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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

The only way to make money from personal projects is to sell a book/course teaching people how to make money from personal projects.

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That's not true at all.

I put an early GenAI side project up, someone convinced me to monetize, and boom - $700k ARR in almost no time.

I'm not sure it's possible now with so little effort given how full the space is, but if you're in the right time and place with the right solution, there are tons of people that will pay you.

Same story as always: create value, solve a problem, make something people want.

Willing to name the service?

> $700k ARR

Projected, or has it been operating for a year?

You have 2000+ recurring paying customers using your fakeyou website?

Yeah! It held at that revenue for over a year, but that was several years ago. Then the market filled out. I stopped working on it (and listening to customers) to pursue other things.

I'm about to open source our desktop AI VFX compositing and animation tools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U

https://getartcraft.com/ (github and download links are not live yet)

I'm an engineer and a filmmaker. I'm really into video generation, but controllability and consistency are critical. I've been working on staging, blocking, and animation tools to control how various commercial and open source models behave.

I just didn't have a passion for TTS and voice conversion.

The Uberduck folks were my closest competitors for a while and they were YC funded. I think Suno and Udio sunk their product roadmap for music tools and they pivoted to something else. Maybe voice agents? They're cool folks.

Now Weights.gg is leading the "TTS for teens / consumers" space. There are dozens of startups in the voice conversion for music production space. This used to be an easy ramp to revenue, but the market is saturated.

Very cool. Thanks for sharing

Not true. There are stories. Sublime Text is one of them. I am sure author of that project made good chunk of money. It used to be the most popular text editor for a while (based on StackOverlow).

I personally have another example. Own MM B2B.

There are also stories of people starting trillion dollar businesses from their garage. Yes you can technically do that. The chances of you actually doing it are ~0.

I believe the OP was talking about the personal projects. Not startups or people who want to make a trillion dollar businesses. I believe there is different mentality behind those.

One ought not underestimate the cumulative effects of time. Multiple long-running projects with modest income can be surprisingly lucrative.

This doesn't appear to be about a book for sale? It's just this old blog post formatted in various ebook formats for download. (And, I guess, with future plans to do the same for other blog posts in their archive.)

Point still stands. They have made ~$0 from personal projects and are now trying to monetize their "journey" with a clickbait title and an ebook.

Oh, the "$1M" title is obviously totally detached from the contents of the post (I mean, I assume it is totally detached from the contents, it's not like this was even worth skimming through). Given it covers 2018-2020, I wouldn't want to say for certain they didn't make $1M in aggregate over the next 5 years though.

But no, I don't think the point stands, because they are not selling an ebook or anything else. The pattern you identified exists, but I don't think this matches the pattern.

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