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.
Mexicos overall internet presence is literally stuck in the early 2000s.
Most business' official website are a Facebook page.
In a country of 150M people and growing expat presence, there is a TON of opportunities for software businesses to enter the market.
For example: Riviera Maya has no MLS style real estate tracker/listing platform. The entire real estate industry operates on word of mouth, WhatsApp and Facebook messages.
> I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranc
You must get business cards 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.
My wife runs a riding academy and she's been resistant to any kind of online or off-farm marketing, relying instead on word of mouth. She thinks we get a better quality of customer that way and we have little trouble keeping our herd busy.
Of course our business is centered around repeat riders, it would be a very different business to organize trail rides for strangers.
Our barn is much smaller than most (7 horses at the high water) but it has been consistently profitable. A barn with more horses and a large staff could bring in more revenue but costs will be higher too. There is a barn down the road that has nice facilities but has had several managers and has only been viable with the last one. We know another troubled barn with an alcoholic owner who has a large off-farm income that has struggled economically and has a legendarily bad safety culture. (I took 10 rides there before we were in full swing and had 3 'near miss' accidents)
Thanks for sharing this! i feel this is a cautionary tale for us HN-minded folks since i see a rather unusual love for the look and feel of the "old internet", and what i like to call the Craigslist style of design. As someone who remembers the internet of the 90s and early 2000s before it was taken over by ads and SEO spam,
i understand the nostalgia, but as a web developer, also know that i need to do right by my clients and build things for them that make their businesses successful. An old outdated website turns away many customers.
I did something very similar for Surfing schools. Not yet making any money off it, but I am trying to. Reaching out to other surfing schools, improving the product adding new features.
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.
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.
What is the tech stack for this? I really want to build small apps like this and have a diversified portfolio but don't know where to start. Are you still earning 3K/month from this and what kind of on-going marketing are you doing?
You might want to play around with the encoding on your videos. On a Windows machine with a i7-8770k (and dedicated GPU) with Firefox latest, the page was spiking up to 100% GPU usage, causing the browsing experience to slow to a crawl. It may be related due to me having a Twitch stream up on a second display.
Probably a Firefox bug, but it's preventing me from looking at this landing page that every one else seems to like :P
Wow this is interesting, you write "read like snapper" on the homepage. I made a screenshot tool for iOS which is actually called Snapper. I have been working on/maintaining it since 2014!
It began in 2016 out of some frustration I was having with consulting clients who would modify their DNS records incorrectly, breaking their email and/or website until I was able to get them back online. It was frustrating digging through emails or old technical documents to find the original values before they had made their changes. I wanted a tool that could automatically backup those records to make reverting easy while at the same time notifying me of any changes so issues could be proactively fixed before their business was impacted.
So with that, ZoneWatcher was born. Depending on your plan, we check multiple times per hour and take a snapshot of each zone's records. When a change happens, we record the change and send you a notification so you can review and have the necessary data to revert if it was in error.
Making close to $500/mo now since a major relaunch / feature update back in December with a decent stream of new users every month. No major marketing done yet other than just word of mouth and the occasional reddit post on /r/msp's vendor threads.
Shortly after stable diffusion was released, I realized that an enormous number of non-ML people were suddenly interested in using an ML model.
However, APIs are insanely expensive and not very developer friendly, and running it yourself required pretty fancy hardware. The goal was to make the technology absolutely as accessible as possible.
So I launched https://computerender.com with the simplest API possible - just a URL that points to an image like:
https://api.computerender.com/generate/cupcake-of-the-sky.jp...
I monitor the prices on vast.ai and runpod to find the cheapest GPUs and run the service nearly at cost (as little as $0.0001 per image). No subscriptions, only pay for what you use.
Recently hit 700k images generated, and am excited to continue expanding the service.
> Feels like one of those "feature of a bigger product" things. But I wonder if there'd be a market for a service where you can get ai generated images just via url. "thingy.com/?prompt=weird picture of a cat with frog ears" or whatever and it returns the image.
Rad to see it validated in the wild & a clever approach to optimising your costs.
Out of curiosity, how do you handle traffic surges? Do you just have to manually add more servers? Or did you write a script to auto purchases more servers on vast.ai since there isn't any autoscaling feature there (that I am aware of)
https://extensionpay.com — A really simple way for browser extension developers to take payments in their extensions. I made it to use in my own extensions since it's a pain in the butt to take payments in browser extensions.
It has an open source library that works across all browsers and allows for one-time or subscription payments. Since 2021 developers have made over $125k with ExtensionPay which makes me happy :)
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.
https://fider.io - an open source alternative to UserVoice. I started this one 6 years ago to learn Go and React. I’ve seen thousands of instances out there being self hosted, so I started a cloud hosting to those who don’t want to manage it themselves.
https://aptakube.com - Desktop Client for Kubernetes. This is very recent, launch was 2 weeks ago, so it’s only starting to get some traction now.
