I sell handmade sculptures of influential people and famous monuments on Etsy - https://www.etsy.com/shop/jurgenstudio. Revenue is 2-6k USD depending on the season. I hired someone part time who took over production and shipping. it's mostly passive revenue for me apart from growing the business by developing new products when I feel like it. The profit margin is around 50% after all material and labor costs are paid.
I think it depends on how the work is produced for celebrities. If it’s a mass produced product and not one off artisan creations, OP might run into problems
Making several is not the issue, I believe. You could make several slightly different hand crafted statuettes, it’s the mass production of one likeness that’s the issue as I understand it.
I get that question a lot. I do not worry about it. There's plenty of similar fan art selling around and I haven't noticed any actions taken to shut them down. I wouldn't reproduce anything under a trademark (for example, Baby Yoda), and as far as I know, human faces are not trademarkable.
Out of curiosity when you say you hired someone to take over production and shipping, do you mean you outsourced it? Or like that from craigslist is producing them now?
It's a an artistic person I found who is happy to produce copies of sculptures for me to get some side income. I teached her how to do it and gave her all my molds so she can do it from her home.
This is super cool. Admittedly, I know nothing about creating concrete figures -- I imagine the real artistic work is in creating the mold? Can you share how that is done -- is a sculpture created and then surrounded by the mold material?
1. I hire a 3d designer to create the 3d model I want. For example, I send him a couple of photos of Alan Turing
2. After I am happy with the likeness, I 3d print it. In this phase the 3d model comes to life and it's usually quite different from what we see on the computer as a 3d model. It has something to do with the difference in perspectives in which the designer designs shapes and in which we observe the item when it's produced as a real physical shape. This is very hard to get it right. Then we repeat the steps from 1 until I am happy with the likeness and the facial expression (this can be many iterations)
3. When I have the 3d printed positive, I create a mold using silicone rubber
4. The 2-part mold is then ready to be used for hundreds of castings (I use concrete)
I love the selection and I'm thinking of buying a couple! Is it possible to have special requests made? Wittgenstein would be a great addition (the tryptic Nietzsche / Freud / Wittgenstein has been what forged my weltanschauung )
It's intended to immediately differentiate from shops who sell cheap plastic sculptures. My customers appreciate heavy brutalist material I use. I spend zero time optimizing SEO, my product images and descriptions are pretty crappy, so I currently don't have much advice to give in that area! What's your shop?
During COVID I was in Mexico. At some point I wanted to go horseback riding. I was researching places to go horseback riding and I was not at all surprised to see I would have to make some calls to book.
Fast-forward a few weeks, I become pretty good friends with the owner at the ranch I went to. We grab tacos one night and he shares his concerns: They're not doing so well financially and are worried about whether or not they'll be able to afford feed in a month.
I got involved and we solved that problem and a few more: revamped the website (it looked and felt like it was from 2006), I whipped up a booking/reservation system to get more customers through the door, and exit surveys to make sure everything was perfect (and figure out what went wrong if it wasn't).
Bookings this month are up 490% from 2018 (according to the paper waivers they had) and that's without a single dollar spent in paid marketing. I answer a few emails every day from prospective riders and make sure everyone's happy. I get a percentage of each reservation which is cool, but the coolest part is that I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranch.
Thanks! We get a lot of compliments on the copy. I wanted to reflect that we are indeed a Mexican horse ranch without the site being incredibly boring. There's only so many cool things you can show/say before you realize that horses aren't really all that interesting on the internet.
This is awesome. Only one minor thing about the website. On mobile when i click on "Meet Pam", the logo in the header is white and the background beige, making it unreadable.
I swear I read the FAQ and the last question was "Are you real? Sometimes. I mean, yes.". I chuckled at that one and it was the end of the page!? Or ir wasn't? OP if you just added it please tell me :) (nah, just partly joking, I'm sincerely confused though)
Not sure if the website is broken, but attempting to book 2 people and clicking a time does nothing on iOS Safari. It might be worth looking at the analytics for device distribution but I presume iOS is the bulk of your traffic, si probably worth optimising it.
I noticed this too. I think it’s because those time slots are not available (if you choose a date a couple months away, you’ll be able to click there time slot). The solution would be to print “No availability” instead of disabled time slot buttons.
It's mostly CRUD, and the stack is very boring: Rails/Hotwire/Bootstrap, about 10k lines (we have apps for the staff on the ground, agents and agencies that we partner with, and some other stuff in there). The tricky part of handling the bookings is that on any given day we have a limited number of horses and multiple types of rides: 3 trails at 10AM, 1 trail at 3PM. A few times a month we'll max out the horses and not have availability for a given time. We can burst horsepower if we need to and accommodate bigger groups if we're hitting capacity and suspect load will maintain its current HPH. (that was a stretch; I tried)
We also track what horses have been used and how much so that we're not riding them into the ground — the people on the ground have an app I built in Framework7 to manage everything; they love it and Framework7 is very fun once you get rolling.
We ask for a 20% deposit to "hold [your] horses" and to prevent no-shows; the rest is transacted at the ranch (though we make the option to pay in full available if you email us). Our cancellation policy extremely flexible and though we say 24 hours on the site, we've never not refunded someone.
An absolutely amazing story. I’ve wondered for a while how powerful bringing skilled software engineers (let’s be honest, people don’t give us credit for the amount of actual business skill is required to effectively do this job) into small businesses would work. Most people who don’t work in tech or advertising don’t think so much about tracking everything. It presents a pretty big opportunity for both small business owners and software people.
One of the things I wanted to do was understand who our customer was. They had really no idea. Waivers are all digitalized and ask for the basics: name, date of birth, where you're from, emergency contact. I use a "gender API" to get the gender of the rider the best we can, and from there we have learned a lot about who our typical customer is.
