Show HN: Buy My Side Project | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Buy My Side Project

buymysideproject.com

190 pointsraunometsa68 comments

I read this quote from Andrew Wilkinson (co-founder of Tiny Capital):

"There are all these cool products that are on Product Hunt. Every day you think "that's cool". But most of them fizzle."

I know this from my own personal experience and I think this is also true for many other developers like me. We build fun little side projects, launch them on Product Hunt, but let them fizzle afterwards.

"A lot of the time it's started by a developer and the developer doesn't understand how to market and grow something."

And even when some of the developers do have the knowledge how to market and grow something, they're often not interested in it as much as creating something.

... read more from my blog about why I built this: https://saashacks.io/buy-my-side-project

I hope you like it!

Would you like to sell BuyMySideProject?

Maybe!

And did you have fun making it?

I did, thanks for asking!

The real question is how you can get good at marketing?

s/how you can get/how do you find someone who's

Personally, I've realized that I hate doing marketing and I enjoy creating things much more.

This helps to get good at marketing if you’re an engineer: https://phireworks.co/pro

What is your affiliation with them?

Apparently, one of showing HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186864

This one looks like a bargain https://buymysideproject.com/startups/hacker-news

$750 and I'll throw in my own side project written in Erlang, take it or leave it.

Selling Hacker News for only $1k? That’s an absolute steal!

I'm not so sure. Any attempt to monetize this site would blow up in your face.

This site is already heavily monetized. Basically every yc startup gets exposure to a broad tech audience. Shit ain’t a charity.

At least it's generally relevant to the audience. They also get more than exposure, they get feedback. Good deal for them I'd say!

Being able to manipulate the ranking algorithm to your own benefit is monetization.

Perhaps sell links to software job postings which start on the front page? HN readers are already used to this.

You haven't noticed the same "Disrupt the housing market job posting" and others that manage to hit the front page on a regular basis?

They been doing that for years already

That's what "HN readers are already used to this." means.

Maybe do some basic sanitisation?

https://buymysideproject.com/startups/scriptalert1script

Yeah, is like some site creators have learned nothing about the Google blacklist, having user content on your main site is risky. I could include ANY js file into their main page (insanity).

edit: much lack of security - https://buymysideproject.com/startups/iframe-srchttpsbuymysi...

edit 2: YIKES! don't click the authors bio on the main page, the site is already clickjacked. This is a fine example of why you take security seriously.

Output encoding suitable for the destination format, not input sanitisation!

Yep, makes sense. I think Laravel handles sanitisation nicely out of the box, but I made a mistake with the project's description:

<p>{!! nl2br($startup->about)) !!}</p>

Switched now to:

<p>{{ $startup->about }}</p>

The number of Chrome extensions available for sale is scary: most buyers of extensions "monetize" in user-hostile ways, earlier this week, I had Bing ads being injected into Google search results - fortunately, I only had 2 extensions installed so it wasn't hard to find which one was responsible. Extensions that are granted access to all sites are a security nightmare.

If anyone is seriously looking to buy a project, they care how much revenue it currently generates. Even if that number is zero, and you are just buying the code, buyers need to know where things currently stand.

Yeah, 30k for a side project is a lot of money if literally the only thing on the site is two screenshots.

I’d even call it laughable.

The site is a listing site, it's not like you click a buy button and then you all of a sudden own a project.

Of course not, but I’ve seen similar concepts before. And they all list some information about the business (especially monthly income) that are very relevant.

To add an example, flippa.com is a similar marketplace and it displays financials and even integrated Google Analytics data from websites for sale.

And I would add some idea of usage. If the project has no revenue but some traffic / traction that is much different than code running on a development server.

There is another use for this resource - a guide to all the chrome extensions up for sale, and therefore should be pre-emptively uninstalled. There is a lesson there, in the whole "Great Suspender" malware case.

Wait, are you selling this site on your site (listed at $10)?

