Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – 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.
I just shipped out the first batch of books a week ago and now waiting for the next batch of books. It’s gotten pretty demanding pretty quickly but I’m really excited about it. I’m hoping I can soon employ my little sister to manage all the shipping. She’s been an Amazon driver for the last 2 years and I think she’d appreciate a change of pace.
Very much looking forward to it. Great work!
Congratulations!
Now, provenance may still be an issue...
Their parents have no interest in turning their kids into programmers (to my great dismay!) but this looks like something they'll have a blast with anyway.
I mean, can anyone write a "For Dummies" book?
To clarify there is a series called XXXX For Babies.
Honestly, I don't see how "for babies" could be trademarked since it's a literal phrase describing the product. "For Dummies" is not used literally.
That's not to say generic words / phrases cannot be trademarked. Just look at Apple. However, trademarks for a generic term must be very limited in scope initially. If the brand obtains substantial recognition, then a broader trademark may be granted. These broader trademarks are typically reserved for household names. Even Apple had trademark issues when they entered the music industry due to Apple Records.
Neither is "For Babies" specific to the series I am describing. The book series is not for babies, as far as I am aware, very few, if any, babies are capable of reading, let alone fully understanding stories that are read to them.
"For Dummies" effectively means using laypersons language to convey complex topics more easily. Not, as you said, to literally mean the readers are of low-intelligence.
Likewise, "For Babies" effectively means using language, images, and story telling to convey complex topics more easily to young children, not just for literal babies.
How do you manage sakes tax collection & other stuff like shipping & such? Assuming you are in US. Do you use Shopify or Etsy or dome online one? Did u apply for a seller's permit to deposit sales tax? If manually, how do you calculate sales tax, because its based on buyer's address right?
Now sitting at 3.7m views.
Be careful about this. It changes the dynamic you have, and can cause issues if you hire non-family in future. Same applies for close friends.
There are some cultures where family businesses, where most members of the family work and participate, are the norm. Quite a huge population of people operate that way.
In my experience, hiring my younger cousin for occasional work during school/uni breaks has been great, but involving close friends looking for work has been disastrous 3 out of 3 times.
Yes. Among Indian comunities, Gujaratis (particularly the Patel sub-community who own the majority of US motels, the Ambanis - Reliance group, big) and the Marwaris (some big Indian businessmen among them, like the Birlas, Ruias, Goenkas), are examples of this.
Possibly Kashmiris (handicrafts shops), Punjabis and Sikhs (auto parts shops, dhabas, etc.), Bunts (a Karnataka sub-community, Udupi restaurants), and Chettiars (gold and jewelry shops, money-lending, trading abroad) too.
And I am only writing about those I know about. There could be others too.
Ended up building an analytics based platform that uses data analysis techniques to generate trade ideas for retail investors [0]. Started it as a hobby July 2019, but it ended up growing quite big. The plan was to generate about $1k/mo but we are generating about $120k/mo these days with over 3000 paid users. I think I'm the most fortunate person in the world, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine this much.
I still work on it solo and have no plans on hiring a team, because solo is where I have most fun, and that's important.
Afterwards, realized that twitter had the most solid trading community out of any other platform. So all I've been doing for the last one year is build a community on twitter now (and of ofcourse discord too since everyone's there these days). I try to post ideas from the system every day, and when people see them work and make some money off of them, they subscribe to the paid plan.
Discord has a massive portion of the overall trading community, so I created discord bots to pull data from the web product, and every data item had our logo on it. That helped quite a lot in expanding the brand name and reaching more people. We're in about 250 discords and reach about 100k members in them overall.
Finally, 12 hours of sitting in front of a laptop every day lol.
You say you leveraged your experience with AI. How savvy were you in the trading/finance world when you started?
If you have good trade ideas/signals, then why do you not use them yourself? I assume you do not use them yourself because it' does not make sense to share your edge (if you have one). If you do not have an edge, how can you be offering "trade ideas"?
But people who have don’t ask those questions because finding edge in the markets is actually pretty easy. Finding edge that is scalable is the hard part.
For professional traders it doesn’t make much sense to engage in all the small edge trades because it won’t pay more than your opportunity cost if you did something else. For retail traders that constraint isn’t true.
Now, I don’t have any idea if this particular product actually offers good trades, but it’s not true that as a class you can’t make more money selling profitable trades than you can using the trade yourself.
Its different. Not everything scales as nicely and dealing with responsibility is going to become a burden soon. Here you are selling your advice, most likely all traders have similar access to this advice and can perform trades with their own judgement.
This doesn't make sense though, running a fund is not necessarily natural progression of being a successful trader. But if one says they have a real edge that the average retail trader can monetize, then why doesn't one just take advantage of it themselves as this is effectively the lowest size of scale.
Either way, congrats! It sounds like a lovely side business.
I found this when searching but I’m pretty sure I’m thinking of someone else. https://www.javarepublic.com/no-ethics-coffee/
Apologies for the vagueness, but do you have any thoughts on that?
Low wages? Actually they are a really good entry-level option for people doing rural-urban migration. Expensive middlemen? They serve a purpose in the marketplace and smooth out logistical inefficiencies. Greedy multinationals? These are often dream work destinations for the locals.
I could go on and on... bottom line is, globalized supply chains aren't broken and don't need fixing
Agreed. It's also being heavily used to put a thin humanitarian sheen on what actually boils down to racism/xenophobia - not in all cases of course, but to a significant extent.
> I could go on and on... bottom line is, globalized supply chains aren't broken and don't need fixing
I wouldn't go that far, I'd say instead that they're not particularly more broken/unethical than pretty much anything else in the business world, but are easier for media to point fingers at and sensationalize without getting into much trouble from businesses.
Because the things I’m talking about were presented as issues specific to coffee.
* How did you go about finding the farm and acquiring it?
* How did you ensure you were paying a fair price?
* What about the legal side of things?
* Are you doing this remotely, or from within Colombia?
As a coffee drinker (and as someone who has visited the golden triangle) this is the most fun answer here!
I am wondering how much survivorship bias is at play here, some ideas look relatively simple compared to the amount they bring in. Or maybe one really has to take the leap of faith and trust that there is demand for virtually anything?
Maybe it’s not so simple, my partner opened a small e-commerce store selling some genuinely nice craft she produces, and has been seeing $0 revenues even with some aggressive ads campaigns, so go figure.
My job currently compensates me above $1M a year depending on stock price (public FAANG company), so I never even considered it worthwhile to invest my evening/weekend time in a side project, and always funneled every second of non-recreational time back into my job. But maybe I’ve been doing it all wrong when I see people bringing in several thousands a month for minimal time investment after the product is stabilized.
To somewhat answer the thread: my “side project” is my investment portfolio of boring index funds, where I funnel all my savings. This year is up about 15% (unrealized gains) and realized income of ~$50k via dividends.
Certainly huge congratulations to the business owners, very humbling thread.
The only thing I would say that can affect your luck is to always say yes to any opportunity that has a chance of taking you forward, even if it is incredibly uncomfortable. A couple random decisions I’ve taken in my life that affected my luck:
- Relocate at a young age to the US from Europe, leaving a promised incredibly cushy job (imagine well paid, for local standards, European tech job with 60 days off a year etc) for a crappy internship at a no-name American company, with no promises whatsoever. I relocated entirely by myself, leaving family, friends and (ex) partner behind. I am still separated from them.
- Took some risks in my career, joining early stage startups to build experience while most of my coworkers would call me crazy for taking a 50% paycut from the job where we were all “stagnating” maintaining old systems.
- Accept new work opportunities even if they mess up your life. They said: “Do you want a job for a 50% raise in NYC?”. I said: “Yes Sir, I’ll be there next Monday and throw my San Francisco life down the toilet, break my expensive rental lease and convince my girlfriend who lives with me that we will have a long distance relationship for a while”.
- Live a frugal and minimalist life like a college student, it’s easier to take bets in your life when you don’t have a mortgage/car/kids and your monthly expenses are under $3k in a very expensive city.
Most people I know would say a sound NO to all the above, and I’m not saying they would be wrong in doing so.
I decided a long time ago that I won’t have kids (not for financial reasons), so there is not much urgency in my life beside the itch to get back more personal time.
Current dream is to early retire with my partner in a small beach town in Mediterranean Europe, and live a simple life.
By most conventional standards I could already retire now, but my stance is more conservative than average: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29691550
More importantly if you want to put survivorship bias on your side, never develop anything until you have a working sales funnel.
Put $1000 aside a month on a design and site for your idea, followed by a marketing person w/ a budget.
The screen following getting their card should be a page letting them know you aren’t onbaording new customers, their card hasn’t been charged and you’ll let them know when you’re taking on more customers (eg. The product is built)
If a website did this to me they'd also be getting a very angry e-mail and zero recommendations from me.
Second not spending hundreds of thousands to millions in dev on a product with no market vs having to buy a new domain because your site went viral and you now have millions of bad reviews. (Hint: this never happens) Is great advice.
There’s also other ways to do it, my friend was creating a course so I got her to do all the marketing first, set a date six months out and used the proceeds of the first sales to fund development.
What I’m trying to get at is to verify sales you need to get people to put their money on the line.
Ultimately I guess I am genuinely jealous of people clawing back their own time, while I am working incredibly hard with life passing me by, that’s it.
I think I personally am at the point where time is a scarcer resource than money. Getting a lower paid job or consultancy is not an alternative either, both would still be too big of time commitments.
I think you answer this question when you say you “never considered it worthwhile to invest [your time] in a side project” but: how much of that perspective is based on comparing ways of earning income vs the desire to want to build something yourself?