Some fun factoids:
* typical rider is 35-44. Less than 10% of riders are under the age of 24,
* about half of people book when they're in Mexico
* average lead time is 7 days
* about 66% of riders have riding exp; about 33% consider themselves "novice" or "expert" riders
Question is how sustainable is that. If you get bored at some point, who will be able to take it over. RoR is a reasonably safe and stable stack from the PoV of software devs, but the discussion above about facebook makes me wonder if they'll end up in 10 years with a website 'stuck in 2020'.
> I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranc
You must get business cards made and start distributing them to friends and family whenever you get the chance. Not for marketing - to brag and to be able to be mildly annoying.
It's definitely my favorite fun fact. I'm grow up in the city but I spent a few summer days on a horse growing up. One of my earliest memories was horseback riding with my mom. I must have been no older than 18 months.
Note that you can also use the ranch business cards as 'get out of jail cards' to avoid social chatter when you need to change the subject: You note that the in-law starts taking the discussion towards some uncomfortable topic during thanksgiving dinner. You immediately use the card: "Say, have I given you my business card?" - and then you move on to talk about the ranch. Even if they interrupt you and try to get back to the topic, the topic will be derailed for good. Usable every 6 months by pretending that you forgot that you already gave them your business card...
My 16-year-old remembers a pediatrician's office she hasn't seen since she was 18 months old (we moved across the country). She described it well enough that her dad and I were both convinced. I was shocked.
We must work with the same people. I work with a guy who would devote dozens/hundreds of hours to this project just for the business card opportunities.
I did something very similar for Surfing schools. Not yet making any money off it, but I am trying to. Reaching out to other surfing schools, improving the product adding new features.
Mexicos overall internet presence is literally stuck in the early 2000s.
Most business' official website are a Facebook page.
In a country of 150M people and growing expat presence, there is a TON of opportunities for software businesses to enter the market.
For example: Riviera Maya has no MLS style real estate tracker/listing platform. The entire real estate industry operates on word of mouth, WhatsApp and Facebook messages.
I keep running into this in the US in large cities. Really well regarded restaurants or music venues do everything through FB and insta. I don't have either of those apps, and I don't remember my passwords from a decade ago. Isn't there a service somewhere, where you give someone some pictures of your food, and restaurant, and you get a container and credentials for a webpage that handles reservations, takes pickup or delivery orders, and lets you update the menu? Why do people do this?
Because Facebook is simple. Any one can update it, and it doesn't go down, and it doesn't cost anything.
I've many times seen web presences fail for small organizations, when the only person that understands the web set up leaves. With Facebook, that doesn't happen.
I'm sure there are services such as you describe, and probably many restaurants use them, and it's not obvious. But Facebook is the default.
No, because facebook is free and they are cozy with the mexican government and this allows them to operate in a country without net neutrality. Therefore facebook, whatsapp and instagram are included for free in most if not all cellphone plans and pay per month options.
I've seen that too. Or when the framework chosen goes away. If the person at a small restaurant or non profit who understood the page goes away you can at least find someone to come up to speed. But sometimes it relies on stuff that just isn't there anymore and you have to start over. I'm not in web dev, or whatever its called, but is there some technology in the space that is the equivalent ofba T-shirt and blue jeans, or a charcoal suit, that will be fine for a couple decades with only informational updates?
You have to constantly install updates for it to stay secure, then every second update your theme breaks, you find out it's not updated for the new version and have to redesign the whole page.
I’ve wondered this too. I don’t know any young people (at least nobody my kids’ ages between 17 and 26) who use Facebook. It seems like they might be missing a large part of their target audience.
Others have pointed out the simplicity of it. Just use an existing platform, doesn't take much IT skill at all.
The other answer is that this is where the people are. Why waste time building your own website when only those searching you will visit it? Interacting with the various social media platforms instead gives you far more options on discoverability.
If you must maintain a presence on those platforms anyways, it becomes even less compelling for a small non-tech company to maintain their own infrastructure.
Facebook marketplace is as trustless as you can get. It's 2010 version of Kijiji/Craigslist with built-in picture upload.
Right now depending on how much effort you want to spend, you can get a place for $2000 usd a month or $600 a month, for relatively similar unit maybe 20min of walk distance apart. Simply because information does not flow freely.
Airbnb fixed the trust issue and dominated rental market in the last few years. But hefty fees + taxes are making them less and less viable for travelers.
I honestly see a big opportunity to just improve the overall experience. Especially considering Riviera Maya is the fasted growing realestate market in Mexico.
If you're serious about working on something like this, email me (check my profile), let's connect.
As a Mexican who travels plenty to the US and works for an American company and has worked for another top-tier software company from the US, I believe this statement is false.
E-commerce platforms, “sharing economy” apps, neo-banks, dating apps, real estate platforms, etc. are all used every single day by millions of people.
Mexican living in México, ~95% of the population use Facebook, word of mouth or driving around where you want to find a place to rent. Of course there are many sites that you can use to find a place to rent, but the best deals and more options are available on Facebook.
Facebook doesn't act as the central trust authority. So as an expat, most realtor is telling me to avoid FB and use them because scams. But as a user it's inefficient to talk to 20 Realtors for 20 listings.
I just want something in between that doesn't inflate the actual price by 40%
Thanks for sharing this! i feel this is a cautionary tale for us HN-minded folks since i see a rather unusual love for the look and feel of the "old internet", and what i like to call the Craigslist style of design. As someone who remembers the internet of the 90s and early 2000s before it was taken over by ads and SEO spam,
i understand the nostalgia, but as a web developer, also know that i need to do right by my clients and build things for them that make their businesses successful. An old outdated website turns away many customers.
