Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

Might not be the same thing, but I had/have built (a) project(s) that I began with the dreams of someday monetizing, but later realized, maybe I shouldn't, couldn't figure out how to charge for it, or didn't see a need of why anyone would pay to use it, and thus, ended up just keeping it as a "free platform".

I'm not upset about the decisions I've made for keeping my projects free, as if anything, they have taught me a lot, and I tend to use what I learned from them for future projects. In most cases, I end up turning on an Analytics feature and studying it, in order to understand the behavior of my users, and exactly what they are using it for and why, so that I can harness that into ideas for future projects.

Two projects like this were a blog I run called Confessions of the Professions ( http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com ). This website was created in order to solicit rants and raves from people about their jobs, careers, and their workplace. While I wouldn't call it a complete failure or complete success, as it has been monetized and makes money through ads, I would've loved to figured out a way to bring in revenue and make it a full time job.

The reason I say success and failure: It goes viral for days and weeks at a time, sometimes receiving over 10,000 visitors a day, while other days, it normally gets its average of about 1,000, though it could be worse. Sometimes, I cannot fully recognize the fact that I began with just Googlebot, my mom, and girlfriend as my visitors, and yet I continue to receive hundreds of emails a year with contributions and people thanking me. I even had a teacher from an elementary class full of students using some of the articles for their school project and thanked me so much for creating the website.

Confessions remains an ongoing project.. I'm always writing articles or receiving them from other people and getting them ready for the website, so I'd say I spent a good 2 years passionate about it and into it, hours and hours a day. I've since limited myself to no more than 1 hour per day on it. Occasionally 2 hours if writing an article.

For the other project, MyPost ( https://mypost.io ) is a web page creation platform that allows anyone to create a page with very little knowledge of HTML or CSS in seconds, or they can completely customize their page with HTML and CSS as they see fit. And there is soo much that people can do with it. I created it for a number of different reasons as well, including as an educational tool for people to learn what it was like to code. Social media has catered to the population so much that while everyone "can use social media and the Internet", far fewer can claim to hit the "View Source" button and actually understand all that makes a website what it is.

As for charging for this, I never could figure it out and hoped to one day just put ads on the website, but ended up scratching this idea, as the ads were just too annoying, even for me. I can tolerate some ad popups, but I created the platform to offer people an experience, not an annoyance. It is this project that taught me a lot about databases and a lot about what people want on the Internet, and that is: an easy way to gain exposure. I have plans for a another project that helps people to do that, similar to ProductHunt and Hacker News.

The time I spent on this was about 3 months initially and then another 2 months just making some changes, fixing things, creating samples, etc.

I would love to quit my day job and just work on side projects and monetize them.. as I'm sure many of us would, but I have yet to get to that point completely. I do have a few projects I built completely with monetization in mind, and while there is a free version of those products, I built them as a subscription-based platform. I also have a few ...

Not mine but... http://nodemailer.com/status/

I have a project which may never generate revenue, despite the fact I spent 2 months after hours working on it. I did a dumb thing and dove directly into the project without first finding a fit or customer base for it.

More or less, it's a scheduling application that allows a user to set when they're open and allow anyone to book that time for however much the original scheduler valued that slot of their schedule. It's a good base application, but without customers, it's wasted potential and engineering time. Guess I'll add a link: https://kronikl.io

There is an added benefit that I built up a lot of custom Vue components and flask modules which can be added to later projects (braintree painments, address inputs, settings pages, &c.), so I'm not considering it a complete loss.

I've decided to pivot most of my time to a more marketing based approach for the time being and, once customers role in, tailor the solution to their needs.

I have not built this project with the main goal to earn money from it but just to build something that I thought was missing in this world.

I am trying to visualise all of world's knowledge with interactive mind maps focused on learning anything in a linear way.

Here is the search engine that searches all of these interactive maps : https://learn-anything.xyz/

Both the search engine and the maps are open source so I am not so sure how and if I can ever make money from this aside from the Patreon page that we have set up for the project.

If anyone has any ideas on how one can monetise this in a good way, I would love to hear it. We don't want to put any sponsored content in there as that would defeat our vision of having most quality resources available for all subjects.

I spent a few thousand building a very detailed database of seed-funding entities that included all the staff and their backgrounds, detailed areas of interest and past investment, and more. I planned to turn it into an actually-useful seed funding search service. But I got distracted with another project needed to pay my bills. Time and persistence are the greatest obstacles to side projects IMO.

