It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer.
It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough.
I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It feels like a conversation that is hard for others to participate in.
Do other founders feel this way? I wish I understood it better.
My dad has Parkinson's and I can relate. My take is: people feel bad for you but society doesn't have canned responses like we do for more common situations like the death of a loved one. This makes people uncomfortable since they don't know what's an appropriate reaction.
Please don't get discouraged though, I didn't even know this existed! The amount of people that will benefit from you bringing this up is >0.
My dad's not interested anymore in computers (more about the cognitive overload than the hand tremors) but this would've helped enormously during the early stages.
It might sound like I'm being ironic, but even if these phrases are cliched and almost contentless in a strict sense, they're very useful for signalling purposes, and when you're talking to someone whose relative is sick or dead, being able to smoothly signal that you care is actually really good for both parties -- comforting for the recipient and convenient for the sender (in the sense that they can easily make their concern and care for the recipient clear without too much hassle).
If you don’t mind me asking, what do you find hard to talk about?
I once experimented with a tremor-compensating extension and some css that hid the “natural” cursor and overlaid a cursor image instead whose position I controlled (using a basic rolling window average to make it steady). This basic test seemed to hold up.
That could potentially open up a whole new market for you…? Just curious if you’ve considered this. Don’t hesitate to reach out by email too if this sounds interesting!
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dictation-for-gmai...
You could maybe add one big transparent layer on top of the page which would catch all "real" clicks and generate synthetic mouse events under the layer at the stabilized position.
Browsers aren't an "ideal" environment (versus an OS where you might be able to hook into the mouse position/display at a lower level), but at the same time, they are ubiquitious, cross-platform, etc.
Might be worth a shot to expand this more. It's on my long list of side projects -- I'd love to collab with someone on it!
Your software looks amazing for me! Your web site describes my situation exactly. It looks like it's Windows only? Any plans for a Mac version?
Edit: I accidentally posted a truncated version of this earlier (I deleted it), exactly because of my tremor!
It’s like the nervous system can’t just jerk my hand around if there is more muscle for it to control.
Now my firearm accuracy makes everyone jealous at the range, people are like “wow, you’re such a natural”.
In fact, "non-invasive operation" is oxymoronic, because an operation or surgery is a medical treatment that is invasive.
Ideally (there's a pun in there, but it's not intentional) we could use our eyes to signal where we want our "focus" to be, but only when we want that signaling to happen. So a simple button held to indicate "track my eyes and focus on where I'm looking when I lift the button" might be useful.
This is peak development to me: to write high quality software to solve a problem I care about and make it available for others. If this sold zero copies, it would have all been worth it.
In terms of marketing (if you’re not already doing it), you could write blog posts about different topics around Parkinson’s + tech use.
The use a tool like Surfer SEO to make sure you’ve covered the search term topic cluster well, and then more people will find it via Google.
I put Adsense on my blog early on and I'd make maybe $10-20 a day with no shenanigans. I wrote a post recommending a route planner I'd found (pre Google Maps). A month later my income jumped to $100-200 a day and it turned out to be due to the route planner post being #1 or #2 for the route planner's name! I assume people were clicking on my blog post, then clicking on to the real site via the ad. This state of affairs lasted for several months until the algo improved and put the real site on top for good. I can't remember the exact total but I had a good $20-40k out of it and it paid for my wedding.
It required a little domain specific knowledge to create, and a recognized name among trading forums to initially market. Otherwise it's super simple and I'm continually surprised that there are no real competitors.
Basically allows to edit Salesforce data directly in excel. I bet they've got thousands of users.
There is someone that built something similar but for browser extensions (https://extensionpay.com/).
I'm not sure this side project could be achieved any other way.
Sometimes the profit margin was above 50% because I could source the product myself - but then it became an issue of what was my time worth and did I feel like quitting my day job which wasn't in any way stressful? I also had to consider the lifetime of an mmo, who could say how long the game would remain popular?