Also the higher up I move on the engineering ladder at a bigger tech company, the more valuable it is to spend time doing things that aren’t coding. The side project lets me scratch my coding itch while doing the more valuable stuff all day.
Edit: typo
So I’ll quit next year to start something because otherwise I’ll never become anywhere near rich with my income.
Just for fun, I went back to my 1040 tax statements for the first three years of my career, about a decade ago: $35k, $65k, $89k.
The fact that you are starting with $200k is fabulous and not to be taken for granted imho. If you are able to put the majority of your after tax savings in the market, compounding over a decade might surprise you even if we are at an all time high.
That being said, people have done more with less under similar circumstances, and thinking $200k is not enough is harmful. I used to make $130k, then I made $90k, and now I make $300k and I don't feel any different, even though I once thought it would make me happier. I don't regret focusing on my career, but I now spend time doing things that make me happy instead of working all the time.
As the saying goes, "you can afford anything, not everything." it's important to determine what brings you most joy. For me, it's being able to buy meal kits so I don't have to worry about cooking (save time).
Of course, saving / investing money is important too.
Fear. Specifically, fear that I would walk away from that kind of income forever and that I could become destitute in the future (I have a weird relationship with money, having grown up rather poor).
You've played the money game smartly and won. You just don't seem to realise that yet. You've described fear of poverty instead.
Can I respectfully suggest you to consider seeing a good psychotherapist if that's not yet the case? A therapist can help you conquer your fear. Please do read my suggestion in the friendly way I wrote it!
You are one of the most privileged people on the planet. Making 1M for working 50-60 hours is amazing. I say this as a business owner myself. So unless you have the real entrepreneurial itch to create something of your own, you are almost always better off working at a FAANG and investing all that cash that you already are doing.
I'm thinking 3M in invested assets should do. If properly diversified (real estate + stock) that should be sufficient to generate about 90k/year of passive income.
So for my calculations I am assuming my portfolio will have a 0% real growth, and that it will just keep up with inflation after volatility. In the best case I am expecting about 65 years to live (wildly optimistic), so my withdrawal rate is 1/65 ~= 1.5%.
I understand this might be overly conservative, but everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and when I pull the plug I better be damn sure I won’t go broke ever.
As mentioned earlier I should be getting there in about 5 years with some luck, so it’s not too long. If the luck won’t materialize maybe I will revisit my plan and the opportunity cost trade-off.
Promoting and marketing is alien space for me (as well as for many other designers and developers here, I'm certain). Please wish me luck promoting and marketing my art in 2022 :-)
I mean it could go either way, just make sure you also consider the upside of a fun (slowly / organically growing) side business.
I probably used more than 100 of your wallpapers over the years. I can currently think of at least four computers in which I've stored many.
I can't quite recall when I signed up for an account, pretty sure it was pre 2005.
This might not be your cup of tea, but if you had facebook (even though I don't like them, this is how it's done) and twitter where you post one image every week or month, it might grow like it did for Alexander Jansson (https://illustratorcentrum.se/author/alexander_jansson/)
Also, on your site it took me too long to realise that the 'next page' image was a link.
Specifically a USB Oscilloscope:
Sell maybe $1k/mo of these through the website and another $3k through Amazon at a margin of around 50%.
The biggest things that I see a lot of people get wrong in the hardware business is the importance of manufacturing and logistics. It doesn't matter that you're constantly producing new and improved revisions of your board if you're out of stock all the time and overseas customers have to pay extra for shipping.
I think you're burying the lede here. It's only $29 inc worldwide shipping! WTAF, that's awesome.
I'll be ordering one as soon as Christmas is out of the way.
Any plans to add an EU or UK distribution point? I'm prepared to wait the 2-3 weeks for free UK shipping tbh, but if you're adding more local distribution early next year I'd hold on.
Oh yeah, thanks for pointing that out. The one time I'm not in a shilly mood (Christmas and all) and the post actually gets interaction. Murphy's Law!
>Any plans to add an EU or UK distribution point?
Sorta kinda maybe. I did have one, but a whole lot of VAT compliance bullshit caught up with me. In most countries, GST/VAT is handled automatically by large eCommerce platforms (if you sell something on eBay to an Aussie, for example, we'll pay 10% GST regardless of the item's physical location and the seller won't even necessarily know).
However, the EU requires every single individual business with any stock located on EU soil to register and file individually in every single country where the stock is distributed regardless of revenue. I can only assume this is to create jobs for bureaucrats.
Now that Brexit has happened and the UK's laws have changed to something sane, I'll probably get something set up over there. This will be months, though. Trying to set up a (different) startup while raising a small child means a lot of Espotek stuff gets pushed to the side!
Interesting perspective - in the main everything around international trade got a whole lot more complicated for us here in the UK since leaving the EU.
On the other hand, though, it gives the UK a bit more freedom to set its own laws and make its own agreements.
VAT laws that are actually designed to collect VAT, for example, plus we finally have a UK-AU FTA!
https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/vat/vat-e-com...
You've just misunderstood what EU was it's not a . You have to file individually in every country because they are individual countries: you wouldn't expect to file for VAT also once for all Asia, would you?
Good job AussieWog93, and all the best to your business!
The logistics are covered by a mixture of Amazon FBA (USA/Canada) and a Chinese 3PL company (all other countries). The only orders I handle myself are the Aussie ones, as well as large orders to overseas universities.
I try to keep at least 6 months' work of stock at any time spread across multiple locations. Given the way social media and online communities work, sales tend to be very bursty. When it got on Hackaday, for example, I sold something like $12k worth in a weekend.
I did run into issues at the start of COVID, as American universities would place huge orders or ask 100+ students to do it individually, but we're now robust to this too!
In terms of manufacturing, this is also outsourced. Full PCBAs are made by a group in Shenzhen. The only work done in-house is packaging them. Combined with the above, this makes the chain immune from the Slashdot effect. If (when) we go viral, I just fulfil every order remotely and then replenish the stock with a large order.
I’m looking to get a similar sized electronics project into production, but don’t know how to vet suppliers.
For anybody thinking of following on this path, I would say it's not really worth it except as a fun hobby. I didn't keep track of hours designing/testing very well but we're almost certainly way below minimum wage on the project. Although I've learned a lot about how to make games which has been really cool. You'll make a lot more money if you don't have to manufacture a real product and deal with the high costs of freight and postal shipping. If anybody is curious you can look up "5.15 climbing card game" on google and you'll find it!
1. Does it have a good rating / breakdown in the BoardGameGeek forums?
2. Does it have a review on YouTube that showcases the main game mechanic?
Ideally, a third party review is always better. The board game community is not a harsh one (it's not like you have oceans of "this game sucks!" reviews -- there is a lot of love for the art) but a third party just seems more... relatable. They are also just trying to have fun.
Keep up the good work!
For prototyping the box and the demo copies we tried a few different print shops that operate in the US. The easiest by far is the game crafter, their website lets you upload and proof your cards through a web portal and I found that to be really good for not making mistakes. Unfortunately their quality is lower because the print runs are so small and the cost is pretty high.
If you get to large scale production (>500 copies) you can start getting things printed for reasonable cost. You can work with a chinese manufacturer directly (a bit risky for a first time project) or use one of the US intermediaries. Panda games is probably the best option there, but their minimum run is 2000.
In early 2022, I'm going to manufacture a small number of the game using The Game Crafter (it's more than just cards), but the whole idea of manufacturing 500 copies and the logistics of shipping are daunting.
[0] https://jitterted.podia.com/print-and-play-version-of-jitter...
So I introduced a personal tier that was covered for commercial use - inspired by Jetbrains and added a monthly subscription option for it. Both of those actions helped increase usage and signups with personal users. Companies still tend to want to pay for a year.
Even though this is completely self-hosted software, developers seem to like paying for tools monthly. Some abuse this by cancelling the subscription in the months they don't expect to use a tunnel, or opening the software then cancelling the subscription and waiting until the process has to restart before re-subscribing. Not much I can do about this side of it.
If people are interested, the product is called inlets and is easy to find on the Internet. I also write about my OSS and independent business work each week in a subscription newsletter using GitHub Sponsors (another side project, if you like)
Books I could recommend: Monetizing innovation, Obviously Awesome, 1-Page Marketing Plan & Minimalist Entrepreneur. I'm not affiliated with any of these titles, but consider them core reading for indie devs and for side gigs.
Project is honeslty cool, we really liked it except the limits of inlets free tier compared to inlets pro tier.
In our use case going for zerotier / tailscale made more sense.
See the FAQ for a comparison vs a VPN: https://docs.inlets.dev/reference/faq/
And the docs:
Subscription only, companies can buy a static licenses if required.
I think I understand how the second case you list would be abuse. If I'm understanding correctly, they're having a tunnel active without a subscription. Is that right?
I don't understand why cancelling a subscription when you know you aren't going to use the service would be considered abuse though. I'm asking as someone who do that without considering it might be abusive until I read your post.
That short notice cancellation flexibility is something I look for in a service, and it enables to sign-up for things I'm unsure of without being tied to them, or I can't afford a commitment to. If there was a minimum contract length, there are services I wouldn't bother with at all.
I generally do it with larger companies though. I look at it as, "I'll pay for what I use, or I won't use your product." (Crunchyroll, the anime streaming with the worst stagnant platform being the example that springs immediately to mind.)
Is there something specific to the way they do it or to the nature of the product? Or is it just a dick move to do specifically to a lone dev or something?