I built Thrail (https://thrail.io) 6 months ago wanting to solve my own difficulty to find and book quality outdoors activities in a certain area, especially when coming to a new place (tourism or recent relocation).

I think there are multiple reasons why it wasn't successful as I believed it might be, most importantly because I built something without first researching the market enough, and failure to do so got me building something which wasn't very helpful to people.

Another important issue was marketing. I'm developer myself, and even though I tried my best to get the word out there, the results weren't as good as I imagined they would be, on one side because I had no idea what I was doing, and on the other, because I didn't spend enough money on higher quality marketing.

I spent couple of months building it but I don't regret that time -- although this conclusion is probably specific to my personal situation at the time, where I had just closed the shop on my own development agency of 3+ years and wanted to get a break by working on something fun. Additionally, out of all the "weekend projects" I started over the years, this was the first one I actually "finished", and that means something to me, regardless of the outcome.

If I get into something similiar in the near future, I would definitely pay much more attention to the aspect of getting the feedback to build something people actually want to use. And marketing, definitely marketing.

Not answering the question directly but one issue is that as a developer you can often make a product for almost free (and it might even be a really good product) but marketing is almost never free.

Sure you can market with sweat equity. Forums, Show HN, Product Hunt, etc but to get real money you often have to advertise. And advertising is not cheap.

I do actually have a product in this category but I don't want to post it with a throw away account.

I built a cash forecasting app (http://www.money-stew.com) that I use religiously to verify that I won't have any trouble paying my bills.

I actually managed to get some traffic and ad revenue ($100< a month) when I first developed it and got it into the Google web app store and was featured for a little bit. I think there where quite a few bugs that I ignored and I stopped work on it for a long while.

I continue to try and improve on it, but it rarely gets the bulk of my free time.

Its been difficult for me to get _any_ feedback on it, so I bounce back and forth between feeling like its a worthwhile venture or its just a pet project that is useful to nobody but me.

I thought probably Hands Free for Chrome would see some donations given how much it could help someone who was disabled, and given how many donations I've seen more ordinary & simple extensions receive, but I only got $10 the past 3 years, and that was a single donation from a friend who felt bad seeing it at $0.

https://www.handsfreechrome.com/

Barely any users, just around 400 or so.

I spent a couple years building https://infiniquest.org in my spare time. This is a site where you can both create and play interactive fiction games, using an engine I built entirely from scratch. I mainly built it to prove to myself I could complete a large project start to finish. I also had the motivation that my son and I could make games for each other, but by the time I finished, he was big into Minecraft and had no interest in text adventure games. :D I had hoped to make some income with it thru ads and paid features, but I never tried too hard to build up a user base, and now it sits there largely unmaintained for the last several years. Last year I completed a proof-of-concept integrating it with the Amazon Echo - that was kinda neat, but there's a lot of work to be done to finish and polish it... and considering there were no users to begin with, I lacked the motivation to undertake that.

I have done a handful of side projects that have lost money and lots of side projects with time spent on something that has not be productized.

I don't really thing you should do a side project with the anticipation of making money.

My focus on side projects is doing R&D and building skills or tools that will pay off in my paid work. From that perspective I don't really consider anything I have done to be a "loss."

I do open source but only to demonstrate something I plan to sell later or to establish ownership of IP.

Spending money on R&D is a great investment since you can deduct on taxes and get an automatic 30% return. That is much higher and guaranteed return compared to "investing" in stock market.

I built https://communiroo.com because I couldn't find a quick and simple single website to expose bug/feature tracking + SO type questions + forums + support requests for my other things I was building. It seemed (and still seems) like it fills a need for mine and everyone else's side projects.

I think the biggest issue is marketing. I tried a few Twitter/Facebook ad campaigns that didn't really pan out, and an HN submission that didn't make the front page. But really I haven't done much to market it, and it just sits there chugging along with few users other than myself while I work on other stuff.

Not sure if it qualifies, as I actually managed to make money for a few months, but: MyGuestmap (now long dead) - started it in 2007, put Google Ads and some donation button. It allowed people to create their own little maps and embed them on blogs, where people could place pins and say something.

