Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
One night in 2013 I had this stupid idea that people would start searching google for "who is retargeting me" just like they do with "what's my ip" — I've created in 30 minutes, bought the domain whoisretargeting.me and put Google Ads. It's made €7000 in 7 years. (1)
Do you have projects like this?
(1) https://pasteboard.co/JbPKJRs.png
478 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 364 ms ] threadRight now I'm working on a dog treat business - I make a treat mix that you add water to and freeze for a meat-based frozen treat. I feel really good about the product and the packaging design (and this is the first time I've ever worked on any kind of a physical product, so it's really cool to see the boxes), and I've sold a few boxes so far. Trying out some advertising now and working on building a presence on Instagram, since that seems like a great place to reach dog people, and the product is pretty photogenic.
https://coopersdogtreats.com/
Google Ads are pretty straightforward, so at this point I'm just running a couple and watching conversion rates - you basically just need to look at how much you're spending vs. how much revenue they're bringing in to figure out if they're worth it.
IG advertising is new to me - I'm planning to reach out to some dog accounts to see if I can offer free samples and possibly money for them to promote. No idea about what the going rate for that sort of thing is or how effective it'll be, but I'll find out soon :)
I just thought she really captured the feel I was looking for - it's an upscale product, but it's for dogs so I still wanted it to feel fun.
The designer gave me image files that were formatted correctly, so I just sent them in and had boxes at my door a few days later. They look great: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-srBIsJgND/
I'd certainly be a customer if I lived in the US.
In the mean time you can always just skip the Starter Kit and buy the mix directly (https://coopersdogtreats.com/collections/frontpage/products/... and https://coopersdogtreats.com/collections/frontpage/products/...), then use any ice cube mold/tray you happen to have around.
Once we get low on my current supply of cheese powder, I'm going to look into getting a food dehydrator to make my own cheese powder.
I think the most informative one I read was on something like shtf fourms. It stayed tame, other than everyone wanting to buy the dehydrator after the author was done.
As opposed to say someone who keeps a month of food, water, fuel, meds, entertainment on hand, which looks pretty normal now.
"The FDA’s regulation of pet food is similar to that for other animal food. There is no requirement that pet food products have premarket approval by the FDA. However, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA) requires that pet foods, like human foods, be safe to eat, produced under sanitary conditions, contain no harmful substances, and be truthfully labeled."
On the legal side, I've got business insurance, which thankfully isn't that expensive. I've been holding off on forming an LLC since that's gonna run me about a grand here in CA including the cost of setting it up and LLC tax, but if there's continued interest in the product, I'll do that soon.
Edit: Also AAFCO is a group that has standards for this sort of thing that are pretty straightforward: https://petfood.aafco.org/Portals/1/pdf/eight_required_labei...
https://www.lobbplewe.com/blog/2019/09/rules-for-out-of-stat...
Why an LLC instead of an S-corp?
For the most part my margins are pretty decent and at this point I'm more interested in proving that there's product-market fit than optimizing for profit, so I don't mind losing some money when my shipping charges don't cover it or people hit the free shipping threshold. Definitely something I'm going to need to get a better handle on long term, though.
That said, when you're taking freeze dried meats and putting them in a food processor to turn them into powder, it stinks to high heaven and you end up with a light dusting of meat powder all over your kitchen. I don't recommend trying it :P
Something I'm very familiar with for treating older woofs in pain, and spazzy "I hate the vet" woofs, haha! Hope to hear from you.
It's been done:
https://www.carolinahempcompany.com/products/lalas-cbd-dog-t...
When hemp was still in the grey area they got hit with shut down by CDPHE at the behest of an undisclosed pharma giant. The creator of those treats was a friend of my co-founder and a regular at our parent company's events in CO where she sold her products. She might have gotten an award at the hemp awards, I'm not sure.
The efficacy of CBD is well understood, what isn't is the standardization and practices for effective administration be it in Humans or animals. My guess is you'd get into issues with freezing the hemp oil/extract infused cbd effectively. I mean you could use shatter, if you were really motivated.
Also, this could subject you to bank account shutdowns and business license delays if your bank(s) find out.
Source: Ex fintech founder with hemp farmers, and ex biodynamic farmer that studied hemp and its various properties during apprenticeship and biologist.
I use burners on social media, so, no info in my bio.
My dog loves the frozen bones with marrow, which I dub frobos.
I’m sure he would love these!
