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Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

563 points| MucuMare | 11 years ago | reply

As it's a new year 2015, let's re-open this topic to see how things are going on this front :)

It can be a SaaS app, a mobile app, or any side project that is netting you recurring revenue

525 comments

order
[+] gedrap|11 years ago|reply
There was a number of similar active threads over the years, some great ideas in them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7094402

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107588

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8246255

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4639271

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5903868

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358111

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387789

[+] yogs|11 years ago|reply
Thanks for sharing...!!
[+] jayleno|11 years ago|reply
commenting for reference later.

Thanks for gathering these

[+] shaaaaawn|11 years ago|reply
Thanks for tracking these down!
[+] leesalminen|11 years ago|reply
I spent all of 2014 building a SaaS for dog daycare/kennel owners. The MVP turned out beautiful. Went to a few trade shows towards the end of last year and people went crazy over the software.

0 outbound marketing yet, and already have 22 customers at $100/month. This year my goal is to scale up to 200 customers.

It's a really weird market niche where no one has built software for in 10 years. Pretty neat.

[+] tkiley|11 years ago|reply
"Profitable side-project" might be an unstable equilibrium. If you're doing something without scale, it will die when you lose interest. If you're doing something with scale, perhaps it should grow into a bootstrapped startup.

inquicker.com started as a hobby / learning opportunity (2005) and grew into a side project with about $20k/yr in recurring revenue from corporate customers (2008).

Eventually, it turned into a full-time job (early 2009) and I found a co-founder (late 2009). We hired our first four employees in 2010. In 2011 we signed our 100th customer and hit $1m in recurring revenue. In 2013 we hit $5m in recurring revenue.

[+] wesbos|11 years ago|reply
I wrote a book and video series on Sublime Text - https://SublimeTextBook.com

It's done about 80k in sales in 3 months - I'm in the process of writing a blog post about how I did it, what worked and what didn't. It's not inexpensive, but it pays for itself quickly so people are fine with spending the $45 on the book + videos.

Feel free to ask questions here so I have content for the post.

[+] mappum|11 years ago|reply
An Android app I made in a few hours makes $500/m from ads, and has 1M+ downloads on Google Play. It claims to be a radar detector for your phone, but that's not even possible (it's actually just completely random).

The description says that it is for novelty purposes, but the reviews show people believe it works and it has a placebo effect. Most reviews say things like "I drove past a police station and it went off! 5/5".

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vox.radard...

It's funny to see it up in the top 20 of the Transportation category on Play, alongside companies that are heavily VC funded. https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/TRANSPORTATION/c...

[+] doh|11 years ago|reply
A year ago I developed an universal video downloader site http://savedeo.com.

I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but people liked the site and kept coming back. Year later the site generates around $30k a month and the operation costs are around $90 (close to nothing).

The site is very lightweight as it doesn't really downloads anything. It just extracts direct links to the files.

There are a great challenges that I have to deal with (like YouTube blocking IPs, sites changing designs all the time, etc.).

[+] zrail|11 years ago|reply
I wrote a book[1] a year and a half ago that just recently crossed $42k in total revenue. These days it consistently earns $1.5k/mo without much further input from me, other than tweaks to the landing page copy and updates once in awhile when Stripe or Rails changes significantly.

[1]: https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com

Edit: If you'd like to read a preview, you can do so here: https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/read

[+] aakilfernandes|11 years ago|reply
I was thinking about doing something similar. Do you recommend using your own domain name (like nathan barry) or having a custom domain?
[+] jchung|11 years ago|reply
What proportion of that revenue are you receiving?
[+] Obasan|11 years ago|reply
Hi, are you an expert or at least well established in the community? Because that usually helps a lot to sell. Thanks!
[+] la6470|11 years ago|reply
Do you mind sharing how you advertised your book or made it popular?
[+] tomrohlf|11 years ago|reply
I created a card game that I sell on Amazon. I have it manufactured in China and sell it though Fulfillment by Amazon.

Quite a change from my day job working in software but I enjoy the diversity.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PJKCXJC

[+] robinhood|11 years ago|reply
I've created five years ago http://www.totalwireframe.com, based on a hunch that it would interest people. It's a site where I sell libraries for an obscure/niche market.

