I am interested in knowing what business you run is it a mobile app, website, Saas?
And how long it took you to reach $2k monthly revenue?
I made a gross income of around 3K a month last year out of Royalties on the soft for each device sold. It's Apache 2.0 software so people can do whatever they want.
I started making money when I decided to list on the GitHub README the list of manufacturers/makers that where sponsoring the project. (Only one person at that time) Soon after the others offered to give royalty as well.
I even got a Chinese company, notorious for selling "clone" of OSHW projects, to support the SW development as well via GitHub sponsor.
I've been working on it for the last four years. I entertained the idea to make and sell the hardware myself. But in the end I learned that's it's not something I'm interested to get into. What I really like is working on the software.
It naturally pivoted into a more community driven project where multiple makers are selling various variations of the HW.
I wrote a retrospective last years [2].
I talked with the makers or manufacturer and we reached an agreement. So to me (and them) it's royalties.
It's not a contract, as the term "royalty" implies, but it is a royalty in the sense that it's determined per unit sold.
It sounds like acknowledging the sponsors is "the right thing", good Karma, or simply advertising for them. Not everyone wants to just rip off open source and not give back, they're willing to share the wealth if you make it easy and let people know they're doing it?
I need to set up github sponsors myself. We get the occasional request "how can I contribute money to you guys" and we always say stuff like "just spread the word". I keep telling myself I don't want to feel obligated by money, but I also know that I'd love to make enough to work on open source full time.
Also I can recommend OpenCollective; I’m sure there are other similar solutions as well. It’s nice to be able to “expense” stuff and I’m sure donors appreciate transparency.
What will help fix that issue is my wife going shopping with the kids long enough for me to figure what is wrong. ;)
Otherwise personally my daily driver is PS5 DualSense
You can connect Wiimotes to PCs over Bluetooth and use any of those Wii-connector controllers through them, which would make them wireless and solve the finding-a-reliable-adapter problem, but I've never managed to make that kind of set-up sufficiently stable. Always having to screw with re-pairing and such.
In the end, my go-to for BT emulation controllers is usually a PS3/4/5 controller. I haven't tried the XBone but I found the d-pad on the XB and XB360 controllers unusably inaccurate, and the face buttons weirdly slow when trying to play old-school Nintendo-hard games. Playstation controller d-pads are much better, and the face buttons feel quicker to switch between, for whatever reason.
It has: Turbo key function for SNES games, Vibration, Macros, Pressure-sensitive triggers, Multi-system support (there is a switch on the bottom that changes the signal from windows to Mac to Linux mode and so on), And it just werks.
Personally, I use an original Super NES controller + a Timville triple controller adapter[1], but a more modern controller that I like is the 8bitdo SN30 Pro+. I primarily play on a PVM via a MiSTer, so your use case may be quite different.
[0] https://rpubs.com/misteraddons/inputlatency [1] https://www.tindie.com/products/timville/triple-controller-c...
They're rugged, reliable, pair easily via bluetooth without any custom software required (just hold the PS button and menu button together), and have excellent button feel. I grew up on the super Nintendo so I'm picky at times.
Battery life is excellent, reported over Bluetooth (so linux and macos can see it), and the controller central pad acts as a mouse which makes navigating menus great without needing to put the controller down. They go to sleep automatically if you close the lid on a laptop they're paired to, and you can change the LED colour and brightness on the controller.
I've had and used one for quite a while now, and in that time two of my friends have purchased one to replace various alternatives (8bitdo, & another one I can't remember) for either reliability, pairing issues, or both.
To top off this review: I've never owned a PlayStation!
> I even got a Chinese company, notorious for selling "clone" of OSHW projects, to support the SW development as well via GitHub sponsor.
I suppose that's RetroScaler?
I guess software is a bit more tangible than a blog post even if both have value.
great that you got this result, btw
I suspect that'll be a common theme in answers here though: if you have a side project making $2k a month, in most of the world that's enough for you to go full-time and try to take it further. If you can make $2k/month on something working only part-time, you can definitely make a lot more if you focus on it.
On your questions: HTTP Toolkit is a desktop app (plus a mobile app and other components for integrations) but it's an Electron app that effectively functions as a SaaS (with a freemium subscription model) that just happens to have a component that runs on your computer. And actually getting to $2k wasn't overnight at all - it took a couple of years of slow steady slog. A few inflection points that made a notable difference (releasing rewriting support & Android support particularly) but mostly it was a matter of "just keep pushing", trusting the trajectory would keep going, and steadily grinding upwards. It's great where it is now, but it's hard work - a solo business is not for the faint of heart!
Under the hood it's just a tiny automated email flow set up via Mailchimp that sends out the download link when you sign up. Nothing fancy, but it's easy and it does the job.
I was just about to ask how do you differentiate your product from mitmproxy but on a quick google search I found this thread from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29627819
That said, one point there is outdated: HTTP Toolkit does now fully support websockets too. There's more I'd like to do there, but as far as I'm aware it's equally capable to mitmproxy in that sense today.
For the web dev case, for example, if you're debugging some interaction that means you can intercept your browser <-> server traffic and your server <-> upstream API traffic all in the same place, and see the full flow, and you can modify server responses or backend API responses in flight, to test out different edge cases.
There's a Chrome dev tools vs HTTP Toolkit comparison page here with a little more detail: https://httptoolkit.com/chrome-devtools-alternative/
In a perfect world, I'd kill for a tool where I could define a script (something similar to a Playwright test) and it'd automatically run and record everything, so I could redo the video much more frequently and accurately. I think you probably can do that for a normal web app already (?) but the challenge here is that HTTP Toolkit is launching other apps that also pop up over the top, and so I need to record them all together.
If you're looking for inspiration around this sort of thing, the Android demo video is different and also worth looking at: https://httptoolkit.com/android/
I stumbled on this nice blog post on automating these recordings. Maybe a partial solution?
https://martinheinz.dev/blog/94
I was thinking of doing a manual process like yours for a start rather than automating, but hearing your thoughts makes me think I'll try automating sooner.
I see what you mean about the multi-app aspect. I'll have to switch to browser windows for mine as well. Your android approach is nice!
It's an _extremely_ simple setup. Actual recording is done with Mac's built-in screenshot tool: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208721. It's recorded at an arbitrary window size I eyeballed the first time, that now I probably have to stick to forever (because if they're all the same size, I can reuse parts to avoid re-recording unnecessarily).