For example:
https://www.purina.com/frosty-paws
And:
http://dogstersicecream.com
Might be a geographical/climate thing. I'm in San Diego, so frozen treats are good year round here.
In hot weather, I imagine a lot of dogs would go for something cold to consume if it was made available.
Might as well put the info to good use, so if correct: happy birthday!
(I suspect this was around the time a year or two ago that I was testing out my HN tagger extension/server)
Edit: I see now that your comments indicate that you're US only. Just to make sure you're aware, your site calculates and suggests shipping to Europe.
Interesting, I'm a chef (ex?) and a friend of mine wanted to start a dog food company in 2016-17 but never got around to it. Your approach looks pretty straight forward, for some reason I thought you'd have to be at a commissary kitchen and have food handlers paperwork on top off all the stuff you mentioned.
I'll share your link with them and maybe they get re-interested, do you have any interest in a collaboration for dog food in the future? Provided it met your standards etc...
I actually wanted to see if we could do it entirely upcycling the loss in food waste in the supply chain and restaurants as I know that Industry well and have made efforts to try and reduce as much as possible. I honestly would take home multiple 3 pans full of high grade sashimi grade salmon from saute's prep, and at least 5 lbs of blood lined yellow fin tuna from my station every week.
I still have a bunch of it sitting in my freezer and I know tons of restaurants and farms are sitting on the same or more.
I'm happy to chat with anybody in the space - I'm very early on, so it may be too early for any kind of collaboration, but definitely never hurts to talk to other folks who are interested in this kind of thing.
I'll see what they say and reach out if they still have the motivation.
I'll refer to this post and drop you a line to your gmail account listed on your site of this materializes an take it from there.
After that, I thought folks might want to buy these, so I had packaging and logo designs done on 99designs, set up a Shopify site, and here we are.
this is the first time i've actually made something to solve my problem though. i started using kettlebells due to covid lockdowns, etc, and thought the apps out there were way too bloated and shitty.
https://primexbt.com/?signup=97540 https://www.binance.us/?ref=35057005
and then I also push bybit referrals which is a 2 step process first you have to create a bybit account: (requires vpn that does not route via the US)
https://www.bybit.com/app/register?ref=DQJx6 and then you have to link a bybit affiliate account here to the email you used to signup to bybit here:
https://affiliate.bybit.com/register/en?affiliate_id=2786&gr...
These allow you to receive 30-40% commission for the lifetime of the accounts that sign up under you.
Strangely not because of the content, rather because there are lots of inconsistencies/imperfections in the design and it doesn't make enough to justify fixing them.
Search YouTube for askjud to see how it works. It’s been the subject of a few viral videos.
So far it’s made $25. All from iOS
But it plods along, earning enough to cover the bills for my second project, Simplescraper (https://simplescraper.io).
With Wunderlist shut down this year it was the perfect time to relaunch Lanes 2.0 to try capture some of those task-manager migrants. But if there's a single thing building side-projects has taught me it's that if you try and chase two rabbits, you'll catch neither.
> FirebaseError: Messaging: This browser doesn't support the API's required to use the firebase SDK. (messaging/unsupported-browser).
I worked on a paid tier (learnt a tremendous amount about actually selling an app, integration with payment processors, licensing, more legal stuff than I wanted to etc.)
Almost from the get go, it started making +$3k/mo. With more changes and offering a Mac version along a Windows version, it averages around +$7k/mo of revenue consistently. I'm the only person on it and have a full time job. Barely need to make code changes and it requires minimal effort for customer support.
I was wondering about any resources you have to learn about licensing and legal stuff, or any common caveats that you ran into.
Second will be dealing with sales tax and it's a nightmare. If you sell to customers in Europe you need to pay VAT to different countries at different rates. Same goes for US states that tax very differently. We moved recently to paddle.com which acts as a reseller and so they take care of all sales tax collection and remittance (they are the one selling the app after all). We moved away from PayPal and so far it's been very smooth.
On a practical level, no foreign government is going to bother you until your sales are in the millions, at least. They don’t have the ability to know your sales in the first place, and you’re way too small to bother trying to go after. Especially since there’s no real enforcement mechanism for, say, France to try and collect $200 from some random American online software business.