Ironically, a badly designed modern website turns me away. (sometimes because the thing literally doesn't work)
I remember trying to book a place and there was some issue with the z-index and I couldn't click to confirm the dates on the pop-up calendar. Made me wonder how much $$$ they could be losing because the % of people willing/know how to delete the offending element must be pretty small.
I agree 100% with what you're saying though. Older websites appear more "complex" to a lot of people. There's good middle grounds though. The new netflix for iOS is really nice, imo. Leans more towards form but still functions very well.
This is one the examples where the exception proves the rule. After introducing my friends and family to a CLI-based booking tool I wrote for them, they have swore off website UI's since. Every other week I get an excited e-mail stating how great the tool is, and how they have also convinced their own friends to give up JavaScript and turn towards Rust.
My wife runs a riding academy and she's been resistant to any kind of online or off-farm marketing, relying instead on word of mouth. She thinks we get a better quality of customer that way and we have little trouble keeping our herd busy.
Of course our business is centered around repeat riders, it would be a very different business to organize trail rides for strangers.
Our barn is much smaller than most (7 horses at the high water) but it has been consistently profitable. A barn with more horses and a large staff could bring in more revenue but costs will be higher too. There is a barn down the road that has nice facilities but has had several managers and has only been viable with the last one. We know another troubled barn with an alcoholic owner who has a large off-farm income that has struggled economically and has a legendarily bad safety culture. (I took 10 rides there before we were in full swing and had 3 'near miss' accidents)
A long time ago, I made some Flash games. I recently converted some of them away from Flash and released them together as a desktop game for modern computers.
I am currently making more than $500 a month from this, although I don't necessarily expect that to continue. Games are a crowded market. It was a fun project, though.
He says in the discussion that porting the games from flash took 3 years. I'm aware that sometimes a single bog post can be the result of a lot of work, but that's next level!
Wanted to join the chorus of nostalgic thank yous! I played the original for hours with my buddies on library computers in grade school. Definitely some core memories. Thanks!
All the mainstream 'successful' apps uses advertising on other social media networks + Apple and Google Ads. They quickly ask / require money to be paid when you join to cover the acquisition costs as part of the on-boarding flow.
Assuming it's a capital repayment mortgage, you're neglecting that you are erasing debt, only the interest payment is really a cost here.
But yeah I think it makes sense to exclude it anyway, needs/wants might change and you no longer have the room(s) available to let or whatever, and it wouldn't really be a useful comparison of your 'side project' earnings to compare a year as a landlord with one not, it's a different thing.
Insurance ($97/mo) + Mortgage ($3,400/mo) + Property taxes ($444/mo) + trash, water ($100/mo) = $4k/mo. My mortgage is new and is only paying down principle ~$120/mo. This means I pay about $900/mo for my room, except I have had an average of $1k/mo in home repairs since I bought the house.
The real value I am capturing is my personal housing _might_ be cheaper than if I rented myself.
I am sure in 10 years, I will be in a good spot, but not today.
One bit of small feedback - I would say your landing page is very busy, it could use some more space separating content once you start scrolling down past the top part.
I got pretty into Stable Diffusion soon after it came out. Like a lot of users, I tinkered around with different ways to run it, going the usual route of running on my weak local machine, then going on to runpod, then implementing my own custom solution.
What I came up with worked pretty well for me, so I created a site that allows users to upload custom models and run Stable Diffusion “in the cloud”.
I launched in early December and it ended up being more successful than I expected. I just got to $700 MRR, which I’m definitely happy about after years of side projects making exactly $0.
While we're both here, it's not exactly clear to me what that whole thing means and does. Arguably i'm not too clued up in SD models and what they are and why would I want them. Might be a good idea to explain this or if explanation exists make it more prominent to hook ignorant people like me. :-)
Great point. I might need an entirely separate landing page for the artist/general audience vs the prosumer type landing page that currently exists.
(If you’re interested, the gist is that custom models allow for completely distinct “styles” as well as unique characters. For example, if you wanted to generate art in the style of Monet, you could train a custom model in that style)
Unless you're wanting people to save the images on the landing page, please optimize the images. WebP and only as big as they need to be rendered.
If I go to a service designed around images and it's taking 5 seconds on a SOLID fiber connection to fully download, it doesn't give me confidence that I'm going to get a fast experience in the rest of your site (even if it's not directly related).
It’s a great point. I had been using BunnyCDN to optimize the images/serve as webp, but there are a few on the model preview page that I definitely need to shrink further.
I wanted to give swift a try when it came out in 2014. I created the keyboard I know you all miss on the iPhone, and it's been doing quite great since. https://typenineapp.com
https://seniormindset.com/ – book and workshop helping people with the shift in mindset that goes into being a senior [software] engineer.
You can tldr my philosophy as “business results trump technical excellence”
No MRR but made about $40k in sales last year. Biggest challenge is figuring out how to turn that into stable revenue. Biggest opportunity is that unlike my previous (technical) infoproducts, this one doesn’t expire in 6 months.
Depends how you count. It's based on ~10 years of working on my own career. But it's also a collection of essays so a lot of writing happened live while the career was happening.
My time tracker says I spent 139 hours last year on this project.
I might be alone in this thinking but the "price goes up every 100 purchases" really gives off the wrong vibe. I understand you are trying to convey scarcity and value, but it comes off like some sort of used car salesman pitch.
Maybe I just too cynical these days, but when I hear certain phrases from salespeople, I immediately shut down the conversation and move on. Am I being too critical? Or is there an angle that I'm just not getting?
I love the product by the way! And the price is very reasonable. So I'm just a little bewildered by the hard sales pitch.
That's there to help bump people over the "Eh I'll buy this eventually" hump, which is common with nice-to-have infoproducts. Because I don't want to do the open/closed cohort based approach at this time.
I don't have the traffic volume or brand strength to go with the "You'll remember to come back when you're ready" approach ... yet?
