Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?
A friend pointed out a bunch of the 'tell us about your successful side project' threads suffer from a survivorship bias. They're still great for inspiration, but I suspect we could learn a lot about challenges and wrong approaches from each others' failures.
So what's a side project you built hoping to generate revenue from it, that hasn't actually earned you much / any money?
Why do you think it hasn't been as successful as you thought it would be / what would you do differently if you did it again? How much time/money did you spend building it, and what kind of iterations / improvements did you make to try and salvage it?
Appreciate any and all answers!
600 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 335 ms ] thread-- I'm not getting customers.
I love reading online content. It is tough to read quality long-form content online.
So, I built https://pipecontent.com
-- By Sharing your article collection(One-tab, Toby, Notion, Google-Docs, Twitter-Threads, Evernote, Dropbox, Website Link)
-- Receive clutter free ready to print PDF OR A high quality printed magazine.
Feedback appreciated.
The best use I can think for your service is for businesses who want to produce and send out magazines (maybe with content from their industry) in an automated way.
My (possibly useless) .02 -- I would not pay for this as is. What I would pay for though is an API that reliably converts internet articles to markdown of the same quality your pdf generation seems to have. A couple years ago I poured 3 or 4 months into a site that let users select time-boxed streams of articles clustered by topic (i.e. "give me a 25 min list of content about Glacier National Park for my subway commute") By far the most challenging part of this project was formatting content in a readable way from various sources, which it seems like you have done VERY well here.
Anyway, congrats on shipping something, regardless of customer base that's very impressive!
My side project in the past have always been good (sarcasm), but it's the marketing / advertising side that I always seem to fail at miserably. When that fails, then the project seems to dry up and I move on to the next half idea.
I don't know exactly how to market something like this, but I like the idea if that matters. Maybe something in the way of talking to a marketing person to find new avenues to drive traffic?
Your website loads fine in my mind, it might be slow but I didn't notice until someone said something. I was able to quickly see your value prop. Website speed can be fixed, the key is your product is interesting.
Best of luck!
It was working fine for a week or so before Facebook caught up and revoked my API keys (effectively killing the app). They didn't give any reason besides some vague recommendation to review their Terms of Service. A few months later at their F8 developer conference they announced they'll be launching their own matchmaking service which will work pretty the same way I built my app.
Moral of the story: never trust big tech.
P.S. I open sourced the app a few years ago: https://bitbucket.org/stonepillarstudios/workspace/projects/... Feel free to fork & revive.
Pretty much the only way to win it so make something that provides marginal revenue, which makes reimplementation not worth it for the giant (but potentially worth it for you). I suspect a lot of Unity and Unreal plugins and authoring tools reside in that niche.
BTW I worked in a startup once and a guy, who was developing opensource plugin for our product, applied for a job with us. The owner (a known blogger BTW) said "Why hire him if he's already working for us?"
Not only you had a person that already knew much more about your product than the average potential hire, but a person that probably was interested in your product (and maybe knew what users wanted) too.
Because you do not want him to abandon the project if it is useful to you?
current Tech giants are need to be replaced
There's no reason their replacement will be any more moral. They should be dismantled imho.
This is what most dating apps do, except Tinder (trying to do a clustering in an n-dimensional space). That Tinder outclasses most other dating apps is proof that your approach wont work. We don't look for people with similar interests for dating. Unfortunately we don't chose who or what we like in a partner.
Patents are fundamentally broken and really don't work like most think or want them to.
By the way, we're hiring: https://imgz.org/blog/2020/12/23/haha-suckers/
I'm no expert but I think one could say you might get into trouble for defamation if you write something like that on your product page.
> Defamation (also known as calumny, vilification, libel, slander or traducement) is the oral or written communication of a false statement about another that unjustly harms their reputation and usually constitutes a tort or crime
What do you think you are going to do differently when you reach that point?
Hahaha
https://imgz.org/i9xyk2H2.png
(or is that a joke I glazed over)
>All construction.
Slightly confused by that wording. Do you mean actual contruction as in build things with a hammer?
Interesting opinion, would be interested in knowing the rationale. Is it related to either a progression of the technology or a regression (like nuclear war taking out the infrastructure)? I couldn't help but think about the Homer Simpson quote ("The internet? Is that thing still around?")
As a result, I’ve decided to make it FREE and open source the code. Hopefully in a few months.
I hear monster charges something like $300 for a job post for 1 month. And $400 for 2 months.
I would think at this rate, that there would be a lot of competition.
Craigslist ran for years just on job posting fees in San Francisco alone.
For $300, monster probably gets you 100k+ pageviews a month. As a scrappy indiehack project, you're probably getting 1k at best.
To be fair, I built it primarily as a way to teach myself Rails, and in this regard it was a great success. But in the back of my mind I figured I might be able to make some affiliate revenue out of the traffic but it never took off.
