Ask HN: Side projects making less than $2k MRR, what's your project?

95 points by rozenmd ↗ HN
While a thread of 2k+ MRR is going, I thought it'd be cool to hear from folks who aren't quite at 2k yet.

99 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] thread
Eurotripr.com - a constant work in progress. The goal is as if NomadList and Indiehackers had a baby and that baby wanted to help others travel affordably around Europe.
This is pretty cool! How much manual work is involved keeping the data up to date?
I was also wondering about this. Or is there some automation in place...
MesoSim: https://portal.deltaray.io

Options Backtesting Service focusing on income and hedging trading strategies. Still under heavy development but have a handful of users who find it useful.

https://markwhen.com

Timelines in markdown (gantt, calendar, map, other views)

It's open source (https://github.com/mark-when/markwhen) and there are some paid options for storing markwhen documents in the cloud.

Straddling paid SAAS and open source is a bit tricky and I still haven't figured it out completely yet. I have some sponsors as well as some paid saas clients but it's not quite paying the bills yet... I like working on it though, hopefully I can find the right balance or a different revenue model that works better.

My other problem is not only am I not good at marketing, I don't like doing it. But I also know it's the other half of the equation.

If you write about what it is that you're doing and keep a blog, that has been a very effective way for me to "market" the work that I'm doing without it sound scummy af. (I don't like feeling like a greasy used car salesman, and writing about developing stuff feels much more natural to me.)
Despite clicking around quite a bit, I can't figure out what the paid options are, and their pricing. So, yeah, you gotta up those marketing skills.
https://www.forth.news

The vast majority of Americans get at least some of their news from social media, even though they don't trust it.

Forth is a news feed for news; not quite social media. Everything comes from vetted journalists who adhere to our editorial policy, so you can trust what you read. No spam, no misinfo, no hate speech.

Have a little over 60 journalists in all sorts of beats/locations, and growing.

Making an open source CMD epub reader in Rust. I don't want to share the code as I feel a bit self conscious about where it is ATM, but when its done I really hope it will be a solid reader for people using the terminal. Its non-profit because I just want to make a neat tool
https://gotem.live

A party game my friend and I built over peak COVID, still play with family & friends frequently. People stumble across it on the Apple TV App Store and occasionally purchase some content which is great!

The cynic in me always suspects these questions are fishing attempts to see what ideas can be cloned to steal some of the revenue.
Maybe I'm more cynical than you because I think lots of hn posts are fishing attempts :)
I assume they all are, but thankfully for the fisher(people), most hn users with products have large enough egos to not care about new competition, and thankfully for them most people fishing for ideas will probably have 10 new ones by next week and never implement any of them.. (I sure have done that a lot myself, haha).
My sense is the expected value is positive (new paying users > revenue stolen)
Well then, you're quite an optimist if it takes the cynic in you to suspect that.
It's even better when it gets into specifics.

"Wanted: a feasible business idea not quite lucrative enough for the proprietor to be able to afford to take legal action."

They might be, but there is so much data on profitable ideas out there it wont make any difference. For example on indiehackers, various businesses for sale sites, and reddit/HN threads.
On the bright side, people here will spend 3 years creating the latest microservice + ai orchestrated infrastructure before launching.

Also it could be the other way around, you need a solution for a problem you have. Say that you built something profitable and wait 'til someone "copies" your idea.

If that's the case it definitely works as creators look for every opportunity to mention their projects somewhere and what better place than this thread.
I asked the question out of curiosity + shared what I'm working on.

Copying an idea and writing code will get folks maybe 10% of what goes into building a sustainable business, so I'm not too worried myself.

https://golang.cafe $1,000/month from various ads (sponsorships, display ads, YouTube Adsense)

It’s in cruising mode never really invested any significant time on it apart from spare hours on weekend.

Entirely written in Go and open source

Why so many domains?
One for samurai puzzles and the others show different difficulty levels and different sets of puzzles. Extremesudoku.info shows the most difficult puzzles we have come up with. Easysudoku.org is the opposite. Sudokuhints.com and fiendishsudoku.com both show a range of difficulty but the puzzles are completely different. Sudokuhints.com was actually the first site and fiendishsudoku.com came up as a redesign. Sudokuprintables.org and sudukopuzzles.org are both designed to allow printing of 2, 4, or 6 puzzles per page and have different sets of puzzles.
Thanks! What I mean is why not one domain to host all of this? Must get expensive and more admin to have so many.
All those domains can still be pointed at the same deployment. The only extra cost is registrar and DNS, which is not much.

Usually the reason for this kind of setup is better SEO.

https://bulkbuffer.com

CSV upload to Buffer. Run it for many years, sent tens of millions of updates, only ever had a donation button that brings in enough to pay for the digital ocean box.