In hindsight, I should have gone all in and captured the whole market vertically, but then again it wouldn't have remained a side-gig that was on autopilot.
I'll probably write about it all some day, I think some people would find it interesting. I had to put a lot of hats on to make it work: developer, designer, marketer, customer support, accountant, security, ops, affiliate manager, ...
So the marketplace you're describing is not RMT then? You're facilitating in-game trades with in-game currencies, and making money some other way? (ads?)
My goal is to make people more prolific and creative writers.
It's not released yet, but I've gotten enough wish lists that I'm confident I will make some money when I do. It's also led to some freelance/consulting work that's kept me afloat while I shamble forth.
https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1469737611824713739 <- My feed is mostly my progress.
A little discouraged by some gambits that didn't yield results I wanted has me not talking about it as much as I was last year. Ah well I bet the hype energy will come back. There's a lot cool here.
The old version is actually still in the Wayback Machine [1]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20061214053323/http://designslic...
We ended up going to 6-7 games for free, sat in MUCH better seats than we ever could have afforded to, and had access to playoff tickets at face value. Further, my friends had access to great seats at reasonable prices and I avoided having to buy from resale sites (who I detest). 90% of the process was automated.
Could you elaborate on this a little? I think I can imagine, but am curious to hear a bit more about how this worked!
Generally, the electron app would pull face value prices and availability from [baseballteam].com, current resale prices from hubstub.com (<- changing name) and stick them into a mini database (object store). From there, I could use these snapshots to track sales across the resale site, determine a fair value for my tickets, and estimate the probability of it selling (by comparing ticket availability between days on the resale site).
Next, I had collected a list of email addresses from friends and a few posts on Facebook and Craigslist. The app had a button create/update a Google sheet with games/prices, pull in the emails, and batch email people (in groups of <50) the information along with the games. The manual part was marking the games as sold in the sheet, tracking etransfers and sending tickets, but it was little work.
As opposed to a "money making business".
(Still very cool though).
The way I think of it is more of taking advantage of an arbitrage (~20% discount on season tickets to face value). Instead of selling all the tickets to earn ~$2k each year, we kept and used the tickets to our benefit.
That's nothing something to be proud of.
You say your friends detest resale sites but it sounds like you just became one yourself unless I'm misunderstanding what was happening here.
Scalping tickets designed to be heavily discounted for fans, then re-selling them to anyone for profit is scummy even if the price still comes under the non-fan price.
At best you're just denying other fans the chance to get discounts for your own profit.
Every casual season ticket holder does this, but most of us don’t systematize it - we just send messages to our group chats, and if nobody wants the tickets for that game then the seats stay empty. There’s absolutely nothing scummy or untoward about OP’s approach.
Given OP bragged about seeing "6-7 games for FREE", it implies a lot of profit was made on the rest of the re-sold tickets.
There's a big difference between being a season ticket holder and buying multiple season tickets for the purpose of reselling and subsidising your own ticket.
scalping tickets isn't morally distinct from any other form of "buy low, sell high."
Where there is sufficient demand for things to sell out to people who want the product, but are unable to get it because someone has used a bot to scoop them up at superhuman speeds... that doesn't feel exactly like the moral equivalent of other forms of arbitrage.
_Especially_ when the sellers themselves would prefer that not happen. The bands want the tickets to go to the fans at no higher than the price the venue sets. Sony wants more gamers to have PS5s at the price they set.
It feels like the marketplace would function perfectly fine, and the true seller and the final buyer want it to work one way, but third party interlopers are taking advantage of other aspects of the scale and technological basis of our marketplace.
Market makers provide value; scalpers rent seek. I think that's a valid moral distinction.
> Market makers provide value; scalpers rent seek.
In the United States, event tickets are functionally a monopoly. In practice, Ticketmaster/Live Nation is a rent-seeking market maker which crushes small events and blocks value from being created.