I’m leaving my job to go full time indie hacker now, wish me luck!
Honestly no game plan, I just enjoy working on both and plan on iterating for a long long time (10+ years) and just slowly growing. I am literally addicted to working on these apps.
I tweet about these projects extensively on Twitter btw if anyone is curious to see what work went into both of these (https://twitter.com/raroque)
I built https://team-today.com in a lock down as a way for my remote team to see when people are on holiday, going to site, or wfh.
Since then it’s grown to include other features like desk booking and PTO approvals. But at it’s all been built around the core concept of seeing when your colleagues are working and where they’re planning on working from.
Great job!
How did you convince users to trust an unknown site to store their personal data?
This is one the things holding me back from implementing my side project ideas. I personally know that I won’t misuse users data but how do I really convince users.
I built KTool (https://ktool.io) — it allows you to forward web articles, newsletters and RSS feeds to your Kindle.
---
I did a Show HN 4 months ago[1].
The reason I started KTool was to spend less time on computer screens, and more on e-ink Kindle. I was afraid of going blind.
After 4 months improving KTool, it now becomes a tool to help you combat doom-scrolling. Instead of mindlessly scrolling the web, I deliberately send interesting articles to my Kindle.
Created Video Hub App (that will be 5 years old next month). I sell it for $5 and $3.50 of each purchase goes to the cost-effective charity Against Malaria Foundation (See GiveWell.org for details).
It was averaging around 100 purchases per month, though it's lower over the last year as I've not had time to release new updates (moving to another state is challenging).
Thanks to the sale of this software I've donated an additional $16,000 to my favorite charity (I give 10% of my income there regularly - see Giving What We Can).
https://videohubapp.com/ - Think of it like YouTube for videos on your computer. Browse, search, and organize your videos
https://getblast.io/ - it is an end-to-end data platform: data ingestion + dbt-like transformations + data quality checks + data catalog, all through a single interface. It is making ~$4k/month currently.
Around the beginning of 2022, I was having a conversation with a few friends that are working at small mobile gaming companies, and they were having a lot of trouble building their data pipelines, especially because of the infrastructure part. I took on the challenge to start hosting some Airflow instances for them to get a bit more familiar with their problems, and over time some patterns started to emerge:
- they were writing custom scripts for mundane tasks.
- they had to write Python code, even though all they needed was scheduling a few SQL tasks.
- they needed some basic transformation abilities, but didn't have the budget to pay dbt-cloud $50/month (the minimum plan is $100 these days, I believe).
- they were losing track of where their data is going through and where it is coming from.
A friend of mine and I have started building some abstractions on top of Airflow to help these businesses: no need to write any Python, automatically deploying their changes to their instances after a git push, building data quality checks, materializing their assets based on their SQL "SELECT" queries, etc. Over time, we have gathered these features into a shared UI, and moved some of these companies piece by piece.
We keep improving the platform, and we are onboarding new companies for the past 2 months throughout our closed beta period. There are still many rough edges that we are trying to cover, but in the end, it was a great feeling when people were actually using the prouct quite often in spite of all these problems. We are pretty excited about where this can go.
If anyone is interested in taking part in the beta program, the first 6 months is free during the beta period. Feel free to fill out the form on the website and I'll reach out personally.
I don't do any active work on it any longer for the past 2 years or so, other than the small bug fixes/when Twitter changes the archive format. Bracing for a shutdown to the API soon anyway.
Back in college (2016-2020), I used to work part-time for my university’s IT department. Most of my time was spent doing software development, but when I wasn’t busy working on a project, I helped work the help desk ticket queue.
Believe it or not, our ticket queue did not have an auto refresh feature - and manually refreshing my dashboard webpage drove me crazy. As a die-hard macOS user, I’ve always used Safari as my primary browser, but unfortunately no auto-refresh web extensions were available on the App Store at the time. So I learned how to package web extensions for Safari and sell them on the App Store.
Fast-forward to today, and I now have a collection of Web Extensions that net me ~$750 a month. Feel free to check out Simple Refresh for Safari here:
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.
I sell cheap but high-quality Anki decks for language learning: https://deckmill.com
Created 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.
[+] [-] joshmn|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pxue|3 years ago|reply
Most business' official website are a Facebook page.
In a country of 150M people and growing expat presence, there is a TON of opportunities for software businesses to enter the market.
For example: Riviera Maya has no MLS style real estate tracker/listing platform. The entire real estate industry operates on word of mouth, WhatsApp and Facebook messages.
