Previously asked on:
2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482433
2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152
2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
They've been selling consistently to others annoyed by the problem or who want to ground their MacBook for other reasons.
I ended up building one [1] to use myself, shared with a few people and they loved it. I asked if they’d pay for it and to my surprise, a lot of people said yes. I’ve put up a website and a “pre-order” button with a regressive monthly discount. Sales were going up month after month, and a few months later I decided to quit my job to go all in on it.
Today, I’m averaging on ~€5k/mo from this app, but I’m still doing some part time freelancing, as well as building other products that are not as successful, but are making >€1000/mo
The latest one is open source, privacy friendly analytics for apps [2] that I’m still very actively working on. This is my current “side project” as the previous side project became my main job :)
There’s also an open source upvote site [3] that I started 6 years ago, but haven’t had much time to work on it lately, still generating $$ monthly
[1] https://aptakube.com [2] https://aptabase.com [3] https://fider.io
In short, I wrote about React from my own perspective for a year (despite thousands out there doing the same thing), made money, and got inspired to do the same thing with an uptime monitoring tool (200th alternative to pingdom when I released it).
I turned a tool I used for convincing contracting clients to not cheap out on hosting into a proper product, 2 hours a day at a time, and kept adding features since.
Here's how I got my first 10 customers: https://onlineornot.com/how-to-get-your-first-ten-customers
type IBackend interface {
Ls(path string) ([]os.FileInfo, error)
Cat(path string) (io.ReadCloser, error)
Mkdir(path string) error
Rm(path string) error
Mv(from string, to string) error
Save(path string, file io.Reader) error
Touch(path string) error
}
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
I’ve been involved in the Jamstack, static site generator, template ecosystem for many years. Built At Lightspeed is a template marketplace focused on ssgs and “modern frameworks”
Sales have been entirely from Affiliate sales, mostly via the Lemon Squeezy affiliate program. Its doing about $400usd/month. I recently launched sponsors and the initial interest has been good.
Tailwind and Nextjs are the most popular categories and best sellers. Tailwind (like Bootstrap before it) has a vibrant commercial template ecosystem. I’m seeing a huge uptick in interest in “full stack” boilerplates that have hefty price tags of $100-$400 and I plan to focus on this area more. No code templates for Framer have also exploded.
The site itself relies on Algolia to drive the faceted search results and filters and overall I’ve been happy with it. It’s a bit expensive and the older release of its react hooks library had a lot of edge cases with nextjs, but it’s been improving.
This year I will continue to refine and curate the results, focusing more on content quality and classification the extending the inventory. I recently bumped it from 4000 results to 20000 as an experiment, and this was just by easing back some of the quality filters.
I'm extremely biased (see below) so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I think browser extensions are a pretty neat way to break into indie hacking. They cost nothing to run because they're hosted by extension stores. They're often faster and easier to build than whole apps because you can just use them to fix or modify existing websites rather than create your own from scratch. They can get organic traffic from extension stores, especially if they're well-named.
The main piece that was a pain in the ass for me was adding payments, so I made a service to do it (https://extensionpay.com), and now I can just focus on making the extensions work well. Because of all my previous work I was able to build and submit my last extension (making over $500/month now) to the chrome store in four hours — no joke! It was a really cool moment. Plus, running an extension monetization API I'm able to see all the extension that make real money and learn from what works for them.
Marketing is challenging, and have only really had some minor success using ppc. Also, I have a fairly high churn rate (like 30%). From talking with users, it's mostly from individuals or small business owners that convert their statements from the year and then are done. Book keepers and CPAs tend to keep their subscriptions, which makes sense.
Tech stack: Java, Javalin, Jooq, PdfBox, JavaScript, React, Tailwind
Hosted on DO
Made 240 USD in December. About 9k visitors and 27k page views tracked through plausible. Spent maybe 5 hours working on the codebase in 2023, which makes a solid ((240 * 12) / 10) = 288 USD / hour.