Nothing really to show visually but I make about that passively selling/trading high end watches. More a hobby than anything just to wear them but some easy cash.
Pretty simple tbh. I hit just about all the major buy/sell sites, Facebook, marketplaces, etc. to buy/sell/trade. Your standard buy low, sell high type of situation. Or, have relationships with the dealers and get watches and retail that sell for more.
Rolex for example is great if you can get it at retail or find a good deal but typically the margins aren't that great otherwise. Other brands have way better margins. Rare or hard to come by (but ones people would want) can bring in great returns.
It's a higher cost business to get into but have plenty of friends in the low to mid market that make some decent money. Less barrier to entry. You can do it with just about anything. Some friends are in collectibles, cards, shoes, etc.
I sell cheap but high-quality Anki decks for language learning: https://deckmill.com
Created using a mix of automation (TTS, machine translation, etc.) and human reviews.
Built it with a friend, making around $500 a month, very stable over the last couple of years. Spend 1 or 2 hours a month on it, mostly customer support.
I read through the entire site and was convinced there was no price, but when I came back to reply I found that there is an element at the top of the homepage (next to "No subscriptions. No frills.") that says "Get access to all our decks for just €15.99."
I completely missed it because the price was in the text in refular font and it wasn't on the Download page or anywhere else on the site. There's no Buy page, so the impression I was left with is that you have a sneaky onboarding that reveals the price after a sign-up... or something similarly shady. Not a very good initial impression.
Cool product. One bit of feedback: after downloading a deck, the page redirects away to "how to use our decks". This is confusing and not intuitive - my workflow was that I wanted to download the Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced deck for one language and I had to navigate back to that language 3 times.
I just downloaded your sample deck for Spanish. One of the sentences is:
Front: I'm not happy.
Back: No soy feliz.
This doesn't seem correct to me.
I'm not happy (right now) => No estoy feliz.
No soy feliz means something like "I'm not a happy person".
EDIT: I should have mentioned that I'm not a native Spanish speaker. It turns out I'm wrong here, and that either estoy or soy would work in this case.
You are correct, but I'd say this one is fundamentally ambiguous (I'm Portuguese myself, where this also applies), as it is a one-to-two mapping here. Without further context you can't really choose one or the other, so we just left it as is :).
I've always found it most painful trying to figuring out when to use verbs that translate to other verbs depending on context. It's just personal experience of course, so not sure if it really matters that much between all languages or types of learning.
Maybe a hint which one is intended in this case would be useful/possible or a hint that it could be ambiguous/other translation possible? I've built a couple of tiny tools for myself to learn languages and I've always run into the same issue with ambiguous translations. I usually ended up with adding some personal reminder or sometimes just (1)/(2) to resolve it, but I never found a consistent resolution for it.
Native Spanish speaker here (ES-MX, specifically, if it matters). I think this is one of the cases where a solid general rule breaks down in the specifics.
You are correct about the difference between "ser" (to be, permanently/over an indeterminate time) and "estar" (to be in a particular state right now). But "No soy feliz" sounds perfectly idiomatic to me, even for a relatively transient state of sadness. ("No estoy feliz" doesn't sound wrong to me either, but feels just slightly less natural than "No soy feliz" even in a context like "No soy feliz ahorita", with an explicit "right now").
As a note: "No estoy contento" (Also "I am not happy", or maybe "I am not in a good mood") is definitely "estoy", rather than "soy". No clue why "No soy feliz" does feel idiomatic.
One feedback can you have tooltips/labels for the "Available Languages" section. Personally speaking my limited familiarity with flags makes it tough to find out how many languages are available.
A little more than $500/mon at the moment. If you are to trust Udemy's "instructor marketplace insights", top courses with the keyword 'devops' are north of $10k/mon, but median is just $27/mon.
Nice and you have some interesting packages I have not touched. I just bought the course to help out :-) and lets see if I can run it on my Raspberry PI here cluster at home I recently built up.
https://extensionpay.com — A really simple way for browser extension developers to take payments in their extensions. I made it to use in my own extensions since it's a pain in the butt to take payments in browser extensions.
It has an open source library that works across all browsers and allows for one-time or subscription payments. Since 2021 developers have made over $125k with ExtensionPay which makes me happy :)
Great way to solve a problem! For those that may be curious. Author said devs using Extension Pay have made $125k in 2021. They charge 5% on transactions which translates to $6250, roughly $520 per month. Perfect candidate for this thread.
i've def thought of using this before, but couldn't quite figure out if i trusted it.
so far, nope!
i appreciate that the site looks clean/barebones, but the logo is _so_ barebones -- just text -- that i thought... oh, this is just unsupported, someone thought of doing it, good idea, but then it didn't make any money, so they bailed, no harm no foul, wonder if someone else will do it b/c it's really needed.
i've had various extensions over the years that i wanted to build out, or pay someone else to build out, but there was no way to recoup my investment.
I'm one of the cofounders of PriceTable. [1] It has been a side project since 2018 or so.
About a year and a half ago I posted about it on HN [2] and back then our revenue was $2,500/mo. We recently passed the $6,000/mo.
At this point we have a few very happy customers who make up the bulk of our revenue. We have been trying to grow more, but our challenge is that we haven't been able to figure out a cost-effective way of reaching potential customers. We target the landscaping market, and most landscaping companies are either too small, or they don't have tech-savvy owners/staff who are motivated to learn and leverage a software solution effectively in order to grow their sales. Phone and email outreach haven't worked well.
If anyone has experience in this market or similar, please drop me a line! ege@pricetable.io
There are some YouTube channels that specialize in landscaping. I could see digitally and entrepreneurially minded landscaping professionals being a good part of their audience. Might be worth sponsoring a video or two.
