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Ask HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell?

323 points| gillis | 12 years ago

A thread similar to this was posted ~1 year ago by illdave. I think it's time for an updated 2014 version.

If you have any side projects that you've built and that you no longer have time for, list them here and let's see if others want to buy it from you.

502 comments

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[+] shazow|12 years ago|reply
I have a bunch of projects I built up which I consider "done" as far as I'm concerned, but at the same time they're basically free to run (AppEngine in the free tier) so I'm always reluctant to sell... I do wish there were people who wanted to take one of these and build them out to the "next level".

- http://www.tweepsect.com/ - Gets 300,000~600,000 pageviews per month (about 1/6 uniques), makes a couple hundred bucks from ads each month. Been around for almost 5 years.

- http://colorblendy.com/ - There's also a Chrome app (20k weekly users), website gets about 4,000~8,000 visits/month. I had some ideas for making a "Pro" edition with things like importing/exporting colors from/to CSS stylesheets. Probably need to do some more market research before diving into this.

- http://wedomainsearch.com/ - Few hundred visits per month, brand new (built several months ago). Fairly cool idea that is really valuable for founders/hobbyists, I use it all the time. Needs some love for promotion and monetization, though.

I love working on these little stand-alone projects (a few more here: http://shazow.net/, also my email address if you want to reach out), sometimes I wish I could just whip them out and sell them as a living but the code alone is never as valuable without putting in effort into growing the audience.

[+] catshirt|12 years ago|reply
http://brainy.io is a project i made that creates a complete API for you by inferring information from your Backbone code. it is a rapid prototyping tool.

the simple idea is that you create your front-end application without an API (using standard Backbone best practices). when you start your application, Brainy can inspect your routes and models and create an API for you.

future potential includes something like websocket support (syncing data), and out-of-the-box server side rendering. i have both of these working but not complete.

i'm not exactly looking to sell the project, but i'd love to appoint a new owner to the application. it has a lot of potential i just simply can't prioritize it right now. my email is in my profile if anyone wants to talk about it.

edit: i'm giving away something i put a lot of time in for free and i'm getting downvoted. why am i not totally surprised.

[+] tobinharris|12 years ago|reply
http://yuml.me

UML diagrams via a URL. 1,000,000 page views per year. We sell 2-3 enterprise licenses per year. Customers include Microsoft, Intel, Bose, Lockheed Martin and Yahoo.

Struggling to find the time & energy to turn this hobby into a stronger business.

[+] bowmanb|12 years ago|reply
Not interested in buying, just wanted to show you a little love. I've used yuml.me and it's great.
[+] NicoJuicy|12 years ago|reply
Used this also, you've got my love!
[+] BHSPitMonkey|12 years ago|reply
Do Microsoft and Yahoo know you're for sale?
[+] ejb99|12 years ago|reply
Have you set a price? Not sure how to monetize it but I like your traffic stats.
[+] ValG|12 years ago|reply
Chain Reaction iOS/Android game: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chain-reaction-connect-dots/...

Makes ~$1500+ in revenue on a monthly basis. Pretty low maintenance, just add levels every other week to keep engagement (~2 hours a month of work). 2600+ reviews, average 4.5 stars.

Box It: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/box-it!-dodge-the-dots-free/...

Another game, jezzball clone. 200+ 4.5 stars. ~$300 per month revenue. Can be much bigger than it is.

Started Instamotor.com with my partners and we're selling b/c we'd rather take the money now and put it into Instamotor than wait every month to get incremental value.

email in profile.

[+] alecsmart1|12 years ago|reply
Can you give me some kind of numbers on how much you would be willing to sell this game for? Besides Obj C, is there anything else one needs to know to manage the game?
[+] grimtrigger|12 years ago|reply
How do you make money on Chain Reaction?
[+] AlexMuir|12 years ago|reply
The Big Eat http://www.thebigeat.com

Menu and takeaway listings (mainly in the UK). Makes around $6,000 per year of Adsense. It's been fairly untouched since I started it in 2006. Has good pagerank for a lot of takeaway names. Costs are a Digital Ocean Droplet @ $5 a month = $60 per year.

[+] DenisM|12 years ago|reply
Well, that's a lot of pent-up supply of side projects!

It seems like a natural buyer would be someone like a student who wants to kick the tires of the whole running a small business thing, but start with a better baseline than merely "from scratch", mitigating some market risks, as it were, and reusing existing code.