Here's a deep dive on that, just under 20 minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Y7uqqEFnY
This doesn't mean that scalpers can't also be rent-seekers, but given that scalpers are highly competitive and Ticketmaster is a monopoly, I think the scalpers aren't in a position to seek rent.
This part has a similar flaw:
> someone has used a bot to scoop them up at superhuman speeds... that doesn't feel exactly like the moral equivalent of other forms of arbitrage.
High-speed trading is all about bots and arbitrage. This isn't the first time those two things have been combined. There are corners of New York where they're practically synonymous.
This one has factual issues also:
> The bands want the tickets to go to the fans at no higher than the price the venue sets.
It's only true of _some_ bands. There's evidence (in that deep dive video) that Justin Bieber has probably scalped tickets to his own shows, at scale.
I'm not saying that if Justin Bieber does it, it automatically can't be scummy. That seems like a very very hard argument to make. I'm a musician and I would not want to have that kind of relationship with my fans (if I had any, beyond a few repeat listeners on Spotify).
I'm just saying, there's a lot in this comment which makes intuitive sense but doesn't actually line up with the reality of the situation.
You’re making a very strong assumption here.
Teams are selling at a bulk discount, that’s it. There’s nothing to suggest that they are doing it to be benevolent.
Not entirely unlike what has happened to the housing market in cities like London or Vancouver.
If you're okay with huge swathes of the population going without whole sectors of entertainment because "it's a free market" then you're entitled to that opinion. That isn't a society I value.
It's my opinion that tickets should be sold for as much as the market will handle assuming the additional proceeds go directly to the artist. Any other approach is charity at cost to the artist.
That isn't the reality of the world.
Maximising the profit of the entertainment "artist" is in reality maximising the profits of the rights holder which in many cases is itself a large corporation such as the NFL.
Do I value the consumers of football over the NFL? Heck yes I do!
It's why for instance Germany has their 50%+1 rule, to help make sure that fans rather than corporate owners benefit from the sport.
Even in the case of things like solo artists, I don't want to live in a world where only the super rich can see an artist live, and everyone else has to suck it up because it maximises the money for the artist.
In reality there's only one Red Sox or Ed Sheeran and you can't magic up another because of market demand.
What I don't think you realize is that rules against scalping help create a mono-culture. Sure huge swathes may be barred from a Bieber concert or whatever is popular today but if that happened the dearth of access to that content will lead to its decline in popularity.
If we let that happen it would open up room in the market for smaller artists and artists at every other level to thrive and build audiences that would otherwise be glued to whatever the corporate record companies are hocking.
A similar way to think about it is that most people would love to have their own yacht but scarcity makes that very difficult. Does everyone deserve a yacht? Instead, with a market, a few super rich get to have a yacht (woopty doo) and the rest of us who want a boat own something smaller and more reasonable.
With more money, you can't build more Biebers.
And given that music is especially easy to copy with the internet, it doesn't follow that their popularity will decline, it simply means that fans will be limited to only watching via TV or the internet rather than being able to attend concerts.
Likewise with sports and sports teams.
Money is the means to prioritize needs in a world of scarcity. If everyone just had more money it would instantly become worth less (not worthless).
You are conflating the live entertainment market and the recorded entertainment market. People will still want to see live music even if it is not some blockbuster name.
Besides, when the rubber meets the road every big name concert I've been to at a stadium size venue is essentially the same as watching a recording because you just watch the big screen anyways.
If you really want the best live experience you just book the artist for your birthday gala. Do you think we should all be able to do that too?
They are expensive, but that is different to scarce.
They especially aren't inherently scarce, which is what I actually said. You missed out the most important word.
There is a natural scarcity to top sports teams or top music artists. Artists can't be cloned and there can only be one champions league final each year.
The other side is even if you want to go to a concert and buy tickets a year ahead of time. What happens if something comes up? You can't resell them. Having the ability to resell your tickets is a huge value to people intending to go to the concert.
You can argue that there should be a better distribution mechanism and I agree, but scalpers are not the problem
They are effectively rent seeking parasites that distort the market and make things worst for regular people.
