Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

Obviously still nice to see what people have built who missed the last post!

It syncs with Google Calendar.

To be fair, I currently does > 500$/month in revenue not earnings.

If it doesn't count let me know and I will delete my comment.

EDIT: I am currently out of stock sadly. If you want to be notified when I am back in stock, you can leave your email here: https://forms.gle/tNcCcYrNBu5nWKgJ9

Asking as somebody who thought making some embedded / HW projects, but the initial cost seems to much to be paid by myself.

I’ve done a lot of research on CE/FCC and while it seems possible to do CE yourself (since you can self-certify) you are on the hook if you miss something, like certain required tests (and doing some tests can be very expensive).

But if this thing just emit in a wrong RF band, it could mean insane fine fine from the local-frequency-band-office. And this is a very likely scenario (not like what happens if it catches fire and kill somebody...).

Anyway, I heard you should aim (at least) to the US market, which needs FCC. (eg. 300+ million people with one language vs. 30+ language in Europe.)

E-paper is a perfect use case for a dynamic shelf calendar

https://lengrand.fr/complete-setup-epaper/

It's definitely something I am having in the backlog, but I cannot promise if and when it will be implemented.

What's the profit margin like?

E-ink displays are expensive. That price point seems not enough to generate decent income.

I was curious... from what I can find online the wholesale price of an e-ink display is not that much cheaper (if any) than buying an equivalently sized Kindle. What is the viability of a business model that involves rooting a Kindle, loading whatever calendar display software you need, and shipping it inside a pretty wooden frame?

Any idea what could be causing this? I am at a loss.

It doesn't expand on any of those points, that's all it says.

I’m curious about the enclosure, do you cut it out of wood yourself or are you using a supplier for it that cuts it/glues it for you?

a) the wood frame seems to be too large (probably there is a technical reason for this), but still. Not much too large though, just maybe 25%?

b) the wood (at least from the pictures) looks cheap (plywood?)

Multiplex is actually nice since it's cross laminated and thus retains its shape. I experimented with solid wood and it started arching after a few weeks.

I started with literally just a Lambda function that checks if static websites were still online, added an email alert if it's offline, wrapped authentication around it, integrated Stripe, and shipped it.

Eventually, I added Slack/Discord/SMS alerts, team invites, support for checking APIs for both uptime and correctness, support for checking JavaScript apps, and more.

My trick for launching into 200 competitors providing the "same" service and still getting customers?

- I work two hours a day, every weekday on OnlineOrNot, and no other side projects. I've had this streak going for about nine months now.

- I focus particularly on features that solve my customer's pain (and I ask my customers what that pain is)

- I'm ruthlessly iterative. If I can't get a feature done in two hours, I figure out how to cut scope down to a two hour block, and ship that. Then iterate on it.

I've been ferociously learning game dev and have allowed myself unlimited time to jump down rabbit holes. Now that I'm actually building a game I need to remind myself to just build it with what I know.

It's an interesting switch in mind set. Still learning obviously, only now I'm pulling together knowledge buried deep within rather than from tutorials.

I'll keep in mind scope and remember your inspiring diligence next time I'm tempted to peek in a rabbit hole.

How do you market it?

I run a modded Grand Theft Auto: V roleplaying server with around 1,500 members (around 300 really dedicated MAU.) If you're not familiar with GTA RP, it tries to emulate real life as closely as possible while still recognizing that GTA is an arcade game. Players live lives as if they were real people, buying cars and houses, holding jobs, opening businesses, receiving medical treatment, being arrested, etc.

I've spent around three years working on the gamemode and spend, on average, 30-60 hours per week on it. It's really a pure passion project. Players support the project through Patreon in exchange for priority queue access (when the server is full, players are held in a queue until a slot opens up for them), custom license plates on their vehicles, custom phone numbers, and other cosmetic perks.

Thank you for such a killer "side" project!

Roleplaying games are really great for exercising your social skills and creative expression though, that's for sure.

If you check out https://nopixel.hasroot.com/, they maintain a list of all Twitch streamers currently streaming nopixel.

nb: I have no affiliation with nopixel.

I found that most teaching platforms for voice actors out there are run by a bunch of celebrities who are pushing edutainment, not education.

So I wanted to make something specific for voice actors. I will try to branch it out to other creators later.

I've got so much more that I'm afraid to publish. Might have to reconsider.

i'd love to read more of your work so i say do it! if not, [email protected] and i promise not to share them ;)

I was the founding engineer and Head of Eng at Reforge the past 4+ years while I was building Closing Credits. I left in August 2021. So, it was a side project for nearly 5 years.