The first year, I sold for $0 of librairies. In 2014, I've made ~$45,000 and it's 100% passive income. I'm not proud to say that I've worked a total of 30 hours on the site last year (it sounds as if I'm lazy, and I'm not). Moreover, I've never spent a single dollar on marketing, no matter its form.

It works so well that I've taken the decision to leave my daily job to work on the site full time. I (perhaps naively) think that if I make that much money while doing practically nothing, I can surely make a ton more by actually working on it every day for a year. On Feb 1st, I'm making the jump.

It has been tough to get there though. The first year has been a disaster. I nearly abandoned the site. Then, one day, I started to gain traction. To this day, I have no idea why. Then, months after months, the sales went up. It took me weeks and weeks of work to create the libraries I'm selling today. I also did a lot of variations, based on the feedback I received from my customers. My customers are the best, I think. They like what I do, they give me a lot of feedback. In the course of my business, I also did stupid things I regret immensely, like copy a competitor (but honestly it was not intentional), and I'm really, really not proud of this.

Sales have reached a peak of $7500 for the month of May 2014.

The site is based on http://jekyllrb.com/ and is hosted on https://www.webfaction.com/, on a 9$ per month plan. As the site is static, I just need Nginx. That's it. GetDPD allows me to collect payments with both Paypal and Stripe.

To let people pay and downlaod, I use http://getdpd.com/. They are fantastic. I've tried a lot of other options and even though GetDPD looks terrible, it's a great product, well worth the tiny monthly cost.

I hope my story will let people know that it's totally feasible to do a great business as a side project. I honestly wonder EVERY.SINGLE.DAY how come it worked for me, but well,... it worked :-)

[+] rifung|11 years ago|reply
Great story! I'm also extremely curious as to how it started to gain traction.

I'm wondering if it has to do with where the site appeared in search results. For example if Google changed their algorithm or if perhaps your web host somehow changed something?

Do you remember when it started to gain traction?

[+] sixpenrose16|11 years ago|reply
Would you be interested in trying something new for delivering downloads, while allowing to collect revenue and build your community? Let me know, I'm working on something very similar. My contact info is in my profile.
[+] agilek|11 years ago|reply
Nice story! And you created all libraries you sell only by yourself?
[+] earlz|11 years ago|reply
I'm making about $500/month (was $800/month when bitcoin price was better) by code reviewing altcoins for exploits, undisclosed premines, and other scams that can hide in code. I have an arrangement with an exchange for a monthly fee, and sometimes am paid by others as well.

I've successfully stopped 1 full blown exploit (admanteumcoin) where there was code that allowed a block to mine any amount of coins desired, (and had RPC calls modified to hide this).

I started out doing it to try to help the altcoin ecosystem, because it's pretty interesting, and because it's a great way to learn more about cryptocurrencies and all their implementations. My code review directory (that isn't actually up to date) is on github: https://github.com/Earlz/coinreviews

[+] mafellows|11 years ago|reply
Lead generation service for mobile developers: iOS Leads - http://iosleads.com & Android Leads - http://androidleads.net

Have an assistant that helps curate freelance/contract positions from around the internet and through opportunities I hear about offline. I'm a mobile developer, so it's an effective side business to be working on.

Many people have scored new clients and worked on interesting projects through the service. Some people find it's not for them. Definitely offer a money-back guarantee if you're working on something digital/saas. No reason to be taking people's money if they're not getting value out of your product.

Another valuable lesson: we did really well with podcast advertising thanks to Release Notes (http://releasenotes.tv/). If you can find a podcast with 10,000 - 20,000 listeners that serves a niche, you should be able to produce a nice return. IMO our landing page is terrible, but it converts quite well.

[+] tjradcliffe|11 years ago|reply
It would be fascinating to see a complement to this thread, "Side projects that never got any traction". The tech press has a huge bias toward reporting on "what works" based on projects or companies that succeeded, without ever looking at the many projects and companies that do exactly the same things as the successful ones without ever getting anywhere.

I've been very successful in the technology world, including running my own scientific and software consulting company for many years, but as a novelist and poet I've been a complete failure, despite approaching the two in very similar ways. Maybe the markets are simply very different, or maybe it's just luck, or something else. So I think it would be interesting to see some side-by-side of projects that took off and projects that didn't.