Bought an e-commerce business that was making ~$2k/mo profit and ran it on the side while I had my DevOps job.
That project has now turned into ~$30k/mo profit, and I've bought two more e-com businesses that average ~$10k/mo between the two - these are early and I expect them to scale up once I smooth out a few bumps.
I go through phases of a lot of work, and next to no work. Depends if I'm busy on growing the businesses or just want to enjoy the income. I'm out of 95% of the day-to-day operations and I have a team of 3 that handle most things.
https://www.microacquisitions.com/how-to-buy-small-companies
I know if I was making that much money via passive income I would never work another day in my life.
An app for making wedding place cards that does about $1000/mo https://www.placecard.me/
A boilerplate for making SaaS apps with Python/Django that does $5k/month (highly variable) https://www.saaspegasus.com/
I also have a third that does around $150/mo. It's an app that adds analytics to GroupMe which is a WhatsApp alternative. https://chatstats.co/
I keep complete revenue and effort data here if you're curious: https://www.coryzue.com/open/
Probably the secret is that I try to spend as much time marketing as I do coding... (I usually fail but I'm guessing I still manage to market more than most devs)
Chat stats is so niche that I've literally just shared it a couple times on reddit and that's basically it. But somehow Google has figured out to show it for relevant queries.
You may want to use Paddle (which takes a bigger chunk of your profits) for that or some other marketplace: in that way Paddle is selling to end customers, taking a cut and then paying you in a business to business transaction.
You are also responsible for other types of taxes (assuming you are working via a limited liability corporation): sales taxes / VAT, corporate taxes, personal taxes, capital gain tax.
Some countries allow you to do some trading without setting up a company but as your earnings go up it will become either not very efficient from a tax perspective or not allowed by the law.
From my experience:
You need to pay VAT in European countries no matter where you're selling from (I use vatlayer.com for getting all the different VAT rates). You generally don't need to pay taxes in other countries until you reach a threshold of earnings / number of sales.
Quaderno.io is another service which track all these different factors for you.
Sales tax / VAT is displayed and charged to customers and you need to pay it to the relevant authorities every quarter.
Then you can pay yourself a salary (which is a cost) from the money you received in the company, based on your country's personal income rates. On what's left, on your company's profit you need to pay corporate tax rate, based on your country's corporate tax rates. On the remaining profits in the company you can generally chose to pay yourself dividends (on which you pay other taxes, based on your country's tax rates on dividends). If you sell your company, you'll have to pay capital tax gain taxes on the profit you made with the company (the delta between the company's capital and how much you sold it for).
TL;DR: you probably need an accountant.
I had the idea of adding a "time travel" feature to it, so you can see literally how terrible the numbers were early on. My hourly rate for the first year was about $3!
Also from a security perspective don't forget to update those very out of date nginx webservers :)
My tool detects version 1.10.3 which was released on 31 Jan 2017
If anyone is curious, czue and I chatted about how he built and hosts Place Card Me at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/39-place-card-me-let.... Basically a full break down of his tech stack, lessons learned, etc.. It also touches on his Django SaaS example app he linked above too.
Really nice to see your Django boilerplate is pulling in those figures, congrats.
I believe it's in the front page for Django SaaS, Django boilerplate and related terms. I haven't gone as hard after Python keywords, though I probably should...
Find it very interesting that the boilerplate was leading the pack. "Don't dig for gold, sell shovels." as the quote goes.
Source data is Stripe (profit), Toggl (hours) and a tiny amount of manual accounting for expenses. I manually dump the raw data once a month into a CSV file, and then have some Python scripts that do intermediate calculations and transform the output to JSON. Then a tiny bit of JS to wire up the charts. So, in short, not automated at all, but takes ~10 minutes a month to keep up to date!
I made that cool frontend for FTP server with an interesting twist as I've abstracted:
1. the backend storage: meaning it connects to a wide range of existing storage like FTP, SFTP, S3, Dropbox, ...
2. the authentication layer: meaning you can use your own identity provider to put your S3 buckets behind your corporate SSO
3. the authorization layer to create business rules
At its core, the software is a framework to develop file manager like web applications by implementing a simple interface (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/f7a4e52703...). This does enable all sort of interesting use case. For example, the mysql implementation shows database name as first level folder, tables as second level folders and each row in a table is shown as a file within the table folder which a user can edit directly through the generated form built from the schema information. That way people who are used to the Dropbox interface can edit the database directly, create shared links, search through stuff without having to know about sql
Most of the money comes from companies who needed various degree of customisation and support or didn't want to host on premise.
How did you go about customer acquisition?
We sell glass water jugs targeted at desk workers, to help remind you to drink enough water. I created it because I wasn't drinking enough water.
Running paid ads has been very hit or miss, and I don't have a knack for the marketing. But word-of-mouth has been good for us and we get the odd corporate sale here or there.
Fulfillment is done in house (I live in Toronto), and the warehouse is my basement!
Happy to answer any other questions :)
As a disclaimer - I don't have a lot of experience manufacturing in China, but I can tell you what I learned from my experience! And from what I can tell it is extremely common, yes.
Our factory works with other factories they know to provide that kind of thing. For our first order they gave us a choice of plain cardboard boxes or white glossy ones. These boxes were clearly custom shaped because they fit the product perfectly. After selling the first 600 units, I then asked them if we could customize the packaging with a design, and they sent us what's called a "dieline" (google it). Our designer did up a nice design on top of the dieline and that's what we're still using.
From memory, I think it was something like 45 cents more per box for the colour printing.
Another example is a little info page that we include. At the beginning I was printing them at a print shop, then opening each box, putting it in, sealing it back up, etc. I eventually asked the factory if they could do that as well, and they did (for a small additional fee)
I saw your other comment about down-selecting factories. How do you do quality checks? For example, as a wild hypothetical, how do you know the product isn't made in hazardous environments or isn't safe?
I did do a bit of QA myself: dishwasher cycles; hot & cold liquids (a good test of borosilicate glass); drop tests from very low heights (it is glass after all).
Most factories worth their salt also undergo some third party testing and I asked for these certificates which detail the chemical breakdown of the glass. Granted, I suppose these could be forged, and I would have no way of knowing.
Finally, there is quite a lot of back and forth with videos on Whatsapp, where you see the factory floor, and get a sense of the type of show they're running.
Part of the down-selection process is also just how willing each factory is to engage with these types of questions!
Also, one thing I'm really proud of is that a lot of our sales (around 12%) come from repeat customers. I've reached out to many of these customers and a lot of them tell me they buy the first one for themselves, and then the next orders are gifts for their friends.
Eventually I started running facebook ads. That worked pretty well for a while but I really noticed a change after the iOS privacy ads opt-in change. I've run experiments with reddit/pinterest/facebook/instagram ads since, and paid ads are overall just not profitable, at least the way I'm running them! We stopped running paid ads entirely two months ago, and I wish I had stopped a long time ago.
I know exactly what it's be unable to come up with the ideas that stick in putting your product in front of a receptive audience of buyers. Especially in this day and age, where it can feel hard to find the confidence or angle for an organic non-spammy message.
It also helps to have an existing network that would be interested, for example from a related product.
There are companies that you can pay to do marketing. I didn't use one of those, since it seems like many of them probably suck out all the profit from any Kickstarter that actually succeeds. But I imagine some of them could be good partners, depending on what you're making.
I second this. I launched my first and only campaign back in 2016, but even then media outlets were wary. Back when crowdfunding was new and exciting, many of them featured products that turned out to never launch. Once bitten, twice shy.
It's free to use and download with an optional Pro subscription that includes additional features and makes > $500/month.
Key things that have helped the revenue in 2021:
- Released a major new version 3.0 which blocks all YouTube ads and has kicked along sales and improved the conversion rate considerably
- Apple's small business program began this year that only takes a 15% cut instead of 30%
- After a long time developing and updating the app, it now includes most features requested by users, so it's achieved a 4+ star rating on the App Stores
- Downloads were originally weighted heavily towards the macOS version but it is now getting more usage on iOS which is growing the overall sales volume
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/get-extensions-iphab0...
The web extension support is what enabled us to deploy complete YouTube ad blocking on iOS in Safari – previously it wasn't possible to do this reliably just with the content blocker API.
On iOS, Firefox Focus (a single tab browser) comes with a content blocker. Hush is another good content blocker. Of course, Magic Lasso (free or paid).
And wow.
There's also the free version of the app which includes ad blocking along with a 1 month free trial of the Pro version available in-app to see if it's useful for you before committing to a full year.
Thank you for building this awesome product
Escape Team, a printable escape room https://www.escape-team.com
All revenue is generated via in-app purchases, and it is about 60% iOS, 40% Android.
People download and print a mission PDF with all the physical cut-fold-and-draw puzzles, then the app offers a $1.99 in-app purchase to unlock the audio narrative/gameplay for that mission. Most revenue comes from mission packs, which are $6.99 for four missions.
I am doing zero advertisement, if just works by word of mouth. I think that is because the game is a very fun and social activity. I also see hundreds (!) of custom missions being created for Christmas in the Mission Editor, there seem to be a lot of escape room-savvy Santas this year.
https://fiendishsudoku.com https://samurai-sudoku.com https://sudokuprintables.org https://sudokuhints.com https://extremesudoku.info https://sudukopuzzles.org https://easysudoku.org
Even just computer science it's impossible to know everything.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/
I figure since people are posting things making many times the $500/mo threshold, I should post something making many times less. :)
It's actually pretty cool to just wait a few months and come back to a stash of money. Bought a Quest 2 the other day and didn't give it much thought, partly because of little eggs like this.
