Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?
I plan on starting a side project but don't really have a niche yet.
I am interested in knowing what business you run is it a mobile app, website, Saas?
And how long it took you to reach $2k monthly revenue?
514 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 341 ms ] threadIt took...around two and a half years, I think, to hit $2k/mo MRR. It was definitely not the stereotypical "launch → iterate a bit → boom, PMF" story that you often hear, which was fine because it was 'just' a side project and I didn't have to worry about running out of money or time.
To be honest: Realising that time is going by so fast really scared me this week. Being mid-30s I really need to get my shit together, soon... :-D
> With great and solemn portent, my teacher announced she would tell us something that her teacher had told her, and that her teacher’s teacher had told him, and so on, back to Yeats: The thing to remember is that no one ever finds out that you don’t know what you’re doing.
it touches on some many things.
..sigh and don't ask me how I know.
A few months ago, my uncle died. To the outside world, he was very well put together, eloquent, and admired by all who knew him. Worked on physics books as a proofreader for a major publisher his whole life and was celebrated for his work. He was a recluse, but very sociable and an excellent go-between for any socially difficult situation, a real keeper of the peace.
When I went to clear his home, I discovered that his personal space was the opposite of all the above. Dirty, messy, not well organized.
Of all the people I ever expected that from, it wasn't him, but he did an excellent job of appearing to have his shit together.
I shared this with a few others who had late family members that had done very well in their respective field, and the sentiment was the same: nobody ever really seems to get their shit together, they just get better at presenting the parts of themselves that matter.
He was a very happy soul.
If this keeps going, each year will feel like a day by the time I'm 60 or so.
[EDIT] Incidentally, I reject the "routine & boredom are what do it" thing. High school felt like it took forever and was far more regimented and regular and boring than my life is now.
I earn about $2000 a month from ads on the landing page (organic SEO), but very soon plan to add a subscription for pro features (while people could still compile it from source and get the full experience without paying, if they wish).
I started the project 8 years ago to create a slick looking note-taking app for myself on Linux. Then I open-sourced and published it, and it just took off and got popular (more than 1.2 Million downloads).
Took around 2 years to get a high rank on Google. Then it was just a matter of putting ads (which I don't like but my income relies on) and ever since it's been quite stable.
We're on Github here btw: https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes
But maybe in the future will create our own paid syncing service, is that something you'll want?
I wouldn't be keen to pay a monthly storage fee but I would pay a one time fee to unlock the ability to connect the data to my own storage like Dropbox, Mega, Google drive, etc.
1. A native app (it's an Electron app).
2. Open source.
At least that's the ad I get on that page.
Qt has been around for years, the documentation is extensive and the community is large and supportive. With QML I faced many problems, especially half-assed examples/documentation, Qt Creator's intellisense doesn't work well with QML sometimes, etc... But the tradeoff is worth it. I'm getting things done in a much faster pace with QML.
A problem that is common both in Qt and other cross-platform frameworks is that you end up writing some custom code for each operating system to make the look and feel more native. But I think it's getting better with awesome open-source projects taking care of beautiful native window decorations[1].
[1] https://github.com/wangwenx190/framelesshelper
Ironically the first version was mocked in Unity, thinking the tooling and ecosystem would make the MVP easy to build. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't particularly easy either. The end result was extremely heavyweight and gave terrible performance. Qt on the other hand yielded fairly snappy and lightweight results, and the development experience wasn't bad at all.
I wonder why more people don't use it, but then, that's my only exposure. Maybe it's not so great for other things, and I suppose there's the whole matter of having to pay for certain tooling and support. Us developers are sometimes super-hesitant to pay for the tools we use, haha.
There are some really good courses for beginners by Voidrealms - Bryan Cairns[1] on Youtube, if anyone is interested.
I think QML definitely deserve a better reputation. I even saw it being used for websites[2] although I'm still sticking with React for that.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@VoidRealms/playlists
[2] https://pureqml.com/
In the early 00's when I was debating if I should pursue software dev (again) I wrote a couple of Win32 native apps in C and absolutely loved writing them. One of the apps was a workout timer which I submitted to Freewarefiles.com. It peaked around 48K downloads. Unfortunately freewarefiles is no more so I can't show off my one and only "successful" native app.
Sometimes I feel I want to delve back into native apps instead of web based.
