www.drunkenweb.com - Didn't intend to make money off it (project for fun to learn python and play with css3/html5), but I hooked up amazon associates w/ targeted ads. Made ~$6 in 11 months :-)
I have a tendency of not monetizing weekend projects. Perhaps I should?
http://colorblendy.com/ I did during a SHDH meetup with @limedaring, then couple months later during another weekend I released v2 with colorpickers on the Google Chrome store for free too: http://bit.ly/chrome-colorblendy
Another weekend I dug up an old game I wrote in an afternoon at school in Python called pytron. My roommates and I spent hours playing it—turned out it was quite fun with multiple players. I ported the game in an couple afternoons to JavaScript, called it LineRage: http://bit.ly/linerage-chrome
I still have "monetize this" on the TODO list for both of these. Was thinking of releasing a "pro" version of Colorblendy with CSS parsing and a saving feature. Also a campaign version with a bunch of levels of LineRage for $1.99 or somesuch. Someday.
Those are both pretty cool! My only suggestion for colorblendy is that it wasn't immediately obvious what it was, and I couldn't edit the middle input textbox. (In other words, maybe style the middle box differently).
I hadn't made a website in years so to get back into it I built two client-aide only sites with jquery. I'm a terrible designer so, bear with me :)
- http://www.drinkpacer.com - select your target level of drunkenness and track your drinking. It keeps you on pace using very estimated math.
- http://www.draw140.com - this was to be like Paint but for twitter. Unfortunately Unicode rendering differences between clients and platforms makes what you see not usually match what your followers see.
I don't consider either of these a failure though, I learnt a lot.. In the case of Unicode, a lot more than I ever wanted to :)
hah! the first one is completely useless. You should totally make an iOS version....I bet anything you could make money at 0.99$ (assuming it hasn't already been done).
The second one is pretty neat. It needs some polish, but I can't help but think that could actually be somewhat useful.
In terms of least revenue, that would probably be my webcomic, http://www.zoitz.com/ , which has had millions of views but for which the only revenue has come from a small textbook licensing deal.
In terms of greatest loss, that would be my photo deblurring tool, http://www.blurity.com/ , which is suffering from my failure to achieve product-market fit. It's had some revenue, but its need for a powerful server has kept it in the red.
The comic was cute. It's a shame you gave it up. I always thought that kinda stuff was a lot of work though (I've read some thoughts on this from Gary Larson). Seems like the kinda thing you need to keep up regularly to ever grow.
Kinda makes me think that a "syndication platform" for we comics might not be a horrible idea.
mogade.com sucks down about $170/month in hosting costs. 2 $35 web servers, 2 $50 db servers (all for redundancy). (i use the hardware for other things too)
It has been my best learning project (what gave me the knowledge to write mongly.com and the little mongodb book). It's also solid Rails experience which is important for me given that I want to transition out of .NET.
Closing in on 500 000 scores store (it's 1 score per user per game, so it gives you an idea of how many unique users). Around 100 games use it (all WP7)
I've never made money from them, nor have any of them gained significant popularity (although pimpmysalary.com is actually receiving an entry every 3 mins. Or so - maybe that's my breakthrough success!!)
I had something vaguely like smsmyride (called regomail) that was web messaging between number plates (a 'rego', amongst Australians). Obviously, there is a massive chicken and egg problem.
"Obviously, there is a massive chicken and egg problem"
Yeah tell me about it! I got written up on lifehacker[1] and I received quite a few emails and comments (some on the page and some not) basically saying "but it won't work unless everyone signs up!!1".
The funny thing is that if everyone who said that to me had told their friends, the chicken/egg problem would probably have been sold.
My standard response when people tell me something I've built has a chicken/egg problem is "right, so how many people have YOU told about it?"
FWIW, I ditched regomail. It didn't even make enough to cover the domain renewal.
You could enter your rego to check for messages. To try and boost pick-up, for anyone checking an empty inbox, I auto-added a randomised and semi-believable message. Not sure if it helped much, but obviously not enough.
Slightly related, I also started building a little web site for people to track cars they'd owned and driven with a view to building relationships between past and new owners for the hell of it. "I wonder what happen to that '74 Civic I traded with that girl for three bottles of wine?" Domain drove.com.au was free when I checked. Took me half a day to build most of the site but by then the domain had been taken and so I bailed - stupid.
I took the Murmur3 hash function and ported it to C, adding documentation as I went. After all, even the greatest technical achievement can be held back by lack of basic documentation. It's a great hash function, very fast and well-behaved, but to date this project has brought me neither wealth nor fame. Of course, it's only been online since earlier this afternoon. If you need to hash something, for whatever reason, I hope this will be useful to you:
http://knottablenecklaces.com makes me about enough to cover costs and google ads. I'm not sure if this counts around here since it's not a software product.
Never made a cent off it. Not that I have tried (to be honest). I am still working in it though, so one day perhaps. I find it useful though, so that's the main thing.
Never made a cent of this either, and the hosting costs are quite large for what is essentially a smaller version of TailRank (if you remember that).
Lastly, I made a "My Twitter Butler" clone with a website and the lot back in the Twitter frenzy. Never sold a single copy. I guess I lost $10 for the domain name and 8 hours of my time to implement it. I was hoping to sell one copy and break even on my direct costs.
searchco.de is rather cool! maybe if you would use a sans-serif or even monospaced font, it'll be even cooler. Also the example on the frontpage (something about SQL) leaved me helpless.
An app that game out of a drunken discussion with some gay friends about how to establish boundaries with a random hookup. I mostly made it as a gag, but I guess it does solve a real world problem. Irony is that it is the least profitable (free, adless), but has more user engagement than anything else I've made and it hasn't been out a week yet :-P
FWIW, I built something like this for myself years ago because I needed to know when my ip changed. I locked it down so I'd be the only one able to use it. When I first saw jsonip.com, I kicked myself.