The effort to grow it is pretty high relative to the returns, but it's also a lot more "sticky." Normal profit streams dry up if you ignore them, whereas I've had my band of faithful patrons for a long time now. People just like supporting those doing work that resonates with them.
Hardware investment is about $4-5k, plus a few hundred hours of development time.
It was never intended as a means of getting rich though, so I am very grateful for the support.
Well done, hope it makes you more some day.
I was very surprised your pages had a .gmi extension but were actually normal html. Then I figured your "memex" engine probably automatically translates gemini content to html and doesn't bother changing the extension (which in retrospect is more of a feature than a bug). Very nice.
I noticed your search engine is not available on gemini. Any plans for that? The spirit of the search engine is a perfect fit for the gemini ecosystem!
The search engine is available on Gemini, just not at that address. Try gemini://marginalia.nu/search
Maybe put a link to this search url somewhere on the main page, specifically for gemini visitors?
There's no indication at all that this url exists when browsing your pages.
I'm planning a bit of a navigation overhaul soon. Right now it's very hard to find all the various projects I'm running anywhere other than at https://www.marginalia.nu/
It brings in right around $500 a month. It is fun to develop, especially that I can dabble into frontend and UI design which is quite far away from what I'm doing daily.
Interestingly, it used to bring in much more but the heydays of apps are over.
It's kind of shocking though that 1 million downloads equals "only" $500 in ad revenue. I would have expected a much higher value. May I ask what the install base is?
Makes perfect sense really... especially considering it's so easy to assume "downloads" = "users"...
It seems from 10 ideas 9 doesn't work and even the 10th brings only modest results.
On the other hand, the Ti-89 still selling for >$100.
Site: https://forwardemail.net
Open Startup: https://forwardemail.net/open-startup
How it works is fully documented here: https://github.com/ladjs/i18n#i18nmiddlewarectx-next
1) Check URL (e.g. if /de or /de/ then it's a de locale - as long as de is a supported locale)
2) Use the custom function (if provided by the detectLocale parameter) for locale detection
3) Check the "locale" cookie value (or whatever the cookie option is defined as)
4) Check Accept-Language header
Regarding nothing being translated, there was an issue with our locales folder sync and that's being resolved soon!
The error was “could not decode raw data”
I've used a free email forwarding service which didn't give me this functionality (maybe this isn't common practice).
So ultimately, your open source code and business transparency[0] is what convinced me to pay instead of self-host.
Thank you for making it.
It's something that seemed small and simple to implement, but has filled a not-insignificant portion of nights and weekends for over six years now. Then covid came around and dried up most of my consulting income, so I figured why not really prioritize it and see how far it can go? Still small, but growing nicely now.
Also reluctantly abandoned the flawed "build it and they will come" mentality and started splitting time evenly between development and marketing. This has probably contributed more to the project's recent growth than several thousand hours of dev time. Take heed, o ye ambitious developer-founders! :-) Recommended resources: Product-Led Growth, Developer Marketing Does Not Exist, 80/20 Sales and Marketing, BusinessOfSoftware.org talk videos, Microconf talk videos (on YouTube).
The first year I started doing this, I grossed about $20000. Last year was bad. Our thrift stores shut down because of Covid. In late June of this year, I started back up slowly because our thrift stores came back. My gross for the last six months is $3,238.63. And again, because of Covid, I've stopped going daily like I was which cut into my fun money.
Last year I bought a brand new pinball machine from my thrift store finds.
Some tips:
If you can go every day, you only have to look at the 'new' stuff which saves lots of time.
The eBay app has a barcode scanner so you can look up anything that's in its original packaging by just scanning it.
Don't pass up anything vintage looking that's still sealed (even if it looks worthless). I sold nearly $100 worth of new in package vintage incandescent bulbs a little while back. I got the lot of them for like $10.
Save all the boxes you have coming to your house in advance of starting this. You can't sell stuff that you can't easily box up and ship.
Never use the post office or UPS/FedEx store. You can get a significant discount through pirateship.com (free to use, offers steep US Postal and UPS discounts) or even eBay's own shipping.
EDIT: A few more tips...
Once you're shipping at least one thing a week, buy a label printer like a Rollo Thermal Printer. It will save you lots of wasted time and energy in printing out, cutting the shipping label to size, taping it to the package securely, etc.
Invest in a good industrial shipping tape gun (not those cheap little plastic ones), get good brand-name shipping tape and a couple of large rolls of bubble wrap... also, start saving the packaging that comes into your house from your online purchases to be reused.
Get a bunch of 'newsprint' packing paper for packing up your stuff.
Basically: don't cheap out on supplies.
Stay organized. I use a set of plastic bins in the basement to store my items once they're listed.
If it is an estate sale run by the individual owner this is usually good and nothing more than a garage sale where everything is sale including the proverbial kitchen sink.
Don't skip on CDs, VHS, Cassettes or vinyl records! Though be sure to check the condition and that the correct disc is definitely in the case before you buy it.
Vinyl records are difficult to grade, so I would avoid them unless you can play them and reliably grade them OR they're sealed OR the surface on both sides appear immaculate. Sadly, they usually just add to my already overstuffed vinyl collection instead of winding up on eBay.
VHS and audio cassettes are hot right now as well, so if you see some classics, definitely give them a look on eBay before you pass on them. They usually have a barcode.
Typically someone will drop off their whole collection at place, so consider buying items to sell in a 'lot'.
A complete hardback Harry Potter book set is $100+! (usually $2 a piece at my thrift shop) I almost have a complete set from my many trips to the thrift store, so pick them up when you see them!
final eBay sale price
- eBay fees
- shipping // unless you have the buyer pay actual shipping
costs
- the cost I paid for the item
--------------------------------------
my net profit (hopefully more than $20 for my time and effort)
two refrigerator filters new in package ($3.99 each) - selling on eBay for about $40 each - retail for about $50 each. My total sale price was $69.95 for both (I undercut the lowest listing by a dollar or so and offered 'free' shipping)
My shipping cost was about $5. My eBay fees were about $10 - they take quite a chunk. $70 - 25 = $45 profit
I probably could have held onto them longer, charging a higher price and not offering 'free' shipping, but sales have been slow because I haven't been buying much so I made them too good to pass up.
$45 for about 20 minutes of hustle isn't terrible. It took me all of 3 minutes to list them on eBay. I plopped them on my kitchen table, snapped a picture of them, searched for the same item in the 'sold' section of eBay. Clicked 'sell one like this' link, filled in a price, selected a shipping option and clicked 'post'.
What was the net?
That said, I don’t think “we shouldn’t let everybody shop there then” is meaningful. Means testing is itself expensive and would likely penalize the very people who need thrift stores. Some things depend on the members of a society having a shared sense of what is and isn’t decent. Halloween candy is free but if I organize gangs of kids to empty out every candy bowl and sell it online, Halloween won’t be any fun.
If it can be scalped, it will be. I'm not sure if the people who like to say "free market" would consider this a negative or a positive.
Right now making about $500/month with $150 going to a 10x10 climate controlled storage unit. At the door going into our unit is a dumpster and we found about 5 huge bags of toys that my wife is going through and listing. We've sold about $30 worth of free stuff from that single dumpster.
In July 2021 I did really well but was going balls to the wall with it and probably made close to $1000 that month. But I got burnt out quick and slowly started getting back into it. My wife has pretty much taken over it as her part- to full-time job (once she gets started on something she can't stop). She has successfully listed about 5 items a day for the past month.
Absolutely correct about the thermal label printer. Bought a brand new one for a fraction of the cost off of FBMP ;-)
I bought a tape gun and wasted more tape than what actually got on the box so ditched that.
Agree with don't skimp on shipping products. Makes life way easier.
I’m at $4k/month and revenue is growing.
I do iOS consulting as well, but I’m inching closer to going indie full time.
For now most of the revenue is in macOS but my ultimate goal is to make iOS be my #1 platform in terms of revenue. That’s because, simply, I’d rather offload a lot of marketing and deployment/payment bandwidth to the App Store to focus on the products.
1. After entering my credit card details, I'm redirected back to your site without any message (I did receive a confirmation email a few minutes later)
2. It's a nitpick, but there's nothing I dislike more than forcing me to convert to my local currency. First the exchange rate is much worse than what my credit card charges, second I lose out on miles.
It's slowly growing, but to be honest the pricing needs to be increased. Profit margins are paper thin (ha!). Still though, it's been fun putting together the website, integrating Stripe etc.
Biggest issue is book publishers. Wow their ordering systems are archaic!
We can't hold stock on hand because we don't know how many subscribers we'll have each month. The issue with not holding stock is that we can't get reliable stock levels from any publisher or distributor. Ordering is a matter of emailing asking for a stock list, waiting to receive the stock list, then sending an email placing the order as quickly as possible. Frequently we'll order only to have them tell us books we ordered are on back order and we'll receive them in a month or two. It doesn't matter how often we say we can't do this, they don't care. I just want to get in there and build real-time stock management and ordering for them!
This is made substantially harder by the fact my wife creates associated resources and activities for each book. We can't deliver different books to different subscribers because she'd then need to produce additional activities & resources for each of the books. There's already 8 different books each month.
Do you think you'd have the same issues in the US or Europe, is it just local distributors don't have that much stock?
I'm largely speculating, however I suspect the situation would be slightly improved in the US/Europe. Some of the distributors are local branches of international publishers/distributors. Hachette for example do have real-time stock management and ordering, and I think even an API. I inquired about this with the local arm of Hachette that we order through, and they didn't really know what I was talking about. I assume they use it internally, but there's nothing exposed.