Awesome story! Come back to the light (literally) side.
This looks incredible I’m definitely going to use it
High performance AI video streaming server and clients for a variety of platforms.
Took several years before the product was in an acceptable state to begin selling, it's been about 10 years since I began.
At least, that was my reaction too, and it seems echoed by many of the people sharing their ('no longer a side') projects.
You might benefit from looking more broadly (friendly suggestion).
It’s a nice start though!
Bug found: Your "Buy" page is missing the header bar for navigation etc.
edit: Contact page has the same problem. :-)
Even in USD, $2k/month has vastly different buying power depending on location. It doesn't go far in SF or NYC but would get you a lot more in rural locations or smaller cities.
$2k/month CAD in Toronto is decent but still a long way from "ramen profitable".
But then we'd have to deal with people :-(
I suspect that'll be a common theme in answers here though: if you have a side project making $2k a month, in most of the world that's enough for you to go full-time and try to take it further. If you can make $2k/month on something working only part-time, you can definitely make a lot more if you focus on it.
On your questions: HTTP Toolkit is a desktop app (plus a mobile app and other components for integrations) but it's an Electron app that effectively functions as a SaaS (with a freemium subscription model) that just happens to have a component that runs on your computer. And actually getting to $2k wasn't overnight at all - it took a couple of years of slow steady slog. A few inflection points that made a notable difference (releasing rewriting support & Android support particularly) but mostly it was a matter of "just keep pushing", trusting the trajectory would keep going, and steadily grinding upwards. It's great where it is now, but it's hard work - a solo business is not for the faint of heart!
Under the hood it's just a tiny automated email flow set up via Mailchimp that sends out the download link when you sign up. Nothing fancy, but it's easy and it does the job.
I was just about to ask how do you differentiate your product from mitmproxy but on a quick google search I found this thread from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29627819
That said, one point there is outdated: HTTP Toolkit does now fully support websockets too. There's more I'd like to do there, but as far as I'm aware it's equally capable to mitmproxy in that sense today.
For the web dev case, for example, if you're debugging some interaction that means you can intercept your browser <-> server traffic and your server <-> upstream API traffic all in the same place, and see the full flow, and you can modify server responses or backend API responses in flight, to test out different edge cases.
There's a Chrome dev tools vs HTTP Toolkit comparison page here with a little more detail: https://httptoolkit.com/chrome-devtools-alternative/
In a perfect world, I'd kill for a tool where I could define a script (something similar to a Playwright test) and it'd automatically run and record everything, so I could redo the video much more frequently and accurately. I think you probably can do that for a normal web app already (?) but the challenge here is that HTTP Toolkit is launching other apps that also pop up over the top, and so I need to record them all together.
If you're looking for inspiration around this sort of thing, the Android demo video is different and also worth looking at: https://httptoolkit.com/android/
I stumbled on this nice blog post on automating these recordings. Maybe a partial solution?
https://martinheinz.dev/blog/94
I was thinking of doing a manual process like yours for a start rather than automating, but hearing your thoughts makes me think I'll try automating sooner.
I see what you mean about the multi-app aspect. I'll have to switch to browser windows for mine as well. Your android approach is nice!
It's an _extremely_ simple setup. Actual recording is done with Mac's built-in screenshot tool: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208721. It's recorded at an arbitrary window size I eyeballed the first time, that now I probably have to stick to forever (because if they're all the same size, I can reuse parts to avoid re-recording unnecessarily).
All of this is suboptimal (using 1080p would have helped, for starters, since lots of tools work better with standard resolutions) but it doesn't really matter, it just annoys me mildly one day a year and that's it.
IMO: if you're at the start, unless you have a super unique situation, I wouldn't look at automating videos or perfecting the recording setup at all - just ship something barely acceptable and see if it works, and then focus on pain points that actually turn out to be blockers later. Getting a core product into real people's hands and getting real feedback ASAP is more valuable than tweaking the video resolution or anything similar!
Like it a lot. Cheers.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35559469
I was wondering what the early days of the journey looked like. - What did the first iteration of this product look like? Was it more or less similar, or substantially different from the spirit of httptoolkit today? - How did you go from (some semblance of a product) to first sale? / acquiring first customer? - did you spend anything on marketing/distribution?