If I have 3 side projects and no full time job at this exact moment, where do I stand? I'll delete my post if I'm violating the side project rule.

Tech choices: I never reinvent the wheel. I just take working pieces from other work that I've done and glue it together. Anything custom, I'll read how others do it.

Lessons: I probably should've chosen a different market. If I had targeted companies and taught their employees professional education rather than poor amateur voice acting hobbyist, I'd probably be making $20M ARR. But I don't mind, this is still fun.

Read your blog, hopefully you aren't telling yourself that right before you fire yourself! In seriousness thanks for the insightful reply. I agree w/tech choices, I'm always thinking about reusability as I piece together my own projects.

It really can solve or at least, begin to solve, every problem in an individual's life.

Linkz.ai is hyperlink auto-previews that keep visitors on your website. It's heavily inspired by Wikipedia & Google Docs link preview popups with special extras. For example, when you click on a YouTube hyperlink, it does not take you to Youtube website, instead it opens lightbox with Youtube video on your website. All with just one line of code.

$500+/m in a first month

Demo page: https://linkz-ai.webflow.io

Technically rich link previews save visitors from the tab-overload.

I don't want to be served a fullscreen auto playing video in a pop-up window when I click on a YouTube link. I want to go to YouTube and view it there, where I can like, subscribe, comment, and so on. It breaks my expectations in a bad way, and I can see why people are growing increasingly frustrated with javascript on websites due to this.

Sorry for being so negative about this. It's a cool concept, but I also really hope that this never becomes the norm. And that the websites I use never implements it. And that's coming from a web developer, someone that's usually cheering on all advancements in the web.

I would _love_ a world where this kind of thing is closer to a first-class feature of the web -- thinking of Xanadu-style transclusions or even Google's abandoned(?) <portal> element. I would love deep-linking from Github->Jira->Github in the same tab, and this points the way towards that. But if there are a dozen implementations of it floating around, and users have no control or warning over when a link behaves this way, it's just another way to wrest control of the browsing experience away from them.

Please be mindful about how you advertise this, is what I'm saying.

Example here: https://blog-545pd1vjp-sambroner.vercel.app/

- Participating in the web dev communities

- "Powered by Linkz.ai" footer in the Link preview popups

- Campaigns on Product Hunt, Reddit & similar

- Soon: Affiliate, LTD, targeted ads for Webflow/Squarespace ecosystems

Makes around $5k/month now (down from $7k/mo previously), fully passive income as I haven't worked on any new features in the app for the past 1.5 years or so.

It does one thing, that people need, and does it well, for a fair price. I assume it requires minimal maintenance, except to keep up with Twitter's API (honestly I don't know if this requires much work, I guess it depends on how much the API fluctuates).

Twitter is a perfect example: removing "some" of your tweets is purposefully made cumbersome for users so that they get discouraged to manage their tweets. Searching through your tweets by date range or by keyword, and a button to delete all results? "Nah, too complicated for us silicon valleyers" :)

One thing to remember with GDPR is that it is not a law that protects customers. It is a legal framework that specifies a set of requirements, which companies must abide to in order to do whatever they need/want with your data. Once you understand this, GDPR becomes much clearer :)

It's a job board that caters to a very specific subset of electrical engineers - specifically, ones that work with FPGAs and logic design for chips.

Need help hiring FPGA or RTL engineers? Let's talk. [email protected]

Today, HR teams usually post jobs on LinkedIn and perhaps one or two more platforms. A world of fragmented job boards would be difficult to navigate for non-specialists.

I don't care about People and Recruitment teams. I care about People and Recruitment teams for a very, very specific subset of electrical engineers.

My thesis is that HR and Recruiting for the sorts of roles I care about isn't very effective to begin with. The lack of specificity in existing platforms is a contributing factor to the problem I'm trying to solve. Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and whatever other generic job boards are just that - generic job boards. They have no reason to care about this niche any more than the other thousands of job categories out there. LinkedIn is becoming Facebook for wackjobs in work influencer clothing. Even StackOverflow Jobs tends to equate this type of work to general software engineering, when it requires very specific, critical knowledge you typically don't get until you're pretty deep into an EE curriculum.

Add value to the Users - the job seekers - and you start to build trust and aggregate supply. The savvy recruiters follow that. Our clickthru metrics already reflect this.

A world of fragmented job boards would be difficult to navigate for non-specialists.

That the crux of my point. I don't care about non-specialists. I care about recruiters who need to find people to write Verilog or VHDL. If I can become one of their "one or two more platforms" besides LinkedIn, I've made it.