Philosophically, I vehemently disagree with the premise that a foreign jurisdiction can tax my business because their citizens choose to visit my website and buy things. Should German websites pay a 200% tax if citizens of Eritrea buy things from their website, just because Eritrea passes a law that says that? I have zero representation or connection to these jurisdictions, and if they want tax money or to stop their citizens from using my website, that’s between the citizens and their government. Until there’s some enforcement mechanism, I’ll just keep ignoring them like I always have.
And sure enough Mac users account for 30% for the revenue today.
Another advantage is that it runs completely on the user's computer. So I have no database or back-end to maintain. There is only a small server to generate licenses + handle some analytics the app emits both built on ASP.NET. The only data I store is in a Microsoft Azure table. I pay around $2 a month for all azure costs.
So basically a license is public info, the app enforces that the logged in user must match the user in the license.
So congratulations for finding a niche which did actually result in paying users.
Congrats on a product successful from the beginning!
Question - Does something like this exist for Facebook?
Do I have to pay every year to keep using the app?
People had a hard time combining the image of a nerd in the basement with that of a flashy sales guy surrounded by models. So I usually didn't mention the bikinis to allow me to charge full nerd pricing for my coding.
This site project brought in roughly €500 monthly with almost no work, because I was renting space in a fulfillment center combined with shopify and a marketing contractor.
What he did was mostly to reply to whatsapp messages and to grant free bikinis to Instagram influencers.
One particularly good angle was yoga teachers. They'd usually be doing retreats at exotic locations and posting inspirational photos multiple times per day. Plus the yoga teachers that are popular on Instagram tend to be extremely attractive girls doing slightly suggestive poses. So that was a great fit for my bikinis.
And you'd be surprised how cheap Instagram influencers are. There's so many people who want to be famous that it's 100% a buyer's market.
The marketing contractor organized a list of Instagram handles, follower counts, and email addresses. I don't really know from where, but my guess would be that it was from his marketing buddies. I mean it wouldn't make sense for an agency to just grant us direct access to all of their members.
He then initially emailed some of them manually. After our brand became more popular, we sometimes received offers via email or pm. He would then determine the value for us and reply accordingly.
How did you charge the marketing contractor?
I wanted to reached out to marketing contractor but haven’t had much information
Thank you!
As one example of the kind of tasks he handled:
Prospective customers could send in their measurements via WhatsApp and he would then look up into our internal measurement tables to determine which bikini size to order.
Or we would get collaboration invites from Instagram Influencers via PM or E-Mail. He would check their follower counts, bot ratio, etc. and then use an (internal secret) Google Docs to calculate the estimated value for us. He'd then use that to either decline or determine how generous our promotional gift would be.
Nowadays, the concept is called VA = Virtual Assistant, for example like what https://timesvr.com/ offers.
All the best with your side business (and all)!
I got started with my endeavors from people explaining things to me on programming IRC channels, so despite its bad reputation, advice from random strangers on the internet can be good advice.
As for this particular project, I stopped it when I ran out of bikinis and couldn't buy more at the same conditions anymore. At the same time, competition from China was also arriving in the form of dropshipping. I could have switched suppliers to reduce my purchase costs and remain competitive, but selling a high volume of cheap products is a lot more work than selling a low volume of high priced items.
But that was a pity later on when I ran out of bikinis and didn't manage to hire him again.
Plus screen printing tends to have much stronger colors and feel more valuable than the offset printing used in on-demand production.
I'd suggest a Kickstarter to finance a 100+ shirt bulk order at $15 per shirt. That way, you have good profit margins and good quality.
I knew him through a shared friend. I lived in Asia for some years, and that's where most westerners go if they want to create a manufacturing business.
Shows the grade distributions per class and if you add in your prior coursework we can predict the workload and grades per class.
Haven’t updated it in 5 years (recently updated the data). Still pulls in slightly more than it costs to host with thousands of students adding grades a year. Probably a thousand a year.
Currently supports UIUC, UT-Austin, university of Washington and quite a few others.
I don’t really talk about it because it was built for a few friends over a weekend right before I left school. The advisors for CS at UIUC we’re always swamped so I figured I’d make a basic one with some data science. Turns out everyone liked it and participated in making it way better
I'll pass on this one, but just wanted to say thank you to everyone who shares a project. It really does help others to see what is possible.
Sidequestion: Does anyone have any recommendations on simple guides to SEO? I'm realizing the power of search traffic to bring in visitors to sideprojects.
I run a Chrome extension that will crawl your site and give on-page/technical SEO suggestions: https://www.checkbot.io/.