There are lots of really interesting things people are posting here, but I bet for every success story there is a story of failure that involves a great many of the same elements, yet somehow never grew beyond the "that was an interesting way to spend my spare time for a while" stage.

[+] dynofuz|11 years ago|reply
I made http://bankofamericaroutingnumber.com It took less than a day and makes about $150/month. Not quite the 1k but not bad for minimal work.
[+] geofft|11 years ago|reply
Hm, how do you get visitors? You don't show up on the first page of Google results for 'bank of america routing number' for me. (I guess you show up second if I add certain state names.)
[+] pbhjpbhj|11 years ago|reply
Can someone explain what this is, is it like a UK sort-code [which identifies a particular bank branch, like a zip-code only for banks]? Why do people need to look it up [online].

Thanks.

[+] jwcrux|11 years ago|reply
That's ingenious - good work, and I'm glad it's working out well.
[+] xenosapien|11 years ago|reply
Wow. So simple, yet so brilliant. Kudos!
[+] adzeds|11 years ago|reply
I created a soccer app that provides information on betting. It trickled along nicely and then in November it jumped to £3k (~$4.5k) then December it jumped to £7.7k (~$11k) and looks to be on that line still as it is on £2k after 5 days of January!
[+] cade|11 years ago|reply
This is fudging the question, but after many months of nights-and-weekends toiling, I launched https://www.land-of-nosh.com out of beta testing today and hope to be making $1,000+/month at some point!

My wife has always hated the meal planning/recipe organization and sharing process and available tools (she'd used a few different products). After asking lots of friends for recommendations and hearing enough times, "I use X, but I don't like it, so if you find something better, let me know." it seemed like a promising lead for a side project!

Worst case: I make no money, and my wife finally has the meal planning tool she's always wanted.

[+] WesleyJohnson|11 years ago|reply
My wife and I are terrible about planning meals and often end up going out to dinner which wrecks havoc on our checkbook. The problem with meal planning is I'm a terribly picky eater and there are few things she doesn't like. I've looked at meal planners/recipe catalogs in the past and I don't know that I've seen any that offer any sort of learning tool to find recipes you'll like based on your ingredient preferences. Of course, I suppose part of the fun in something like this is choosing new things to try instead of always relying on your old favorites. I'm not sure if your software does this or if there would be any interest from customers outside of myself, but I thought I'd mention it. Anyway, just the musings of a potential customer. I may check this out regardless, it looks really good. Kudos for launching.
[+] GFischer|11 years ago|reply
It looks REALLY nice, congratulations.

It's something I could see myself using, but it seems too US-centric at the moment :) . Still, I'll give it a try :)

Do you have an e-mail or something for feedback?

[+] reuven|11 years ago|reply
I wrote an ebook ("Practice Makes Python", http://lerner.co.il/practice-makes-python ) for people who have learned Python basics, but want to gain fluency. I'm working on videos for a higher-tier offering, and then will start to market it more seriously.

I only launched the book about 1.5 months ago, and I'm at about $1500 in revenue. I'm definitely hoping to see greater income with the higher tiers (including video) and greater marketing. I'm also speaking with some companies about them buying site licenses of the book, which would increase the revenue even more.

[+] pbhjpbhj|11 years ago|reply
FWIW I just finished a beginners python course on Coursera - Programming for Everyone (PR4E, https://class.coursera.org/pythonlearn-003/). There's no natural follow on as the course uses a book for which only the first part has been translated in to a course. There were a lot of people on the course asking what to do as follow-up; might be a lead for you.

I just signed up for your samples as 'pbhj' if you want to get in touch.

Incidentally, when one adds themselves to your email list for samples it takes you to https://lerner.leadpages.net/new-practice-makes-python/thank... but there's no route back other than using the back button. IME this tends to mean people will just close the tab, providing a route back or on to a related page might help conversions or give you chance to get affiliate conversions or what-have-you.

[+] sgt|11 years ago|reply
Are you still writing for Linux Journal etc? I remember your articles from back in 98, 99, 00.
[+] stickperson|11 years ago|reply
How have you marketed this so far?