All of this is suboptimal (using 1080p would have helped, for starters, since lots of tools work better with standard resolutions) but it doesn't really matter, it just annoys me mildly one day a year and that's it.
IMO: if you're at the start, unless you have a super unique situation, I wouldn't look at automating videos or perfecting the recording setup at all - just ship something barely acceptable and see if it works, and then focus on pain points that actually turn out to be blockers later. Getting a core product into real people's hands and getting real feedback ASAP is more valuable than tweaking the video resolution or anything similar!
Like it a lot. Cheers.
I was wondering what the early days of the journey looked like. - What did the first iteration of this product look like? Was it more or less similar, or substantially different from the spirit of httptoolkit today? - How did you go from (some semblance of a product) to first sale? / acquiring first customer? - did you spend anything on marketing/distribution?
Technically, the first iteration was https://github.com/httptoolkit/mockttp - an HTTP integration testing library for JS. Not a desktop app at all! I'd originally built that for testing uses, but as it matured I realised that with a UI and automated setup tools it'd be useful as a complete product (but Mockttp still powers all the internals today, and you can use it directly to build your own custom intercepting proxies too).
For the first real product, the very first public 'launch' was literally a landing page with some demos of the potential UI and a signup form, just to test interest and check it wasn't a terrible idea. The results looked promising, so that was followed a few months later by a very basic but usable free version (entirely read-only, and only supporting Chrome interception) with the freemium features on top appearing a few months after that. From this stage it was all very much the same spirit as today, just less feature complete.
> How did you go from (some semblance of a product) to first sale? / acquiring first customer?
Once I announced the paid version (a blog post to my tiny set of newsletter signups, plus a little response on HN/Reddit/Product Hunt etc) I got a handful of paying customers (but certainly less than 10) within 24 hours. Nice but not a meaningful income, and from that wild peak it dropped back down to maybe one new customer per week or so afterwards, so it was quite slow going at the start.
However, those paying customers (and the mere fact of offering a paid service generally) resulted in _much_ better feedback. Rather than "this is cool" all of a sudden I had real demands for specific features, from people with concrete use cases and money in their hands. The initial paid features were just made up off the top of my head, and honestly didn't create a particularly compelling paid feature set. It's very hard to really know what people will pay for! That feedback was incredibly unbelievably useful to fix that.
From there, building out the key features people asked for over the following 6 months boosted things very significantly, and started to get things moving for real, and then you get into a virtuous circle, where more users => more feedback => better product => more users => ...
> did you spend anything on marketing/distribution?
I tested advertising at a small scale for a few months, but it didn't really work great. I think largely because it's very very freemium - 99% of users pay nothing - so the acquisition cost for a paying user doesn't make sense, and also honestly I don't have much experience with ads and I'm not sure I'm any good at writing them.
Content marketing meanwhile has worked great, keeps passively returning dividends, and cost nothing. I've tried to fill the blog (https://httptoolkit.com/blog/) exclusively with detailed & high-value original content (detailed breakdowns of a recent HTTP security vulnerability, not "top 10 HTTP libraries for Python") which shares well on social networks for an immediate burst of traffic, and then (in most cases) provides both a long-term SEO boost and constant incoming traffic on related topics that converts into users. That starts slow, but again steadily builds up over years, if you keep working at it. Content marketing + SEO are pretty much the only marketing channels I work on right now.
Even with root, certificate pinning can cause problems (as the sibling comment points out) but you can usually defeat that fairly easily: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/frida-certificate-pinning/.
For non-Android, HTTP Toolkit can't set it up for you automatically, but you can absolutely intercept _anything_ manually if you can configure it with your own HTTP proxy setting (fairly common) and add a trusted CA certificate (less common).
Do you mean that improving documentation helped get customers? I have a small side project and I think this is one of its weaker spots, even if it is relatively simple [0]. I noticed "helper popups" are getting used quite extensively.
It probably did, but no that's not what I mean, sorry :-). By "rewriting support" I mean adding features that allowed you to rewrite arbitrary network traffic, rather than just viewing it (as in the very first PoC).
For system-wide setup, you'll just need to configure that manually - setting your system proxy and trusting the CA certificate. The settings you need are on the Intercept page, in the 'Anything' section. For portable browsers, you may also be able to configure proxy & CA settings within the browser itself, which might be more convenient, depending on your setup.
So far we’ve hosted 12 dinners over the past year. Growing from out first meal with 13 friends to as many as 80 guests for this months meal. Our mailing list has over 400 people on it and we’ve sold out every event since our 4th. Sometimes we end up hosting multiple nights.
It’s not a very scalable business as it exists today. For now is just a passion project that makes a few bucks, allows us meet interesting people, and provides the opportunity to discover new foods and restaurants.
What I will say is that I think the timing was right. My co-host and I lived in Manhattan pre-pandemic and regularly took advantage of the restaurant variety there. Our dinners are hosted on Long Island and our theory is that people who move from Manhattan to Long Island over the last 20 years started to expect higher quality food and a larger variety of ethnic options. Over the past decade or so the variety and quality of Long Island restaurants has greatly improved from what was here 25 years ago when I was growing up.
Post pandemic we saw an appetite (pun intended) for people to just get out of the house, be around other people, and have an experience. Quite a few people who come to the dinners say that they keep coming back because their partner/family aren't adventurous eaters so they never get to try new foods or typically wouldn't order some of the things we put on the menu. We aren't going for a fear factor vibe, but we do try to get people out of their comfort zone. We have a large number of solo guests who enjoy meeting new people and sharing a like-minded experience. Initially the group skewed heavily towards males in their 30's, which was our friends. Today its a very diverse group of people.
https://www.newsday.com/lifestyle/restaurants/dead-chefs-soc... (https://archive.is/w9Z1A)
As a customer I'd probably want to run a tab at the restaurant for whatever I drink (assuming they're alcohol-friendly) but as an organizer I'd probably want an upfront corkage fee I could take a reliable cut of.
I would definitely be interested in something like this coming to our area.
What an unique side project, I'm very impressed.
https://www.outcoldsolutions.com
Now I also started macOS development for the last 2 years, and making around 2k a month.
Enterprise customers seem very lucrative and in rare cases can be, if you are working with a small department or individual with autonomy.
If you find yourself being asked to make a sales presentation to an IT steering committee, run away.
One of my clients is a team that has a budget and that team makes the decision without involving other parts of the co.
In another one of my clients the decision is taken by multiple depts, first the team that is gonna use the product gets in touch and we create a contract for them, then the legal dept is involved, after it's all clear the dept in charge of payments is involved. In that last step they tried to renegotiate the amount of the contract saying they didn't have that kind of money. I told them no problem and just went silent, a couple of weeks later they approved the contract.