With the big distributors, I think the situation may be improved elsewhere in the world. However, given we're after social emotional development themed books, we do tend to branch out and order from smaller boutique publishers. I imagine their operations would be similar worldwide.
Looking at your site, the first thing I noticed is that you use AusPost (I'm assuming you'd be paying MyPost Business rates).
Especially for larger packages within the same city, Sendle generally has better rates and turnaround times.
Have you looked into alternative logistics options?
>>We can't deliver different books to different subscribers because she'd then need to produce additional activities & resources for each of the books.
Is there a reason you can't ship new customers books (and resources) from your existing back catalogue? This could solve the inventory problem too.
I can't remember whether this factored in, but we are ourselves reasonably remote. Technically Melbourne, but not really. So I think the typical advertised rates aren't always accessible to us.
It doesn't help that Auspost recently implemented some sort of automated parcel measuring/weighing and it's incredibly wrong. We use the exact same box for every single delivery, yet we randomly receive bills to our business account claiming we've underpaid postage due to the odd parcel supposedly fluctuating in dimensions, by over 10cm in some cases!
Needless to say, we will definitely be revisiting this again. Will for sure check-out Sendle again. Thanks!
Ahh, in that case you might be boned. Sendle rates can be pretty ridiculous for anywhere deemed remote, with pretty arbitrary definitions too.
Clyde and Warrandyte are "remote", for example, but Lilydale and Rosebud (!!!) aren't.
Sorry, I missed this.
We've discussed this and I'm keen to give it a go in some form or another. If we continue to grow I think it'll become a necessity. However, each month has a unique theme that's consistent across the 4 age brackets. So we can't necessarily send out previous month's stock as it won't match the month's theme.
What we have started doing though is selling one-off bundles in addition to our subscriptions. These are selling reasonably well considering we haven't really pushed them. So I think we may be able to offer past subscription bundles in a similar fashion. The only thing that gives us pause is that we've noticed other book subscriptions have attempted this and had issues clearing out their excess stock. Whether that's a reflection on their product, their website, or the fact people just aren't interested in "old" stock, I'm not yet sure.
My wife recently published such an emotional development book in Slovakia [0], and it became a bestseller there. She's now translating and expanding into other countries.
It would be nice for our wives to connect :).
A long term goal for us would be to work directly with authors. We'd love to publicise authors writing quality books, and I imagine it'd be helpful when doing a print run to have 100% confidence X books are going sell.
Unfortunately, we don't yet have enough subscribers for this to work. Because we only use a book once, and our subscribers are split across four age brackets (with different books), we're currently only ordering a small number of each book.
However, we really want to make this happen.
Wonder if there's an indie children's book writers guild you can tap into instead of having to go through publishers, which you can then print yourself from places like https://www.lulu.com/
Or somehow find companies that have the exact same need?
We started in January and are now at ~30k a month and growing steadily. Our revenue streams are split by ad revenue, patreon, sponsorships, and other various income split somewhat evenly. It took a year of working with seeing no profits, but now we are growing at a steady pace and just hired our first employee (an analyst, we are a finance youtube channel)! We see it more an an e-learning company with youtube as it’s main marketing base, as we are building out career courses (for investment banking and MBA stuff), a newsletter, and sites for helping people with their investments.
I’m the editor, and I vastly cut down my editing time by building out a program that does most of the editing for me using ffmpeg to automate 80% of the work. A video that might take 8 hours to edit only takes me 2 hours, and I think thats the biggest reason it feels like a sideproject still because of the optimized workflow.
I have used it to slice up videos I recorded in batch.
Not exactly a side project though -- more of a spinoff project, since I got started on it because Tarsnap needed FreeBSD support in EC2. Most of my recent work has been far beyond what Tarsnap needed though.
Our content is a lot higher quality than most other similar channels, mainly because the software I made automates so much. Which is why I think this one stood out. I effectively spend an hour a month or so just maintaining the software, while the actual work of uploading/making thumbnails is outsourced to someone I know. He spends maybe 15 minutes per video and we upload daily. It's a fun side-business to have but I don't expect it to be viable long-term unless I somehow pivot it into something else.
I have a web GUI for fetching thread comments from the Reddit API and where the user can quickly pick which comments should be filtered out. It also lets the user know if a comment is "bad" (violence etc.) from some automatic string matching so they can be filtered out or edited quickly.
Then on the backend I fill a HTML template with the comment data making it look pretty. Then I use Puppeteer to render and screenshot it into an image. Then I do a "segmented reveal", revealing one sentence at a time using HTML classes and CSS, depending on what part of the text is currently being read. It also scrolls down so the sentence currently being read is in the center of the screen, and does some other stuff like censor bad words using the CSS blur filter. Then I use ffmpeg with a bunch of complex_filter entries to add TTS audio to the screenshots, add transitions and stuff and concat it all together.
It's really not that complicated, but learning ffmpeg and making rendering reasonably quick and correct was a challenge.
All it takes is a little patience. I only charge $25 an hour and have more work than I can handle.
You're a better man than I! Also, raise your rates a bit. You are undervaluing yourself significantly. Even if you doubled your rates you Will still be in plenty of demand. And for those who simply can't afford it just give them a discount back to your old rates. I was charging 75 an hour for a long time and that was cheap in my area.
My goal is to fully automate the rest of my manual tasks in the business and focus on distribution for the next year. Hopefully that will allow me to scale to around $5000/month.
Take every personal productivity app and put it into an all in one, integrated experience. Available for free (self-hosted container) or in the cloud. No ads, written in Go/Typescript.
I look at working on Homechart as slowly whittling (coding) a large piece of wood (backlog) into a finished product. Thankfully the piece of wood grows in size every month, I really enjoy the whittling aspect. The thought of selling it or bringing in corporate processes (product managers, sprints, etc) would kill my enjoyment of working on it.
It's written in Rust, self-hostable, and does not use a DB of emails (like some competitors do).
Landing page: https://reacher.email.
It offers automatic SSL for unlimited custom domains and subdomains through dedicated reverse proxy clusters. Each comes with a dedicated anycast IP address so that your users can point an apex A record at it and be geo routed to the nearest region of your cluster.
You can add virtual hosts for domains, subdomains, or specific paths through a really simple API and it'll handle SSL and verification automatically in a few seconds during the first request.
It's been really fun to work on, plenty of hard problems to solve and it's been really useful to people, including myself. I had a baby boy this summer so I've had roughly zero time to market it in any way but there's still tens of thousands of domains running through approximated clusters now so it's been growing a little bit at a time on its own.
Current future plans are for edge caching (nearly done), ddos mitigation, and then hopefully something more interesting like colocating serverless workers or distributed apps maybe.
Also a different business model (pay a monthly rate for servers in however many regions you want) with some different benefits and trade offs. CloudFlare SSL for SAAS didn't publicly exist when I started this, and it's economics ($2 per domain) still don't make sense for a lot of apps.
In the future, I'll probably look at whatever CloudFlare will have a hard time offering under their business models, and do those so that people have options. Even just the same features but with different pricing models can be really useful to companies with different constraints and goals.
[link redacted]
Today, 90% of my time is spent on content marketing, followed by improvements to the website.
Data is automatically pulled once a day. Parsing the data feeds can be frustrating, as there is no consistent format or documentation, therefore I need to code around many possible edge cases.
I do all the web design and development work myself.
Stack:
Front end: plain JavaScript
Back end: Node.js
Host: $10 DigitalOcean droplet
Web server: Nginx
SSL: Let's Encrypt with certbot
Proxy: Cloudflare
Database: Postgres
Caching: Redis
Indexing: MeiliSearch
Most of the traffic comes from organic search. It took me more than a year of SEO work to get any traffic at all from search engines. I was a bit naive about how much marketing I actually needed to do - I almost gave up several times.
Started dabbling in freelance consulting/paid interviews and found I can easily get in the $500-$1,000/hr range.
So, been doing a few sessions a month and earning a couple thousand in extra cash. Not bad and met some interesting folks/companies in the process!
I've been thinking of something similar if I can build a sufficiently relevant specialty knowledge.
IANAL, but I believe in some states it is completely illegal for employers to add such clauses in employment contracts. Even if that clause exist, it is highly unlikely to be enforced in courts. We need to stop taking this abuse or living in fear of our employers.
Again standard disclosure, talk to a lawyer.
I'm certain it would not be considered legal where I am from.
Because they want a job?
And given this particular industry, there shouldn't be a need for anyone to give away that much to their employer. Simply walk away and find another position.
And before it is mentioned, ofcourse there are niche situations where that one and only position with this requirement is available and nothing else. But those are outliers and not worth mentioning.
What an entitled and out of touch attitude.
And thus brings no value to such a discussion. That does not mean I dismiss the existence of such situations. I simply decide to see the whole forest, rather than focusing on a single tree.
And in case it had eluded you, we who work in the tech industry (which I would hazard a guess is the majority here on HN) are all privileged beyond what most of humanity has ever experienced in terms of job security and wages (even when taking into account the great big gab between the lowest and highest levels).
https://pikaso.me which lets people post their tweets on Instagram
https://postsheet.com for sending emails / SMS from data in Google Sheets or Airtable
https://volt.fm for viewing Spotify stats and discovering new music
It doesn’t match my own data aggregated via regular scraping of the recently played endpoint.