There’s nothing wrong with reselling tickets if something comes up, but if you buy up bulk tickets to flip them for profit that is scummy behavior.
>>if you buy up bulk tickets to flip them for profit that is scummy behavior.>> For me to relate to this, the "buy up bulk" part would have to be qualified. Does that mean buying so many that the market is cornered - hence forming a monopoly? If that's the case yes - I can ethically map monopolies and anti-competitive behavior to "scummy behavior".
But if, for whatever reason, I have some statistically non-significant amount of tickets - say 10 or 15 for a 50k-100k stadium event - and standing on the sidewalk outside, there is plenty of demand for those tickets at say double the original price, it's not clear to me how that is ethically problematic any more than the buying any other asset that you expect to appreciate.
But maybe what I'm describing does not fit the definition of "scalping"?
The system would work fine if there weren’t rent-seeking parasites who offer no service other than taking tickets off of the market that would go to regular people.
I wish artists sold tickets in batches starting a month or two out, but they don't. So this is the system we're stuck with.
Borderline perhaps.
That said, I've got manufacturing and fulfillment mostly outsourced, so my day-to-day is really marketing emails, managing FB ad spend and sending product to the warehouse when I run low on inventory. Given that, it's looking like this is going to get relegated back to a side project while I find myself a real job.
While I'd obviously prefer to be making a boatload of cash, it has been really enjoyable so far, and I have learned a ton. The most painful thing has been Apple's privacy changes - before those, I was running FB ads that were effective enough to be immediately profitable from customers' first purchases. Now the cost of acquiring a customer is greater than the profit I make on the first purchase but less than the lifetime profit I make from a customer, so I can still do it profitably but it requires investing cash up front.
I also have a fairly large YouTube back catalogue of ~1,650 videos. While most of my videos get less than 50 views, I still generate ~$500 a year in AdSense.
I'm making a pretty bad job monetizing this TBH. I originally wanted to sell the HW myself but turn out that with real job + young family with the little energy and time left I can't do more than "here's the code".
Turn out a few makers pick it up and are nice enough to give me a cut on their sales. Adding user donation I maybe made 2K out of it this year, not much but better than nothing I guess.
I wrote a retrospective about the last three year working in this if you like more detail [2]
There are options out there but half good build but not good or easy.
I'm working on an e-learning platform that aims to solve a few pain points my sister encounters in her job as a teacher. I'd be curious to hear about your experience.
I created a SaaS bootstrap for Javascript called Nodewood [1]. It actually started as just a template for me, because there's a lot of setup for each new JS web project that I kept skipping to get to the "fun" stuff, like I'd just hard-coded the user as ID #1 instead of writing user registration/login code. Since then, it's grown to also have form validation, a starter UI, teams support, subscription support with Stripe, an admin panel, a CLI tool, and I'm currently adding a deploy option via Pulumi [2].
I've sold a few licenses, but also it offers me a platform to "scratch my own itches", which then become available to the people who bought a license.
[1] - Nodewood: https://nodewood.com [2] - Pulumi: https://www.pulumi.com/
Do you offer any way to view the source before purchase?
I've built something similar for my favorite tech stack but haven't had any sales yet. I find it useful in my own projects and I've seen other similar projects make some money (like JumpStart Pro for Rails) so thinking it's something around my positioning / offerings rather than full lack of a need.
Some things I think you're doing really well:
* Great sales copy and documentation
* Great aesthetics -> adds to "trust"
* Message bot for feedback
Qs:
* Q1: Did you do any customer research to help determine what features to build?
* Q2: What did you find (if anything) is the biggest reason people choose to use boilerplate rather than rolling their own?
For those interested -> CloudSeeed - SaaS boilerplate for Sveltekit + .NET + Postgres - https://cloudseed.xyz/
https://randomcountrygenerator.com/
I didn't touched it, sometimes for many months in a row.
But still makes a decent passive income.