Sometimes it takes 1 year 'til the client starts using (paying) the product, other times they are good to go in 1 week, most of the times it takes 1 month.
We don’t offer anything crazy on the support side. 2 business days reply. It is not sas, so nothing crazy to monitor from our side.
Also, we have insurances, a lot of resellers, we are technical partners with a lot of companies, have 7 years experience of business behind us.
It all came with time, and we build our confidence.
This helps hockey stick revenue but is also the #1 customer complaint since logs will always grow (no cap).
Just curious how you hit millions in revenue with a 2-person company.
I'm sure lots would love to hear more about your story (e.g. perfect write-up for IndieHackers.com)
Also we provide very unique solutions, like transforming, redirecting logs with annotations applied to your pods/deployments/namespaces. Also can pickup logs from volumes without any additional deployments.
So some customers see benefits from us, some don’t.
I am building a Zillow for Europe [1]. The real estate market in Europe is a big mess and for the past 10 years not much has happend so far in proptech because it was easy to rent/sell properties. Now things are changing and I see a lot more supply coming on the platform. So far rented out 40 apartments doing around 3k in profit a month. We focus primarily on overseas/expats right now
Another project I started with a good friend from Google is Webtastic AI [2] it's a lead gen platform that indexes large amounts of data and I am using simple ML models to clean it up and make sense out of it. It does around 1.9k a month now but we just launched 2 weeks ago so that looks promising. Thanks to google cloud we got 100k credits which makes it a bit more feasible because the startup costs are extremely high.
It's hidden on mobile because I didn't have the time yet to optimise it!
after applying a filter i get a 404 (only fitler was bedroom size): https://homestra.com/houses-for-sale/?amount-of-bedrooms=2
On the note of filtering, why do you not have upper bounds on bedrooms/bathrooms? it seems like filtering for a 2 bedroom isn't possible because "2+" would give me a ton i am not interested in
Ill add the elevator filter, thanks for your input!
For apartments:
* Searching by floor (or below or above floor)
* Searching by presence/absence of elevator
For all property types:
* Searching by rented / unrented status (evicting tenants for your own use is hard)
* Searching by build phase, if you're interested in new-build properties
* Searching by build year (some people prefer Altbaus, some consider them the work of the devil)
* Searching by heating type (underfloor vs radiator)
* Searching by rooms, not bedrooms. In Germany, a 1-room flat is a Studio Apartment and doesn't have a bedroom.
* Display of and searching by fees when buying (typically this is searching for "no estate agent fee")
* Display of and searching by Warm & Cold rent when renting
* Ability to search by state & city (at a bare minimum, and note that state affects how much property tax has to be paid when purchasing)
I think most countries are going to have a lot of little quirks like this, and it's going to be a hard sell to get people to switch over until you've got a lot of these in place for each country. I know that I've used international sites like this in the past and ultimately abandoned them because they either made it too difficult to find what I wanted, or there just weren't enough properties on there.
Thanks for your feedback, really appreciated!
As a European, I (at least) don't understand what this means - and therefore don't understand your offering, your USP?
What does/will Homestra offer, and how will it be different from e.g. Immobilienscout?
Google maps was crazy expensive I went with Mapbox[1] for now which seems to have enough features and is less expensive.
About $10k/mo gross revenue and takes a few hours of work a week (unless there’s a downtime event that needs fixing). A lot of upfront work to build some of these systems though.
Got to $2k/mo in the first month of doing this. I don’t recommend working (as a solo operator) with clients who have budgets less than $5-10k/mo. Too much overhead for too little return in that case.
In what little spare time I have left after my day job and looking after two small kids, I put more automation in place to improve reliability for my clients and reduce my own ops time requirement.
I get leads for this by referral from people I’ve done good work for in the past. But it’s the kind of thing you could bootstrap by direct outbound sales, publishing authority-building content to the right business audience, going to conferences/trade shows, or building a referral network from other service provides.
For ongoing things I do fixed rate or usage based pricing.
For custom one-off stuff, consultancy, and build-out of systems I charge a day rate.
1. Dedicated operational IT admin: Dealing with repetitive tasks+requests, like managing customer’s Microsoft environment and on-site infrastructure.. Owning physical and AD infra doesn’t sound like a part-time job.
For e.g; a/v and physical IT asks; like conference room operation maintenance and support, Desktop workstation triage (have you tried turning the monitor on?). The dreaded “can you set up the printer?”…
And what if the customer sets me up as their site’s dedicated AD domain admin? Resulting in repetitive requests for user/access management CRUD operations. And/or micromanagement of tedious things like email and mailing lists…
Or
2. Dedicated software developer, website or business workflows.
Building a website and getting micromanaged or overburdened. (“can you change the logo to blue?” “Can you redesign the whole home page?”)
Or, get pulled deep into providing a business-critical software workflow or application. Fielding sales/exec requests, interpreting their business requirements, and then building AND delivering (for e.g a customer management system) is not a part time job…
How do you operate to keep the scope limited? What steps help buffer yourself from a slippery slope of full-time services?
I have a small side gig building "controllers." By controllers I mean devices that are typically arduino controlled and use peripherals in the arduino ecosystem. They span a very wide range, but are typically very feature-limited. e.g., I have a client who is converting massage chairs to be pay-per-use.
As you noted, it's not easy to keep a service-based business from growing to take over all your time. I manage it by keeping the feature set clearly specified and working on fixed price.
Want to add a feature we didn't discuss? That's another charge. My niche is taking on very small projects that are too small to move the needle for a full-blown engineering services company (I've worked for two) and I always work fixed-price, so I need to be very aggressive about scope creep.
Project scope keeps growing? Either tell the client that it will be a while until I have time to complete it, or, more frequently, that they will need to find someone else. This is pretty easy to say because as mentioned above I'm clear about only taking on small projects.
I've had people who basically want me to be their engineering department. That's a hard "no:" I simply don't have the time.
Used to do this as an agency principal and it involved a lot of time spent managing clients and projects and subcontractors. Drove myself crazy and took a couple years off after nearly burning out.
I look for projects where the software solves a single targeted business problem and can quickly get to “done”. Then the client is happy to pay for ongoing maintenance/ops, so any additional effort I put into the software is around reducing my ongoing workload.
Follow on work came from other people at that first client company who knew my work and went on to work at other companies.
