Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

129 pointsfolli77 comments

It's the time of the year again, so I'd be interested hear what new (and old) ideas have come up.

Previously asked on: 2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421

2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095

2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167

2019 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863

2018 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306

2017 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804

View on HN

$500/month (3 figures) is a great milestone. I remember talking to a mentor that said, “you have something people will buy, stop working on features and focus just a bit on marketing.” It was good advice because now I’m regularly generating revenue of 4 figures per day.

Rewind 5 years…

I was so frustrated I couldn’t easily design and print barcode labels on my Mac using a spreadsheet. I opened up vscode and wrote a crude MVP in react and got it working in electron.

I put it on the Mac App Store and the next morning had my first sale in the Caribbean of all places. It’s now making 5-figures per week.

Last year I decided to start another side hustle, importing and selling high quality label printers bundled with my app, now making 4-figures per week with a growing reseller network.

Design App at https://label.live

Label Printers at https://mydpi.com

Edit: I’m still consulting so I still consider these two projects my side hustles.

>> “you have something people will buy, stop working on features and focus just a bit on marketing.”

This. So much this.

IF you want to make money from a project [1] then you need to sell it. Selling takes time send effort. For most of us here the -developing- is the easy part so we just do that - seemingly forever.

Stop programming; start marketing. That will be a lot more profitable, or show that what you have is nothing people want. Marketing doesn't have to cost money, but it does take time send effort.

[1] sometimes the developing is its own reward, and that's cool too. You don't -have- yo turn every project into money.

I'm at $500/month for my side hustle Chrome extension SnipCSS: https://www.snipcss.com

I should do marketing, but instead I'm building another product - an AI (ChatGPT wrapper) to help automate marketing.

"If I force myself to do something I hate while having a full-time job, I'll just burn out" is what I say to myself. We'll see if procrastinating essential business tasks works out for me in the long run, lol.

What's your conversion rate?

Hey, can I just say, I really appreciate and respect your pricing strategy on the design app.

Fixed one time cost for personal or business. Or a cancel-any-time subscription model. Really, there is a spot for everyone in this pricing model.

It's refreshing and builds trust. I have no need for your software, but it's like the trust is so attractive, I would consider buying it just because it's there to buy.

Anyway, congrats on the side gig income. I need to get me some of that.

I was reluctant to offer a subscription because of how much I personally didn’t want to use one. However, it’s proved useful for many reasons: 1) seasonal use e.g. agriculture, 2) flies under radar of some approval and expense report requirements, 3) longer term trial, i.e. many subs cancel and convert to one-time, 4) lowers friction for users that might otherwise pirate.

Exactly. So much value you're offering here. I wish more vendors had your attitude.

Before I buy a (digital) movie, I end up renting it first. The rental costs me $2.99 and if I like the movie, I purchase it for $15.99. Yes, Amazon (or whomever) makes more money off of me, but I would rather pay the "wasted" $3 in order to decide if the movie is worth watching again. In a lot of cases, I don't want to repeat the movie again.

Like I said, your approach is transparent and builds trust. People dislike the new "rental/subscription" model that is being forced. Anyway, kudos and thanks for the reply.

Inspirational post, thanks for sharing.

Question: on your design app, is the bulk of your revenue reoccurring or onetime?

It’s about 20% recurring and 80% one time license sales.

My high level business plan is that my app is probably useful to 1% of businesses worldwide. This equates to $500,000,000 or $50M/year over 10 years. Big goals!

Hey! I’ve used Label Live a lot. Great app and excellent value. Thank you!

No no, thank you!

How do you collect money and pay taxes and stuff? Did you start a company for it?

Yes. I already had an LLC for consulting. The other side hustles are dba “doing business as” and registered trademarks.

I really like your design app's home page -- modern, inviting, disarming, and attractive. Did you build it? If so, can you talk a bit about what technologies you're using and the design process? If not, how did you go about deciding on a contractor to build it out for you?

Thanks for sharing your story!

This is the 3rd big rebuild of the site.

Even though the website uses the same tech stack as the electron app I decided to hire a sub contractor to build it, that way, my dev energy could stay concentrated on building features. I think we found each other on LinkedIn by chance. They reached out to me because I sounded human. Ha!

At the time, the design was inspired by the gradients on the stripe website.

I do most of my own illustrations using Sketch. The logo design is mine. My last name is Larson and my mother (Linda) used to sign her name with two big capital cursive L. The alliteration of Label LIVE and Linda Larson were fun… and as I tried to sketch the flow of a label through the printer I just stumbled on a cursive L that had invoked my own warm fuzzies. So here we are!

The name choice was mostly looking at TLD name availability for the word “label” and .live appeared. That was pure luck.

I'm coming up on three years of running OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com).

I still work on it two hours per workday, before my day job starts, but it now supports uptime monitoring for websites, APIs and JavaScript apps, as well as cron job/scheduled task monitoring, and has built-in status pages (https://hackernews.onlineornot.com for example).

It's been funny working in a "red ocean" (as MBA-types call it), competitors will enter the market with such enthusiasm, and close up shop a few months later when they haven't made nearly enough money to justify the effort.