All of the money are from the watermark removal sales (10 USD). A lot of people say I could be making much more with some subscription model, but so far I'm resisting. (And the codebase is a mess :D )
It's evolved from then and now has 40+ real-world projects you can build to level up as a software engineer.
You can find the coding challenges here: https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/intro
After many requests I built a few paid courses, which I'm slowly adding to around the day job.
Best month I've done so far is about 2k, at about 30 USD per commission.
I think to make it more worthwhile people posting here please write a little about your tech stack, why you made it, what are your struggles, and tips for other founders, etc.
I’ve posted this previously, but it’s been more than a year since I published the course and it’s still right about $500/mon.
When I was starting all this, I had higher hopes, but it’s been difficult competing with instructors who already have tens of thousands of students and thousands of reviews - they appear on the first page when you search for a particular subject and “no one” goes past the first page.
No frills, 6.5 hours of digestible videos, 30+ functions/formulas, enough theory to help you learn on your own. Writing complex formulas in Excel was my gateway to proper software development. It's a useful skill even now as a developer, working with data in CSVs, making small tools for quick automation, things like that. (Just don't make a CRM in Excel, lol.)
btw I had to make a new account for some reason so this is technically my first post but i've been using HN for a while now.
Manabi Reader, iOS/macOS app for learning Japanese by reading. Tracks the words you read on the web and shows you what % of an article you're already familiar with (vocab or kanji). Tracks your JLPT level progress. Has Anki integration or its own companion flashcards app.
I have coded it to be as flexible as possible, so it works for all breeds and all disciplines.
I have collaborations with Racing Associations within Australia to provide the software to new owners of retired racehorses.
I am trying to expand to the USA via Texas and to the UK this year.
I initially started by offering the service for free, but it eventually became too expensive to handle by myself. I then decided to switch to a paid and free tier and by that point I had amassed enough of a user base that a decent handful signed up to the paid tier. I optimized for user growth > revenue in the beginning because I kept thinking, "if people are not going to use this for free then they surely are not going to pay for it".
Anyhow, it's called Proseable and it also supports English, Italian, German, and Spanish!
The project is Laminar, a UI library for Scala.js https://laminar.dev Yes, you can run Scala on the frontend. The language is nice, the implementation is rock solid, the community is relatively small, yet lively. On Scala.js, Laminar is more popular than even React.js, and is used in SaaS apps, financial services, hospitals, etc.
I opened Github sponsorships three years ago, but overall since the library's inception it took me 7 years of continued work to get to this point.
Just about at $500 per month in recurring hosting fees.
It's a CMS which publishes static sites to Cloudflare workers sites.
I've not done any marketing, it's all word of mouth and took 3 years to get to this point.
Gonna keep growing it slowly on the side.
It's fully automated, all traffic is organic. Sales are quite consistent, normally peaking during holiday periods.
A business partner is the one that sells it, but now I am looking to do direct sales:
(The site is in Spanish, and the app is already localized in English but not yet an international customer):
Now I am turning it into a more fully-featured app with integrated eCommerce (still incomplete!) and an offline native iOS/Android app for order taking.
My other side project (https://webtastic.ai) has become my main work now since it has grown quickly since the last time I posted on HN
https://www.samurai-sudoku.com
https://www.fiendishsudoku.com
I'm still nowhere near wanting to quit my "day job" for it.
Shameless plug: https://arbitrand.com/
Both available on my Play Store account called Digital Minimalism: https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=719880784008107493...
Online casinos in the US will give you daily bonuses of $0.50-$1 just for logging in, and I built a Chrome extension that automatically collects the bonuses for users every day for a bunch of different casinos.
I charge $20/mo and users make roughly $200/mo in bonuses (trying to adhere to the software must provide 10x value philosophy).
It's solid and scales well. I've sold 700+ copies and most customers are happy with it.
Is this something anyone else thinks about?
Kudos to everyone who makes money from side projects!
stories from two artists.
We also cover a few more misc cases like detection of potential GDPR/CCPA personal data leaks.