What I like about this is that rather than all the research and development going to waste, it's helping someone else. So if you want to start a new thing, you can try to buy the closest thing that's already there, and stand on the shoulders of the previous generation.

There's an idea for a market place lurking in there somewhere. not so much from "get the most cash for your side project", but from the "find a good use for your old work" angle. I have a couple of projects I want to offload myself, and I care more about them being put to good use than about finding the highest bidder or whatever.

[+] nhebb|12 years ago|reply
I think this is the flip side of "business guy seeks technical co-founder". I would love to see a site that partnered up developers with marketers. I can't be the only developer that realizes that they suck at marketing.
[+] aetherspawn|12 years ago|reply
But a student has no money.
[+] psobot|12 years ago|reply
http://the.wubmachine.com, an automatic music remixing web + mobile app that I built a couple years ago. Still gets anywhere from 20-40k uniques/month. Has native iOS and Android clients, as well as the web app. Ads + in-app purchases generate a couple hundred bucks each month with nearly-zero maintenance, but I'm not sure I have the free time to keep it running indefinitely.

- Costs under $50 per month to run

- Generates anywhere from $200-$1200 per month, depending on the season (it gets big each December for some reason)

- 20,000-40,000 uniques each month

- native iOS and Android apps have ~10,000 installs each

If anyone happens to be interested, shoot me an email at [email protected].

[+] tinkerdol|12 years ago|reply
Wow, this is awesome! How does it work? Or, if you don't want to give away your secrets, how could one get started with mixing and transforming music like this?
[+] waleedka|12 years ago|reply
Website Screenshots: http://www.bitpixels.com

Serves 40 million images a month. It can generate small thumbnails or large screenshots of full-length Web pages. It runs itself and I rarely touch it, but I don't have time to improve and monetize it.

[+] consta|12 years ago|reply
Wow .. that is something I have been looking for quite some time. In the meantime I decided to make a custom solution, but yours seem to work way smoother.

- Do you cache images? If so, how long are they cached? - Are there any restrictions, beside adding the attribution link, for commercial usage?

[+] TomGullen|12 years ago|reply
40m images a month as a free service? How much is that costing you to keep up?
[+] gotrythis|12 years ago|reply
If you don't sell it, please open source this. :-)
[+] chaseideas|12 years ago|reply
Please email me traffic details and more info. Would be very interested in taking over, or working with you, on this project to grow it to that next level.
[+] ejb99|12 years ago|reply
Do you make anything form it now? What are you hoping to get for it? - and what stack are you using?
[+] Fogest|12 years ago|reply
How do you make money from it right now?
[+] ghouse|12 years ago|reply
TuneFind -- http://www.tunefind.com/

Trailing Month, Google Analytics:

1.9 MM sessions, 1.2 MM users, 8.3 MM pageviews

Age - 9 years.

Database of ~60k song appearances in TV and movies.

Great SEO -- Google search for "<show_name> music"

[+] stevesw01|12 years ago|reply
I have experience with high traffic music sites. What price range would you be interested in?

Are all the songs user submitted or do you use content scrapers?

[+] tomatohs|12 years ago|reply
http://mote.io

Turn your phone into a remote control for the web. Works with:

- Youtube - Spotify Web - Hype Machine - Vimeo - Pandora - Rdio - SoundCloud - Grooveshark - Plex - TuneIn Radio - Google Play - Twitch.tv - Last.fm

--------------------

http://22pixels.com

Photoshop download resources. 15,000 visits / month.

--------------------

http://rooster.am

Wake up call alarms personalized with Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.

--------------------

Email me if interested: [email protected]

[+] cjstewart88|12 years ago|reply
I've always kicked around the idea of selling Tubalr, if anyone's interested shoot me an email([email protected] with an offer.

- URL: http://www.tubalr.com

- Age: 3 1/2 years

- Cost to run: $9

- Registered Users: 28,009

- It's been wrote about on sites like mashable, techcrunch, fast company, the next web, etc. .. it's been on the front page of hackernews and reddit. Google for "tubalr" to read around the web.

- Traffic has died down a lot because I haven't spent the time taking it to the next level... it needs to be mobile.

- 37,992 pageviews monthly

- Average time on site: 1 hr 5 minutes

Anyways, like I said, shoot me an email if your seriously interested. I'd love to make my time spent on the project pay off by helping me pay for student loans...

[+] Jake232|12 years ago|reply
I feel this could be easily monetized, if you don't get a sale you should look into it for sure. iTunes have an affiliate system, and they have an API endpoint for search. You could simply have some links to purchase the latest album of the currently playing artists / just played artists etc.
[+] a2xm|12 years ago|reply
I'm in a similar situation. I built a music site for a uni project, and have over 100,000 monthly page views but no real time to work on it.