I see that name pop up on all sorts of queries and I'm shocked it's not in the db. Digging into that presently. Thanks for the suggestion.

https://cushychicken.github.io/grow-your-mailing-list-by-bei...

We're seeing a steady and growing trickle of organic traffic, too.

I initially built it to route PUBG players in Australia (myself included!) onto the fastest links to overseas servers as the Australian servers did not have enough players. It was strung together with OpenVPN and a Discord bot as I never expected more than around 20 people would use it... mostly figured it would be me and my squad mates. Within three months I had around 350 users by word of mouth paying $5 per month. Most of my users came from established competitors as my service was a lot simpler to use. The user numbers died down over the following year mostly due to competitors offering an aggressive referral system and I was focused on other projects.

Last year I decided to expand to other games and regions. I rebuilt it as a standalone Electron based Windows app using a kernel network driver that can route individual Windows apps through my WireGuard VPN servers. I built everything except the network driver which was done by a Windows networking specialist - https://ntkernel.com

I currently support PUBG, DOTA 2, iRacing, Apex Legends, Rocket League, Final Fantasy XIV, Super People in Australia/New Zealand and PUBG and Rocket League in North America.

The service is stable and relatively scalable so this year I'm hoping to focus on the marketing in between other projects. Part of that will probably include a name change as I figure it doesn't make a lot of sense to people outside Australia

The other thing the VPN does is allows people to choose which region they want to play on. For example, in PUBG, when you launch the game it pings all of the different available regions and selects the one with the lowest latency. This is not always ideal as there may not be any players on the closest servers and you end up playing against a bunch of bots.

https://asoftmurmur.com

There are a lot of improvements I want to make, but due to life commitments it has been stuck in maintenance mode for far longer than I'm comfortable with

I really liked your app. We had a construction project going on for the longest time and I would mix up your rain, storm, sea and the singing bowl sound everything together and blast it on my soundbox!!

Thank you.

Revenue breakdown is roughly equal between android, ios and web, somewhat surprisingly. Android converts worse but has higher user numbers. Web converts much worse, but converts at a higher price (justified by the fact that hosting/maintaining the web stuff take a lot more time and money)

Can you talk about how you advertise and got traction enough to get to $500/month?

Pure dumb luck. I made the site to scratch my own itch many years ago, and then it took off because there were few similar sites at the time (that let you mix together different sounds). Only promotion I did was mention the site on reddit a few times. Users were prepared to tolerate a lot of rough edges at first.

There has been zero advertising. The site gets a regular influx of new users because it's been featured on a number of discover-interesting-website portals (the modern versions of StumbleUpon). This happened with no input from me. I assume it's a good match for these kinds of portals because it's immediately usable without any kind of instruction, signup etc.

I only made the decision to monetize after a long period of the site getting lots and lots of organic traffic with no input from me.

When I started the site, I mainly used CC0 licensed sounds others had recorded.

Then I started recording my own sounds. How much work it is is very situational - if you regularly find yourself in an environment which has the sound you want to record, and not many other sounds around, then it's pretty trivial. For example, you want to record rain in the forest, and you regularly walk in a forest where it rains and there aren't many other noise sources (e.g. other people, planes overhead, singing birds, etc). The actual recording itself doesn't take much work, because I shoot for a level of sound quality that will satisfy 80%-90% of people, rather than a real "audiophile" quality level.

On the other hand, if you want to record something that only happens occasionally and with lots of other noise sources nearby, it can be a ton of work. For example, you want to record the sound of thunder, but you only get occasional storms, you live in a city with lots of other background noise, and it usually rains when it storms and you want rain on the recording. In that scenario, you might have to travel far and burn a ton of time trying to get the right conditions for recording.

→ https://www.namy.ai

It currently has a modest but pretty consistent 200-300 users daily, almost all of it direct traffic (my SEO skills are very lacking). I'm assuming people recommend it to their friends, and that's where the traffic is coming from.

It's not yet at $500/mo, but it's getting close. Server costs are significant though, since running an AI model is a bit expensive.

Ideas and feedback are welcome.

On the same line of thought, it would be awesome (but probably difficult/expensive) if you could show the price of each domain directly in the results.

Otherwise, it seems like a neat tool!

Good problem to have I suppose ^^

The monetization model is just referral links to Namecheap, where I get a 10% commission. I want to make that a bit more elegant (especially for people with uBlock Origin, which it doesn't track), and also add a few other referrals (logo makers and maybe hosting).

Couldn't think of other ways to monetize this without making it obnoxious (I hate ads, and making it pay-to-use also seems restrictive to me). If you have any ideas, I'd be open to hear them!