Technically, the first iteration was https://github.com/httptoolkit/mockttp - an HTTP integration testing library for JS. Not a desktop app at all! I'd originally built that for testing uses, but as it matured I realised that with a UI and automated setup tools it'd be useful as a complete product (but Mockttp still powers all the internals today, and you can use it directly to build your own custom intercepting proxies too).
For the first real product, the very first public 'launch' was literally a landing page with some demos of the potential UI and a signup form, just to test interest and check it wasn't a terrible idea. The results looked promising, so that was followed a few months later by a very basic but usable free version (entirely read-only, and only supporting Chrome interception) with the freemium features on top appearing a few months after that. From this stage it was all very much the same spirit as today, just less feature complete.
> How did you go from (some semblance of a product) to first sale? / acquiring first customer?
Once I announced the paid version (a blog post to my tiny set of newsletter signups, plus a little response on HN/Reddit/Product Hunt etc) I got a handful of paying customers (but certainly less than 10) within 24 hours. Nice but not a meaningful income, and from that wild peak it dropped back down to maybe one new customer per week or so afterwards, so it was quite slow going at the start.
However, those paying customers (and the mere fact of offering a paid service generally) resulted in _much_ better feedback. Rather than "this is cool" all of a sudden I had real demands for specific features, from people with concrete use cases and money in their hands. The initial paid features were just made up off the top of my head, and honestly didn't create a particularly compelling paid feature set. It's very hard to really know what people will pay for! That feedback was incredibly unbelievably useful to fix that.
From there, building out the key features people asked for over the following 6 months boosted things very significantly, and started to get things moving for real, and then you get into a virtuous circle, where more users => more feedback => better product => more users => ...
> did you spend anything on marketing/distribution?
I tested advertising at a small scale for a few months, but it didn't really work great. I think largely because it's very very freemium - 99% of users pay nothing - so the acquisition cost for a paying user doesn't make sense, and also honestly I don't have much experience with ads and I'm not sure I'm any good at writing them.
Content marketing meanwhile has worked great, keeps passively returning dividends, and cost nothing. I've tried to fill the blog (https://httptoolkit.com/blog/) exclusively with detailed & high-value original content (detailed breakdowns of a recent HTTP security vulnerability, not "top 10 HTTP libraries for Python") which shares well on social networks for an immediate burst of traffic, and then (in most cases) provides both a long-term SEO boost and constant incoming traffic on related topics that converts into users. That starts slow, but again steadily builds up over years, if you keep working at it. Content marketing + SEO are pretty much the only marketing channels I work on right now.
Even with root, certificate pinning can cause problems (as the sibling comment points out) but you can usually defeat that fairly easily: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/frida-certificate-pinning/.
For non-Android, HTTP Toolkit can't set it up for you automatically, but you can absolutely intercept _anything_ manually if you can configure it with your own HTTP proxy setting (fairly common) and add a trusted CA certificate (less common).
Do you mean that improving documentation helped get customers? I have a small side project and I think this is one of its weaker spots, even if it is relatively simple [0]. I noticed "helper popups" are getting used quite extensively.
[0]: https://aihelperbot.com/guide
It probably did, but no that's not what I mean, sorry :-). By "rewriting support" I mean adding features that allowed you to rewrite arbitrary network traffic, rather than just viewing it (as in the very first PoC).
For system-wide setup, you'll just need to configure that manually - setting your system proxy and trusting the CA certificate. The settings you need are on the Intercept page, in the 'Anything' section. For portable browsers, you may also be able to configure proxy & CA settings within the browser itself, which might be more convenient, depending on your setup.
https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/gpt_for_gma...
https://workspace.google.com/u/0/marketplace/app/gpt_for_doc...
https://gpt.space
The best part is not even about the money but about having a lot of users, democratising GPT and saving a lot of human hours everyday!
Edit: Your T&C says it was written in 2019, you can't possibly been running the project since then right? https://gpt.space/terms-of-service
Without verification you don't know if any of them are marking $2k+
I've been doing this for over 2 years now. You can take a look at my changelog to see most of the updates (at the beginning I did not maintain a changelog so it doesn't start exactly when I started the site): https://jpdb.io/changelog
Not everyone uses every feature though; some people only use the dictionary, some people use the SRS, some people look at my difficulty lists, some people look at my vocabulary lists, some people only upload their Anki decks to see which shows/books/etc. have the most known vocabulary, etc.