I could have my bots play minigames as long as I could write a basic AI to do it based on the the objects on screen. It also won't flag any anti-cheat software because it doesn't hook into the game at all, just watches the screen and emulates a mouse+keyboard.
How'd you make people aware of it?
More than 860 users per day, on average. Continuously growing user base. Profit through Met-Art affiliation: https://partners.metartmoney.com
Oh nvm demo video. You select a portion of the image to get other images "like it". Very interesting.
Where does your domain name come from? How do you get people to trust that install? What's keeping you out of an app store? How do you source update material?
I expected to see pr0n related stuff in this thread, but your post struck me as super curious-inducing. Thanks.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haujobb
People trust the SexTechGuide assurance that the app is clean:
https://sextechguide.com/apps/android-apps/melondream-apk-re...
Also, it appeared in The Register and Wired, both big-name news sites:
https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/18/smutfinder_ai_is_now_...
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wired-awake-190516
Most app stores don't allow pornography.
Every article in our help center is a Google Doc in a folder within our Google Drive. We simply pointed Kbee to this folder and it rendered all of the content in a standalone, external wiki that our users can access.
Would love to get your feedback on it if you get a chance to check it out :)
From there, we tried our hand at a few failed experiments (Lifetime deal platforms...Avoid like the plague) and ultimately settled on optimizing for SEO as we realized most of our paying subscribers are finding us organically on Google. Decision makers for Kbee tend to range from single-person teams to government organizations so we think optimizing for SEO is the best way for us to continue attracting the right type of customer for Kbee.
Happy to share the list I mentioned above if you're interested!
Most people have never encountered the problem, so it’s hard to talk about this in general company.
But it’s solving a pain point for a few hundred finance/consulting folks with Macs, or tech startups buying Macs for their finance/strategy teams.
Haven’t worked on this as much since kids came, but I’d love to figure out better ways to get this in front of people who need it.
1. People in school (MBAs, late college undergrads mainly) who have past experience with windows excel. You might be overpriced for them.
2. People at work (tech/consulting/finance mainly, mostly analysts) who have past experience with windows excel and currently use Macs. You may be underpriced here
Maybe try pushing this on some of the MBA forums?
But I’m not sure how to do price differentiation when the scope for product differentiation seems limited (it’s a fixed feature set replicating alt shortcuts). I’ve mainly given discounts to students who write in.
Appreciate the other comment suggesting expanding this beyond Alt shortcuts - that could be one avenue.
Should I keep all ideas in a spreadsheet and then choose one, or make a grading system for ideas?
I choose my side projects more emotionally; generally based on things I'm excited about, think will be fun to make, or involve things I'm curious to learn. Happy to share more if interested.
Once you figured that out, make a side project, using the method you discovered, that helps you choose which side project to work on.
Then start working on that side project.
1. Any idea that comes in your head, jot down in a card or list. This is just to get in the habit.
You may sometimes write a full page about the idea, sometimes it’s a sentence.
2. Quick triage, is this for “fame” (it’s just a small, time bound, scoped, fun project with no explicit objective or plan to earn money), or “fortune” (you’d only want it to be a business, prepared for months and years of work), both are fine
3. For “fame” tasks, pick ones that scratch an itch where you want to learn something or solve a problem (simple website, VS Code plug-in, OSS repo on GitHub, a tool/script you wrote and use locally you want to offer to others as a website, etc) something that’s time bound and has a very simple and complete scope.
4. For “fortune” tasks, decide which ones you feel are interesting, you have knowledge about the problem personally, you see revenue generation possibility, you can do it on your own or with minimal resources to start, you know it’s going to take years, but you’ve got something encouraging/progress to show yourself within 1-2 months
That’s how I think about ideas lately.
It doesn't matter if one idea could be the next big thing if you aren't motivated to complete it and make it well. You'll execute better on the ideas you are interested in.