I earn about $2000 a month from ads on the landing page (organic SEO), but very soon plan to add a subscription for pro features (while people could still compile it from source and get the full experience without paying, if they wish).
I started the project 8 years ago to create a slick looking note-taking app for myself on Linux. Then I open-sourced and published it, and it just took off and got popular (more than 1.2 Million downloads).
Took around 2 years to get a high rank on Google. Then it was just a matter of putting ads (which I don't like but my income relies on) and ever since it's been quite stable.
We're on Github here btw: https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes
But maybe in the future will create our own paid syncing service, is that something you'll want?
I wouldn't be keen to pay a monthly storage fee but I would pay a one time fee to unlock the ability to connect the data to my own storage like Dropbox, Mega, Google drive, etc.
1. A native app (it's an Electron app).
2. Open source.
At least that's the ad I get on that page.
Qt has been around for years, the documentation is extensive and the community is large and supportive. With QML I faced many problems, especially half-assed examples/documentation, Qt Creator's intellisense doesn't work well with QML sometimes, etc... But the tradeoff is worth it. I'm getting things done in a much faster pace with QML.
A problem that is common both in Qt and other cross-platform frameworks is that you end up writing some custom code for each operating system to make the look and feel more native. But I think it's getting better with awesome open-source projects taking care of beautiful native window decorations[1].
Ironically the first version was mocked in Unity, thinking the tooling and ecosystem would make the MVP easy to build. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't particularly easy either. The end result was extremely heavyweight and gave terrible performance. Qt on the other hand yielded fairly snappy and lightweight results, and the development experience wasn't bad at all.
I wonder why more people don't use it, but then, that's my only exposure. Maybe it's not so great for other things, and I suppose there's the whole matter of having to pay for certain tooling and support. Us developers are sometimes super-hesitant to pay for the tools we use, haha.
There are some really good courses for beginners by Voidrealms - Bryan Cairns[1] on Youtube, if anyone is interested.
I think QML definitely deserve a better reputation. I even saw it being used for websites[2] although I'm still sticking with React for that.
In the early 00's when I was debating if I should pursue software dev (again) I wrote a couple of Win32 native apps in C and absolutely loved writing them. One of the apps was a workout timer which I submitted to Freewarefiles.com. It peaked around 48K downloads. Unfortunately freewarefiles is no more so I can't show off my one and only "successful" native app.
Sometimes I feel I want to delve back into native apps instead of web based.
Awesome story! Come back to the light (literally) side.
This looks incredible I’m definitely going to use it
Don't create competition for yourself. They can go on having no idea how lucrative your little side project is and you can go on reaping the benefits. As soon as you tell someone with more resources that your little side idea is actually turning over large sums of money, you better believe their wheels will be spinning on how to get a piece of it. It's so easy to avoid this, you just have to not run your mouth.
Every once in awhile, there are threads and comments here on HN about the various people who have had their UI, content, data or concepts stolen as well.
Unless you’re a full-time hobbyist or boast a mature project, please be cautious.
Sometimes competition ain't as easy to attract as you might think
I’d actually love to read a thread about people making 2k per month on a stolen sass idea.
The idea is not the hard part. The hard part is building the software, building the customer base, building the automation processes, and doing all the business-things associated with it.
I’ll grant that if you say “Hey, this thing is actually a marketable product” that you’re reducing the cost of a potential competitor, but really there is so much work to do. Even if you can get a lot of it COTS, there’s still a lot of effort to be put in.
One simple reason to post: For every potential competitor reading about your project, there are thousands of potential customers.
If you’re happy with your existing cash flow this point seems less relevant; the better choice would then be to protect your competitive advantage and stay hidden, right?
These threads attract unique businesses, with a twist. (Almost) None have groundbreaking, earth shattering ideas. They usually have an interesting story to them. It attracts people like me, who just love to immerse myself in such conversations, stories and experiences. Maybe potential customers, if not me, could be someone I talk to.
Secrecy isn't a strong competitive advantage after you're in the market.
If your idea is so fragile that anybody else with a similar idea can knock you out of the market, it's probably not very good.
I've developed the iOS/iPadOS app, Proxyman for iOS [0], which gains steadily ~2k recurring revenue every month. Basically, it's an iOS app that helps you to capture and decrypt HTTP/HTTPS traffic on your phone. The app is needed if you need to inspect traffic from your app.
Because it's an iOS app, published on AppStore, you can provide a subscription pricing model: e.g. $4.99/month, $39.99/year, or lifetime $99.
I also develop the macOS version, but it's a huge market, which is out of context.
Don't forget to activate the Premium for iOS with your Mac License Key. No need to purchase the Subscription.
I'm happy to support you.
Really curious, how does the revenue from macOS and iOS compare?
Even if its with a small team thats impressive, the UI is polished and full of features.
If you don't want to do it as manually there are paid tools that will help. Google "app store screenshot maker" for options.
1: https://hackernewsletter.com 2: https://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/647
It is one of the few newsletters I look forward to so I can “catch up” with topics that were popular during the course of a week on HN.
I love the simplicity and I don't mind the ads.
I've helped them to gather and do properly documented their cases, and support them during their visits to the police to make a claim. Police try to bounce as it's always a headache due to multiple countries/jurisdictions involved - VOIP provider from Finland, hosting in the Netherlands, money goes to Chinese company bank account, etc.
I had to demonstrate to them it's not something impossible, so I've provided guidance, prepare requests drafts, etc. I've dived deeply into OSINT, forensics, audit, bank compliances and procedures, infrastructure enumeration, and other cybersecurity things to solve these problems.
There were never payments required, but when it works people donated some money to keep infrastructure, as a tip or so. When it becomes 30k+ annually years ago, I've decided to make it my full-time job, with some pivot on what we're doing - now it is mostly cybersecurity services to businesses and companies. But still helping civilians to handle scam attempts every month.
They're meant to be pages for very easy combinations of text, mixed media, embeds, etc. — let more people create fun/interesting places on the internet. [2]
I started working on mmm.page in Feb 2021, and launched it that May on Hacker News [3], then it hit $2k/mo last year, and has been growing steadily since. There are roughly 30,000+ users at the moment. Revenue has been trickier for this project because it's a SaaS aimed at consumers, who are more price sensitive — but the flip-side is I love working with all the people who use the platforms. Just today, someone shared this moodboard that captured exactly how I've been thinking about it mmm.page [4]. Some other fun examples here [5]. I'm planning a second launch in May. Hopefully some good news to share there.
