My 10 Year Side Project Story

[xupybd]

"another said it should have taken an hour not a weekend to create."

I hate comments like that. Maybe someone could make it in less time but I suspect the commenter hadn't even tried. Why throw your estimate out there as better than someone's real effort? That level of arrogance is frustrating.

[debarshri]

I used to be of mindset where I used to think why did people take months or years for something which I thought would have considerably less time. Until I started building my own product. Building something with insights, care, robustness and building something right is function of time and money. Therefore as an indie dev, take your time to build it. Rushing a solution and doing a half ass job often backfires when you reveal it to the world.

[marcos100]

In brazilian portuguese we have an expression called "engenheiro de obra pronta" (something like "engineer of a completed construction").

It means that's easy to talk about a finished work, it's faults, how it could've been done better and, if one were to replicate it, he would take a lot of less time.

Of course he would, someone else took the trouble to plan everything and fix the all the problems to reach a reasonable architecture/design. And obviously, that person will never do it because "it's trivial".

[marginalia_nu]

I think it's easy to overlook all the little things.

Sure, you could probably whip something up in an hour that did a large part of of what it needed to do, but it would be kinda crappy and half-assed.

You almost always do 80% of the work in the first 20% of the time, the rest is a lot slower, but every bit as important.

People absolutely can tell when they are using something that has thought and effort put into it, and you can't fake that.

[mbrodersen]

I think it usually is a combination of lack of experience and a deep desire to impress others. In other words: they are immature and lack self confidence.

[thrashh]

I think it’s because some people grew up having to make time estimates and deciding whether to do something based on the estimate.

If they were in the same boat, they might have not done it if they expected it to take a weekend.

[is_true]

I guess it could be either: Different constraints or ignorance.

[jonathanberger]

I made this post but credit to kw_dev who inspired this with his https://kwcodes.com/how-i-failed-5-side-projects-in-6-years-... HN post from a few days ago.

[hbn]

I made a very small and simple scraper utility for a photo sharing website (it's one of those sites that doesn't let you download through the app or easily on the website, similar to Instagram). Grab the link, throw it in a box on my site, and it gives you the full-res image you can right click -> download.

It's doing pretty decent in traffic, ranking around number 4 in a fairly generic search for this utility, and gets about 1200-1400 invocations of the download functionality per day. I'd like to monetize it but I'm not really sure what I can do. I put some ads up from a small ad network that's slowly been building up a couple cents per day maybe (and Adsense isn't really interesting in my type of site -- I tried), but I'm not even really sure how valuable my traffic is anyway.

If someone has suggestions for a better way to monetize, I'd be willing to hear you out!

[forgotmypw17]

Donation button in a visible but non-intrusive spot.

Share a little bit about yourself to humanize.

It will probably make you more than the ads.

[jonathanberger]

I had trouble getting AdSense "interested" also. Depending on what Adsense is telling you I'd have varying suggestions if ads were still the way you wanted to go.

The best ways I know to monetize something for consumers: ads, app stores, donation buttons.

I tried an iPhone app to monetize the time zone converter but in my case the ad performed better. I tried a donation button for a few weeks and it brought in more than I expected.

[dolphenstein]

Can relate. I built a little web utility back in 2009. Did practically nothing with it (occasional updates every 2/3 years) and it slowly accumulated inbound links and google ranking. Then finally in 2019 I decided to put a bit more effort into it. Now I make my living from it! :-)

[hihihihi1234]

What is your web utility, if I may ask?

[rajasimon]

> You mention making living from it. Can you tel me your MRR?

[is_true]

Hi Jonathan. Love the simplicity. In the spanish translation I would change "Realimentacion" to "Comentarios" or "Enviar comentario".

[jonathanberger]

Thanks, fixed.

[hu3]

Thanks for sharing! Inspiring little project that made the world a better place and earned you some ROI.

[jonathanberger]

I appreciate the comment and "world a better place" is exactly how I like to think about it.

[travisgriggs]

> The site now has more than a million visitors a month and earns a nice side income from a small ad.

So when it says that, what does that mean? It pays for hosting costs I assume. Are we talking enough to pay for a couple of meals out a month? Or enough to retire on?

[dillondoyle]

CPMs can range, but if it's high quality and or niche they could be fairly high for something like a 'sponsored' ad on a super target forum/email list.

Still not a lot of impressions though. it would be 1,000,000 / 1000 = 1000 * __ x.

Where X I might guess anywhere from $.5 cpm to maybe even $10 if it's super unique and high quality niche. banners are cheap for a reason.

Though someone like Axios where they do a more 'sponsored' big higher quality ad probably gets more. I think some jobs or industry email lists able to get sponsors to pay big. Video gets more.

It's all about niche & quality. I'd rather spend more on a higher quality ad than touch any open market banner crap.

[jonathanberger]

It means I didn't want to get too specific about the amount involved. But I can see there's lots of interest in this question.

I wonder actually if something like https://www.levels.fyi could be built or exists but for ad-supported websites (side project idea?). It'd be really useful for people to understand more broadly "if you create site of type x and it gets y amount of traffic you can expect this level of ad revenue".

One reason the amount involved in my case would only be so useful is that sites can wildly vary (by as much as 100x I'm told) in how much $ per visit is generated (the industry term is "RPM").

[pipeline_peak]

> Besides, that’s what your day job is for.

Someone had to say it.

[pkdpic]

Just wanted to say this was super inspiring, practical, unpretentious and to the point. My favorite HN read in a long time.

[jonathanberger]

Thanks so much.

[kristaps320]

thanks for sharing! the story is very inspiring and i like your product especially the domain name you chose, could you share more about how you used google trends to decide the domain name to take?

[jonathanberger]

My original domain was www.thetimezoneconverter.com. I can't remember what my original search was 10 years ago but I tried out a number of queries on Google Trends to see which variation of "time zone", "time zone calculator", "timezone converter", etc. (different spaces and such) were most popular. Then I named the site that and got that domain.

Many years later (and just a few months ago) I switched over to a new domain "Dateful" as I had accumulated a number of different features for the site that went beyond just timezone conversion. "Dateful" isn't based at all off Google Trends, I just like the name.

[johnx123-up]

    The site now has more than a million visitors a month and earns a nice side income from a small ad.

SCR, interested in the actual number if possible

[sloreti]

As someone with a couple side projects kicking around, enjoy posts like this. Would you be willing to share what kind of ad revenue a tool like this can generate with 1M views per month?

[jonathanberger]

I'm hesitant to share publicly but if you send me a message I always love to discuss side projects. :)

[sneilan1]

Check out https://www.google.com/adsense/start/#calculator The numbers on this seem inflated though. From what I've googled/read, I've seen numbers as low as $1k/month per 1 million pageviews. Unsure if number of unique visitors effects that number however.

[rgbrgb]

very cool, thx for sharing and for making a useful thing on the internet! I know it's gauche, but I'd love to get a rough feel of how much you're making from that ad. You think you'd ever go full-time on this type of side project?

[jonathanberger]

Thanks! My dream actually is to do it full-time but there's only so much I can reduce my personal burn rate by. I also sent you a direct message.

[slickbackiq]

very easy to use!

[jonathanberger]

Thank you.