I'd love to support other languages too, but at this point it isn't very feasible. I'm just a single man, and this is just a side project, so I simply don't have the resources to even do everything that I want to do with Japanese (and there's still so much more I want to add/improve!), never mind branching out into other languages.
You might as well ask how a screwdriver is different from an apple. (:
Google Translate, is, well, a translator. You give it text, and it translates it. That's it. My site's for people who want to actually learn Japanese to fluency, with a particular focus on media-based immersion.
For example, is there a Japanese anime you'd like to watch without subtitles? I can probably help with that; I have vocabulary lists for many shows, and the site can teach you (through flashcards/spaced repetition) most of the words you'll need to be able to understand it.
I also have a plugin for the mpv video player where (if you load appropriate Japanese subtitles for the show you're watching) the plugin will color-code all of the words according to whether you know them or not, and you'll also have access to a popup dictionary where you can just hover your mouse over any of the words and see their definition. You can also use the plugin to make vocabulary flashcards with the screenshot + audio from what you're watching; demo video by one of my users: https://streamable.com/ww6x0e
I can keep on going as there's a lot more, but I'll stop here! It's probably not appropriate for someone who just wants to learn a little bit of Japanese for tourism purposes.
So far we’ve hosted 12 dinners over the past year. Growing from out first meal with 13 friends to as many as 80 guests for this months meal. Our mailing list has over 400 people on it and we’ve sold out every event since our 4th. Sometimes we end up hosting multiple nights.
It’s not a very scalable business as it exists today. For now is just a passion project that makes a few bucks, allows us meet interesting people, and provides the opportunity to discover new foods and restaurants.
What I will say is that I think the timing was right. My co-host and I lived in Manhattan pre-pandemic and regularly took advantage of the restaurant variety there. Our dinners are hosted on Long Island and our theory is that people who move from Manhattan to Long Island over the last 20 years started to expect higher quality food and a larger variety of ethnic options. Over the past decade or so the variety and quality of Long Island restaurants has greatly improved from what was here 25 years ago when I was growing up.
Post pandemic we saw an appetite (pun intended) for people to just get out of the house, be around other people, and have an experience. Quite a few people who come to the dinners say that they keep coming back because their partner/family aren't adventurous eaters so they never get to try new foods or typically wouldn't order some of the things we put on the menu. We aren't going for a fear factor vibe, but we do try to get people out of their comfort zone. We have a large number of solo guests who enjoy meeting new people and sharing a like-minded experience. Initially the group skewed heavily towards males in their 30's, which was our friends. Today its a very diverse group of people.
https://www.newsday.com/lifestyle/restaurants/dead-chefs-soc... (https://archive.is/w9Z1A)
As a customer I'd probably want to run a tab at the restaurant for whatever I drink (assuming they're alcohol-friendly) but as an organizer I'd probably want an upfront corkage fee I could take a reliable cut of.
Perhaps you can get relatively authentic Indian food (ignoring the variations in Indian cuisine for a second) in the U.S. and Canada, compared to India (I've traveled India for comparison). Because there are tons of import markets in both countries to get all the same ingredients.
But Indian food in Greece definitely has a Greek flavour to it, because it's quite hard to find the proper ingredients to make more authentic Indian food. They used feta instead of paneer!
Well, if something that is not prepared with authentic ingredients is authentic to you we have divergent opinions.
This doesn’t exist online, where it’s acceptable to post “drive by” snarky putdowns that add nothing to the conversation and don’t actually address the issue at hand - in this case, the difficulty of sourcing ingredients.
A constructive comment would have asked about the difficulty of sourcing obscure ingredients and how the founder deals with that.
Again; you are missing the point. It has nothing to do with whether the food is “authentic” or not, which is itself a highly debatable question. It has everything to do with the way you communicate to people when disagreeing with them or criticizing their ideas.
If you don’t care that people will immediately think you’re a pedantic, difficult person, as long as you get to be “right”, then sure, feel free to disregard what I wrote.
The guy said two sentences. You may think it's rude but it's probably the language barrier and he's just trying to give his honest perspective and there was no rudeness intended.