>We target the landscaping market, and most landscaping companies are either too small, or they don't have tech-savvy owners/staff who are motivated to learn and leverage a software solution effectively in order to grow their sales
This is interesting, I don't know anything about your business but I feel like it might be worth having a landing page that is focused on landscaping. I don't really understand what the business does or how it can be helpful to a landscaping company.
Your website does not scream out to me that you are targeting the landscaping market and is a micro-startup going for the same market that the big companies cover so it might be a big hurdle to get the next client.
the genericness of the first few sentences are kinda not idea because they don't capture the "clickbait" nature of your product. you want to enthrall them into checking you out more. "The Perfect Mix of Sales Automation and Operations Management." doesn't really tell me much. "Create quotes in 30 seconds from your phone" or "control your business from anywhere" or whatever does capture my attention more. the headline doesn't have to encompass everything your business does but the subheading should have something like "complete business automation on the go"
getting customers is a hard problem® if it wasn't one of the biggest companies in the world wouldn't be an ad selling company with a swath of ways to deliver ads to you.
Hey man, I bought Steredenn on the PS4 like 5 years ago and it was one of the best shootemups I've ever played. I haven't beaten it yet but was considering picking it up again for the Switch. Thank you for making it. I am working on my own game and games like yours are an inspiration for me to keep going with it.
If I can ask a question, was there an initial design decision to build the game in Unity, or was that just your preferred tool out of experience?
(asking because I am fool-heartedly going in pure libsdl2 and C++)
Unity was chosen because I am a C# guy coming from XNA, and Monogame was super rough at that time.
Also it allowed us to really focus on the gameplay and not too much and the engine, while having access to all consoles.
We still had a lot of headaches with it…
Now I’m considering switching to something but I’m glad I had that experience on a mainstream and fully documented engine.
Best of luck with your game, if you need advices send me an email via the Steredenn or Flipon contact address.
Login as guest directly at https://app.erdlab.io No registration required to test. No email confirmation needed to register either if you choose to do so.
I didn't have enough time to dive into all the information or test out the editor. However, one bit of feedback that I have is just wondering what sets ERD Lab apart from other existing solutions? What motivated you to make your own DB design tool? If a prospective customer was either weighing the pros/cons between several DB design tools or already using another tool, what would compel them to decide on using ERD Lab?
Maybe consider including a table highlighting the differences in features/pricing from other similar tools on the homepage (after the list of features) or a separate page entirely highlighting this information? For example, Render.com has a page specifically highlighting how their product is a better PaaS solution compared to Heroku [0]. This is just a thought.
Personally, I'm not familiar enough with DB design editors to know what I should be looking for in such a tool. Moreover, about ~1 year ago, I was looking for a solution that solved this exact problem, so I am genuinely curious about this.
Finally, just wanted to mention that while I don't need this at the moment, I did bookmark it to consider using in the future.
I made collaborative painting apps, https://hellopaint.io and https://malmal.io (there might be some slight NSFW content). In the best months I made 800€+ in ad revenue from malmal but currently it's a lot less. I think there's potential to make a lot more though, although I'd like to stop showing ads and switch to some more predictable income model. I do have a patreon but it only brings in ~100€ per month. I could promote it more though.
I built https://team-today.com in a lock down as a way for my remote team to see when people are on holiday, going to site, or wfh.
Since then it’s grown to include other features like desk booking and PTO approvals. But at it’s all been built around the core concept of seeing when your colleagues are working and where they’re planning on working from.
React, Java, AWS. Took us about 6 weeks to build the initial MVP, each feature we add took a similar amount of time to implement, we typically iterate over things three times. We build something, make it better, then make it perfect. So far so good.
Great job!
How did you convince users to trust an unknown site to store their personal data?
This is one the things holding me back from implementing my side project ideas. I personally know that I won’t misuse users data but how do I really convince users.
Ding, ding, ding! This is correct. I was just ranting to my wife about this. Haha.
I always wonder, “How are these random companies able to convince folks to just give them personal data like that?” And of course, I already know the answer: Practically speaking, most folks don’t give a damn about their data! That’s unfortunate. (Well, not so unfortunate for the companies collecting all of it and their data brokers!)
We integrate into MS and Google which holds personal information such as names but we do make an effort to reduce the amount of personal information we hold.
The real difficulty is getting government or financial institutions to buy in, they have LONG approvals processes and require proof that certain security practices are being adhered to (ISO27001 helps but is costly).
https://www.arbeitnow.com - a job board for Germany. It's been up for two years this January and it keeps me going! Revenue and traffic fluctuate a lot, does not really matter to me as long as people keep finding jobs through it so I'll keep working on it as long as I can.
I have a weird set of skills that I've grown from just doing things that are interesting and fun.
https://www.munkle.it
- Think Anki, but optimized for speed, and will be focused on content creators. First sale this month (>$500_ from manual outreach to a big content creator Individual purchases will be turned on eventually, but we're not focused on that right now. This is a labor of love as through college and 20+ professional certifications I wanted something faster and easier than what was available.
https://www.skullsplitterdice.com
- I spend around 4 hours a week on this, but I used to do this full time. Currently it runs high four to low five figures 100% organically, but can easily do more if I ran ads. It 100% wouldn't be worth my time if I weren't using it to teach my kids things like customer service, product design, how to make content valuable to people so you get search traffic, single piece flow, etc.
It's also cool because I can geek out on a new thing in the area and apply it to something to see if I make any money on it or just have fun making art. Things I've done in the past is includes making a book for the game these are used for, a "choose your own adventure" style Facebook messenger adventure linked from hidden inserts in products, and working with visual and voice over artists to make stories around different products. My latest was using midjourney to create a character that I animated to say a script talking about a product.
Did I make money from that? No, was I entertained? Heck yes.
I started a solitaire website 5+ years ago. When Covid hit, I ended up finally putting ads on it. Since then it's been growing steadily and about half a year back I made it my full-time gig.