[+] [-] unity1001|3 years ago|reply
You must get business cards 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.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|3 years ago|reply
Of course our business is centered around repeat riders, it would be a very different business to organize trail rides for strangers.
Our barn is much smaller than most (7 horses at the high water) but it has been consistently profitable. A barn with more horses and a large staff could bring in more revenue but costs will be higher too. There is a barn down the road that has nice facilities but has had several managers and has only been viable with the last one. We know another troubled barn with an alcoholic owner who has a large off-farm income that has struggled economically and has a legendarily bad safety culture. (I took 10 rides there before we were in full swing and had 3 'near miss' accidents)
[+] [-] kilroy123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] culiao|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kinkrtyavimoodh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcardoso|3 years ago|reply
I did something very similar for Surfing schools. Not yet making any money off it, but I am trying to. Reaching out to other surfing schools, improving the product adding new features.
[+] [-] jorgesborges|3 years ago|reply
Edit: Saw the URL from another comment. Great work, simple and does exactly what’s needed.
[+] [-] phist_mcgee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rrmdp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rogual|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] trungdq88|3 years ago|reply
People like the app for its ability to turn a normal boring screenshot into a beautiful one that they can share on social media instantly.
[+] [-] dbancajas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicbou|3 years ago|reply
How to you keep those mini videos up to date?
[+] [-] adepressedthrow|3 years ago|reply
Probably a Firefox bug, but it's preventing me from looking at this landing page that every one else seems to like :P
[+] [-] wingerlang|3 years ago|reply
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/01/22/snapper-2-screensho... - video
[+] [-] rrishi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egorfine|3 years ago|reply
How did you market this app? How did you get the traction?
[+] [-] fnands|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rymawby|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerrygoyal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmaly|3 years ago|reply
How long did it take you to develop the app to where it is today?
[+] [-] booi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomschlick|3 years ago|reply
It began in 2016 out of some frustration I was having with consulting clients who would modify their DNS records incorrectly, breaking their email and/or website until I was able to get them back online. It was frustrating digging through emails or old technical documents to find the original values before they had made their changes. I wanted a tool that could automatically backup those records to make reverting easy while at the same time notifying me of any changes so issues could be proactively fixed before their business was impacted.
So with that, ZoneWatcher was born. Depending on your plan, we check multiple times per hour and take a snapshot of each zone's records. When a change happens, we record the change and send you a notification so you can review and have the necessary data to revert if it was in error.
Making close to $500/mo now since a major relaunch / feature update back in December with a decent stream of new users every month. No major marketing done yet other than just word of mouth and the occasional reddit post on /r/msp's vendor threads.
[+] [-] tehsauce|3 years ago|reply
However, APIs are insanely expensive and not very developer friendly, and running it yourself required pretty fancy hardware. The goal was to make the technology absolutely as accessible as possible.
So I launched https://computerender.com with the simplest API possible - just a URL that points to an image like: https://api.computerender.com/generate/cupcake-of-the-sky.jp... I monitor the prices on vast.ai and runpod to find the cheapest GPUs and run the service nearly at cost (as little as $0.0001 per image). No subscriptions, only pay for what you use.
Recently hit 700k images generated, and am excited to continue expanding the service.
[+] [-] n1c|3 years ago|reply
> Feels like one of those "feature of a bigger product" things. But I wonder if there'd be a market for a service where you can get ai generated images just via url. "thingy.com/?prompt=weird picture of a cat with frog ears" or whatever and it returns the image.
Rad to see it validated in the wild & a clever approach to optimising your costs.
[+] [-] Y_Y|3 years ago|reply
Is it supposed to work even without an API key?
[+] [-] Ephil012|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dopeboy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nimchimpsky|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Glench|3 years ago|reply
It has an open source library that works across all browsers and allows for one-time or subscription payments. Since 2021 developers have made over $125k with ExtensionPay which makes me happy :)
[+] [-] jurgenwerk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goenning|3 years ago|reply
https://fider.io - an open source alternative to UserVoice. I started this one 6 years ago to learn Go and React. I’ve seen thousands of instances out there being self hosted, so I started a cloud hosting to those who don’t want to manage it themselves.
https://aptakube.com - Desktop Client for Kubernetes. This is very recent, launch was 2 weeks ago, so it’s only starting to get some traction now.
I’m leaving my job to go full time indie hacker now, wish me luck!
[+] [-] mogulchris|3 years ago|reply
They are pretty different target market wise/price point and that has been pretty cool to see the differences in marketing/churn/adoption/etc...