Authenticity, in other words, is not an absolute. It's a spectrum, and you can get pretty darn close to the "authentic" end of said spectrum without needing to literally import foreign water.
Or your friend interrupts a restaurant owner - a restaurant they've never eaten at - and says "you call that 'authentic' food? I doubt it."
I would definitely be interested in something like this coming to our area.
What an unique side project, I'm very impressed.
If your purpose is cash flow, freelancing can quickly generate $2000++ with much less risk than starting a SaaS.
That’s not to say starting a SaaS is a bad idea…but if pure short-term cash production is your goal, I’d consider finding clients who trust you to pay you hourly on the side.
FWIW, I’ve started 2 SaaS companies with a collective revenue of $0, and my side freelancing currently makes more than $2k/mo.
Lastly…it’s very possible that you have lots of other goals other than cash, and if so, good luck with your SaaS! I started MoneyHabitsHQ.com and it was one of the most fun learning activities of my career, despite not producing revenue.
I’m working as a Solutions Engineer now. Its basically freelancing without sourcing customers and a consistently big pay cheque every month. Any tips on starting freelancing?
Being connected to the right business folks seems to be the key.
I hope this is a typo, because $99/mo is nice to have, but I'd honestly consider the SaaS I'm building a failure if it made less than 4 digits a month.
I guess it depends what level someone considers a failure. It it keeps making money and trends are improving I wouldn't consider it a failure. For example 500 EUR would pay my rent so the bar is lower for me, but sure anything more than 1000 is already nice, especially if it doesn't require constant attention.
But since I literally just deployed my new landing page for the Early Access, and looking to launch by the end of the month, I figure I might talk about it.
I'm working on Bernard (https://bernard.app), a link checker service for website owners. Since the job market is tight, I figured I might go all in into what I hope will become a profitable, lean, one-person business.
Hoping to reach ramen profitability within the next 12 months.
I made a gross income of around 3K a month last year out of Royalties on the soft for each device sold. It's Apache 2.0 software so people can do whatever they want.
I started making money when I decided to list on the GitHub README the list of manufacturers/makers that where sponsoring the project. (Only one person at that time) Soon after the others offered to give royalty as well.
I even got a Chinese company, notorious for selling "clone" of OSHW projects, to support the SW development as well via GitHub sponsor.
I've been working on it for the last four years. I entertained the idea to make and sell the hardware myself. But in the end I learned that's it's not something I'm interested to get into. What I really like is working on the software.
It naturally pivoted into a more community driven project where multiple makers are selling various variations of the HW.
I wrote a retrospective last years [2].
[1] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro
[2] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro/discussions/289
It's not a contract, as the term "royalty" implies, but it is a royalty in the sense that it's determined per unit sold.
I talked with the makers or manufacturer and we reached an agreement. So to me (and them) it's royalties.
It sounds like acknowledging the sponsors is "the right thing", good Karma, or simply advertising for them. Not everyone wants to just rip off open source and not give back, they're willing to share the wealth if you make it easy and let people know they're doing it?
I need to set up github sponsors myself. We get the occasional request "how can I contribute money to you guys" and we always say stuff like "just spread the word". I keep telling myself I don't want to feel obligated by money, but I also know that I'd love to make enough to work on open source full time.
Also I can recommend OpenCollective; I’m sure there are other similar solutions as well. It’s nice to be able to “expense” stuff and I’m sure donors appreciate transparency.
What will help fix that issue is my wife going shopping with the kids long enough for me to figure what is wrong. ;)
Otherwise personally my daily driver is PS5 DualSense
You can connect Wiimotes to PCs over Bluetooth and use any of those Wii-connector controllers through them, which would make them wireless and solve the finding-a-reliable-adapter problem, but I've never managed to make that kind of set-up sufficiently stable. Always having to screw with re-pairing and such.
In the end, my go-to for BT emulation controllers is usually a PS3/4/5 controller. I haven't tried the XBone but I found the d-pad on the XB and XB360 controllers unusably inaccurate, and the face buttons weirdly slow when trying to play old-school Nintendo-hard games. Playstation controller d-pads are much better, and the face buttons feel quicker to switch between, for whatever reason.
It has: Turbo key function for SNES games, Vibration, Macros, Pressure-sensitive triggers, Multi-system support (there is a switch on the bottom that changes the signal from windows to Mac to Linux mode and so on), And it just werks.