1) I created a course called Learn Programmatic SEO. It's an excellent intro to SEO for someone new to the field, and it teaches the SEO approach through which companies like Canva, Zapier, Veed/Kapwing and others grew their search traffic to become $10-$100mn+ ARR generating companies.
https://preetamnath.com/programmatic-seo
The course was made in Feb 2021, I spent a week crafting and editing the content but the learnings came from before it. I've done almost no marketing for many months now and I still average $500-$600/month, completely passive income. Lifetime income from the course is ~$20,000.
2) I created a habit tracker spreadsheet which earns $50-$60/month, again completely passive.
https://www.preetamnath.com/habit-tracker-template
The template is really simple and easy to use, and I believe it can make more. I built another site called https://www.dailyhabits.xyz and I'm planning to drive some traffic from it to the habit tracker spreadsheet to grow revenue to $200-$300/month. Let's see how that goes!
Tech stack: Static site hosted on S3 (less than $1 a month) and Cloudflare for CDN.
vim file.txt
....
:wq
git add file.txt
git commit -m "New stuff. Read it."
git pushI shared it on Reddit and got great feedback. The app has completely changed since then and now it's a task management and organizer tool.
The app has premium add-ons where you can buy add-ons separately. It was getting complicated to manage it and the only scope to get more revenue was to add new features.
I moved the app to subscription based in May this year and it's been going great.
The app has $2.5K MRR and the only costs that I have is domain, server and Google Ads.
For each of my four books, I got paid a decent advance. One of the books has been quite successful and has earned back its advance, so I now get royalty checks. An audiobook deal and half a dozen foreign-rights deals have sweetened the pot.
It's not what I would call a passive income method, however, because a lot of work goes into it, even years after publication.
If you are considering writing a book, I'd highly suggest finding a literary agent. Worth every penny of their 15% commission.
What’s the work that goes into one of your books years after publication?
Or, since you mentioned your advance, I assume you have traditionally published. In that case I thought your publisher would handle all the operational issues, eg marketing.
Or do you mean the work goes not into the older books but into drafting and editing the newer ones?
A small number of top-tier authors -- those whose books are virtually guaranteed to be bestsellers from day 1 -- tend to have marketing and publicity teams that will continue to be active well after publication.
But for midlist authors like myself, the publisher will do a marketing/publicity push around your publication date, but after a few months, it tends to die out. Which is not to say that they won't seize a good opportunity if it presents itself. But generally it's the author who's setting up their events after that point and figuring out other creative ways to spread awareness of their book, e.g. writing regular blog posts to maintain their brand.
~5000$/mo
An investment tracking app with a unique view of things (events).
Started just before corona, since I needed something like this myself. Turns out a lot of people were searching for something like that. The fact that many other investment tracking apps are either ad ridden, slow or have a bad ux helped as well.
Technical:
- App flutter
- Backend go
- Database postgres
- Hosted Kubernetes on GCP
Flexbox Froggy took off and I kept going.
I’m nowhere near $500/month but learning to trade simply has taken me years and I’m very proud of my smol accomplishment.
None of these are zero sum games. Especially stock market. Stock market is not a zero sum game at all. https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/72945/is-the-stock...
Ofcourse, if you are not trading, or buy a company stock and hope to get dividends than there is no transaction and hence it is not zero sum. But if you are trading it is zero sum.
Trading algorithms are often implemented in Python/Pandas so learning hackerrank problems about stacks/queues can make one better at implementing trading algorithms. Some hackerrank problems involve hashes which are verified empirically which calculus. Studying calculus can lead to better understanding of the black-scholes theorem and brownian motion.
There's even an aesthetic nature to really good trades which can lead down an interesting path on gestalt theory and composition. Drawing charts is an art form too. Check out https://www.tradingview.com/u/tntsunrise/ for examples of minimalism in the stock market.
A previous commentor on this topic wrote that I'm studying tea leaves but what if for fun I wrote an image processing algorithm that processed the position of tea leaves in a cup and traded small amounts based on that?
Even something like moving averages has applications in programming language theory. It's easier to implement a moving average in a stateful rather than functional way. It's fun to figure out faster ways of cranking out new algorithms to trade markets which leads to better productivity. Markets move really fast. Old algorithms quickly become outdated.
As long as one does not make huge risks (that aren't well thought out), one can trade based on whatever their imagination leads them to. Anything can be tried and systematically backtested. Most traders won't think outside the box but it's so much more fun when you do.
There's so much synergy between math, computer science, betting strategies, art, drawing, data science and visual theory. Everything one studies in trading can lead to 10 insights in other areas. It's just a genuinely fun topic that can lead to a lifetime of happiness.
For backtesting to work, wouldn't one need to re-run (i.e., playback and not simulate) all inputs from what the real data was (instrument pricing, the weather, social media sentiment, whatever) at a time resolution finer than what your algorithm operates on? If so, that's a massive amount of data that may even be impossible to get.
Backtesting definitely reveals ways in which trading algorithms can fail though. It can reveal more scenarios than one would initially consider which is super helpful.
But, at the end of the day, I have not lost money. I have only made money even though it is a TINY TINY amount. I'm talking like dollars.
But it may not be possible for mere mortals to do this — perhaps all the profit is sucked up by HFTs with supercomputers.
In my hometown of Chicago, a lot of people used to be employed in the pits at the CBO market making. (Basically being around to take the opposite end of a trade and making small profits by selling/buying at better prices.) But those jobs were eliminated by HFTs. HFTs absolutely sucked up a ton of profits. All the traders I spoke to who had traded in the 80's, 90's and 00's said that trading got much much harder from the years 2005-2010.
Retail traders still have the ability to take speculative risk and buy/hold. It just takes a lot of time.
Basically we find the top rated products and summarize why people might like them.
It's nothing too fancy, and I got into it mostly to see if I could do it without investing more than 1 day a week into it and outsourcing the rest.
I'm more focused on my main thing right now (marketing agency) so the side project's been pretty stagnant.
It's really not THAT difficult to make $500 per month if you invest your nights and weekends into making it happen.
how do you get it ranked so it shows up in google search?
Edit: Oh, you said $500, not $5. Oops!
Site: https://remoteleaf.com
Open Startup: https://remoteleaf.com/open (need to update this page with latest stats)
This is brilliant.
Yeah - the whole thing is appengine, fitting fully in the free tier, and getting the html template for that home page working on every browser was the hardest bit. There's no login or anything, and the database is just one record per sale. Wallets are all pregenerated. Checking for theft just involves polling a block-explorer API and sending a mail if anything changed.
> ServerBaitThief.com retains ownership of the wallet contents at all times.
(wrong domain name)
Not gonna do that unless something more major breaks...
It is royalty free if they stump up the up front cost, but the idea that using this music will cause you to lose ad revenue on your YouTube videos should be front and centre.
Many of the people using our tracks are small YouTubers that aren't even eligible for monetisation. The bigger YouTubers who want to monetise are happy to buy a $39 license.
Can I reach out to you somewhere? You can also write to <username> at Gmail.com if you don't want to publish it here.
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/typenine-ultimate-t9-style-k... [2] https://medium.com/porsager/a-better-iphone-typing-experienc...
> Checkbot for Chrome finds SEO, speed and security problems before your website visitors do. Test 100s of pages at a time for broken links, duplicate content, missing titles, invalid HTML/CSS/JavaScript, insecure pages, redirect chains and more.
I started working on it for myself to help automate common checks I was having to do manually when working on websites. I wanted something that checks many pages at once, works on localhost as you develop, and will let you scan again after you've made changes to see if you've fixed problems.
https://youtube.com/parttimelarry
Revenue sources: ads, affiliates, sponsorships
I'm now working on building out a 3D printing course teaching others how to do the same.
I have 3 Ender 3's. They're easy to mod and work great if set up well.
The B2C tools (browser extensions, iOS apps, PDF viewer) do require some maintenance and customer support.
I launched BeeLine on HN [2] and have had the pleasure of working with various folks from the HN/YC community, including Insight Browser and The Program Audio Series. Hit me up if you have a relevant project and are interested in partnering — most of our HN-sourced partnerships are no-cost.
I don't think CRDTs are commonly used in video games, at least not yet. We're using data sync in this way for collaborative world editing. I think it will be much more common in the future as it reduces boilerplate API code and puts the focus on the UX (which we are definitely still working towards!).
Essentially, I'd get a purchase and have the files sent to the customer, costing me a couple minutes for the $20 or so from the sale. About one sale per day equates to around $500 a month.
The site is/was https://hsktests.com/.
I'll probably try something similar again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This looks awesome, downloaded and going to try it out.
Still working on my marketing pitch so feedback is welcome!
For custom domains, no. With https, yes.
Am using Caddy for this exact use-case at work. Thought it would make a good subscription service, but didn't get around to doing it yet. Well done, GP.
About half of the income is from algorithm profits and half from subscription fees. Feedback/questions appreciated!
These sorts of things blow my mind, and I have no idea where one would start.
Interesting that you trade your own predictions. That's a good sign.
When did you start this? There were companies like numberfire in the US that did this for American football and baseball.
Workflows + playbooks + iPaaS + task management
If it were back in the old days, I would've charged for it upfront for $5 or so. Instead I decided to make it free to try with an in-app purchase to remove all limitations. Targetting a niche customer base that have already paid at least $22/year for a Pinboard.in subscription and are likely to be disappointed by the current offerings meant I was able to go for a more sensible price. Right now the full unlock costs $15 and includes 3 platforms (iOS, iPadOS, and macOS) with family sharing enabled.
I was able to recruit 100+ beta testers and added some much needed features before launch. Since then it has been a steady pace of one update every month or two which adds either new features, UX improvements, or bug fixes.
