Show HN: Four years of profitable side-projects | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Four years of profitable side-projects

coryzue.com

145 pointsczue33 comments

I've been doing the solopreneur / indie hacking thing on the side for the last 4 years, including meticulously tracking my time spent on each project.

I find that seeing the data to be a useful reminder that product businesses can take a long time to get off the ground, but can really pay off eventually. I hope maybe this inspires others to take the plunge and not give up!

I just wanted to let you know that (as someone beginning their journey) this was incredibly inspiring. Thank you for sharing!

Thanks!

Nice. What’s your next project?

I'm convinced my SaaS starter kit Pegasus[1] still has a ton of potential, so am planning on keeping it the focus of 2021 - and possibly building some adjacent products for the Pegasus audience/customer base (e.g. Django educational content).

I'm also interested in using Pegasus to build a proper subscription product. I have a few ideas brewing but no concrete plans as of yet.

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

How have you reached your audience (outside of posting on HN/Product Hunt). Do you actively promote or pay for advertisement? This thing is awesome, kudos for launching!

I reach people mostly via SEO and content marketing. I started publishing articles about Django development back in 2018, and this year I spent a lot of time working on a series of guides to building a SaaS with Django[1] - basically documenting a lot of the things I had to do to build Pegasus. These serve as lead-generation and for SEO. Many of the guides have gotten picked up in Django communities/newsletters, etc. and bring nice traffic and product awareness in the community.

In the last month I've started my first experiments with targeted paid ads in relevant blogs. Still a bit early to say how well they're working.

[1] https://www.saaspegasus.com/guides/

Do you track time spent writing as time working on your side projects?

Just wondering if you are counting this as marketing time?

I track all writing that I do specifically for content marketing (e.g. the guides I linked above) as marketing time toward the product.

I don't count time writing on my personal blog on this chart - though I do track it - since it's less clear how it benefits any individual product if at all.

weird question I know: but how do you take the payments, report them for tax purposes? As someone who has done some things that were orders of magnitude smaller and decided not to charge for them because of the headaches involved I’m genuinely curious. Thanks!

Stripe. Everything is registered under an LLC, and Stripe provides the necessary tax forms and such.

thanks. i take it that you don’t have to collect sales tax?

Hi Cory, I've seen you post Place Card Me a couple times on the passive income project threads on HN. I'm really happy to see that your efforts on that project and others are paying dividends, and I find your story and stats here really inspiring! Thank you for sharing :)

Thanks!

Really cool! Do you mind sharing how much of this money was reinvested into the business (a breakdown of the expenses)?

This is really cool! I've been following your open stats page for a few years, so it's exciting to see the overhaul with new visualizations.

I've started adding revenue graphs like this to my monthly retrospectives,[0] and your page was a big inspiration for me.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/12/#stats

any advice for someone taking a stab at their first profitable side project? Mainly getting people to use it...

Assuming you are a developer with no marketing experience - promote yourself/your project to the point that makes you uncomfortable.

Most people will submit something to HN, it won't get traction, and then they give up thinking their project wasn't any good. Getting the word out is usually more important than how good your thing is when it comes to success - so don't underestimate the amount of investment you should spend on it. But obviously do so in a way that isn't spammy, shady, etc.

I used Google ads to get my very first users[1], and SEO to eventually get most of the traffic for my first product[2].

[1] https://www.coryzue.com/writing/first-test/ [2] https://www.coryzue.com/writing/seo-for-developers/

That GroupMe stats project is something I've toyed with on and off over the last 5 years or so. Seeing it as a finished project and even generating revenue is definitely a bit of a wake up call for me. Thanks for sharing!

Ha! It doesn't generate much, but yeah, I was surprised too!

I'm curious about the place card one - you come up first on a Google search for "make place cards", which is great (congrats!). How much of that was because you saw an opportunity there from an SEO perspective (i.e. relatively highly searched, low competition) vs. you put the app together and then actively did SEO?

It was almost 100% the latter (built the app first then did SEO).

Back when I started I didn't know anything about SEO or even how to know if something was "low competition". I only figured out how to do keyword research several months later. The one thing I did before building was Google the terms I wanted to rank for and confirm that I could build something better than what was already on the first page. But that was more about looking into competing products than anything SEO-related.

Interesting - thanks!

I was wondering how much Covid impacted the "place card me" project, but then stupid me realized the numbers are right there :D.

And indeed you can really notice the impact.

Lol, yep! March-May was brutal for the site and it still hasn't come close to fully recovering

Hi Cory, this is really inspiring for the starting indie-hackers like me.Could you please share how do you continue building audience around your projects?

What are you using to track your time? I've tried multiple times but never managed to build a habit, any tips?

I use toggl (https://toggl.com/). Can't recommend them highly enough and their free tier is amazing for a solo-person.

For forming a habit 1) live tracking is essential and 2) make it as easy on yourself as possible. What I learned after many years is that the level of granularity I actually care about is at the project basis and not the task basis, so just logging stuff to big buckets, not sweating if it's off by 5-10 minutes, and trying as hard as possible to always be logging. I almost exclusively only log time when I'm on my laptop which makes it easier to not forget.

Has the income generated been significant for you or is it more for fun?

Started as fun, now becoming significant.

This is a massive achievement. Do you have a full time job?

Thanks! I took a six-month sabbatical in 2017 to get things off the ground, and then returned to work at ~50% later in the year.

To compensate for the lost income, I did freelance consulting, though have scaled that down as the products have started to generate real income.

Very nice, Cory - congratulations :)

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