- Ensure there's demand. Go on google and type in your problem or solution, are there a lot of results and ads? If yes, there is demand. If the top results are poorly made blogs with only adsense for monetization, there might be a problem. If there are literally no competitors, drop the idea immediately.
- No moat. For solos your priorities are inverted to VCs, pick a market that's easy to attack with lots of competitors where you can be the 50th. Ideally the market is somewhat niche, so it will be overlooked by larger companies.
- It's hard to compete with big companies as one person, but you can turn weakness into strength by offering a product that is simpler and easier to use (ie. fewer features) unbundle instead of bundle.
A great way to find these niches is through the "free tools" section of large websites. This means it's a niche they're using for lead gen and seo purposes. eg: https://www.shopify.com/tools https://www.wordstream.com/wordstream-graders https://www.hubspot.com/resources/tool
Just wanted to note that I make >50k/month, and this is the opposite of the approach that I've taken for about half my projects. I look for niches that I think will grow a lot, but which have no competition at the moment because the niche is so small. I build the site, SEO-optimise it, and then just leave it. I do this for lots of little niches that I think will grow, and about 1 in 5 take off. Some of my biggest sites didn't take off for years.
> No moat.
For my strategy building a moat is critical because I have way too many projects to keep on top of them and fight off competition that have a 1% better feature-set. The product should ideally get more useful "automatically" as it grows (e.g. user-contributed content, or something like that).
---
My general advice: Learn basics of SEO, look around at what people want, build niche tools/things to help them get what they want. Keep repeating that and you'll eventually hit upon an idea that gets really big. Keep it simple (and cheap!) - a bunch of my projects that serve thousands of users per day run on Glitch and Replit (yes, really). Try to stick to project ideas that don't require much ongoing maintenance. There are likely many other good strategies - this is just my approach.
But for the past several years, I have been only playing niche sports: specifically Canadian football (CFL). It's way smaller stakes but the competition is much easier and I've written my own analytics tools so I have a nice edge compared to NFL where there is tons and tons of high quality content and analysis. I've profited over $20k during the past three seasons.
But to try and promote it I created a free automated email subject line checker which people loved -> https://sendcheckit.com
A couple years in and we've checked around 5 million subject lines for people.
There's an embed API that I originally let people use for free, but after it started being really abused I now charge a small annual fee for access. It's not enough for a full time income and I don't really talk about the site that much as it doesn't fit in the "portfolio" of my other professional interests which are mostly cybersecurity related.
https://vc.ru/life/189035-doooooom-2-s-shestyu-nulyami-kak-y...
I wrote a simple UI where she can drop an imgur link, select tags specific to the pic/vid, and then it generates a list of subreddits to post to and suggests a time and a title.
I made another tool where you can drop in a bunch of pictures and select a date range and it will schedule them to onlyfans and fansly at the same times. We make 500-1.5k a month which just about covers lingerie and occasional weekends away. Could probably make more but neither of can be bothered with all the baiting tactics others use to try and keep/extort fans.
It's not something we talk to anyone about for obvious reasons.
We grow the user base slowly, organically, deliberately. Our quite reasonable cost can be a barrier to entry for some users but our particular solution to this particular problem can save people many thousands of dollars over the course of a few years.
edit/ Typos...
Are you betting or cleaning data and reselling it or displaying it and earning income via ads?
- https://manifold.markets - https://www.unitarity.com/app - https://futuur.com - https://predict.hypermind.com/hypermind/app.html - https://www.metaculus.com - https://polymarket.com
The app has made me a fair amount of money, but I don't really mention it to my friends or family. The thing is, I am Norwegian, and most people here use iPhones. Since the app is only available for Android, the conversation usually ends in an -oh, anyway.
The app (AnyTracker):https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shervinkou...
Thanks.
The bad reviews usually come when people try to track from websites that are JavaScript heavy, where the app does not work so well. Maybe I should have been more precise; it works on most websites, not all.
It goes pretty far beyond the standard retirement calculators, and is finally at the point where I'm seeing better than minimum wage on all the time I've invested on nights/weekends.