I improved the game and functionality over time. The game has always been above the fold, but the content was greatly revise this past year. I've been doing a lot of optimizations on the game, but nothing big. After all, it's limited how much innovation can be done a game like that .
Good site. I just gave you at least an hour of ad views because I can't ever stop until I win one. :) Note that on chrome on linux, the ads get quite heavy and slow everything down after 5 or so games, and I have to reload the page or it's too unresponsive to play.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] thread2. After I am happy with the likeness, I 3d print it. In this phase the 3d model comes to life and it's usually quite different from what we see on the computer as a 3d model. It has something to do with the difference in perspectives in which the designer designs shapes and in which we observe the item when it's produced as a real physical shape. This is very hard to get it right. Then we repeat the steps from 1 until I am happy with the likeness and the facial expression (this can be many iterations)
3. When I have the 3d printed positive, I create a mold using silicone rubber
4. The 2-part mold is then ready to be used for hundreds of castings (I use concrete)
Congratulations!
I'm curious because I have an Etsy shop and love to talk all things about optimising the shop front. The competition is steep nowadays over there!
Fast-forward a few weeks, I become pretty good friends with the owner at the ranch I went to. We grab tacos one night and he shares his concerns: They're not doing so well financially and are worried about whether or not they'll be able to afford feed in a month.
I got involved and we solved that problem and a few more: revamped the website (it looked and felt like it was from 2006), I whipped up a booking/reservation system to get more customers through the door, and exit surveys to make sure everything was perfect (and figure out what went wrong if it wasn't).
Bookings this month are up 490% from 2018 (according to the paper waivers they had) and that's without a single dollar spent in paid marketing. I answer a few emails every day from prospective riders and make sure everyone's happy. I get a percentage of each reservation which is cool, but the coolest part is that I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranch.
Obligatory disclosure: some semblance of ownership.
Wish I could go to Mexico and do this! :)
Edit: Saw the URL from another comment. Great work, simple and does exactly what’s needed.
We also track what horses have been used and how much so that we're not riding them into the ground — the people on the ground have an app I built in Framework7 to manage everything; they love it and Framework7 is very fun once you get rolling.
We ask for a 20% deposit to "hold [your] horses" and to prevent no-shows; the rest is transacted at the ranch (though we make the option to pay in full available if you email us). Our cancellation policy extremely flexible and though we say 24 hours on the site, we've never not refunded someone.
Some fun factoids:
* typical rider is 35-44. Less than 10% of riders are under the age of 24,
* about half of people book when they're in Mexico
* average lead time is 7 days
* about 66% of riders have riding exp; about 33% consider themselves "novice" or "expert" riders
* 45% of riders are male, 55% are female
* 1 rider reported they are from Antartica
You must get business cards made and start distributing them to friends and family whenever you get the chance. Not for marketing - to brag and to be able to be mildly annoying.
Great tip in general!
That is an incredibly early memory! 3-4 is more typical, and 2 is usually the earliest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia
I did something very similar for Surfing schools. Not yet making any money off it, but I am trying to. Reaching out to other surfing schools, improving the product adding new features.
Most business' official website are a Facebook page.
In a country of 150M people and growing expat presence, there is a TON of opportunities for software businesses to enter the market.
For example: Riviera Maya has no MLS style real estate tracker/listing platform. The entire real estate industry operates on word of mouth, WhatsApp and Facebook messages.
I've many times seen web presences fail for small organizations, when the only person that understands the web set up leaves. With Facebook, that doesn't happen.
I'm sure there are services such as you describe, and probably many restaurants use them, and it's not obvious. But Facebook is the default.
Others have pointed out the simplicity of it. Just use an existing platform, doesn't take much IT skill at all.
The other answer is that this is where the people are. Why waste time building your own website when only those searching you will visit it? Interacting with the various social media platforms instead gives you far more options on discoverability.
If you must maintain a presence on those platforms anyways, it becomes even less compelling for a small non-tech company to maintain their own infrastructure.
Genuinely curious. I've always hated sales but would love to work on making existing solutions better.
Right now depending on how much effort you want to spend, you can get a place for $2000 usd a month or $600 a month, for relatively similar unit maybe 20min of walk distance apart. Simply because information does not flow freely.
Airbnb fixed the trust issue and dominated rental market in the last few years. But hefty fees + taxes are making them less and less viable for travelers.
I honestly see a big opportunity to just improve the overall experience. Especially considering Riviera Maya is the fasted growing realestate market in Mexico.
If you're serious about working on something like this, email me (check my profile), let's connect.
That is what not having proper net neutrality is in Mexico.
E-commerce platforms, “sharing economy” apps, neo-banks, dating apps, real estate platforms, etc. are all used every single day by millions of people.
How would you typically find a place to rent where you live?
Facebook doesn't act as the central trust authority. So as an expat, most realtor is telling me to avoid FB and use them because scams. But as a user it's inefficient to talk to 20 Realtors for 20 listings.
I just want something in between that doesn't inflate the actual price by 40%
I remember trying to book a place and there was some issue with the z-index and I couldn't click to confirm the dates on the pop-up calendar. Made me wonder how much $$$ they could be losing because the % of people willing/know how to delete the offending element must be pretty small.
I agree 100% with what you're saying though. Older websites appear more "complex" to a lot of people. There's good middle grounds though. The new netflix for iOS is really nice, imo. Leans more towards form but still functions very well.
It’s in-house. I wasn’t happy with anything we tried, and honestly it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.
It’s in-house. I wasn’t happy with anything we tried, and honestly it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.
Of course our business is centered around repeat riders, it would be a very different business to organize trail rides for strangers.