It has failed so far because: it is a small niche (most people just use Spotify these days), I haven't marketed it very well and haven't found the niches where likeminded people hang out (building is definitely easier than marketing). I could definitely do more on the homepage to explain the features, particularly around tracking artists and being notified when they release new albums, but at the end of the day I just haven't been able to market it (nor did I spend a lot of time on this aspect of it). For a long time it only worked in the UK (an even smaller audience compared to the global market), although I did just roll out an update for it to work in the US, but have not done anything to advertise the fact.
Feedback welcome!
However, something I would like to see and i think could be more niche-oriented would be similar as this but for physical releases. Discogs does have some retailers, but they need to manually upkeep their inventory in there. If you could scrape physical releases and show where I can order album X for the cheapest (shipping included) or even see where it is available to buy, that would be a service I would love to use.
Regarding Discogs - I don't have any interest in physical media unfortunately so will leave that problem for someone else to solve.
For example, you could see many big SaaS login pages to get inspiration.
The issue is that categorizing sites is way more time consuming than I thought, and WordPress makes saving/using user “likes” really challenging.
An app to simplify choosing a restaurant with friends/partner. I mostly created it to have something to do during lockdown, but it would have been fun if it took off.
One piece of knowledge I learned from someone is that advertising paid decently for apps with moderate success. Knowing this steered me in a good direction.
My first app with very small success handled Access databases locally on Android. As I had the first app which could do that, I released it in four days with very few features, but blurbs saying to contact me if they wanted more features. The lesson here is what people wanted. In my mind, I was thinking of how to handle tough technical challenges and new features with domain specific functionality. But what people want was simple. A recently opened files menu. To expand database browsing to database searching. To then expand searching to allow case insensitive searches. To again expand searching to allow wildcards. This was all fairly simple, the features I thought people wanted were much more complex. I would not have learned this lesson if the market had been more mature, if people had another option to use.
I did other niche apps without lessons learned other than that niche markets are small.
Then I had my success (for me a consistent $2000+ in revenue a month without much maintenance work needed on my end meant success). The difference between my success and the previous apps I did was I aimed for a broad mass market, not a niche one, and there were some significant competitors. This is a startup lesson that is heard often - don't aim for a niche market just to avoid competition. There were two main differentiators for me - my app was a book reader, but I did a lot of work to make sure it was easy to browse, search and download tens of thousands of Project Gutenberg books (which I hosted for speed). The other differentiator is I focused on EFIGS languages, not just English, so I was #1 result for libro and libros (books in Spanish) for a long time, and also did well in France, Germany, Italy etc. Project Gutenberg having done the legwork of a supply of many foreign language books helped.
So the main lesson was to aim for the mass market for the Android form factor, and try to find a way to differentiate from competition. People appreciated my niche Access database app, but it took some weeks for me to make $20 advertising revenue from it. Many more people wanted to read Alice in Wonderland and other books.
However, I still can think of any monetization except Ads (which I don't think will help because the VPN server also include ad-blocker). The only monetization might be donation. But if anyone has any idea I would be glad to listen to.
Btw, the link to side-project: https://www.zudvpn.com GitHub: https://github.com/zudvpn/ZudVPN
Good luck!
Why they can
Pro version is like $1.99/month subscription.
* https://gravityextend.com/ - Gravity Forms add-ons
* https://woo-plugin.com/ - WooCommerce add-ons
I started with Gravity Extend, which was a personal need. Since this sort of worked, I added Woo Plugin. Results on these sites provide (in part) affiliated links. They generate some money, but not that much.
Things I hadn't anticipated:
- Sellers not allowing you access to their affiliate program because a) you haven't bought the product yourself or b) the sites only 'list' products, but don't actively sell/review the product.
- Most sellers are okay, but some need a continued reminder that they actually have to pay the generated affiliate fees, increasing required labor input.
On the membership landing page is a free signup. You get access to a 12-lesson course with tutorials and tactics I’ve used to land three FT remote jobs in my career.
The upsell was group coaching. Some people got excited about this. Only a few people paid.
I learned that unemployed people are not usually willing to pay for a service (especially if there are no video testimonials).
I’m confident that if I persevered this could have become something but I lost interest. Many people are still registering for the membership. I may return to the project soon and find a way to turn the content into a paid, self-paced course—-without paying for SaaS.
My first couple attempts sucked and never saw the light of day.
My 3rd attempt launched and was called Paperback Writer. No one was remotely interested in using it, so I eventually shuttered it. (Didn't even have any free users to be worried about.)
That was a few years ago, and my conviction about what would make for a good ebook writing app have only grown stronger. There are glaring shortcomings in all of the existing solutions: Scrivener, Vellum, Sigil, iBooks Author, Calibre... they all kinda suck for writing and publishing novels in particular.
So I'm now working on version 4 of the idea, this time rechristened as PaperbackAuthor: http://paperbackauthor.com
(I still like the name "Paperback Writer" better, but it's a nightmare SEO-wise. When you google "PaperbackAuthor", my twitter handle comes up first. So I consider that an early win.)
I have no idea if this one will attract any users, but I'm passionate about it and need to get it out there. If only so that I can stop thinking about it.
