HN Explorer

Ask HN: What to do with side projects that don't make money?

6 points by shawnps ↗ HN
I have a couple of side projects that I and other people find useful, but that do not make me any money. They are:

1. nihongo.io - costs me about $15/month to run. It's a fast Japanese dictionary built in Go that I use every day. I know some other people use it a lot too. Its main advantage is that it is faster than other Japanese dictionaries.

2. Go Report Card (goreportcard.com) - costs me about $5/month to run. It gets a lot of attention on Twitter and people think it's cool. But it is a bit of a pain to maintain, and the small DO droplet I'm using often runs out of memory or has some other issue. For a couple of months I was getting Pingdom reports that it was down, and then manually restarting the server because I didn't have time to solve the root problem. Finally fixed a big issue yesterday only to find another one today. I think it could be useful to the Go community and people are already starting to use the badge on their READMEs even though we haven't publicized how to do that yet.

Google Analytics from last month:

1. nihongo.io: 805 sessions, 661 users

2. goreportcard.com: 965 sessions, 841 users

Should I even bother trying to monetize them? I've spent a lot of time on them and would love if I could just cover the costs of running them.

3 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 20.7 ms ] thread
adib
1. Nighongo.io Turn this into an offline app, should be a lot less in running costs. Otherwise use advertisements. Initially use Google Ads but try to arrange direct-placement advertisements from related businesses (e.g. Japanese language schools, travel agencies to Japan, etc).

2. Try to sell this to enterprises that uses Go and position it as a lint tool for their Go code base.

But if the above failed, move it to a free tier cloud platform (e.g. Heroku's free tier) and just use it as a portfolio to add in your résumé.

Jayd2014
Make an audit of your sites or hire someone to do it. Decide what went right and wrong with the whole project. Finally decide whether it have a future. You really need to be firm in your decisions and cut ties with projects that are taking time/ not making money or you don't have interest in them anymore. Go to flippa and sell if needed and concentrate on new projects.
itnAAnti
If you have aspirations of ever making a living from running an online business, what you would learn from trying to monetize these two would be worth more than the money. If you don't care about making money online and its just a hobby, then I think Jayd's suggestion of putting them on flippa is a good idea. You could cut ties, make some money, eliminate the monthly cost, and ensure they continue to be useful to people (to the extent that you can without doing it yourself, anyway).

With <1,000 users / month, I think advertising is unlikely to cover your hosting costs, and ads would impact the speed of Ninongo.

Trying to comercialize either would be a lot of work. Probably more than writing the original code bases, so only do that if you're really interested in learning how to make a business out of it - don't do it on a whim or you will almost certainly fail.

If none of the above sounds appealing to you, then add a "tip jar" and mention that maintaining the tool costs you money, if the visitor finds it useful to leave a small donation.