Our barn is much smaller than most (7 horses at the high water) but it has been consistently profitable. A barn with more horses and a large staff could bring in more revenue but costs will be higher too. There is a barn down the road that has nice facilities but has had several managers and has only been viable with the last one. We know another troubled barn with an alcoholic owner who has a large off-farm income that has struggled economically and has a legendarily bad safety culture. (I took 10 rides there before we were in full swing and had 3 'near miss' accidents)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458090/Hapland_Trilogy/
I am currently making more than $500 a month from this, although I don't necessarily expect that to continue. Games are a crowded market. It was a fun project, though.
https://foon.uk/how-flash-2022/
He says in the discussion that porting the games from flash took 3 years. I'm aware that sometimes a single bog post can be the result of a lot of work, but that's next level!
1/ Started a niche dating app in 2017. Revenue ranges form 700-1,100/mo. Hosting is about $50/mo.
2/ Bought a house and rent our spare rooms for $3,100/mo.
3/ Contracting projects for a small dev shop earned $3-10k/mo (depending on how many hours I worked).
If I buy it, I'm wondering how to grow it though. How do you solve the chicken-egg problem?
But yeah I think it makes sense to exclude it anyway, needs/wants might change and you no longer have the room(s) available to let or whatever, and it wouldn't really be a useful comparison of your 'side project' earnings to compare a year as a landlord with one not, it's a different thing.
The real value I am capturing is my personal housing _might_ be cheaper than if I rented myself.
I am sure in 10 years, I will be in a good spot, but not today.
https://OpenSay.co
What I came up with worked pretty well for me, so I created a site that allows users to upload custom models and run Stable Diffusion “in the cloud”.
I launched in early December and it ended up being more successful than I expected. I just got to $700 MRR, which I’m definitely happy about after years of side projects making exactly $0.
The site in question: https://stadio.ai
<a class="font-semibold hover:text-red-700" href="/verify-email">Click here to verify your email.</a>
(If you’re interested, the gist is that custom models allow for completely distinct “styles” as well as unique characters. For example, if you wanted to generate art in the style of Monet, you could train a custom model in that style)
If I go to a service designed around images and it's taking 5 seconds on a SOLID fiber connection to fully download, it doesn't give me confidence that I'm going to get a fast experience in the rest of your site (even if it's not directly related).
Thanks for the feedback!
I made this because every time when I start a project and bough a domain and setup email. first thing. So I scratch my own itch :).
You can tldr my philosophy as “business results trump technical excellence”
No MRR but made about $40k in sales last year. Biggest challenge is figuring out how to turn that into stable revenue. Biggest opportunity is that unlike my previous (technical) infoproducts, this one doesn’t expire in 6 months.
My time tracker says I spent 139 hours last year on this project.
Maybe I just too cynical these days, but when I hear certain phrases from salespeople, I immediately shut down the conversation and move on. Am I being too critical? Or is there an angle that I'm just not getting?
I love the product by the way! And the price is very reasonable. So I'm just a little bewildered by the hard sales pitch.
That's there to help bump people over the "Eh I'll buy this eventually" hump, which is common with nice-to-have infoproducts. Because I don't want to do the open/closed cohort based approach at this time.
I don't have the traffic volume or brand strength to go with the "You'll remember to come back when you're ready" approach ... yet?
Rolex for example is great if you can get it at retail or find a good deal but typically the margins aren't that great otherwise. Other brands have way better margins. Rare or hard to come by (but ones people would want) can bring in great returns.
It's a higher cost business to get into but have plenty of friends in the low to mid market that make some decent money. Less barrier to entry. You can do it with just about anything. Some friends are in collectibles, cards, shoes, etc.
Created using a mix of automation (TTS, machine translation, etc.) and human reviews.
Built it with a friend, making around $500 a month, very stable over the last couple of years. Spend 1 or 2 hours a month on it, mostly customer support.
I completely missed it because the price was in the text in refular font and it wasn't on the Download page or anywhere else on the site. There's no Buy page, so the impression I was left with is that you have a sneaky onboarding that reveals the price after a sign-up... or something similarly shady. Not a very good initial impression.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25678152
I'm not happy (right now) => No estoy feliz.
No soy feliz means something like "I'm not a happy person".
EDIT: I should have mentioned that I'm not a native Spanish speaker. It turns out I'm wrong here, and that either estoy or soy would work in this case.
Maybe a hint which one is intended in this case would be useful/possible or a hint that it could be ambiguous/other translation possible? I've built a couple of tiny tools for myself to learn languages and I've always run into the same issue with ambiguous translations. I usually ended up with adding some personal reminder or sometimes just (1)/(2) to resolve it, but I never found a consistent resolution for it.
You are correct about the difference between "ser" (to be, permanently/over an indeterminate time) and "estar" (to be in a particular state right now). But "No soy feliz" sounds perfectly idiomatic to me, even for a relatively transient state of sadness. ("No estoy feliz" doesn't sound wrong to me either, but feels just slightly less natural than "No soy feliz" even in a context like "No soy feliz ahorita", with an explicit "right now").
As a note: "No estoy contento" (Also "I am not happy", or maybe "I am not in a good mood") is definitely "estoy", rather than "soy". No clue why "No soy feliz" does feel idiomatic.
LPT: use "affordable" instead of cheap, it basically means the same thing but has a totally different connotation
eeeh that's always been the meaning, what's newspeak about it ? What do you think the "afford" part of "affordable" is for ?
> I want something that's cheap!
That's ok, but then you probably don't want something that's "high quality" like the OP mentions, "cheap" is newspeak for "low quality"
Anyways, this is marketing 101
Except, this is software, there's just about no correlation between charged price and quality.
I can sell you the same piece of software at different prices and it will be exactly the same quality.
I do not do any advertising for it, but as it is played in groups, it nicely advertises itself.
https://www.escape-team.com/create
GitLab will be a tough one for R-Pi :) There’s this one: https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/settings/rpi.html but I was told it doesn’t help that much (haven’t tried it myself)
Oh, and you will need a public IP.
