Ask HN: Those making $1000/month or more on side projects – Show and tell | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Those making $1000/month or more on side projects – Show and tell

50 pointskasukabe25 comments

Most months I earn around a grand on https://www.damninteresting.com/ after I pay for hosting, subscriptions, residuals, author payments, etc. And that is 99% from donations, I refuse to host ads (and about 1% from occasional content licensing). I pour so much time into it that my hourly rate is fairly low. For me, it's not about the money, I just enjoy doing it.

Here's the 2023 thread for this, with links to the 2022 and 2021 versions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482433

And a separate thread on ideas generation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942558

I built Userdoc (https://userdoc.fyi) a requirements management system for software projects.

After running a development consultancy for 8 years, I wanted a dedicated system for gathering and confirming requirements, and only syncing them with project management tools like Jira when they are ready (but keeping them in Userdoc as the living documentation and source of truth.

Things are going well, we have some large enterprise and government clients - and a two week experiment with AI back in January has lead to infusing AI into most aspects of the platform, which has opened up a lot of doors.

would you mind sharing what you are doing for AI integration?

Sure, we generate user stories based on requirements, personas based on needs/goals - and auto generate user journeys. We also use AI to generate detailed acceptance criteria for user stories.

Customers have saved days using Userdoc, whether that's to help them flesh out the requirements they already know, or generate requirements they couldn't come up with themselves.

I don’t get why anyone would advertise their financial success when there’s an army of copycats ready to jump in and get a slice of the action.

Parasites! Youtube and social media are full of them.

For 99% of the projects the chance of getting new customers being mentioned here should be much higher than the chance to lose a single customer because a copy cat actually stealing one.

have you been on either side?

That's not really how it works

I’ve had the same thought. These are typically small enough projects that a single person can build and copy them.

If the main advantage of your project is on not being advertised to avoid copycats, I'd question the business model in the first place. Sooner or later any proper business will face competition.

https://cronhub.io (makes about $1200/Month revenue. About $200/Month in costs which I can optimize further but I don't have the time)

I took this over from someone else over a year ago and work on it very rarely due to support volume being low and I have another business that keeps me busy full time. Tech in Laravel/PHP. If anyone is interested in helping, let me know.

How do you generally get new users for this?

Decent Inbound traffic. I literally need to fix some technical issues to get more conversions. But I get stuck with my other business a lot more. This project needs a bit more love and can do wonders. It also has the concept of Scheduled functions and not just cron monitoring.

Nice! I remember learning about Cronhub when the original developer was building in public on social media, back in 2019. I remember thinking it was a cool idea, and even recommended it to a friend that was running a startup and was having some issues with failing cron jobs.

Cool to see that it’s still around and profitable! Yeah, maintenance of an inherited codebase is hard, but happy to see that someone took over it.

Yea. Great guy. We are in touch and he still helps out occasionally if I have a question.

I'm really curious how much one should expect to pay to acquire a project that does $1200/month like this?

Usually 3-4X of yearly profits for smaller projects like these. If it is growing at a decent pace, then you can ask for a bit more but don't expect to get more than max 3-5x of yearly profits. For example, if I sold it today, I would expect around 40-50K minimum. If Growth was better and I was spending tons of time on it, I would ask for more.

Thank you.

An question that interests me in all of these: How did you come up with the idea?

I believe that ideas usually come from personal needs or desires.

I originally built OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com) to have a convenient way to convince my contracting clients that their hosting sucks.

Those are rookie numbers, I once made an app in 4 hours that made $1800 a month.

Now my side project is making computer chips. The hobby is a bit more expensive than playing golf. But I guess hobbies are always expensive.

Nobody asked.

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