One note: it's a website, and most people edit it on desktop, but a surprising # of users convert /after/ trying it on mobile. I also found the conversion rate increased significantly after I made the homepage itself editable — thereby demo'ing the product without a login. Just a small note.
Anyway, feel free to reply or DM on Twitter if you have questions — especially re: solo bootstrapping "fun" consumer products that are trying to also become self-sustainable.
[1] https://mmm.page
[2] https://twitter.com/xhfloz/status/1631746024120221698
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424
I just visited your homepage to check it out, but was greeted with a page that said "You can't edit this page" with a grayed out Edit button. And I'm not sure why, or what I should do so I am able to edit it (maybe sign up? but I wanted to see the demo before signing up).
It took...around two and a half years, I think, to hit $2k/mo MRR. It was definitely not the stereotypical "launch → iterate a bit → boom, PMF" story that you often hear, which was fine because it was 'just' a side project and I didn't have to worry about running out of money or time.
To be honest: Realising that time is going by so fast really scared me this week. Being mid-30s I really need to get my shit together, soon... :-D
> With great and solemn portent, my teacher announced she would tell us something that her teacher had told her, and that her teacher’s teacher had told him, and so on, back to Yeats: The thing to remember is that no one ever finds out that you don’t know what you’re doing.
it touches on some many things.
..sigh and don't ask me how I know.
A few months ago, my uncle died. To the outside world, he was very well put together, eloquent, and admired by all who knew him. Worked on physics books as a proofreader for a major publisher his whole life and was celebrated for his work. He was a recluse, but very sociable and an excellent go-between for any socially difficult situation, a real keeper of the peace.
When I went to clear his home, I discovered that his personal space was the opposite of all the above. Dirty, messy, not well organized.
Of all the people I ever expected that from, it wasn't him, but he did an excellent job of appearing to have his shit together.
I shared this with a few others who had late family members that had done very well in their respective field, and the sentiment was the same: nobody ever really seems to get their shit together, they just get better at presenting the parts of themselves that matter.
He was a very happy soul.
If this keeps going, each year will feel like a day by the time I'm 60 or so.
[EDIT] Incidentally, I reject the "routine & boredom are what do it" thing. High school felt like it took forever and was far more regimented and regular and boring than my life is now.
It's a micro-SaaS for photographers who edit in Lightroom. Lets you reverse-engineer Lightroom edits from JPG files and download them as presets that you can apply on your own photos.
Took a month or two to reach $2k/mo, riding the wave of instagram's popularity in 2017-2018, plus the project went viral initially. However, the niche is ultimately too small to grow the revenue significantly. Still chugging along, almost 6 years later, though.
I launched my first game in 2015 which took 6 months to even reach $100/month. From there it earned around $500/month for the last 7 years. It required a huge upfront investment, ongoing updates to keep relevant and a significant fraction of revenue going into advertising.
I launched a few additional games that were low quality and ended up removing them. I started another 4-5 ideas that were abandoned.
In 2021, during a few month break from my job, I produced one more game that has averaged around $2000/month revenue for the last 2 years. Also needs regular updates and promotion to stay relevant.
Overall I would only recommend this route if you’re really passionate about game dev. The overall time investment has been really high, and it isn’t truly passive income because mobile games lose users quickly when not updated often.
Are you able to share details on both aspects?
Awesome results!
I've been doing this for over 2 years now. You can take a look at my changelog to see most of the updates (at the beginning I did not maintain a changelog so it doesn't start exactly when I started the site): https://jpdb.io/changelog
Not everyone uses every feature though; some people only use the dictionary, some people use the SRS, some people look at my difficulty lists, some people look at my vocabulary lists, some people only upload their Anki decks to see which shows/books/etc. have the most known vocabulary, etc.
I'd love to support other languages too, but at this point it isn't very feasible. I'm just a single man, and this is just a side project, so I simply don't have the resources to even do everything that I want to do with Japanese (and there's still so much more I want to add/improve!), never mind branching out into other languages.
You might as well ask how a screwdriver is different from an apple. (:
Google Translate, is, well, a translator. You give it text, and it translates it. That's it. My site's for people who want to actually learn Japanese to fluency, with a particular focus on media-based immersion.
For example, is there a Japanese anime you'd like to watch without subtitles? I can probably help with that; I have vocabulary lists for many shows, and the site can teach you (through flashcards/spaced repetition) most of the words you'll need to be able to understand it.
I also have a plugin for the mpv video player where (if you load appropriate Japanese subtitles for the show you're watching) the plugin will color-code all of the words according to whether you know them or not, and you'll also have access to a popup dictionary where you can just hover your mouse over any of the words and see their definition. You can also use the plugin to make vocabulary flashcards with the screenshot + audio from what you're watching; demo video by one of my users: https://streamable.com/ww6x0e
I can keep on going as there's a lot more, but I'll stop here! It's probably not appropriate for someone who just wants to learn a little bit of Japanese for tourism purposes.
My advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: get it out there quick, listen to your customers and be ready to act on their feedback. Finding product/market fit is a journey even if you are selling into the most well understood vertical since it's not just about what the market expects it's about what your engineering talent/capacity can delver in a reasonable amount of time.
> get it out there quick
What did "getting it out there" consist of for you? How did you get it out there in the beginning?
That is very kind of you, thank you.
> What did "getting it out there" consist of for you? How did you get it out there in the beginning?
For Scanii in particular, the original product was a thin wrapper around an open source AV engine, a hacked on a weekend UX, and a credit card processing integration to collect payment - the very minimal needed to find out if _anyone_ was willing to pay for this service.
With that said, what worked for me in this case is not what I would focus here since it depends on what kind of business you are trying to build. What I do believe is important is focusing on the economics of your space which, for IT, is all about productivity or, more succinctly, saving people's time - they pay you X for something that could cost them, in terms of people's time, Y to do.
So, what you want to ask yourself is whether signing up, paying and onboarding onto your product (the X in the equation above) is significantly lower than the next best alternative, either doing the same on a competitor product or building something themselves - the Y above.
For scanii, even at launch it saved people lots of time managing and operating malware detection engines which are cumbersome and hard to keep up to date. I had a feeling that would be the case when I launched but I couldn't be sure until our first customer voted with their credit card.
I'm a developer by trade, so marketing and the like isn't my forte. Did you use ProductHunt? Indiehackers? Reddit? Twitter? Word of mouth?