Would love some funding, or for someone to take it over and help out with student loans.

Have you had any luck trying to sell it?

[+] viiralvx|12 years ago|reply
Cody, I'm still sorry I couldn't have maintained the Android app for you. :/ I loved working on it but just balancing that out with school kicked my ass.
[+] stevesw01|12 years ago|reply
I remember when it was first posted on Mashable. It was a great site, that I remember. I'm very suprised the traffic died down.
[+] pearjuice|12 years ago|reply
I saw this years ago having development updates on Forrst. Tubalr outlived its spawn-place.
[+] jw989|12 years ago|reply
*

webNES (http://webn.es) - A mobile NES emulator for the browser.

A finalist at the PennApps hackathon in 2014. It gained a lot of attention on social media (Youtube/Twitter/The Blogsphere) during the competition and has been gaining users ever since. Has nearly 300,000 uniques visitors and an average of 2,500-5000 page views daily. Also featured in many online news websites such as Lifehacker (http://lifehacker.com/webnes-plays-your-nintendo-games-in-a-...)

Contact me at [email protected] for more information

[+] fookyong|12 years ago|reply
http://pitchpigeon.com

Press release platform for startups. Been around for a year, makes about $1k per month, all organically with zero maintenance. Still tons of potential but I am just way too busy with my main startup now, in a different space.

Contact me at [email protected] if interested!

[+] ShaneCurran|12 years ago|reply
https://www.chemical.io/ - Lab management made easy

Chemical.io is a free cloud based lab management system that lets you catalogue chemicals using a smartphone and automatically re-order chemicals when running low.

It's an excellent domain and the software is very polished so it would be a great investment for prospective buyers.

I'm also open to offers on http://www.libramatic.com/. It's a cloud based library cataloging solution that lets you catalog books by scanning the ISBN using a smartphone's camera. It's currently in use in over 1,000 libraries and has a number of paying customers on monthly and yearly subscriptions.

Feel free to hit me up at [email protected]

[+] PhrosTT|12 years ago|reply
Would mind telling me how you're decoding barcodes from the images? This is a problem I'm currently working on using js/canvas. Did you use ZXing?
[+] rbres|12 years ago|reply
Sites By Hand https://sitesbyhand.com/

$150k rev last 12 months Full project management platform to manage clients & contractors (developers, designers, erc.) with auto-quoting proposals, signing and paying online, and tracking and monitoring the progress of your site as it's being built -> 80% done with the platform & built in Rails.

Was doing this while at Stanford, but school is overwhelming and I can't keep working on it. Really promising opportunity to build the first scalable custom web service company.

Rights to existing clients, brand, full code repository with $100k worth of development hours, portfolio, multiple domains, trademark, and tons of infrastructure to execute rapidly on projects.

[+] knodi123|12 years ago|reply
I was a developer/founder once. I partnered with another developer, and we made a tool that would track the ranking of your site in regards to certain search terms, to a.) figure out whether your SEO guy was worth the money, and b.) figure out which SEO tricks worked best.

We weren't really making any money ,so I sold out my half of the company to a business guy. My former dev partner then went on with the business guy to make it a half-million a year business with about 4 hours a week of maintenance work.

Of course, I truly believe it wouldn't have gone anywhere if we didn't bring in a business dev guy, and I can't see any reason in retrospect why I should have expected their business to do so well once I left, but...

Seller beware! :-)

[+] ronreiter|12 years ago|reply
http://www.learnpython.org + the rest of my tutorials

I generate quite a lot of revenue for them from ads (about 500,000 hits per month), but they have so much potential and I don't have time to invest.

[+] ghempton|12 years ago|reply
https://deckepic.com - Cards Against Humanity meets your social graph. With a few clicks, generate a custom tailored deck for you and your friends based on Facebook data. Download a completely free version or pay for a printed version of your deck.
[+] DanceInside|12 years ago|reply
This is awesome. I was actually thinking of making a custom deck for my friends, but it would have been too time-consuming. But now...

Maybe you could start charging a modest sum for downloading the complete PDF file? I know I would totally pay for that.

[+] ahrens|12 years ago|reply
That's awesome! I'm actually working with a kind of CAH version, could be interested in buying it. What do you want for it?
[+] davman|12 years ago|reply
This is cool, and I wanted to pay you money, but you only ship to the US :(