Personally, I use an original Super NES controller + a Timville triple controller adapter[1], but a more modern controller that I like is the 8bitdo SN30 Pro+. I primarily play on a PVM via a MiSTer, so your use case may be quite different.
[0] https://rpubs.com/misteraddons/inputlatency [1] https://www.tindie.com/products/timville/triple-controller-c...
They're rugged, reliable, pair easily via bluetooth without any custom software required (just hold the PS button and menu button together), and have excellent button feel. I grew up on the super Nintendo so I'm picky at times.
Battery life is excellent, reported over Bluetooth (so linux and macos can see it), and the controller central pad acts as a mouse which makes navigating menus great without needing to put the controller down. They go to sleep automatically if you close the lid on a laptop they're paired to, and you can change the LED colour and brightness on the controller.
I've had and used one for quite a while now, and in that time two of my friends have purchased one to replace various alternatives (8bitdo, & another one I can't remember) for either reliability, pairing issues, or both.
To top off this review: I've never owned a PlayStation!
> I even got a Chinese company, notorious for selling "clone" of OSHW projects, to support the SW development as well via GitHub sponsor.
I suppose that's RetroScaler?
I guess software is a bit more tangible than a blog post even if both have value.
great that you got this result, btw
I'd love to be able to find more than 10% consistently on something like USDC
The Bitcoin Standard explains the philosophical underpinnings of why this isn’t a big Ponzi and there is real material value to stateless money:
The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking https://a.co/d/bC6XZqm
I have an engineering background so breaking into the marketing and sales domain has been quite a journey. It's been a roller coaster of ups and downs, but I remain hopeful.
One of the things I've enjoyed most about building your own thing is just talking to other founders and learning about their experiences. While the dataset has not been large enough to make quantity compensate for quality, I've still learned quite a bit.
It's been fascinating to read about everyone's side projects, and I'm curious to know if any other founders here have faced challenges with fundraising bookkeeping or cap table in general. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
I've developed the iOS/iPadOS app, Proxyman for iOS [0], which gains steadily ~2k recurring revenue every month. Basically, it's an iOS app that helps you to capture and decrypt HTTP/HTTPS traffic on your phone. The app is needed if you need to inspect traffic from your app.
Because it's an iOS app, published on AppStore, you can provide a subscription pricing model: e.g. $4.99/month, $39.99/year, or lifetime $99.
I also develop the macOS version, but it's a huge market, which is out of context.
- [0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/proxyman/id1551292695
Don't forget to activate the Premium for iOS with your Mac License Key. No need to purchase the Subscription.
I'm happy to support you.
Really curious, how does the revenue from macOS and iOS compare?
Even if its with a small team thats impressive, the UI is polished and full of features.
[0] https://theapplaunchpad.com/
If you don't want to do it as manually there are paid tools that will help. Google "app store screenshot maker" for options.
About $10k/mo gross revenue and takes a few hours of work a week (unless there’s a downtime event that needs fixing). A lot of upfront work to build some of these systems though.
Got to $2k/mo in the first month of doing this. I don’t recommend working (as a solo operator) with clients who have budgets less than $5-10k/mo. Too much overhead for too little return in that case.
In what little spare time I have left after my day job and looking after two small kids, I put more automation in place to improve reliability for my clients and reduce my own ops time requirement.
I get leads for this by referral from people I’ve done good work for in the past. But it’s the kind of thing you could bootstrap by direct outbound sales, publishing authority-building content to the right business audience, going to conferences/trade shows, or building a referral network from other service provides.
For ongoing things I do fixed rate or usage based pricing.
For custom one-off stuff, consultancy, and build-out of systems I charge a day rate.
1. Dedicated operational IT admin: Dealing with repetitive tasks+requests, like managing customer’s Microsoft environment and on-site infrastructure.. Owning physical and AD infra doesn’t sound like a part-time job.
For e.g; a/v and physical IT asks; like conference room operation maintenance and support, Desktop workstation triage (have you tried turning the monitor on?). The dreaded “can you set up the printer?”…
And what if the customer sets me up as their site’s dedicated AD domain admin? Resulting in repetitive requests for user/access management CRUD operations. And/or micromanagement of tedious things like email and mailing lists…
Or
2. Dedicated software developer, website or business workflows.
Building a website and getting micromanaged or overburdened. (“can you change the logo to blue?” “Can you redesign the whole home page?”)