1. Mogul - Privacy focused Personal CRM (https://mogulnetworking.com/) (~$650/mo, ~6 years old)
2. Ellie - A better day planner (https://ellieplanner.com/) (~$160/mo, ~1 year old)
Honestly no game plan, I just enjoy working on both and plan on iterating for a long long time (10+ years) and just slowly growing. I am literally addicted to working on these apps.
I tweet about these projects extensively on Twitter btw if anyone is curious to see what work went into both of these (https://twitter.com/raroque)
[+] [-] andyish|3 years ago|reply
Since then it’s grown to include other features like desk booking and PTO approvals. But at it’s all been built around the core concept of seeing when your colleagues are working and where they’re planning on working from.
[+] [-] robofanatic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrichman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jay-barronville|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] longnguyen|3 years ago|reply
---
I did a Show HN 4 months ago[1].
The reason I started KTool was to spend less time on computer screens, and more on e-ink Kindle. I was afraid of going blind.
After 4 months improving KTool, it now becomes a tool to help you combat doom-scrolling. Instead of mindlessly scrolling the web, I deliberately send interesting articles to my Kindle.
Recently, I added newsletter & RSS support, it's 100% automated now.
My favorite source of content is Hacker News RSS[2], Stratechery[3], Indie Hacker Newsletters[4] and a few other Substack newsletters.
I can enjoy reading HN latest stories or my fav authors' latest pieces on my Kindle without spending hours browsing on my computer.
I just reached $620 MRR today (Jan 23)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32637996
[2]: https://hnrss.github.io
[3]: https://stratechery.com
[4]: https://www.indiehackers.com/newsletter
[+] [-] yboris|3 years ago|reply
It was averaging around 100 purchases per month, though it's lower over the last year as I've not had time to release new updates (moving to another state is challenging).
Thanks to the sale of this software I've donated an additional $16,000 to my favorite charity (I give 10% of my income there regularly - see Giving What We Can).
https://videohubapp.com/ - Think of it like YouTube for videos on your computer. Browse, search, and organize your videos
MIT Open Source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
[+] [-] karakanb|3 years ago|reply
Around the beginning of 2022, I was having a conversation with a few friends that are working at small mobile gaming companies, and they were having a lot of trouble building their data pipelines, especially because of the infrastructure part. I took on the challenge to start hosting some Airflow instances for them to get a bit more familiar with their problems, and over time some patterns started to emerge:
- they were writing custom scripts for mundane tasks.
- they had to write Python code, even though all they needed was scheduling a few SQL tasks.
- they needed some basic transformation abilities, but didn't have the budget to pay dbt-cloud $50/month (the minimum plan is $100 these days, I believe).
- they were losing track of where their data is going through and where it is coming from.
A friend of mine and I have started building some abstractions on top of Airflow to help these businesses: no need to write any Python, automatically deploying their changes to their instances after a git push, building data quality checks, materializing their assets based on their SQL "SELECT" queries, etc. Over time, we have gathered these features into a shared UI, and moved some of these companies piece by piece.
We keep improving the platform, and we are onboarding new companies for the past 2 months throughout our closed beta period. There are still many rough edges that we are trying to cover, but in the end, it was a great feeling when people were actually using the prouct quite often in spite of all these problems. We are pretty excited about where this can go.
If anyone is interested in taking part in the beta program, the first 6 months is free during the beta period. Feel free to fill out the form on the website and I'll reach out personally.
[+] [-] Fermat963|3 years ago|reply
I don't do any active work on it any longer for the past 2 years or so, other than the small bug fixes/when Twitter changes the archive format. Bracing for a shutdown to the API soon anyway.
Past submissions on how it used to bring in $7k per month and a few technical details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439606 (June 2020), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29998723 (Jan 2022).
[+] [-] willswire|3 years ago|reply
Believe it or not, our ticket queue did not have an auto refresh feature - and manually refreshing my dashboard webpage drove me crazy. As a die-hard macOS user, I’ve always used Safari as my primary browser, but unfortunately no auto-refresh web extensions were available on the App Store at the time. So I learned how to package web extensions for Safari and sell them on the App Store.
Fast-forward to today, and I now have a collection of Web Extensions that net me ~$750 a month. Feel free to check out Simple Refresh for Safari here:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simple-refresh-for-safari/id14...
[+] [-] j_4|3 years ago|reply
https://j4nw.com/pawnbarian
I feel doubly blessed that it worked out with no ads or micropayment sinks of any sort, just a demo and a single $5 purchase.
[+] [-] sphuff|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] mjaques|3 years ago|reply
Created 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.
[+] [-] itake|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] hemmert|3 years ago|reply
I do not do any advertising for it, but as it is played in groups, it nicely advertises itself.
[+] [-] hemmert|3 years ago|reply
https://www.escape-team.com/create