Didn't work.
Mostly I blame myself for not validating the idea properly. If “The Mom Test” book had been around at that time I could have saved that money and a lot of strain on my marriage. I feel strongly that it is by far the most important business book to be published in the last three or four decades.
May force with you
After months of doing nothing much, I decided to implement a game (which I came up with in school, and had also created a basic version in college). I had an electronics background, so I did know programming basics and had to write Perl scripts at work. However, I didn't know much of Java (had a course in school) and Android. Somehow, over the course of a year, I made the app.
The main game idea I had in school was simple inspiration from tic-tac-toe. Make squares instead of lines on a 4x4 board. While writing the code, I was ever trying to make it impressive. So, I came up lots of choices - larger board sizes (up to 12x12) for both tic-tac-toe and the square ones, with blocking moves.
To monetize, I added ads. After release, I got about 0.12 dollars or something over few months. I just removed the ads instead of trying to salvage it. I had bought a domain/hosting, so financially, it was a loss.
In hindsight, biggest issue was UI/UX and not knowing how to promote. I'm still proud of the code I implemented for computer moves.
App is no longer on play store (because it stopped working on newer versions), but you can still see screenshots here: https://github.com/learnbyexample/squaretictactoe
I wanted to re-implement in Python later, started it but never finished. May be next year ;)
First App was a birthday calendar (Back in 2012-13), where I pulled Contact book, Google Plus and Facebook and at one time also had a section of born today. But it had bugs, it took too much time to solve. When I fixed things, Google Plus was shutting down, and FB APIs also got more restricted. I dropped working on that project.
Second App was a utility around a service called PushBullet: Still active and one of the must have utility back in the day, I developed an open-source utility around that app. I couldn't market it properly, (Didn't know real possibility of Product hunt or Hacker news back then). Then PushBullet went behind paywall and I stopped using it entirely. Also lost interest working on that project.
Third App was another utility managing (and intelligently deleting) files in Android Phones: Current Files App (Started as Files GO) didn't exist then. I worked on this longer than any other project. Even tried to do marketting, at it's peak (when I posted about the app on reddit) it had ~100 users a day, then daily job got on the way and I couldn't work on the app. Then Google Happened, their restrictive play store policy meant I have to chose between other aspect of life and this project. I dropped working on this....
Not counting many ideas that didn't go beyond failed or unconvincing POCs. I have stopped developing apps entirely since couple of years. Got some backend certificates, and now in a free time I indulge in Chess, Reading and writing blog post (80% in native language on non tech stuff and 20% on tech stuff).
Edit: Started working on a POC of a service I had in my mind since long. Let's see what happens.
Please explain HN moderators?
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? They ask you to email hn@ycombinator.com instead of posting like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25581828 was particularly excessive because it adds noise to the story feed—and doing this doesn't work anyhow. I only knew about your question because another user decided to help you out and emailed us.
- I paid about $400 in ads to Google: they have a much better business model than us ;)
- I competed against free offerings, and I still had clients, because I could afford ads, they could not.
- It was a very strange, happy feeling when the first customer paid us. They decided to give actual money to us, some complete strangers??? To a website that looked totally amateurish, with no design whatsoever? Felt weird.
- I would have made way more money by working at McDonalds for the same amount of time. But that was not the point.
- It did not make sense to continue after the event, not enough $$ to be made.
Overall a very, very positive experience. I helped with my programming skills, and gave me confidence that people would buy something that works, even if ugly and unknown people.
I wonder if this idea got legs if you would get in trouble with regulators of some kind..
We stopped because there was a lot of competition, we saw a short term gap in soccer in the US market. But fairly quickly we would have been crushed. Spending a lot of time on something that would not have brought in much money was not that interesting, since it was not fun enough beyond the novelty of the experience.
I wanted a not-too-intrusive Github notification system that would give me a broad overview of what happened in my starred repos (i.e. repos for which I'm only a consumer), as some kind of ‶real-time″ changelog. Indeed, I star quite a lot of e.g. emacs packages and other small utilities, which don't have a strict release schedule/changelog cycle, so it's easy to miss a new feature.
So I developed a service that would send me a weekly newsletter of ‶what happened″ (issues, releases), and I decided to make it public, as I assumed I was most probably not the only person with such a need. I never planned on making actual money out of it, but I thought it could recoup hosting costs, which it didn't.
But on the other hand, I learned quite a bit while doing it, so it's probably still a net win.
I was thinking of building something like this but rather for people I follow on GitHub: their contributions, comments, PRs and so on. A kind of a way to learn from one’s GH peers.
I paid for a little advertising but those already in industry more interested than business people. LibreOffice needs Android update.
My interpretation of the comment:
For the past two years (i.e. since 2018), I've read and summarised 25 years of computer news. Finally published this year after editing/adding some chapters, like one about SSDs. You can find it by searching on Amazon "Google Phone News September 2020 micro LED TV, 5 nano meter chips". I paid for a little advertisement [to no success].
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-News-2018-19-micro-meter-ebo...