Comment by shazow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shazow | Hacker News Reader

I have a bunch of projects I built up which I consider "done" as far as I'm concerned, but at the same time they're basically free to run (AppEngine in the free tier) so I'm always reluctant to sell... I do wish there were people who wanted to take one of these and build them out to the "next level".

- http://www.tweepsect.com/ - Gets 300,000~600,000 pageviews per month (about 1/6 uniques), makes a couple hundred bucks from ads each month. Been around for almost 5 years.

- http://colorblendy.com/ - There's also a Chrome app (20k weekly users), website gets about 4,000~8,000 visits/month. I had some ideas for making a "Pro" edition with things like importing/exporting colors from/to CSS stylesheets. Probably need to do some more market research before diving into this.

- http://wedomainsearch.com/ - Few hundred visits per month, brand new (built several months ago). Fairly cool idea that is really valuable for founders/hobbyists, I use it all the time. Needs some love for promotion and monetization, though.

I love working on these little stand-alone projects (a few more here: http://shazow.net/, also my email address if you want to reach out), sometimes I wish I could just whip them out and sell them as a living but the code alone is never as valuable without putting in effort into growing the audience.

I'm not interested in buying any of them I'm afraid, but I just wanted to say that your website (shazow.net) and your projects are all very impressive. You have a readable style of writing and a good eye for simplicity.

Thanks for putting it out there :)

Thank you for the kind words!

I have a few more projects in the pipeline that I've been reluctant to publicize, but now I'm suddenly feeling more motivated, ha. :)

Do it!

Unless you're reluctant because they need a cleanup, in which case, do that, and then post in next month's thread ;)

You're the developer I want to be someday.

I realize that may sound weird. I'm ok with it.

Ha, thanks Chris! I hope you become the developer you think I am someday, and more. :)

Almost a Haiku, it is.

Hey Andrey, I was a paid member of SocialGrapple before it got acquired by Google, what has happened to it now?

Hi Thomas! My sincere apologies for letting you down with SocialGrapple. :(

Unfortunately not much happened with it. I joined Google to work on an in-house social analytics product, but most of it never launched. I've since left Google so I don't know what's going on in that department anymore.

I'm working on https://briefmetrics.com/ now, which is vaguely in the same space as SocialGrapple, sans the social for now. :) I'm considering introducing some social metrics into the email reports someday. I'm also working on splitting up the pieces of the project so that most of it can be open sourced and thereby guaranteeing some kind of continuity for loyal customers.

http://www.tweepsect.com/ - is blocked in Russia

These idiots banned a/the cloudflare endpoint.

[1] http://antizapret.info/index.php --- see for yourself (108.162.196.104)

This site is pretty interesting. Where do they get this data from? I'd think that banned site list is not published anywhere?

Oh, nevermind, I read it on their website. ISPs are just leaking these lists.

My work bans it too "Your request was categorized by Blue Coat Web Filter as 'Scam/Questionable/Illegal'."

i got an alert saying that too many tweeter queries can block you. Seems like a dangerous thing. what say?

In the graphic on the home page:

It erks me that different words 'stalkers' and 'stalking' are used to refer to the two parts of the graph, when there is no distinction between them.

Confused me that's all :)

Have you tried selling these on http://flippa.com

Nope. I feel Flippa is better for high-value domains and highly-ranked content sites. I don't feel that web applications get valued appropriately.

How much are you selling tweepsect for?

It's free to run, requires 0% maintenance or effort, and brings in money every month. Send me an email with a tempting offer and we'll talk. :)

Sent.

what do you run it on?

It's all front-end JavaScript running on the free AppEngine tier. Basically just static file hosting.

Out of interest, how is briefmetrics doing? Its a good concept, and nice clean report structure

Thanks!

The fundamental product I wanted to build is done, so it basically runs itself while I do business development and sales. Eventually I'll need to dive back into the code to add more features I have on the roadmap, but I work best when I "switch modes" for spans of several weeks at a time so it may be a while. :)

The current revenue is about $250/mo. I've been trying to focus more on agencies with many clients and offering them custom-branded whitelabel emails reports for their customers. Making some progress on that end.

At the same time, as you can tell, I kind of have a habit of doing other random projects on the side, so things take longer than they should. :)

thats really cool. My first thought was that it could be useful for people like you with several side projects that they dont really spend a lot of time actively maintaining, to get 'at a glance' stats to see that things are ticking over. To that end, you could consider a multi domain plan, $18 for 3 domains or something.

I love projects like this, particularly because although the income seems modest, I frequently live in developing countries for long stretches, where $250/month trickling in pretty much pays for the necessities.

You're absolutely right about the pricing. Right now it's still in the "throw a number down on the front page and see if it sticks" stage of pricing. I'm still banging my head against the wall to find a better pricing scheme, but it will likely be similar to what you mentioned.

Here, I'll write it down just so I can get it out of my head. :)

* Hobby: $4/mo (paid yearly), limited to 1 site and 1 recipient

* Startup: $10/mo, unlimited sites, unlimited recipients

[Custom Branding]

* Freelance: $35/mo, custom branding, 10 sites

* Studio: $85/mo, custom branding, 25 sites

* Agency: $150/mo, custom branding, 50 sites

It's a lot of plans but maybe the two-bucket separation would be manageable. Or maybe I need to do a more fluid $4-5/mo/custom-branded site plan, but pay-per-use plans typically doesn't perform as well for non-developers.

Love the projects. Keep it up :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com