Thanks for the reply btw, very helpful info. I've been iterating on something in my free time that fills a very small budgeting niche. I'm going to wrap it up with a website this weekend and see if I can gain any traction. At the very least, I know that if I had found the product I've built for $1.99 a month or something, I would have just paid the money. Hoping that others feel the same.
Best of luck with your launch!
Presumably you're now using commercial AV tools, rather than Clam? Did you have to get some kind of special license from them to use it like this?
Thanks and good question. We don't really compete with virus total since it's more of a research tool and, for a while, their terms explicitly prohibited commercial use (but I think that has changed). Jotti is a similar thing, more of a research tool than a high performance API you can use to build commercial products on.
> Presumably you're now using commercial AV tools, rather than Clam? Did you have to get some kind of special license from them to use it like this?
Yeah the product has expended a bunch over the years and we use multiple detection engines [2] to catch all kinds of unsafe content. But you are right, we do license a commercial AV engine to act as a backup to our own to ensure best possible detection rates. The licensing process warrants a blog post of its own since it's not what I would call easy.
[2] https://docs.scanii.com/article/149-how-do-the-different-det...
I get the wood from my grandpa's mill. I use both redcedar and pine, but I'm currently experimenting with oak (much slower wood to CNC and it is much more expensive as well).
I made a couple for family and friends, they thought they looked great and said I should be selling them. So at the end of February this year, I reopened my Etsy from when the pandemic first shuttered me inside my house, and listed my vape holders first. After a week, I had a few sales, and then I added my first rolling tray. By mid march, I had already racked up 20-ish sales before I told my Facebook friends about it (which is a shitty feeling - selling to people who probably get hit up by MLMs from all the other highschool people you wish you could forget), but that secured 7 more sales, and they started to snowball after that. I'm currently just under $1000 in revenue for the month of April, and everyone on the Etsy forums are saying this is the slowest time of the year for them (Easter + Tax Season), so fingers crossed after Monday, everything just starts picking up steam.
I batch out a bunch of them on the CNC at once (in fact I have to do a boatload more this evening), then while those are cutting, I have a pile of others that I need to sand. About the time I'm done with those, the next will come off the CNC, then takes me 5 minutes to set it up again and keep going. It gets tedious sometimes, but I can basically zone out while I do my sanding and listen to podcasts and music and still be able to hear the CNC start to cut something incorrectly (happens far to often).
I've been fortunate to get some featuring by Apple which has driven most of my sales. I'm hopeful the daily word game, Well Word, will start to take off because it's the best game I've made and I'm really proud of it.
I started working on Pine Tar Poker while I had a different job about 13 months ago and I've since switched to trying my hand at converting my side project into my full-time gig [3]! My short-term goal is to be able to pay my mortgage with the proceeds.
Sorry to ask so many questions, but as a maker of personal projects which are games, I'm curious about the promotion and monetization of mobile games =)
I was lucky to get my first game, Downwordly, as Game of the Day on iOS. This plus other sustained featuring (Essential Word Games) led to 50k+ downloads. Unfortunately I did a bad job with the IAP value proposition (both explaining it and what it actually is), so the conversion rate is abysmal (<1%). Pine Tar Poker was also Game of the Day a few weeks back and had some sustained featuring (Best New Games). That let me ship a few hundred copies over a few days but once the featuring dried up, the sales did too.
Well Word is currently featured under Best New Games and is getting decent download numbers in the mid 100s and has a great conversion rate of ~15%. I'm hopeful that it can continue to spread through word of mouth and the built-in score sharing.
I have made next to nothing on Android. I've never (that I know of) had any featuring and the Play Store doesn't have as many editorial pushes in my experience. To be honest, the download count and revenue from Android is such that I only release games there because it takes less than an hour or so (thanks Unity) and my brother uses Android.
I'm currently working on an expanded version of Pine Tar Poker for console + Steam so I'm interested to see what I can learn in that space! Let me know if you have any other questions. I hope hearing about my experience so far was helpful.
Though I have to agree that it's a bit unclear how to proceed at first. Maybe make a link to the tutorial more easily accessible, or even auto-suggested on first visit?
I mentioned it in another comment, but the mobile version (also free) is where I put most of my energy. If you liked the web version, please give it a try and let me know what you think. Appreciate the support!
I like Yahtzee so it interests me.
Thanks
As you play, you can use your winnings to buy items that give you an edge and transition your play from pure luck to more skill based. Along the way, you can have your fortune read to unlock puzzles that reward you with magick runes that can transform cards to allow you to score hands that at first glance are impossible.
Here's the trailer which shows some gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuLh8Ft4Uhg
Bug found: Your "Buy" page is missing the header bar for navigation etc.
edit: Contact page has the same problem. :-)
A few years in and almost reached what I'd consider v1 feature complete.
You're really onto something.
What would make me switch from Notion to Outline?
If your purpose is cash flow, freelancing can quickly generate $2000++ with much less risk than starting a SaaS.
That’s not to say starting a SaaS is a bad idea…but if pure short-term cash production is your goal, I’d consider finding clients who trust you to pay you hourly on the side.
FWIW, I’ve started 2 SaaS companies with a collective revenue of $0, and my side freelancing currently makes more than $2k/mo.
Lastly…it’s very possible that you have lots of other goals other than cash, and if so, good luck with your SaaS! I started MoneyHabitsHQ.com and it was one of the most fun learning activities of my career, despite not producing revenue.
I’m working as a Solutions Engineer now. Its basically freelancing without sourcing customers and a consistently big pay cheque every month. Any tips on starting freelancing?
Being connected to the right business folks seems to be the key.
I hope this is a typo, because $99/mo is nice to have, but I'd honestly consider the SaaS I'm building a failure if it made less than 4 digits a month.
I guess it depends what level someone considers a failure. It it keeps making money and trends are improving I wouldn't consider it a failure. For example 500 EUR would pay my rent so the bar is lower for me, but sure anything more than 1000 is already nice, especially if it doesn't require constant attention.
It's a simple keyboard-first electron app that hooks up with your Google / Outlook cal. Target market is folks who schedule meetings outside their org like founders, CSM, biz dev, sales, EAs, etc.
E.g. Do any of these times (CT) work for you?
April 13 (Thursday) * 3:30 pm - 4:00 pm
April 14 (Friday) * 2:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Just curious, how do you market your product?
GTM is the hardest but mostly through referrals / word of mouth. I want to do more Twitter/LI ads.
We hit $2k monthly revenue after about 1.5 years. Growth completely stopped during COVID, but is now growing very well (more than 10x that).