Perhaps this doesn't quite fit with the "not talk about them" part of your question though. Past feedback from the HN community has been a huge part of shaping the development roadmap and keeping me energized about the project.
Never really talked about it in my software circles (until now), but it’s probably time, as we’re doing mid 7-figures/yr, growing rapidly, and have three ft employees (sales and shipping). It’s become my ft gig as well and I couldn’t be happier.
Currently I’m considering hiring another dev with a similar passion for the game, ideally someone with computer vision experience. Austin location preferred but would consider remote.
I did it to be able to call myself a full-stack software dev. Basically, get over my imposter syndrome.
Am now playing with that idea for a Heads up Display for AR glasses, using SwiftUI [2]
The first use case is to port a visual synth, I created in the early Naughts, which used a static template on a Wacom Tablet[3]. The interface controlled > 2000 parameters.
The question is: how to control thousands of real-time parameters with virtual touch?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31676445#31677125
For the longest time I had a solitaire app for Mac that I ran as a side-hustle. A couple of years ago I programmed solitaire from scratch for the web. Fast-forward a few years and the site starts to generate some actual traffic. I then decide to put ads on it even though I thought you couldn't really earn money on ads anymore. It didn't generate a lot of money, but enough that I wanted to keep working on the site.
Today the site is earning $10.000/month from ads. It wasn't until the site started to earn $5.000/month or so that I actually started to talk to people about it.
You can try out the site here if you want: https://online-solitaire.com/.
If you're an incumbent, you'd rather not call attention to your segment which might be inviting new competitors and lower margins.
Pulls funny photos from a Flickr group. People write funny captions and vote for their favourite. Some of today's active users have been on the site for more than a decade.
I used to pay the £50 monthly prize out of my own pocket, but some generous users offered to fund the prize themselves via a whip-round.
So the small amount of money from paid link advertising on my sites (approx £45/month) now covers the hosting. In my head, that means I can justify spending my free time modernising and grow the site. I'm slowly upgrading it from PHP to http4s+ReactJS
There are some fun tech things I enjoyed inventing on the site - real-time collaborative mind-mapping to help people think of caption ideas; bots that identify bad user behaviour and create forum topics to start a private discussion with the admin team; real-time updates using websockets; a system that automatically identifies the best voters and rewards them with a quota of "super-votes" they can use to vote more than once on the best captions.
It went on for a few years. Ads revenue peaked at 700£ per day, (200£-300£ being more normal) which was nice money, even if I wasted it all on a failed startup. Eventually Google banned us from AdSense removing half of the revenues and I quit the project.
So this content creator I met had the idea of working a little hard on the product by creating a little scene of things (as opposed to just dropping a script in a barstool) and then also writing the code to animate the avatar in some kind of loop. So for example, she created a little patch of garden and a wheel barrow, and when someone chose to camp on it, their avatar got on all fours and appeared to be working on the garden, like weeding or whatever. Another one was a ladder that could be placed by a window and the avatar would climb up it and appear to be washing the windows. We had 5 or 6 different campers like this. For obvious reasons this product blew up. I don't remember what she sold them for but at the peak I was pulling in $100 a day and my cut was only a fraction of the total cost. This continued for at least a year before we had a falling out about another product and she dumped me from the cut.
=> https://www.facebook.com/groups/virtualbeings/posts/14218620...
Never intended to pitch for seed or anything it's just happened naturally and as a result of the live performance.
https://www.smart-edit.com/Home/Buy/
It sells around 20+ copies a month, usually to published or self-published authors of fiction. It's been selling at that level for about 8 years now. 1 in 3 sales is for the Pro version, which constantly surprises me.
I haven't updated it in a couple of years. The last substantial work was back in 2018. It never gets mentioned on writing websites anymore, but sales still trickle in.
I've moved on to other things, but it's nice to see those emails come in during the month.
It really helps me in my everyday needs.