Got to 40k maps in a few months (it somehow got viral in a forum, then went from there). I even made $1k in ads one month. Some of the users included indie artists, setting up maps for fans, and diverse groups of people (there was a map for "moms of kids with cancer", for instance, which is pretty cool)

Then Google banned me for serving ads in porn sites. Then Paypal banned me (and took my funds) for taking money from shady accounts. Then my hosting service asked me to leave because they found "adult pics" on my site. A quick audit on the profile pics revealed that there were quite a few maps with porn content (including all the illegal stuff). I took stuff down as fast as I could, but never managed to get Google to pay me again. Tried my luck with a few redesigns, setting up a new adsense account (got shutdown immediately), etc. In the end, I let the domain expire and that was that. At least I didn't spend a lot of time or money on it...

Ouch.

Edit: registrar > hosting service

I built http://start9.io three years ago - the idea was to somehow manage to show video game publishers that a 'professional' vintage gaming platform was something that could attract users. I wanted it to be the Netflix of the retrogaming.

Unfortunately, I never managed to find cofounders that were as much motivated as I was - each one I worked with was working on it as a hobby more than anything else, and I usually had to tell them what to do, which was exhausting considering I was the only developer to develop such a big beast. Adding marketing on top of that was just too much. We still applied to Y Combinator with the last cofounder I worked with, but he wasn't really ready to move to another continent for the project and quickly started looking for excuses to drop it. He got one when we ended up not being selected :) We're still friends, but I learned that it's hard finding people to build things.

I'm still extremely proud of this project, tho. Both technically and humanly, I learnt so many things! And the project is still running without needing much maintenance, so I guess it's still a success in some way. Plus, it helped me to find jobs, since people are usually a bit impressed when you can explain to them in interview how gameboys work under the hood ... :)

I built http://greetingbin.com as a platform for uploading images of greeting cards along with some metadata to the cloud. Then you could throw the card out and still have a digital copy of it. Needless to say, I have no users. Granted, I didn't do any marketing, but I realized that in actuality I never used the product myself, so why would anyone else use it?

I built an ad arbitrage site around shitty 50 slide slideshows. Drove traffic with Facebook paid and monitized with AdSense. Cleared $2k the first week and then basically got crushed by Google smart pricing.

http://lookwork.com is a "visual RSS reader," subscribe to RSS feeds minus the words. Sort of a mood/inspiration feed for artists and graphic designers.

First launched free around 2012 I think. Then there was a relaunch where we tried to go subscriber-based. At the time, the only online payment options were Paypal (shudder) and Amazon (a mess to configure). The subscription model flopped, so we relaunched free again.

We have a very small set of very rabid fans, but have had difficulty explaining this thing to potential users. Fortunately the Digital Ocean hosting is cheap enough that we can just leave it running on autopilot. (the old AWS hosting was a money pit)

I built https://bugdedupe.com/ last year- the idea was to make it easy to remove duplicate bug reports by using some academic research I worked on involving machine learning.

The system worked well, but I struggled to find users, and it died a sad, lonely, death.

TwoFactorAuth, a Rails gem for supporting the open U2F hardware two factor authentication standard. https://www.twofactorauth.io

When the standard was released 2.5 years ago I figured that exacting security code against an unevenly documented API was worth paying for, but nobody understood what 2FA was, why SMS is garbage for 2FA, that you could now get devices for a couple bucks that would work on dozens of sites while respecting your privacy, etc.

I spent about a month coding and tried to sell it for a couple months, but I simply didn't have the resources to try to do all the education needed. I put it on the shelf.

But this spring I've gotten a couple inquiries about updating it to Rails 5.0 and 5.1, so I guess the knowledge is getting out there. I did another survey and there are still no drop-in libraries for the languages I'm comfortable in (Ruby, Python, JavaScript, PHP) - either they require a lot of fiddly customization or they're half-finished hobby attempts.

I'm considering updating the gem, automating the license purchasing, taking steps to enforce the dual-license, and seeing how it does.

I'm in the process of growing my website, evildojo.com, with the intent that it will be a key to financial freedom, but so far it hasn't made me a dime. Fortunately, costs are very low, and I've been primarily using it as a blogging/linking platform, in essence my personal hub on the Internet. I built a static-site generator and write all of the content in markdown. It loads very fast, which was a primary goal.

Oh, boy, lots of them!!!

I'm good at "releasing". I'm not good at deciding what to build (demand) and I'm not good at the marketing side.