- VidCap [1]
- AI Profile Pic [2]
- Mission Control Plus [3]
- Batteries [4]
- Kay [5] (makes less, currently at $600 MRR)
[3] https://fadel.io/missioncontrolplus
No problem if don't want to answer, but I'm curious about what rough percentage of your income from those apps comes from Setapp? How does their compensation even work for a permanently running utility? As far as I know, there's not a lot of information out there about their business model and how they compensate developers.
Anyways, thanks for the useful apps.
The Setapp SDK tracks usage time and the app makes a fraction of user monthly payments (factored by app price and user time spent on the app)
It took about 10-12 months reaching those numbers, and I'd say we still have lot's of room for improvement. It's also very low maintenance, but highly scalable. What I do is basically localise the game to as many big languages as I can, and then throw some ASO on it and hold my fingers. Haven't spent any dollars at all on the marketing otherwise.
[1] https://yangmeistudios.com/games-and-apps/charades [2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/charades-what-am-i/id159211843... [3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yangmeistu...
It's been interesting to see the changes in the audience over time. In 2005, 100% of our audience was desktop browser readers. Somewhere around 2011, mobile readers became the dominant group. Today, our biggest audience by far is podcast listeners. We'll probably need to start creating videos soon if we don't want to get left behind. And what comes next? AI-enhanced immersive binaural VR experiences? The future is weird.
It started as an experiment for my personal website and I was in the same position as you're right now. We were already working on a Notion like app to take notes, but didn't make any money and probably went into the wrong direction. As my prototype seemed to work quite well, we decided to turn it into a product.
My initial goal was to do server-side analytics without the downsides of parsing access logs, but of course we now also have a "regular" JS snippet integration.
You can learn more about our journey here [1] and on our blog [2]. Let me know if you have any questions!
My urls aren't even that long but get truncated because they get only 30% of the space.
Make more space for links: allow me to hide some columns and persist that across sessions. I really don't care about bounce rate or percentages.
Also, a deadly sin of arrogant designers: in your infinite wisdom you decided to to limit the width of that page so even if I go fullscreen I don't see the full URL but a lot of unused space. Why do you hate me?
Last year I've built for my gf, a custom D2C (direct to client) ecommerce webapp [0] for her handmade products.
Then I started looking into PPC, tracking, social advertisement & marketing etc.. Now we are profitable avg ~8k / month only on retail.
[0] https://yuma.gr
Also with a custom admin dashboard we were able to scale a lot in our & employee's productivity
[edit]
I would use shopify for bootstraping temporary viral campaigns for niche products.
*edit typos
I'm already doing kinda the same work with 2 established ecommerce B2B industry businesses, one in US and one in my country, and I'm getting payed a percentage of the gross profit from online sales & leads.
We have a competitive advantage because no competitor on these sectors has an "in-house" dev for ecommerce ops.
Yes she still makes all the products (with help though now) as she finds a lot of enjoyment doing it and as we're trying to find shortcuts for our work, she found her ways on becoming more productive on the making process. At some point this whole thing became unmanageable, especially on Christmas.
Now the business operates with 3 people on board, me for the digital part, she for the art behind the brand and another one person full time for order management, client support, helping on the making etc..
And very soon we'll hire one more and move out of the house to a bigger space because we'll enable B2B as there is demand on these kind of products.
At least, that was my reaction too, and it seems echoed by many of the people sharing their ('no longer a side') projects.
You might benefit from looking more broadly (friendly suggestion).
It’s a nice start though!
Started making $0.15 a day and has taken a couple years to make decent monthly revenue. One cool thing is that it's also helped developers make a lot of money — over $200k so far and growing!
I've been working on it for about 2 months. While not quite at 2k/month yet, it's nearly there and progressing in that direction. Revenue is coming from several customers who are using the data to build Discord bots that alert them (and their own paying users) about good odds, arbitrage opportunities, etc.
But since I literally just deployed my new landing page for the Early Access, and looking to launch by the end of the month, I figure I might talk about it.
I'm working on Bernard (https://bernard.app), a link checker service for website owners. Since the job market is tight, I figured I might go all in into what I hope will become a profitable, lean, one-person business.
Hoping to reach ramen profitability within the next 12 months.
https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/gpt_for_gma...
https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/gpt_for_doc...
The best part is not even about the money but about having a lot of users, democratising GPT and saving a lot of human hours everyday!
Edit: Your T&C says it was written in 2019, you can't possibly been running the project since then right? https://gpt.space/terms-of-service
Without verification you don't know if any of them are marking $2k+
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/playlistai-playlist-maker/id16...
It was also picked up by FastCompany, TechCrunch, some others, which has helped people continue to find it
Been trying to convince my manager to buy personal licenses for everyone on my team - glad to support this excellent product.
I have an engineering background so breaking into the marketing and sales domain has been quite a journey. It's been a roller coaster of ups and downs, but I remain hopeful.
One of the things I've enjoyed most about building your own thing is just talking to other founders and learning about their experiences. While the dataset has not been large enough to make quantity compensate for quality, I've still learned quite a bit.
It's been fascinating to read about everyone's side projects, and I'm curious to know if any other founders here have faced challenges with fundraising bookkeeping or cap table in general. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
I also never share it because I am concerned about a competitor coming in.
Took me about 6 months from publishing my app to hit $2k and another 3 months to hit $5k.
Edit: to clarify, I sell a physical product, so there are added costs in terms of manufacturing, shipping, stock keeping, etc...
[0] fibretiger.co.za - Price comparison for fibre internet services in South Africa. It's an extremely fragmented market, we have about 10 fibre networks (10 that matters) and twice as many ISPs
[1] littlebigstats.com - Corrective Maintenance and Planned Maintenance for Restaurants or anything with assets and 10+ branches (KFC Kenya) is one our clients. You will be surprised how many org are trying todo PPM and CM with a whatsapp group and spreadsheet. We even implemented a version (you have to squint a little) of SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) methods so you just have to define the "rules and boundaries" for a good and efficient maintenance process. Example: any new tickets logged by branches should be assigned within 1 hour. Or no more than 20% of your corrective maintenance tickets can have a "AWAITING PARTS" status. etc.
I started writing in 2011. After a few books I was able to do look during launches but sales fell dramatically after.
Now I have a couple books doing $2k / month.
Since I do corporate training I have probably made dramatically more than this from the marketing from my books but don't really have a way to track that.
It runs as a freemium SaaS and is turning a healthy profit. There area about 15k blogs running on the platform right now.