The app is highly rated (4.8/5 overall rating) and has a good number of loyal customers who follow me on Twitter (@GetPinsApp).
Original tweet: https://twitter.com/quanganhdo/status/1346130521034788864
It's a tool that lets you create content sites based on your unused domain names. It's been growing steadily.
My video/photo/livestream production company produces roughly $6 to $12k per month in revenue at a profit of 40 to 60% depending on the type of work and whether I shoot it myself.
Estimate that 60% of work that I quote are projects that I shoot myself. The other 40% I produce the jobs and have contractors work on them.
I've recently shot for a Fox Studios documentary that has spanned pre-COVID to next year, which is a real highlight for me. I also happened to shoot for the broadcast team at the first music festival in Australia since COVID hit.
Now for NYE, I'll be shooting the promo videos for a large music festival which is an awesome way to spend the holiday season, getting paid to party.
I really love my job and I'm grateful for all the opportunities that it brings me, whilst being able to sustain myself with a full time career in tech.
I'm working on an image hosting side project and wanted to know. Thanks
Now making almost $500 MRR with 10 customers.
This is an app to share tasks, duties and manage rotations in Slack. It was an internal tool at my previous company (Algolia), that I rewrote with their permission as a SaaS and sold to them. Growth is slow, mostly driven by Google searches and Slack app store.
One out of 10 signups per month will eventually use the service. For the few ones I've been able to ask "Why did you leave", the answer is: they want a Google Calendar for Teams. Which I am slowly building. This way, the shift scheduling will be more flexible.
Show HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26025254
Yes! I know, we could have picked something non travel related since we launched in the middle of COVID but we have been thinking about the idea for a while and decided to pull the trigger anyway.
Here is the link if you want to give it a try: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/travi-your-trip-planned/id1536....
On a couple of occasions I traded shout outs with some newsletters and I think this was the most effective method for obtaining new subscribers.
Our aspiration is around SaaS for real estate brokers that I've dabbled with for many years. Stopped dev work due to boredom to "focus on the big picture". Kind of bleeding a bit since then but the products seem to be quite nice now.
Getting to the sales / marketing phase now and figuring it out (not our strong point ... painful stuff :) )
It could probably be higher, if I were any better and/or more persistent about marketing, but right now I'm focusing on the last two releases I have scheduled on the roadmap before releasing "1.0" (easy scripting and an easy deploy system), then I'll switch much harder into marketing for it.
The back-end is Node.js, Express, and MassiveJS for DB access, while the front-end is Vue 3.
I'm really happy with my choice of MassiveJS especially, instead of an ORM, since it allows me to make Models in Nodewood as simple JavaScript objects that can be populated either from the database or from API responses. This means that you can use the same model in the front-end and the back-end, with the same business logic, the same validation logic, etc. Saves a lot of time writing (and maintaining) a lot of code in two or more places!
I partnered with the guy who helped me build a fence to start a landscaping company. He was making $23 / hour prior to working with me.
I provide all the capital equipment (diesel truck, 14' dump trailer, Kubota tractor), and I do the marketing, recruiting, accounring, legal, management. He handles all bids and actual jobs.
It currently takes me less than an hour a week to do my work as I have delegated a lot to employees in my other company. Starting up was full time for a month.
I split all profits 50-50 with my partner.
I've been thinking about a similar approach.
> I partnered with the guy who helped me build a fence to start a landscaping company.
How did you identify him as a reliable candidate for a business partner? Would love to hear more. Thank you!
He had done lawn mowing and some landscaping for several years prior, but the primary work we are doing now he had not done before.
I strongly think the best opportunities for side gigs that make a lot of money are in the construction trades. Providing a service that people desperately need makes sales pretty darn easy.
> I use Stripe for direct sales on the website and RapidAPI (ex Mashape) as a m
How did you learn about "marketing, recruiting, accounting, legal, management" ? Do you have prior background? And what kind of market research did you do to find a hole in the market that you can fill?
I learned marketing working for another digital agency 15 years ago, recruiting I just carefully studied the market for years and tried and failed lots of time to learn how it worked, accounting I took two courses in, legal I learned dealing with several small claims and a couple of superior court suits plus a great class, management I learned from Manager Tools podcast and years of trial and error.
My market research was just observing how hard it is to find good construction trades help and then trying to put up some marketing to see if we got leads.
I love it because is 100% passive. Improvement ideas are very welcome.
I started with a couple of common ideas that we always had to implement for a lot of clients and I built a couple of simple Django-based services on Digital Ocean, in the free time I had from taking care of my newborn.
Therefore right now I'm running:
- https://getgeoapi.com: a GeoLocation API with additional data
- https://currency.getgeoapi.com: a Currency Conversion API
I'm terrible at marketing, so what I did was to leverage existing marketplaces. Slowly, over months, I started to build a reputation and build a userbase.
Profits range between 1000$-1800$ and I'm planning to expand to other marketplaces (I have a lot of customer who are on Shopify, even if I don't offer a Shopify app) and build other APIs. Hopefully I'll have more time once my sons go to nursery / school.
I use Stripe for direct sales on the website and RapidAPI (ex Mashape) as a marketplace.
I can't say RapidAPI is been smooth sailing: their payment processing is riddled with fees (thanks PayPal) and there are frequent outages and issues with their proxy. Still, I think using a marketplace can be a decent approach for developers who don't want to spend their days on reddit or finding their clients.
- SMTP - Maillog: which can eanble you to use IMAP - API integration to read email as JSON - WebHook - Complex routing with regex and custom rule from header - Sieve filter
Note: We're re-branding to https://mailwip.com due to nameconflict with hanamirb.org
- https://developer.boomla.com/
These are really 2 distinct products. I wanted to build a website builder that made sense, which I figured needed a new OS to avoid the nonsense complexity. (It's an overlay OS.) They go hand-in-hand, as every OS needs a killer app anyway, which is the website builder.
The website builder is taking off. I'm providing it for free, with the caveat that I'm going to start a domain registrar soon and I'll ask people to move their domains to this registrar, which will cost about the same as other registrars. So the revenue is not collected for now.
For me the long game is the application platform, which takes a unique, simpler approach. Lots of no-code users started hacking code on Boomla, I'm pretty excited about that. You just write the code and Boomla takes care of everything else.
I'm not sure it qualifies as a side-project, as it started out as such but now it takes all my time, even though it doesn't pay my living. Some border case I guess.
Not really a side-project per-se, but I do quite a bit of calculation on ROI, where to move what share of my funds to, and occasional yield-farming strategies so it does take a up a good bit of time
The goal is to have that stable enough so that I can quit and focus on my actual side projects that I am hacking on after work
For yield farming you are dealing with higher risk, but you can easily get 50%+ APY on liquidity pools, compare that with the 12% above and it's not too hard to get to $500 a week
Got into learning bodyweight fitness from reddit and lacking access to a proper gym back in the day. Started initially as a simple webpage, I've now built a mobile app that earns about $1000/mo, its a way for beginners to get into bodyweight workouts and learn exercises with youtube videos.
https://www.airsoftbazaar.com/help/terms-and-conditions https://www.airsoftbazaar.com/help/privacy-policy
- We allow users to highlight their listings, which means the listing is shown on the homepage and at the top of the selected category
- we have a verification wizard that verifies the users telephone number and iban, which we charge for as well
We’ve almost finished a Stripe Connect integration, which allows users to pay for items through the platform itself (they now pay in person or by bank transfer). This will contain a processing fee.
I do a ton of marketing by various blog posts I write, my YT channel (2k subs) and Twitter.
I'd also recommend making sure you are a real expert in whatever you are making content around. There's a ton of competition for online courses, you either need excellent presentation/marketing, or extremely credible.
Building an audience is also challenging - I did so using my YT channel [1], which also gave me a chance to get better at coding + explaining at the same time.
https://www.patreon.com/kyefox
You can find an endless flood of packs and presets for making music, but most of it is...not well-differentiated. With mine, I try to strike the right balance between novel and usable. You won't see "500 Serum presets for $39! Limited time!" from me, but the few I've posted and those I will in the future will stand up well against any of those impressive-looking packs.
I also just got Pigments! It has a lot of what makes Serum good, but it also comes with more than wavetable synthesis. I'm finding a lot of good sound in the combination of wavetables, analog emulation, and sample/granular synthesis. I'm likely to come to favor it over Serum in the future.
When I started, I want to make about $300 per month. Now that I make more, I struggle to find a way to scale. I'd be much more content when I reach $10k per month.
Tbh, I kind of burned out working on it, because I poured a lot of effort at one point and the end result wasn’t what I was hoping for.
Now I’m just trying to sell all of the remaining inventory and just move on.
It's static analysis SaaS that detects bugs and code smells and offers the fix right inside the GitHub PR, so no need to context switch - just click commit and continue with your day
I'm debating on testing market depth and just 3PL, but I don't want the risk of having inventory. The items weigh less than a few ounces, and really rely on inefficiencies.
I guess it's more or less knowing where to look, scrapping that data, reviewing depth (e.g. how many sold, continuously keep scraping and parsing) and seeing if margin is good.
Basically came as an excuse to kill time with regex. $1500 net profit minimum, I'm debating if I should really make it a solid business and hire some staff for it. But then that'd kill the joy and make it more work work.