It currents helps about 4K+ users a month. Still blows my mind.
I figured I would really just be making it for myself but decided to make it a product and have made a few hundred dollars in the first months. It pays for the hosting costs and gives me some motivation to work on it. It's also been surprisingly stable and my monitoring is good, so if I am not actively working on it I can just walk away and forget.
It involved me working all weekends and 4 to five hours after work, and also spending nights playing poker in Poker Stars.
Basically, if I wouldn't have built the app and just played poker without using the app suggestions I would have made more money.
I am still convinced that given some hundred man year of work and a lot of money to buy GPUs, I can make some millions with it. Not sure those millions would be worth. :)
The hardest thing about it is that talking about budgeting is really personal. People are more than willing to talk about their process but things get awkward when it gets specific.
I can’t screenshare with someone to onboard them because that would involve seeing every bank account they have. Im curious if anyone has thoughts on how to solve that problem?
But this may be the only way.
Your `/book/introduction` page could use a little css change for the nav sidebar (zoom out on your screen to see what I mean)
I think removing this css will help
left-[max(0px,calc(50%-45rem))]
Will do!
My 13” MacBook doesn’t make it easy to test at wide screen widths =D
You have to "Zoom Out" (Ctrl + -) on the page for testing on wider screens. For testing smaller screens, zoom in.
It'll be the 10th year on the App Store in September, I need to spend more time on marketing instead of building.
It is making approximately $0 per month :)
What was your motivation in building it?
I intensionally keep it 100% free and no ads, because good news should not be for money and should be easily accessible.
A neural network that would recommend buy & sell signals on various stocks in a hand-picked index, that had an invite only daily newsletter called "Justin's Junkmail." I made some good money from putting one ad that I hand selected into each newsletter, at the footer. The entire thing ran almost on auto-pilot, other than me fussing over the wording of the auto-generated recommendations and which ad to let through for the next week. The newsletter mailing list grew organically, and without any prescience, just prior to the dotcom bust, I sold the mailing list and software that ran it for "a nice sum of money." The new owner drove the entire thing in to the ground - but that's a story for another time.
A year later I wrote a neural network to pick the winners of horse races, with a piece of software you could download, and also, again, a daily newsletter that grew organically. The newsletter contained information on predicted winners at select races, previous day's results, and how accurate the predictions have been for the past 24 hours, the past month, and for various jockey, trainer, horse and track combinations. The newsletter drove the sales of the software. I sold that entire package for "a nice sum of money" back in 2004-ish. It ran on auto-pilot pretty much, other than having to deal with refunds, and the outsourced worker I had entering all the race data manually (to get around a website scraping licensing issue) not finishing the data upload in time for the newsletter to publish.
I built a small business website that would match borrowers (business owners) with lenders (private and institutional investors, banks, equity credit), and that made "some pocket money" each month, and ran on auto-pilot, other than having to deal with the usual IT issues of a website written in VisualBASIC and running on IIS, which I eventually sold "for a nice sum of money" back in 2008 (which unfortunately was used to pay off some debts of my video game studio).
I built a clutch of mobile friendly funny videos websites, with hand selected ads, that ran on auto-pilot. Unfortunately I abandoned it due to bad advice from a business partner. I now wish I had fired my business partner (or never got involved with him) and kept working on the websites.
I currently have a country-wide (United States) information website on licensing requirements, job opportunities, training facilities, and career advice, which runs on auto-pilot other than me coming up with a dozen topics to write about that month, which is really just me trawling through two or three popular web forums on the subject to find out which questions are hot that month, and then I outsource the writing work for the articles. The website makes "lunch money at a nice boutique cafe with over-priced soup" after all expenses (several hundred dollars a month for writing and graphic design) are taken out and has been running for about six or seven years now.
I have a whole bunch of videos (1,500+), not under my personal brand, that I've created that make a few hundred dollars in ad revenue each month that I, fortunately for the viewer, do not appear in. I'm simply the voice over.
I am currently working on another idea...