My latest project helps you get more followers and increase user engagement on Instagram. It's a Google Chrome extension called Magis. It's currently bringing in $30 per month with $25 per month in fee's for the payment solution. Yay $5 profit; if you don't count my time.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magis/kahkfpeemmmj...

My previous project helped you validate your idea before you create the actual product. Apparently it was a bad idea because all it really seems to do is piss people off. Anyway, meet FauxBuy.

https://fauxbuy.com

Those are just the last two. I build a lot of stuff that's not profitable.

I'm really good at this! It has culminated in a number of unreleased projects. Many people would call them failures, I see them as learning opportunities (helps me keep my sanity.) And indeed they have been, I've accumulated a ton of knowledge in a variety of areas as a result. The project I'm perhaps most proud of is called 1v1.me (and its 301'd domain, 1v1me.com) -- a challenge + wager platform for gamers.

The idea was to allow people to find other gamers to challenge to matches for which there would be a monetary reward. I'm not a lawyer, but I've understood such an arrangement to exist in a legal grey area (at least here in Canada.) Regardless, I had looming concerns about legal issues. The major issue for the eventual discontinuation of my work on the project was bad scope management, which resulted in me developing far too much product at once. One such example was my choice to include real-time matchmaking in the "MVP". A great learning experience to be sure.

So anyway, now there's a git repo with a fairly clean NodeJS + (oops) Backbone.js project sitting on BitBucket with hundreds of hours of work put into it that'll never be released!

Perhaps the most valuable lesson I've learned from my various projects is how to manage scope, and focus on minimizing work up front. Delay work until the last responsible moment.

I think there's a lot of money to be made in such a venture, if you can manage your feature set properly. The biggest trouble is verifying match results though - which now that I think about it - may have been one of my primary concerns. (I had an entire system set up for verifying match results via automatically uploaded screenshots, which would then be verified using instructions by workers on Mechanical Turk.)

If I were to do it again, I'd focus solely on the main experience of challenging someone and pick specific games that are easy to verify the results for.

Nothing major, but I put a few sticker designs up on StickerMule's marketplace: https://www.stickermule.com/user/1070831731/stickers

It's been a couple months, and my $20ish investment (you have to place an order for a sticker before you can sell it) has turned up $43 of profit. So technically it was profitable, but I don't think I've even reached minimum wage for the time I spent on it.

We haven't made any money at Fogbeam Labs[0] yet. I could talk a lot about the reasons why, and why I'm still crazy optimistic, but it might take a while to write it all up. Maybe I'll do a blog post one day. I think it's all too long for an HN comment.

That said, I can try to distill out a few key points:

(in no particular order )

1. Doing this as a "side project" while the founders still work day jobs. I think doing that is fine, but it limits how fast you can move and how aggressive you can be.

2. And (1) goes hand in hand with this one, which is "not being focused enough". I should have emphasized a "what is the single most important thing we can do now to generate revenue" approach from the beginning. Instead, we worked on this "grand vision" which is pretty cool, but took forever to get close to having a shippable product.

3. Early on I was thinking mostly about on-premises deployments, with the idea of rolling the code into a SaaS version as "next step". In hindsight, that was probably exactly backwards. Going SaaS, and going "down market" in terms of customer size would have made it easier, I believe, to get initial traction. IoW, as Mark Suster put it[1] "hunt deer, not elephants".

4. Not taking my health seriously enough. As some of you may recall, I had a heart attack[2] near the end of 2014. And while I lived and was able to get back in the saddle, that whole ordeal happened at a really bad time from a company perspective and cost us basically the entire following year, as I recovered both physically and mentally. In hindsight, I was pushing myself way too hard, and not doing the things I should have been doing w/r/t diet, exercise, etc.

On the flip side, we have done some things right. Probably the most notable is keeping the burn rate extraordinarily low. We spend a small enough amount of money that I can fund our current activity level out of my pocket nearly indefinitely. Which is a big part of why we're not out of business despite having no revenue. And now things are starting to look up, as we have one really solid prospect in the pipeline and are deep into the transition to a SaaS delivery model for the "old" products, and have a really cool new SaaS offering stirring as well.

The interesting point for us will be if we can sign even 3 or 4 relatively small deals and get some real traction established. Then we can decide if we want to go pursue outside money or not, or if we want to just keep doing the organic growth thing.

[0]: https://www.fogbeam.com

[1]: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/most-startups-should-be-deer...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8550315