Because someone is: https://buymysideproject.com/startups/buymysideproject

Haha, no! :) I see someone here made a joke (removed this from the list).

Perhaps it would make sense to do domain verification? Otherwise I think it'll get quickly become super spammy.

I already see HN listed on there for $1k. I think it’s reached that point already.

I’ve bought HN three times now. I’m pretty sure one of those sales was legit.

The most valuable thing you could do is add bidding and acceptance to the site. Obviously a lot more work, but if you’re serious that’s the way to make your own value and give value to sellers and buyers.

Agreed — OP I’ll help, email in bio

Product hunt is mostly results of someone else’s Fail Fast approach. If you buy one of these, the project will fail twice.

These types of marketplaces always turn into low-quality listings for side projects that have never made money, listed for $$$, created by people who have never made money online.

When I was toying with the idea of selling my business last year, and other side projects in the past, I looked for a legit website where I could list my business alongside other like-businesses, but I never found one. There are brokers, but those are annoying to deal with and I feel the sector is ripe for a good marketplace with vetted listings.

There's no way a real business owner is going to list their sale alongside the usual noise these websites eventually produce. It looks bad and the chances of finding a real buyer seem very slim.

Seen this startup acquisition marketplace? https://microacquire.com/

It's like a themeforest.net but for web products, yay.

On a serious note it sounds like a great idea but it is not. Unless the coding monkey comes packaged in the price. Why would I want to maintain and try to sell someone elses code? It would probably be less effort to just reverse engineer any of those. But maybe I'm wrong and there are actually people wiling to buy this stuff.

Great solution, I've been thinking about how to sell my side-project the past couple weeks. POST request to 'https://buymysideproject.com/new' is throwing a 500 btw.

Thanks! Yes, sorry – I checked my logs and I think it's about putting commas, spaces, etc to INT fields.

I did a quick filter_var(..., FILTER_SANITIZE_NUMBER_INT) around my numbers and I think it should be working ok now!

If you leave it blank it also 500s.

Submitted a product with 7 pictures, only 1 last picture was added to product :(

Any way to edit?

https://buymysideproject.com/startups/automationsio

166 years of ARR is a big side project lol.

Sent you an email with the edit link!

Haven’t received anything, checked spam too

I don't ask for everything to be dispayed in public, but there's too much information. One of the projects falls inside one of my market expertises, but they just copypasted their APP store pitch.

IDK, it's not very appealing.

Hmm, what do you mean by there's too much information? Like the copy-pasted description is just too long?

The public plaintext emails are not a good idea. Scrapers will gobble these up and spam those emails into oblivion. At least put them behind a captcha.

I'm sorry, I wanted to say "too little information", not my primary language, got confused.

Have you sold anything yet ?

I don't know to be honest. Potential buyers can directly email sellers, so I'm not involved in the conversations (if there are any).

But I think I'll email sellers in a few days and ask! It's a very fresh project, I made it few days ago.

Is there a submission queue? I submitted my project Stock Inspector but it didn't show up immediately.

Nice Job It would be interesting to see how many hits u got from hackernews and how many you converted

Check out flippa.com

I thought this was going to be an NFT site at first.

Getting 500 when submitting a new project :'(

Thanks for letting me know! I checked my Laravel logs and I see a few errors similar to this:

invalid input syntax for integer: "60,000"

So I added filter_var(..., FILTER_SANITIZE_NUMBER_INT) around my INT fields (TTM and asking price).

$startup->ttm = filter_var($r->ttm, FILTER_SANITIZE_NUMBER_INT);

$startup->price = filter_var($r->price, FILTER_SANITIZE_NUMBER_INT);

Should be ok now!

Why aren’t you using Laravel’s built in validation features?

I run this one.

https://www.sideprojectors.com

I love this! Keep it up!

big fan but it crashed!

Thanks! Submitting a product? Sorry, should be fixed now.

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