The bot initially started as a fairly simple interface to display the real-time prices and graphs with the price history, but then as the core features were completed, it evolved into finding price spikes and dumps using simple algorithms. Once the user base increased I released a paid membership to get the best notifications while keeping other features free, and it grew organically from there! It's only been few months since it launched but it's generating well over $1k/m revenue so far.
https://vimalin.com - Backup software for VMware Workstation/Player/Fusion so that you can backup your virtual machines while they run.
https://vimarun.com - Automatically run a VM on startup of your host and suspend the VM on shut down (Windows only)
https://antview.dev - A WebView2 ActiveX control so that you can use the Edge browser control in software that normally would not be able to use a modern html5 browser control.
https://apps.apple.com/am/app/fityou-lose-weight-in-30-days/...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vietfitnes...
About $2K/mo, flexible but sometimes unpredictable schedule (log4j vuln on a Friday? Seriously?), friendly clientele, 6 years strong and going.
And I do about $1200/month running a piece of software that handles early and late fee charges for a couple large Airbnb hosts. <-- this one I actually hate, but it started with another vision and this is the service that worked. And now it's like free money and I know the hosts would just replace If I took it away.
https://vatcomply.com https://github.com/madisvain/vatcomply
The idea is that you can geocode, show exchange rates and validate VAT numbers all from the same API.
I am working on a dictation tool (https://flashdictation.com), but don't know what is the best strategy to reach teachers.
Despite extremely inconsistent marketing efforts, throughout 2021 residual sales netted me an average of over 500 dollars per month. It is wonderful that a project I worked on in college still fills my fridge every week by reaching new readers on its own momentum.
Would you be willing to briefly discuss what you use for scheduled emails? My plan so far is to just save email schedules into a DB table with a time stamp they’re due and have a cron job that frequently checks it, but I haven’t gotten a chance to test the scalability and performance of this.
I started this service during my last undergad year, improving the pipeline really helps me a lot in understanding crawler, schema designs which you don't learn from anywhere. This experience also helps me land my first job as well.
What sort of agency do you use?
Sorry if it's a stupid question, but I can't wrap my head around this -- are there "sell your web service" agencies or what?
(browsing on my mobile if it makes a difference)
I hadn't even realised it blocked such stuff by default ...
My only misgiving is that twitter itself is extremely negative, and that the signal to noise ratio (no pun intended) is fairly bad. I've been on the front lines of answering twitter during outages, and I'm scarred for life. It's been 6 years since I was at ASO and I just now can stomach visiting twitter without having a PTSD like response. So gathering review and comments from there is gonna be a hard one for me to swallow. I do like the fairness of the concept, but in practice I think the source (twitter) itself is flawed in this regard. I've seen people paying <$10/mo go to absolute war against a host on Twitter because the host wouldn't fix their hacked site. So... I'm biased against it lol.
bestinclassiosapp.com
Aside from that, I hope to ship another app next year.
Really need to make something better.
We sync Stripe (and other payment processors) to Xero to automate bookkeeping for indies/small biz. Doing about $2.5k/month.
~0.012 euros for each user reached.
E-commerce business selling medical supplies. Net ~ $4k/month.
Stack: iPhone, Shopify, Instagram, PayPal, Google (Sheets, Gmail)
Crossed $1000+ MRR pretty quickly and it's been growing organically since.
It makes around $1000 a month, depending mostly on its position in relevant search results.
I'm making a web app to help Musicians finding and booking places to play Music: https://noisycamp.com
- college professor office hours
- comedy open mic
- pizza ordering
- covid testing
- misc one-on-one meetings
- potluck parties
I am at $204/m for https://Bruzu.com
Cool API to generate Images on the fly.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fonts-for-stories-reels-art/id...
With all the chat about crypto mining I always wondered if it would double/treble a household’s bill, or is it actually more reasonable than that?
I also have the GPUs in a grow tent (designed for growing marijuana) with an 8 inch in-line fan hooked up to the supply of my home’s HVAC system. I’m heating my whole house with cryptocurrency and saving about $80-100 per month on gas (furnace has been off all winter).
Can I ask what your power costs are? The problem is that in high population centers in the US, electricity costs make it not economical.
What’s super nice about mining is that it’s quite resilient to market trends. For example if crypto crashes 50% the number of transactions on the blockchain skyrockets (everyone either buying the dip or panic selling) which results in more cryptocurrency actually received from mining. The value of the coin can go down, but I get more of it.
As a passive revenue stream it’s actually quite beautiful. Just don’t forget to pay taxes!
I am all for the further decentralization of this technology and hope others can profit from this also!
The only way OP's method is worse is the capital costs of the processors. The energy spent on the actual heating is converted with 100% efficient either way.
Here's a neat video about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto
My house is from the 1800s and only has heating for the kitchen/dining room/living room.
You’re not wrong, and I’m not saying other actual side jobs waste more energy necessarily, but the gap may not be as large as you think.
(hours spent on research, hardware acquisition, setup, and maintenance) / (net profit, after accounting for hardware depreciation and obsolescence)
As far as it being “Monopoly money”, >40% of US dollars were created since the start of the pandemic. Yes, there’s a lot of technical details there and most of that money isn’t “in circulation” and many would argue that the way this is being done shouldn’t be inflationary, but it’s never been done at this scale and we do have the worst inflation in 40 years so it may be a contributing factor. Contrast this with Bitcoin which has a fixed known supply, or other crypto currencies or tokens which may exist primarily for their utility, and IMO “Monopoly money” isn’t a fair characterization. Even BTC which has little in terms of “utility” can be used to move money equivalent to billions of dollars a far lower cost than the traditional financial system so it has its advantages.
At least blockchain related technologies enable new use cases, IMO it would be more fair to blame something like Electron and inefficient web technology replacements for native apps for being inefficient and wasting energy. But I wouldn’t do that either, it’s silly. The people making software don’t control energy policy and that’s the real issue.
Thanks!
Maybe a new 3090ti if I can snatch one at MSRP, but don't have the money anymore for it...
Was also looking into filecoin mining, but requires lots of HW (would have to buy at least a graphic card, 64gb ram, and lots of disks lol) and you've to pledge/stake money too for each block or tb committed to serve...
Looks like a hassle but high returns, so anyone with more budget than me and enough technical chops, might be inclined to look into that! Just saying
Thanks for all the info, got me into a lot of research, for now I'll keep on the build camp
The best way to learn IMO is to try it yourself with your gaming computer. I personally use a platform called NiceHash (not sponsored, nor am I advocating for them, there are alternatives) which pays out in Bitcoin. Try it out yourself, depending on your GPU you could be making $3-10 per day. Run it for a month or two, or longer. Transfer that Bitcoin to an exchange of your choice (Coinbase, crypto dot com, etc.) and sell it for cash. Then use that cash to buy more hardware (or beer).
The pool accepts 'shares' of 'close but not quite' values to prove that the client is actually doing work. Then, you had the emergence of marketplaces of hash power -- you could bid on or sell a specific number of hashes a second for a given time. The highest bidder would be able to point your mining hardware at their choice of pool with their payout credentials.
It is in the interests of the miners to prevent a situation where one pool takes a majority of the hash rate. Miners will migrate to smaller pools if one is getting too big.
- Where is the heat going? Are you exhausting it out the window? Are you going to burn your house down? - How are you distributing power? Are you using a PDU and a 240V 30A breaker or are you maxing out several 15A 120V lines? - Is the humidity dropping rapidly to dangerous levels, risking shock? Are you going to fry that brand new $10,000 ASIC miner because you dried out the air too much? - Did you short out the GPU pins removing a GPU from the socket? Did you just cost yourself thousands of dollars?
Safety is important not just for yourself and family but you need the hardware to actually survive. If you have a bunch of 3090s that just finally reached ROI 9 or 10 months in but the cards themselves just died, you’ve effectively broken even after all that effort.
Surprisingly GPUs are quite resilient so long as you’re not massively overheating them, and you open them up every now and then to replace the thermal paste and perhaps thermal pads. I have a monitor visible at all times that displays all the temperatures, and I have one eye on a humidistat making sure I don’t suddenly drop below 30% relative humidity on an unseasonably dry day.
There are lots of resources available. If you’ve ever built your own PC you already have like 80% of the knowledge you need.
I saw a similar post where the poster was making a decent amount but wasn’t yet profitable because of $30k in startup costs.
Also I need more airflow, I’m exhausting extra heat out a small basement window. If I want to expand I need to consider intake fans from a second window to keep airflow moving seamlessly.
I’m in a peculiar position where if I lease out a warehouse for $3000/month I literally deplete all the profit and break even until I expand more. I’m not sure where to go from here, suggestions welcome! So far the best plan I have is just wait until I can afford a bigger house with a big backyard, so I can build a mining shed out there.
In terms of ETH2, it is already quite profitable to mine ERGO or RVN or other proof-of-work GPU mineable coin algorithms (search for "what to mine" in your preferred search engine). The biggest question is, when ETH2 comes (whenever that is) will the profitability of ERGO and RVN increase or decrease with the influx of miners? Sure difficulty will spike massively, but in my opinion it is also likely that the value of these cryptocurrencies spike as well, however proportional.
The truth is no one really knows. I have an idea, but I could be wrong.
I'll probably stick with what they recommend once ETH changes. It does seem probable that the values of the new favorites will spike a bit once everyone jumps on board.
Do you think bitcoin-only asic miners are still a viable thing to set up as an ongoing thing? I feel like asic miners are currently a risky investment due to their nature of being linked to certain currencies.
Coincidentally my GPUs have not only paid for themselves and then some, but I could sell them used now for more than I bought them for. I’m lucky in that respect.
The community is not very trustworthy, but the software is actually really straightforward once you figure it out yourself.
Edit: There's wood involved, but not that kind of wood.