Or, get pulled deep into providing a business-critical software workflow or application. Fielding sales/exec requests, interpreting their business requirements, and then building AND delivering (for e.g a customer management system) is not a part time job…
How do you operate to keep the scope limited? What steps help buffer yourself from a slippery slope of full-time services?
I have a small side gig building "controllers." By controllers I mean devices that are typically arduino controlled and use peripherals in the arduino ecosystem. They span a very wide range, but are typically very feature-limited. e.g., I have a client who is converting massage chairs to be pay-per-use.
As you noted, it's not easy to keep a service-based business from growing to take over all your time. I manage it by keeping the feature set clearly specified and working on fixed price.
Want to add a feature we didn't discuss? That's another charge. My niche is taking on very small projects that are too small to move the needle for a full-blown engineering services company (I've worked for two) and I always work fixed-price, so I need to be very aggressive about scope creep.
Project scope keeps growing? Either tell the client that it will be a while until I have time to complete it, or, more frequently, that they will need to find someone else. This is pretty easy to say because as mentioned above I'm clear about only taking on small projects.
I've had people who basically want me to be their engineering department. That's a hard "no:" I simply don't have the time.
Used to do this as an agency principal and it involved a lot of time spent managing clients and projects and subcontractors. Drove myself crazy and took a couple years off after nearly burning out.
I look for projects where the software solves a single targeted business problem and can quickly get to “done”. Then the client is happy to pay for ongoing maintenance/ops, so any additional effort I put into the software is around reducing my ongoing workload.
Follow on work came from other people at that first client company who knew my work and went on to work at other companies.
I am building a Zillow for Europe [1]. The real estate market in Europe is a big mess and for the past 10 years not much has happend so far in proptech because it was easy to rent/sell properties. Now things are changing and I see a lot more supply coming on the platform. So far rented out 40 apartments doing around 3k in profit a month. We focus primarily on overseas/expats right now
Another project I started with a good friend from Google is Webtastic AI [2] it's a lead gen platform that indexes large amounts of data and I am using simple ML models to clean it up and make sense out of it. It does around 1.9k a month now but we just launched 2 weeks ago so that looks promising. Thanks to google cloud we got 100k credits which makes it a bit more feasible because the startup costs are extremely high.
[1] https://homestra.com/ [2] https://webtastic.ai/
It's hidden on mobile because I didn't have the time yet to optimise it!
after applying a filter i get a 404 (only fitler was bedroom size): https://homestra.com/houses-for-sale/?amount-of-bedrooms=2
On the note of filtering, why do you not have upper bounds on bedrooms/bathrooms? it seems like filtering for a 2 bedroom isn't possible because "2+" would give me a ton i am not interested in
Ill add the elevator filter, thanks for your input!
For apartments:
* Searching by floor (or below or above floor)
* Searching by presence/absence of elevator
For all property types:
* Searching by rented / unrented status (evicting tenants for your own use is hard)
* Searching by build phase, if you're interested in new-build properties
* Searching by build year (some people prefer Altbaus, some consider them the work of the devil)
* Searching by heating type (underfloor vs radiator)
* Searching by rooms, not bedrooms. In Germany, a 1-room flat is a Studio Apartment and doesn't have a bedroom.
* Display of and searching by fees when buying (typically this is searching for "no estate agent fee")
* Display of and searching by Warm & Cold rent when renting
* Ability to search by state & city (at a bare minimum, and note that state affects how much property tax has to be paid when purchasing)
I think most countries are going to have a lot of little quirks like this, and it's going to be a hard sell to get people to switch over until you've got a lot of these in place for each country. I know that I've used international sites like this in the past and ultimately abandoned them because they either made it too difficult to find what I wanted, or there just weren't enough properties on there.
Thanks for your feedback, really appreciated!
As a European, I (at least) don't understand what this means - and therefore don't understand your offering, your USP?
What does/will Homestra offer, and how will it be different from e.g. Immobilienscout?
Google maps was crazy expensive I went with Mapbox[1] for now which seems to have enough features and is less expensive.
[1] https://mapbox.com/
[1] https://cleavr.io