I ran it completely free for about 2 and a half years. When I added the "upgrade" with some add-ons it jumped to $2k a month in a matter of weeks.
Ask HN: Side projects making less than $2k MRR, what's your project? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35571486
Even in USD, $2k/month has vastly different buying power depending on location. It doesn't go far in SF or NYC but would get you a lot more in rural locations or smaller cities.
$2k/month CAD in Toronto is decent but still a long way from "ramen profitable".
But then we'd have to deal with people :-(
Currently at 70k Euros a month. It took me about 3 years to get here. And it took a few months to get to 2k monthly revenue.. However, the first two months I was at break even and it took me about a year before I could figure out how to get this system running profitably. Currently profit margins are about 7%
My real biggest risk though is when I open up my own store is chargebacks. Digital goods have a very very high chargeback risk, and I need to be clever on how I mitigate that!
E.g. https://news.cybersixgill.com/how-gift-cards-are-used-to-lau...
But yes! especially in b2b sells. I always try to be super anal about kyc with selling to business buyers in bulk, and avoid buying from them. I straight up stick to institutional suppliers to avoid this issue :(
Requestly is an open-source [1] Chrome & Firefox extension [2] that I started to help me in faster web development by capturing & modifying network requests directly in the browser without using any external tools. It eventually replaced Charles & Fiddler for many companies but now we are building a desktop version[3] too.
On a side note, Side Projects are a long-term game but the good part is you can do multiple along with your job and pick the one getting more traction. For example - I did many other side projects but continued with Requestly for 2 reasons - I was using it myself almost everyday and It was gaining organic traction.
Good luck in finding the project of your calling.
[1]: https://github.com/requestly/requestly
[2]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/requestly-redirect...
We hand-pick remote jobs from all over the internet and send you the personalised list of remote jobs that are fit for you.
It took 2 years to reach $2k revenue and I lost interest in this project due to a lot of manual work. With the advancements in AI, I'm planning to focus on it again.
High performance AI video streaming server and clients for a variety of platforms.
Took several years before the product was in an acceptable state to begin selling, it's been about 10 years since I began.
The site did: - $200 a month the first year. - $900 a month the second year. - $2K a month the third year. - $5K a month the third year. (We started working full time). - $9K a month this year.
Even when it was only a side project it demanded a lot of work, but we love the space so it was ok.
I charge around between $20-30k everytime a new setup is created and for each customer I charge around $650 per month for the SLA. Additional development is offered at $155 per hour. Currently I have three different installations that net me around $2100 per month in addition to extra features here and there.
It took around 2-3 years before I hit $2k.
The post purchase survey angle is growing steadily but the platform was built to be flexible so I'm looking for other use-cases to focus on what competitors don't currently service for a phase 2.
Also recently it's been a great way to experiment with OpenAI and see what all the buzz is about. So far the ChatGPT API has been very impressive at spotting trends in user-provided data to share with our customers. Honestly this feature alone makes me consider focusing on it full time; but it would be a bit of a leap financially given current circumstances.
TLDR: I recommend building something, keeping your head on a swivel, getting feedback (being on an app store or marketplace makes this easier) and adjusting as rapidly as possible if you want to get paid and have a shot at bootstrapping bigger.
Could've probably done it quicker if I did more things that don't scale (as people often say). Should've focused less on SEO and more on outreach or other growth channels.
I've since got my CS degree and I'm working on it full time now :)
How can your customers be sure you do not inject any faulty or malicious stuff into their apps?
We obviously don't inject malicious stuff since that'd ruin our reputation immediately (& open us up to lawsuits). I could see that happening with free app builders, but we make our money from subscription fees, so we have no need to turn to such illegal stuff to monetize the apps.
Even going open source wouldn't solve the issue, since most customers wouldn't be able (due to lack of technical knowledge) to compile the app themselves.
It is not a service, but has one-time payments, so there is no stable MRR figure. It was initially sold through CodeCanyon, here's a graph with my earnings there: https://i.snipboard.io/7lubPE.jpg
Being a one-man-team, I tried to keep operation as simple as possible and automate the processes that could be automated.
The MH industry contracted drastically after the 2008/2009 financial crisis, and the handful of dealership software companies still in the industry went under. So I basically have the market to myself right now. The total market is not very big, though - maybe 1,500 independent manufactured housing "street dealerships" in the USA at this point.
I have 15-ish paying customers right now. I'd love to be able to spend all my time on growing the business, but I've been too afraid to quit the other freelance dev work I do. Also, I unwisely took on a big contract that I haven't been able to finish in a timely manner, which is dragging me down. I wish I'd spent that time growing the MH SaaS instead.
Later, in my mid-thirties, I left corporate software development for six or seven years, and managed the business for my dad. While I was there I wrote software to help me manage things, which, after I left the business to return to software development, I turned into the SaaS product which I've sold to other dealerships.
Plans are: $1500/mo, $2000/mo, $2500/mo. The difference is the effort - we're more into the highest priced projects. Currently have 2 customers.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/logs-pure-expense-tracker/id64...
I'd love to be able to find more than 10% consistently on something like USDC
The Bitcoin Standard explains the philosophical underpinnings of why this isn’t a big Ponzi and there is real material value to stateless money:
The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking https://a.co/d/bC6XZqm
It took me a very long time to find the idea of SDK. Previously I was thinking only about B2C cases. B2C market is already VERY crowded with Canva and million of its competitors. But B2B market was almost empty when I started.
* Not Robot https://notrobot.eu – online CAPTCHA; beta live; GA coming soon :) (free); SaaS;
We support open start-ups https://wideangle.co/open, but we are not publishing our numbers :)
It is a project I use for other projects of mine. Furthermore, it has very little overhead, i.e.: it is cheap to operate to the point I am happy to do it and make a dent in reCAPTCHA land grab.
It is still backed by real business with SLA and operational support. It is free, but it is not a toy.
I am considering adding analytics (hit/miss) for a symbolic fee. But time will show if there is interest.
[1] https://slack.com/apps/A01EL1SR7V4-groomba [2] https://groomba.ai
Website builder / development [2]
Both are side and I'm currently ramping them both up now that they are self sustaining and I can focus on hiring sales agents and app devs.
[1] https://clearpayments.ca or US https://clearmerchantsol.com
> Making it easy for owner to fine apps to streamline their processes.
Generates ~10k/month. Plus, teaches a bunch of people how to code for free :)
Also how much time it took to reach that point?
I estimate we have another two-three years before we are finished... +_+
I think it took us a couple of years to break the $2k/mo threshold.