It has an open source library that works across all browsers and allows for one-time or subscription payments. Since 2021 developers have made over $125k with ExtensionPay which makes me happy :)
so far, nope!
i appreciate that the site looks clean/barebones, but the logo is _so_ barebones -- just text -- that i thought... oh, this is just unsupported, someone thought of doing it, good idea, but then it didn't make any money, so they bailed, no harm no foul, wonder if someone else will do it b/c it's really needed.
i've had various extensions over the years that i wanted to build out, or pay someone else to build out, but there was no way to recoup my investment.
maybe i'll give it another look.
https://gourav.io/notion-boost
About a year and a half ago I posted about it on HN [2] and back then our revenue was $2,500/mo. We recently passed the $6,000/mo.
At this point we have a few very happy customers who make up the bulk of our revenue. We have been trying to grow more, but our challenge is that we haven't been able to figure out a cost-effective way of reaching potential customers. We target the landscaping market, and most landscaping companies are either too small, or they don't have tech-savvy owners/staff who are motivated to learn and leverage a software solution effectively in order to grow their sales. Phone and email outreach haven't worked well.
If anyone has experience in this market or similar, please drop me a line! ege@pricetable.io
[1] - https://pricetable.io [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26855726
This is interesting, I don't know anything about your business but I feel like it might be worth having a landing page that is focused on landscaping. I don't really understand what the business does or how it can be helpful to a landscaping company.
Your website does not scream out to me that you are targeting the landscaping market and is a micro-startup going for the same market that the big companies cover so it might be a big hurdle to get the next client.
the genericness of the first few sentences are kinda not idea because they don't capture the "clickbait" nature of your product. you want to enthrall them into checking you out more. "The Perfect Mix of Sales Automation and Operations Management." doesn't really tell me much. "Create quotes in 30 seconds from your phone" or "control your business from anywhere" or whatever does capture my attention more. the headline doesn't have to encompass everything your business does but the subheading should have something like "complete business automation on the go"
getting customers is a hard problem® if it wasn't one of the biggest companies in the world wouldn't be an ad selling company with a swath of ways to deliver ads to you.
- Flipon (https://flipon.net) an arcade puzzle/match-3 inspired by Tetris attack on PC mobiles and switch
- Steredenn (https://Steredenn.pixelnest.io) a roguelike shoot them up, pc, iOS, switch.
I’ve been lucky to have an extra income with those two games for a few year.
If I can ask a question, was there an initial design decision to build the game in Unity, or was that just your preferred tool out of experience?
(asking because I am fool-heartedly going in pure libsdl2 and C++)
Thanks again!
Unity was chosen because I am a C# guy coming from XNA, and Monogame was super rough at that time. Also it allowed us to really focus on the gameplay and not too much and the engine, while having access to all consoles. We still had a lot of headaches with it… Now I’m considering switching to something but I’m glad I had that experience on a mainstream and fully documented engine.
Best of luck with your game, if you need advices send me an email via the Steredenn or Flipon contact address.
Login as guest directly at https://app.erdlab.io No registration required to test. No email confirmation needed to register either if you choose to do so.
Here is a 1 minute video of ERDLab in action. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VaBRPAtX08
Maybe consider including a table highlighting the differences in features/pricing from other similar tools on the homepage (after the list of features) or a separate page entirely highlighting this information? For example, Render.com has a page specifically highlighting how their product is a better PaaS solution compared to Heroku [0]. This is just a thought.
Personally, I'm not familiar enough with DB design editors to know what I should be looking for in such a tool. Moreover, about ~1 year ago, I was looking for a solution that solved this exact problem, so I am genuinely curious about this.
Finally, just wanted to mention that while I don't need this at the moment, I did bookmark it to consider using in the future.
Otherwise, great job, and I wish you the best!
[0] - https://render.com/render-vs-heroku-comparison
Since then it’s grown to include other features like desk booking and PTO approvals. But at it’s all been built around the core concept of seeing when your colleagues are working and where they’re planning on working from.
I always wonder, “How are these random companies able to convince folks to just give them personal data like that?” And of course, I already know the answer: Practically speaking, most folks don’t give a damn about their data! That’s unfortunate. (Well, not so unfortunate for the companies collecting all of it and their data brokers!)
The real difficulty is getting government or financial institutions to buy in, they have LONG approvals processes and require proof that certain security practices are being adhered to (ISO27001 helps but is costly).
https://www.munkle.it - Think Anki, but optimized for speed, and will be focused on content creators. First sale this month (>$500_ from manual outreach to a big content creator Individual purchases will be turned on eventually, but we're not focused on that right now. This is a labor of love as through college and 20+ professional certifications I wanted something faster and easier than what was available.
https://www.skullsplitterdice.com - I spend around 4 hours a week on this, but I used to do this full time. Currently it runs high four to low five figures 100% organically, but can easily do more if I ran ads. It 100% wouldn't be worth my time if I weren't using it to teach my kids things like customer service, product design, how to make content valuable to people so you get search traffic, single piece flow, etc.
It's also cool because I can geek out on a new thing in the area and apply it to something to see if I make any money on it or just have fun making art. Things I've done in the past is includes making a book for the game these are used for, a "choose your own adventure" style Facebook messenger adventure linked from hidden inserts in products, and working with visual and voice over artists to make stories around different products. My latest was using midjourney to create a character that I animated to say a script talking about a product.
Did I make money from that? No, was I entertained? Heck yes.
You can check out the game here: https://online-solitaire.com/.
I wrote a post about my journey on Indie Hackers if someone is curious about it: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-a-simple-solita....
Did you start having only the game at first above the fold and then added more content below? How did it evolve over time?
It looks like SEO drives most of your traffic.