Ask HN: Side projects making less than $2k MRR, what's your project?
While a thread of 2k+ MRR is going, I thought it'd be cool to hear from folks who aren't quite at 2k yet.
To test social media preview: https://ogtester.com/
To add location to images: https://geotagseo.com/
To use dictation for learning (German): https://www.flashdictation.com/
To decide the meal: https://whatdinner.com/ (WIP)
To get distracted:
To use Stable diffusing in Notion:
To experiment with Stable diffusing https://articletoimage.ai/ (WIP)
I did to solve a problem I had.
Combined, do they bring more than 2K/month?
Timelines in markdown (gantt, calendar, map, other views)
It's open source (https://github.com/mark-when/markwhen) and there are some paid options for storing markwhen documents in the cloud.
Straddling paid SAAS and open source is a bit tricky and I still haven't figured it out completely yet. I have some sponsors as well as some paid saas clients but it's not quite paying the bills yet... I like working on it though, hopefully I can find the right balance or a different revenue model that works better.
My other problem is not only am I not good at marketing, I don't like doing it. But I also know it's the other half of the equation.
Puzzle rush integrated with spaced repetitions to improve tactically at chess. I hacked a solution for myself during covid to combine those two, and achieved very good results reaching 2000 on lichess (from around 1800), which was my goal then.
In a recent break between jobs I decided to create an integrated, easy to use solution, and I've got lots of ideas about how to improve it - if it gets traction :)
There's an open source CLI (https://github.com/onlineornot/onlineornot), and a public API under active development.
As someone who got interested in the stock market a few years ago, I didn't find anything that suited my needs in terms of features and design. So I developed a solution tailored to my requirements and eventually opened it up for others as well.
The key features include a stock screener with technical indicators like 50-day range, and a report view for each stock including charts and key financials.
I still use the app almost daily to aid my own stock market research. We currently have a few dozen active users.
"Wanted: a feasible business idea not quite lucrative enough for the proprietor to be able to afford to take legal action."
Also it could be the other way around, you need a solution for a problem you have. Say that you built something profitable and wait 'til someone "copies" your idea.
Copying an idea and writing code will get folks maybe 10% of what goes into building a sustainable business, so I'm not too worried myself.
Card Crusade - a roguelike deckbuilder (similar to Slay the Spire)
Barnard's Star - multiplayer tactical strategy game (like XCOM or Into the Breach)
Both games are on iOS and Android. Makes just over $100 per month. It's a ton of work. Doing it wayyy more for the enjoyment/satisfaction of the project than the money.
Usually the reason for this kind of setup is better SEO.
https://sunclock.net/ a 24hr clock that shows sunrise, sunset, twilight times, and the position of the sun and moon
https://bigclock.app/ it's just a clock, but BIG
They're not monetised apart from a buy me a coffee button.
Like the early days of the internet when you could open up port 80 on your home machine and connect via unencrypted http. In other words getting unbiased information from LLMs will be a challenge and LLM biases will become political, but right now, for a minute, we can have nice things.
It enables some pretty cool things like fairly straightforward microtonal modulation! Right now I'm working on a paper to submit to a computer music conference about it. Happy to send the draft if anyone's interested (email on website in bio).
I released it last December. I've had a couple sales, not many, but still enough to cover the cost of Apple developer membership, so at least I'm sort of in the positive!
Should also mention that I've gotten feedback on it from some pretty major artists, including Grammy nominees and winners like Jacob Collier! which is very very exciting
Happy to answer any questions!
Made as a hobby during the pandemic -- it scrapes eBay listings for laptops, and provides a parametric search (RAM, SSD etc) inspired by the likes of Digikey and Mouser, and sorts on total value. I like to buy used electronics, but this kind of search is still shockingly bad on typical marketplaces (Amazon etc)
An example search to get you started: https://www.bytebucket.co/?mincpu=800&minram=12&minssd=500#t
pretty quickly finds for example an 11th gen Intel, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD laptop for ~$200. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me. The really good deals get swiped up within a day or two though.
Btw, I think you have a bug with power usage: https://www.bytebucket.co/?mincpu=800&minpower=15#t this should show a number of results
Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567822 - April 2023 (424 comments)
Lunni is a dashboard for Docker Swarm. It helps you if you already use docker-compose to develop an app locally, and just want to deploy it with as little effort as possible. It also has a bunch of apps available for one-click install in the built-in Marketplace, like Vaultwarden, Chatwoot, or PocketBase.
I'm trying to get myself to start writing to potential customers, but haven't succeeded just yet. (If you're interested in a demo, let's chat! https://cal.com/notpushkin/lunni) As such, MRR right now is still exactly $0.
It’s in cruising mode never really invested any significant time on it apart from spare hours on weekend.
Entirely written in Go and open source
I have a couple of customers involved, receiving great feedback so far, unfortunately, it doesn't generate enough revenue yet and it is progressing very slowly (chicken-egg problem).
I believe we can scale the number of customers but it is hard to find the right balance between doing sales and feature improvements. For obvious reasons, I prioritize consulting hours that pay our bills.
Working on a ChatGPT tutorial now for it: https://docs.firestarterapp.com/tutorials/chatbot-1/
This is all free/open source and will remain so, but in the future I might also offer paid courses/enhanced features.