The SEO best practices it checks for are explained + justified in a simple fashion here: https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/
I know a lot of developers are skeptical about SEO advice (e.g. keyword density stuff, experiments that try to reverse engineer how Google does ranking), but the rules from the guide above are linked to things Google have directly recommended. Most on-page SEO best practices align with what would benefit a regular user also.
Because good SEO is indistinguishable from good UX. :)
The best SEO advice you can give someone is "make the page easy for a blind person to read".
Just doing that one thing will get you about 99% of the way there.
Yep, makes sense when you consider most search bots "see" webpages in the same way a screen reader will. Anything that helps a screen reader understand the content of a page better is going to help a search bot and vice versa - they're both bots. :)
You can sign up for a 7-day challenge to publish one excellent, SEO-optimized blog post:
http://bloggingfordevs.com/
(Oh, and if I need to qualify myself, I grew traffic on one of my side projects (a content website) to over 100k per month primarily via SEO)
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In terms of sources for SEO information and just getting started, I'd check out Brian Dean's guide (I haven't read through it thoroughly myself, but he's very known in the SEO world):
https://backlinko.com/seo-this-year
Another useful way of looking at this is to see the factors Google actually use to rank your content:
https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/ranking-factors
The Ahrefs blog (a tool for doing keyword research and competitor analysis) is also chock full of resources:
https://ahrefs.com/blog/
SEO changes all the time, I'd also recommend plugging into some communities or following SEO professionals on Twitter. Barry Schwartz is a great example of this:
https://twitter.com/rustybrick
These are just a few things off the top of my head.
After the success of one of our interviews on HN [1], someone contacted me and suggest that I interview a highly successful value investor. We had a great 'Taaalk' [2] and he then put me in touch with an investing friend of his in London who runs a fund. We met for lunch and he taught me all about how he invests in shares, it was very straight forward, so I started following his guidance and made 50% on my money last year [nothing magical, just solid and practical value investing advice] - meaning I could take the year off and do a masters in Psychology of Mental Health - which is (slowly) helping change my career into a direction I love.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9300017)[the link to our site wont work, to see the interview go here: https://taaalk.co/t/how-to-think-about-chess]
[2] https://taaalk.co/t/value-investing
P.S. Anyone can make their own interview, so if you have a friend you think should be interviewed - please keep Taaalk in mind :)
They're either too naive to realise it was luck, or trying to scam you.
Bit brazen, but the idea isn't entirely unique.
Edit: P.s email me at adam@adamfallon.com if you would like a promo code to get the app for free :).
* https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nitronotes/id1502080216
Bit of background - lots of Amazon sellers use a software called tactical arbitrage that scrapes retailers to get prices and compares prices to Amazon. It comes with a couple hundred sites built in, and the ability to add new sites using custom xpaths. I made a chrome extension that lets you point and click on arbitrary sites to automatically create an xpath file that would be compatible with this software. Charged $199 for it, although I had some launch specials at $149 and above.
Still have a handful of organic sales a year, although it's not really worth the time spent in support anymore. In retrospect I should have made it $99 upfront plus $10/month or something and provided ongoing support.
Thanks.
I've made $250 in a single year on a single consultation.
The first iteration was a service that listened to build and repository actions. I switched it up to generate static reports. It queries github at a point in time for raw PR data. Then it generates a basic PR report based on that data. It generates CSV so visualization falls on the end user :p
- https://github.com/ImpactInsights/valuestream
- https://medium.com/valuestream-by-operational-analytics-inc/...
I would stay awake some nights and jot down every product mentioned in overnight infomercials (before I knew what TiVo was). then write a review on them the next day.
Thousands of people would search for “X review” in the days after watching those infomercials and I would rank #1 because some of them were brand new products.
BTW, writing fictional reviews for money is not only unethical, it can be illegal too
For what it’s worth, i am no longer involved with this today.
Since October 2019 it's made $200 in the form of 1 episode having a sponsor.
As a side topic, I would be very happy to have anyone on who wants to talk about their tech stack for their side projects.
Subscribed in pocket casts and will tune in later!
My web app [3] earned only 50€ since 2016. My other projects (ex: mockrest.com [4]) don’t make me any money at all. I have to use other strategy.. :/
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flatangle....
[2] https://github.com/joaoventura/pybridge
[3] http://elements.flatangle.com/
[4] http://mockrest.com/