill the demand.