|
|
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.
|
|
 |
|
Nice! Was the booking system simple CRUD, or did you require credit cards for payment or reservation? Edit: Saw the URL from another comment. Great work, simple and does exactly what’s needed.
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
> I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranc You must get business card 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.
|
|
|
|
Awesome work! Would you mind sharing? I live in Mexico City and would love to try horse back riding.
|
|
|
|
Sure. We're in Vallarta if you ever make it out this way. :) https://ranchoelcharro.comObligatory disclosure: some semblance of ownership.
|
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
I sell cheap but high-quality Anki decks for language learning: https://deckmill.comCreated 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.
|
|
|
|
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. 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.
|
|
|
|
Oh my god, you made the Hapland games?
I spent hours of through high school playing them.
Wanted to say thanks for the great times!
|
|
|
|
Holy smokes! What a massive time sink it was :) Brilliant little gems, absolutely brilliant.
|
|
|
|
What's the programming language and environment to run it for the non-flash version?
|
|
|
|
|
https://www.escape-team.com - a printable escape game. It currently makes about $600 on iOS and $400 on Google Play, all through the $1.99 IAPs. I do not do any advertising for it, but as it is played in groups, it nicely advertises itself.
|
|
|
|
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 was expecting Rihanna or Gizeh, not Zizek ans the Berghain, and I love every bit of the surprise! Congratulations!
|
|
|
|
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?
|
|
|
|
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?
|
|
|
|
How much do you spend on likeness rights for the people or the similar thing for famous monuments?
|
|
|
|
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. The site in question: https://stadio.ai
|
|
|
|
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).
|
|
|
|
When previewing models and your email is no validated, the link comes up in glorious html on the screen: <a class="font-semibold hover:text-red-700" href="/verify-email">Click here to verify your email.</a>
|
|
|
|
https://sre.rs - DevOps course (Udemy) for smaller teams and individuals
|
|
|
|
I had 3 sources of side income last year. 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).
|
|
|
|
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://mailwip.com email forwarding with extra stuff like webhook, full inbox log, SMTP support, and "email to blog" 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 :).
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
|
OpenSay - Responsible anonymity in Slack, moderated by AI and team effort. https://OpenSay.co
|
|
|
|
Neat. What lib implemented that radar graph on the landing page?
|
|
|
|
Thanks! Heavily edited ChartJS Radar Chart
|
|
|
|
Very cool, I don't think most folks realize how much this would help reduce favoritism and nepotism in the workplace.
|
|
|
|
I made a simple app for tracking stock prices on your desktop: www.stockdesktopwidget.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.
|
|