A humorous book of quotes with profanity added: https://whatacools.com/serenity/
An app to use your e-reader as a typewriter: https://solarwriter.msol.io/ (actually, this one is free)
It's a small project in Flutter I showed on HN few days ago. It's basically an alternative to Android File Transfer, but with a better UI and without the limitation of 1.5 GB files because it uses adb under the hood. MRR: €0 and it will always be this amount of money :)
Alphalerts helps investors find new investment opportunities by offering stock, options and crypto alerts.
https://chapati.systems/autoupdate/
Autoupdate automates the update process of various software like Python, Gitea, Zitadel, Drone, Kanboard, Caddy, Podman and System.
I also created multiple libraries for fetching business data from official government sources (e.g.the SEC)
I try to get most of the data directly from the source and plan to launch a different product which will resell it.
I made $12 on it in 2022 with no promotion.
Not sure how people are finding it as it is on the 4th page in the search for phrase: Coding for kids
The first one is Fluent[0], to learn vocabulary by placing words on a canvas. Third iteration over the last several years.
Second is blogging platform nofuss[1], where you do all the publishing through the email.
[0]: https://fluent.im/ [1]: https://nofuss.io/
The main issue with it is time - there’s no way I would go full time YouTubing with the current numbers so the day job has to take priority.
I scraped ~100k recipes from across the internet, and made this site to focus on south asian recipes (~2k). I will soon add features to better sort and filter these recipes by various diets, ingredients, and regions in South Asia.
I just launched a few days ago, and no revenue yet.
Some other approaches I spent a lot of time on:
* Extracting Structured Data From Recipes Using Conditional Random Fields [1]
* Chef Watson [2]
* Ingredient Parser - Model Guide [3]
[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/0...
[2] https://blog.kitchenpc.com/2011/07/06/chef-watson/
[3] https://ingredient-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/ind...
[4] https://pretty-recip.es/recipe?recipe-url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww....
I’d be interested in a partner to help grow it and replicate for other cities.
Its predecessor was basically hacked together for a company retreat while stranded at schiphol airport for a whole day.
It has quite some usage, but basically only covers its hosting costs.
A party game my friend and I built over peak COVID, still play with family & friends frequently. People stumble across it on the Apple TV App Store and occasionally purchase some content which is great!
Helping startup people in early stage to validate ideas before investing too much time and money in product development, just crossed $500MRR after launching it 3.5 months.
A desktop version of the “companion” apps floating around the space. Features emoting, expressions, eye contact, low latency voice synthesis, and a two way conversational model.
A static site to see IMDb ratings of all episodes of a TV show in a nice table. (ratings updated everyday)
A weekend project I built to scratch my own itch. Going on cruise mode for a while now.
The way it works is very simple. I'm copying from a comment I made earlier:
Everyday IMDb publishes bare bones datasets at https://www.imdb.com/interfaces/. I've a bash script to download them, format and load into MySQL from which I export two types of json files:
1) A file with all the TV shows names, id, ratings etc (shows.json) - this is what's used for search. It weighs < 700KB compressed (I could certainly optimize this file but I've stashed it for later).
2) A file for every tv show with all the ratings and votes for its episodes. Based on your search, the specific file will be fetched to display the ratings. (This one file per show could also be optimized but looks premature at this stage.)
Strictly speaking, a database is also not necessary but it serves 2 purposes: 1) I could easily query to satisfy some curious show related questions. 2) The datasets include a ton of stale data (like shows w/o episodes and vice versa), so I find it easier to cleanup through SQL.
The above architecture allows me to host the site as a static site. When I launched, I had a typical node backend that connected to a db to run searches etc. But thought it was way too much infrastructure for a simple site!
Glad to hear you have a concrete goal. Front-end is actually easy to pick up if you don't get carried away by the latest thing on the block. IMO, it's pretty mature nowadays and I prefer the tools available now over the ones I had when I started way back.
If you've no front-end experience, just pick framework like Vue or React and start building stuff. If you've the time, I'd even advice you to start with vanilla JS, HTML & CSS (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ should be your bible). It will not only set you up with a solid foundation but let you appreciate the conveniences & conventions when you pick up a framework. There's tons of tutorials available for pretty much anything web related. Good luck!
Thank you again!
Have you thought about contacting littlemachineshop.com to see if they'd be interested in carrying it? I've used them in the past to put together similar upgrades for my lathe.
Options Backtesting Service focusing on income and hedging trading strategies. Still under heavy development but have a handful of users who find it useful.
CSV upload to Buffer. Run it for many years, sent tens of millions of updates, only ever had a donation button that brings in enough to pay for the digital ocean box.
2 millions shows, 70 million episodes collected so far.
Now, I just need to find the perfect audience for it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Here is one idea - if you can list the advertisers for podcasts/episodes, that might interest new podcasters/other advertisers. Kind of a search engine to search podcasts by advertisers (or vice versa)
Go make one for a friend (or enemy)
The vast majority of Americans get at least some of their news from social media, even though they don't trust it.
Forth is a news feed for news; not quite social media. Everything comes from vetted journalists who adhere to our editorial policy, so you can trust what you read. No spam, no misinfo, no hate speech.
Have a little over 60 journalists in all sorts of beats/locations, and growing.