Anyway, I'm a big fan of the "outlast" strategy as described by Justin Duke (of Buttondown): https://www.applied-cartography.com/goon-squad - my aim is to ship high quality code over a very long time, and the business seems to be growing faster and faster each year, so it seems to be working.

How do you compete to find customers in such a crowded SAAS segment which is uptime?

A few ways:

- Building a better product than the incumbents

- Showing up, doing the work, every single day

- Refusing to compete on price

- Marketing until it feels like it's too much, then marketing even more

Easier said than done, of course.

Impressive.

Would you mind giving an overview of the marketing activities you perform?

I learned most of what I know from the 30x500 course by Amy Hoy/Alex Hillman, but the gist of it is reading and participating in forums, providing valuable advice, and writing articles that spread that advice further.

He posts and comment a lot (spam?) about it in a forum with potential customers: hackernews

I haven't seen any of OPs comments, but I remember when Checkly (also in this space) first launched the founder of that was posting a lot here and on Reddit.

I wouldn't say their comments were that helpful or insightful - mainly just advertising. Now they've raised ~$10m. It's spam, but it works ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

Spam works. It needs a level of shamelessness that I don't think is worth it, as many other things also work.

This is exactly what I mean by "market until you think it's too much, and then some" - if it was truly too much, the average forum member would know (imo).

Yep, and reddit too.

I stopped doing (for money) side projects in 2015.

Instead I started to buy solar farms from my yearly xmas bonus. Invest 40K (10K bonus + 30K loan) -> 6000K/year. Net -- post costs & taxes. On average the loan was paid off in 6 years (thanks to low interest rates). From there on it's pure revenue.

Rinse repeat. Not even accounting for the free tax credits I get out of the investment.

Just doing my planning for the '23 investment. If I stop doing anything right now the last loan will be paid off in 2030 (interest rates are up a bit), and I will be making ~5K/month. Net. "Forever".

I use the time I gained for free work on important projects.

Would you share where is this? I know someone in the US who wanted to do this, but they couldn’t as the power company would pay them less than they would be making.

Oh, sorry, this is Germany.

How do you “buy solar farms”? Don’t you have to maintain them? From your comment makes it sound like it’s not a job in itself.

There are quite a few services here that handle everything. Basically you just say "I have $X", and they say "Ok, the bank will add 3X, which will result in 0.5x revenue per year, and a 2x tax deductible".

And yes, the post cost ROI is around 18%, currently -- not including the tax discounts.

> There are quite a few services here that handle everything

May I ask what is it called?

Could you give us a name of such a service?

Wait so these farms yield 15% ROI? And you can invest with leverage? How is this possible.

Government pushing hard to get out of coal & gas ;)

> Invest 40K (10K bonus + 30K loan) -> 6000K/year

6000/year, not 6000K, right? At first that sounded like you won a lottery.

Yep 6000 == 6K/year.

My bad.

You could probably make money just taking other peoples' money and doing this for them.

Getting high on OPM is the way to go. Could be another YC startup.

I guess the problem here is counterparty risk. If the solar farm goes bankrupt, you lost your investment. Also they may be illiquid (hard to sell?).

That is probably why you are investing your bonus, rather than selling everything to go all in. Because apart from the counterparty risk, 15% lifetime yield is pretty good. Obviously there is a threat from unlimited energy scenario like cold fusion, but that is probably 35 years away :-).

I created https://www.screenprices.info/ whilst looking for a new monitor for my WFH setup - I wanted a super simple interface to help find the right screen and felt the other sites out there were too convoluted.

Launched just under a month ago, and recently passed $500 for November.

Plan to add analytics similar to Google Flights next to help people find the best monitor for their needs, and focus on the scope and quality of the data.

All from amazon affiliate revenue? That's impressive for only one month. Have you done much promotion?

Just a suggestion since I am in the same boat, offer use case (programming, gaming). Dell is also seemingly missing when you click KVM on the side menu but your description has it. (Dell U2722DE) Might have to work out a few ux bugs since the list stops sorting when you uncheck an option. A full refresh causes a complete reset as well.

How do you attract traffic to this site?

https://github.com/refined-github/refined-github

I never intended it to be a side project, I just liked the extension and started contributing heavily to it, to the point where I became the maintainer for the next several years.

I get about that amount per month in GitHub Sponsorships. Not nearly worth the amount of time I put into it, but it’s relatively effortless work. It makes my regular work on other GitHub projects more enjoyable (due to the features that Refined GitHub adds)

Really cool. My last job recommended it so I had started using it. I got laid off a while ago and I still use it now.

I used it a lot when i was required to use github. In fact, i think i used to send you a lot of patches on npm stuff. I recall sending open source sponsorship requests often but never heard of any follow up.

Thankfully not required to suffer github anymore. Specially now that their search is so bad. I dont' even want to imagine the work you had "refining" their new code viewer :)

I love one of my friends - among many other things he does, he grounds me.

I'll pitch some moonshot crazy idea that would be nearly impossible to pull off even with tremendous effort.

And he'll agree that it sounds neat, but comment, "I think you could make dozens of dollars with that."