The brilliance of jsonip.com isn't really the service, it's the vision that it should be free and world-readable.
http://www.topchan.tv was just released about 2 months ago and have never made a dime. The hosting is for free for now so the net is $0. But I have never really wanted to charge for it. It's more for building for myself, and see if others find it useful.
I made Idyllic Past[1], a webapp that emails you a weekly comment from your Hacker News and Reddit accounts. The eventual goal was to catalog all the things the user liked on the internet and present random items to him by email.
I was hoping to capitalize on nostalgia by running ads in the emails.
Unfortunately, I got only 3 signups. The post I made on HN was completely ignored (only about 20 people visited the link), and the post I made on Reddit ended up with a net score of 0.
Oh well, lesson learned -- gauge interest on a proof of concept before spending the time to build a full product.
67 comments
[ 26.0 ms ] story [ 478 ms ] threadhttp://colorblendy.com/ I did during a SHDH meetup with @limedaring, then couple months later during another weekend I released v2 with colorpickers on the Google Chrome store for free too: http://bit.ly/chrome-colorblendy
Another weekend I dug up an old game I wrote in an afternoon at school in Python called pytron. My roommates and I spent hours playing it—turned out it was quite fun with multiple players. I ported the game in an couple afternoons to JavaScript, called it LineRage: http://bit.ly/linerage-chrome
I still have "monetize this" on the TODO list for both of these. Was thinking of releasing a "pro" version of Colorblendy with CSS parsing and a saving feature. Also a campaign version with a bunch of levels of LineRage for $1.99 or somesuch. Someday.
- http://www.drinkpacer.com - select your target level of drunkenness and track your drinking. It keeps you on pace using very estimated math.
- http://www.draw140.com - this was to be like Paint but for twitter. Unfortunately Unicode rendering differences between clients and platforms makes what you see not usually match what your followers see.
I don't consider either of these a failure though, I learnt a lot.. In the case of Unicode, a lot more than I ever wanted to :)
The second one is pretty neat. It needs some polish, but I can't help but think that could actually be somewhat useful.
Good work!
My friends keep pushing me to pivot it into a game but I don't think it's a good idea liability-wise...
In terms of greatest loss, that would be my photo deblurring tool, http://www.blurity.com/ , which is suffering from my failure to achieve product-market fit. It's had some revenue, but its need for a powerful server has kept it in the red.
Kinda makes me think that a "syndication platform" for we comics might not be a horrible idea.
It has been my best learning project (what gave me the knowledge to write mongly.com and the little mongodb book). It's also solid Rails experience which is important for me given that I want to transition out of .NET.
Closing in on 500 000 scores store (it's 1 score per user per game, so it gives you an idea of how many unique users). Around 100 games use it (all WP7)
http://cueyoutube.com/
http://pimpmysalary.com/
I've never made money from them, nor have any of them gained significant popularity (although pimpmysalary.com is actually receiving an entry every 3 mins. Or so - maybe that's my breakthrough success!!)
Yeah tell me about it! I got written up on lifehacker[1] and I received quite a few emails and comments (some on the page and some not) basically saying "but it won't work unless everyone signs up!!1".
The funny thing is that if everyone who said that to me had told their friends, the chicken/egg problem would probably have been sold.
My standard response when people tell me something I've built has a chicken/egg problem is "right, so how many people have YOU told about it?"
[1]http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2009/09/sms-my-ride-lets-you-wa...
You could enter your rego to check for messages. To try and boost pick-up, for anyone checking an empty inbox, I auto-added a randomised and semi-believable message. Not sure if it helped much, but obviously not enough.
Slightly related, I also started building a little web site for people to track cars they'd owned and driven with a view to building relationships between past and new owners for the hell of it. "I wonder what happen to that '74 Civic I traded with that girl for three bottles of wine?" Domain drove.com.au was free when I checked. Took me half a day to build most of the site but by then the domain had been taken and so I bailed - stupid.
My only criticism is that while I like a good clean design like that, it could definitely be a lot more appealing to the eye.
Hope it takes off for you.
https://github.com/PeterScott/murmur3
Aggregators don't make money!
Sorry it doesn't make money!
Never made a cent off it. Not that I have tried (to be honest). I am still working in it though, so one day perhaps. I find it useful though, so that's the main thing.
http://www.chunews.com/
Never made a cent of this either, and the hosting costs are quite large for what is essentially a smaller version of TailRank (if you remember that).
Lastly, I made a "My Twitter Butler" clone with a website and the lot back in the Twitter frenzy. Never sold a single copy. I guess I lost $10 for the domain name and 8 hours of my time to implement it. I was hoping to sell one copy and break even on my direct costs.
An app that game out of a drunken discussion with some gay friends about how to establish boundaries with a random hookup. I mostly made it as a gag, but I guess it does solve a real world problem. Irony is that it is the least profitable (free, adless), but has more user engagement than anything else I've made and it hasn't been out a week yet :-P
I was thinking about sticking ads in as a property on the JSON object, but that'll double the bandwidth of the response size. =)
The brilliance of jsonip.com isn't really the service, it's the vision that it should be free and world-readable.
Maybe make a landing page with some ads?
I've never made any money from it, but I get a kick out of knowing that people in far-away places are using something I've made.
I was hoping to capitalize on nostalgia by running ads in the emails.
Unfortunately, I got only 3 signups. The post I made on HN was completely ignored (only about 20 people visited the link), and the post I made on Reddit ended up with a net score of 0.
Oh well, lesson learned -- gauge interest on a proof of concept before spending the time to build a full product.
[1] http://www.idyllicpast.com
A reminder service for power Twitter users. Didn't get enough hits to generate any Ad revenue.