My side project is mainly just complaining about working for "the man" while not doing much about it. It's a crowded space, but it definitely makes less than $2k/mo!
Money isn't everything. It's good to pick something you can be passionate about.
He did. He is passionate about complaining :P
We should team up, this is my side project, although it's also drooling over new ai developments.
generative-compl.ai/ning
Are you interested in a co-founder?
Couple of mobile strategy games:

https://pollywog.games/

Card Crusade - a roguelike deckbuilder (similar to Slay the Spire)

Barnard's Star - multiplayer tactical strategy game (like XCOM or Into the Breach)

Both games are on iOS and Android. Makes just over $100 per month. It's a ton of work. Doing it wayyy more for the enjoyment/satisfaction of the project than the money.

The art on the games look great! Are these games made with unity?
Thanks, although I didn’t do any of the art :P and yes, both Unity!
https://chess.braimax.com

Puzzle rush integrated with spaced repetitions to improve tactically at chess. I hacked a solution for myself during covid to combine those two, and achieved very good results reaching 2000 on lichess (from around 1800), which was my goal then.

In a recent break between jobs I decided to create an integrated, easy to use solution, and I've got lots of ideas about how to improve it - if it gets traction :)

Personally, I've been working on OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com/) for over two years - it's a set of uptime monitoring tools, with a hosted status page.

There's an open source CLI (https://github.com/onlineornot/onlineornot), and a public API under active development.

Very nice! Took all of a minute to setup basic status checking for my personal web and mail servers. I'll definitely be recommending it to folks.
MonsterWriter: The most enjoyable desktop app for writing a thesis or paper
I got bunch of those projects:

To test social media preview: https://ogtester.com/

To add location to images: https://geotagseo.com/

To use dictation for learning (German): https://www.flashdictation.com/

To decide the meal: https://whatdinner.com/ (WIP)

To get distracted:

https://mathlegame.com/

https://learnle.net/

To use Stable diffusing in Notion:

https://slashdreamer.coom

To experiment with Stable diffusing https://articletoimage.ai/ (WIP)

I did to solve a problem I had.

You got a very nice collection.

Combined, do they bring more than 2K/month?

https://masala-joy.vercel.app/

I scraped ~100k recipes from across the internet, and made this site to focus on south asian recipes (~2k). I will soon add features to better sort and filter these recipes by various diets, ingredients, and regions in South Asia.

I just launched a few days ago, and no revenue yet.

Have fun going down the rabbit whole of parsing structured data from ingredient phrases. Had a fun few weeks with that!
Yeah it has not been trivial so far! Let me know if you have any tips you can share
I settled on a regex based approach with lots of data clean-up and normalisation up front. Example of my site [4]

Some other approaches I spent a lot of time on:

* Extracting Structured Data From Recipes Using Conditional Random Fields [1]

* Chef Watson [2]

* Ingredient Parser - Model Guide [3]

[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/0...

[2] https://blog.kitchenpc.com/2011/07/06/chef-watson/

[3] https://ingredient-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/ind...

[4] https://pretty-recip.es/recipe?recipe-url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww....

Maybe GPT-4 or some other LLM? Maybe too expensive but I would think they'd be able to accomplish the technical task.
My main side project is Pivotuner[0], a MIDI effect plugin for adaptive pure intonation

It enables some pretty cool things like fairly straightforward microtonal modulation! Right now I'm working on a paper to submit to a computer music conference about it. Happy to send the draft if anyone's interested (email on website in bio).

I released it last December. I've had a couple sales, not many, but still enough to cover the cost of Apple developer membership, so at least I'm sort of in the positive!

Should also mention that I've gotten feedback on it from some pretty major artists, including Grammy nominees and winners like Jacob Collier! which is very very exciting

Happy to answer any questions!

[0]: https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/projects/pivotuner/

https://waifu.amorai.ca

A desktop version of the “companion” apps floating around the space. Features emoting, expressions, eye contact, low latency voice synthesis, and a two way conversational model.

I run a website to create sociograms online: https://cliq.at

Its predecessor was basically hacked together for a company retreat while stranded at schiphol airport for a whole day.

It has quite some usage, but basically only covers its hosting costs.

This site https://startablog.com fluctuates - we have spurts of way more than 2k/month and some way less. I think it averages out to <2k/month though.
I run two projects, both with zero income.

The first one is Fluent[0], to learn vocabulary by placing words on a canvas. Third iteration over the last several years.

Second is blogging platform nofuss[1], where you do all the publishing through the email.

[0]: https://fluent.im/ [1]: https://nofuss.io/