It's then that I realize, I have no strategy for how to actually make money off my idea. I just wish the free product already existed.

Every now and then he thinks my ideas are worth following, and it's nice to have someone more objective than me help ground me in ideas that might actually pay off!

For whatever reasons… mainly my own Privilege… I rarely prioritized money in anything I decided to create. I too am thankful for the financially responsible ones that were born knowing how to make things work economically.

https://www.fundedlist.com (~$1100/month)

I curate and sell leads to agencies/marketers that want to sell to recently funded startups.

Each weekend the list is created for the previous 7 days and is sent out on Monday morning.

Marketing is purely cold email outreach right now (since that's my wheelhouse). However, I'm considering SEO and content, as it's less intrusive and can pay off long term.

Looking forward to ideas around marketing in this thread!

Do you cold call companies in that list every week asking if they want subscribe to a cold call list?

It's not recurring but my most recent macOS app ScreenMemory [0] passed that (and more) recently without much marketing. I posted on some subreddits and on my small twitter following.

It's an app that takes screenshots of your screen continuously, and lets you explore it on a timeline, as well as search text on the screen.

It's a new-old idea for me. In 2015 [1] I wrote a script that did this, without a GUI. In recent times Rewind.ai started getting hype, which I guess reminded me of it. Earlier this year I saw an open source app, which seemed to vanish. Another app I tried, I just didn't like (can't remember the name). And finally, there existed a very barebones similar app (TimeSnapper) which has been around for ages, but doesn't have much feature wise, my MVP had the same base features, and I felt as if I was only getting started at that point.

I figured I could fill some void between all of this and so far people have given me good feedback.

[0] https://screenmemory.app/ [1] https://jontelang.com/blog/2015/08/15/automating-screenshots...

Looks great but your page copy should mention it is mac only.

Thanks, I really should add that.

Writing books which generate revenues of about $500 per month (all of them combined, not every single one). See http://t3x.org

would you mind me asking what motivates you to write as much as you have? just writing one book is bucket list item for me, yet here you've written >= 13! do you write for an audience or is it perhaps primarily to consolidate your thoughts?

I have written much more, more like 20, but not everything is still available. Then with a few books I ran out of motivation, so they just sit in my archive.

At the beginning writing somehow fascinated me, but right now it is probably just habit/momentum/karma that keeps me going.

How do you market or spread the word about them?

Sometimes I post here, sometimes on reddit. Mostly I have no idea how people stumble across my books, though.

Is "lisp from nothing" the sequel to the buddist practice book?

As a former Vipassana practicioner, I bought and enjoyed the Mental Development book. Short and to the point; helped me to start meditating again after several years of hesitation or a "dead end" of sorts. The tone and style of your writing have an interesting "math-y" feel -- but it also feels very clean and somehow calm.

Same goes for the Klong book, which I bought and enjoyed thoroughly. Haven't mastered the language, though, but I'm hoping to; it definitely is really interesting, especially for a person like me who loves the build-your-own-tiny-tools-with-tiny-languages-for-your-own-use-and-prefer-low-end-computers philosophy. I'm definitely a fan of your work; your webpage and entire way of life has been an inspiration for me for years already.

If you don't mind me asking -- are you working on any upcoming books these days as well?

I've been working on https://webtoapp.design for for 4 years now (in 10 days). It's my first business, so I've made plenty of mistakes. By now I have someone that handles the easier customer support inquiries and after all the other costs I can live off of it (not an appropriate software engineer salary for Europe, but it's enough).

It can be very frustrating, since I help my customers through the entire app creation and publishing process, so that includes dealing with Google and Apple.

I keep working on it because it's growing slowly but steadily and it provides me a lot of flexibility. I don't know which marketing channels to focus on to speed up growth though, at the moment it's pretty much all SEO.

I built freemium chatgpt extension.. reached $7k MRR recently.

https://chatgptwriter.ai

This looks great, when will you release a Firefox extension?

How do you make money from this?

We make about $1300/month (shared among three co-authors) from the ebook "Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS" and a companion online course: https://stratospheric.dev/

There is one more month. Why is everyone saying it is the end of the year?

It's not the beginning nor the middle though. People aren't saying the year ended but it's ending, closer to the end rather the the beginning.

Many businesses tend to wind down in December (other than those that have a holiday season ramp-up), so it's a good time for a retrospective.

this is hacker level pedantry

Time to start a new side project: isittheendoftheyearyet.com

I maintain Blackslate it is tech journal where we publish articles and news about Open source, AI, ML, Blockchain, Cloud, Mobile and other latest technologies.

https://www.blackslate.io/articles

Currently I am not making $500 but over the period of time there is a potential to make.

Any kind of side projects?

The lowest RE rental income I have is $500/mo. I have 6 of them, between $500 to $2100 per month.

I don't actually do anything besides approving invoices. The PMs do everything.

How much do you have to spend on PM?

10% of rent

Is the figure for profit or revenue?

Revenue, unless profit is a better metric (you are running a Shopify store for instance, so cost of goods is a big factor)

If you are at 90% margin, might as well ignore the costs, especially for this informal chat.

It's very inspiring. A lot of ideas has been verified.

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