Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

Got to 40k maps in a few months (it somehow got viral in a forum, then went from there). I even made $1k in ads one month. Some of the users included indie artists, setting up maps for fans, and diverse groups of people (there was a map for "moms of kids with cancer", for instance, which is pretty cool)

Then Google banned me for serving ads in porn sites. Then Paypal banned me (and took my funds) for taking money from shady accounts. Then my hosting service asked me to leave because they found "adult pics" on my site. A quick audit on the profile pics revealed that there were quite a few maps with porn content (including all the illegal stuff). I took stuff down as fast as I could, but never managed to get Google to pay me again. Tried my luck with a few redesigns, setting up a new adsense account (got shutdown immediately), etc. In the end, I let the domain expire and that was that. At least I didn't spend a lot of time or money on it...

Ouch.

Edit: registrar > hosting service

I started working on it in 2014 and it's been on my mind ever since. I applied to YC with it a long time ago (was not accepted, and I can see so much wrong with the application I sent now...) I was laid off in November so I jumped back into the project and have been working on it since.

The main thing I'm planning on changing up now is: it's too general purpose—closer to a platform than a specific product. So next I'll focus on building one particular product on top of it: something kind of like Chrome's object browser (which you get when using console.log)—but showing dynamic structural changes in time (steppable/reversible), and being multi-language.

The other main issue is that, even though I'm trying to get it into user's hands as soon as possible, it has been a giant task for me to get even an alpha of this thing together on my own,—though I am damn close now. And my sister has been helping a bit recently.

Edit: direct link to video: https://youtu.be/KwZmAgAuIkY (looks much better full size!)

Lessons learned:

* I should've paid someone to do some decent graphics, turns out "minimalist aesthetic" is not the same as "no effort put in to design"

* Making it a free demo, with the full game available as an in-app-purchase, sounds like a good deal for the user but in actuality sets off peoples' "IAP == crapware" alarm

On the upside, I also made a fake corporate website (http://ineptech.com) to promote it and that was so much fun that I'd probably waste all that time again.

Unfortunately, I never managed to find cofounders that were as much motivated as I was - each one I worked with was working on it as a hobby more than anything else, and I usually had to tell them what to do, which was exhausting considering I was the only developer to develop such a big beast. Adding marketing on top of that was just too much. We still applied to Y Combinator with the last cofounder I worked with, but he wasn't really ready to move to another continent for the project and quickly started looking for excuses to drop it. He got one when we ended up not being selected :) We're still friends, but I learned that it's hard finding people to build things.

I'm still extremely proud of this project, tho. Both technically and humanly, I learnt so many things! And the project is still running without needing much maintenance, so I guess it's still a success in some way. Plus, it helped me to find jobs, since people are usually a bit impressed when you can explain to them in interview how gameboys work under the hood ... :)

This change effectively made my somewhat useful app almost completely useless, at least in my eyes, because now there's little incentive to self study.

I could have tried harder to market it but I'm glad I left it alone.

Lessons learned: - Politics suck. Any business related to firearms is going to be vulnerable to government regulations. - Money matters. Once you start charging for something, you automatically feel the need to deliver a product of higher caliber. You also get immediate validation on whether or not your idea is worth it and how much it could be worth.

I think there are multiple reasons why it wasn't successful as I believed it might be, most importantly because I built something without first researching the market enough, and failure to do so got me building something which wasn't very helpful to people.

Another important issue was marketing. I'm developer myself, and even though I tried my best to get the word out there, the results weren't as good as I imagined they would be, on one side because I had no idea what I was doing, and on the other, because I didn't spend enough money on higher quality marketing.

I spent couple of months building it but I don't regret that time -- although this conclusion is probably specific to my personal situation at the time, where I had just closed the shop on my own development agency of 3+ years and wanted to get a break by working on something fun. Additionally, out of all the "weekend projects" I started over the years, this was the first one I actually "finished", and that means something to me, regardless of the outcome.

If I get into something similiar in the near future, I would definitely pay much more attention to the aspect of getting the feedback to build something people actually want to use. And marketing, definitely marketing.

It's a plugin to bring gesture-shortcuts to graphic design tools (Sketch, Photoshop, etc.). I've worked on it in bursts of my spare time for a few years, and took a break from development the past several months. At some point I started calling it more of a 'passion project' because I just really wanted to see other forms of UI in the world outside of the sandboxes of gaming, and a hope that it'd maybe serve as some portfolio piece in trying to work as a software developer/designer.

At the moment I'm trying to motivate myself to work on it again, partly because even in a touch-bar age I still find myself using it. Yet at the same time need to figure out how to get it past a beta phase and to a point where I'm more comfortable marketing it.

The hardest thing is trying to find time/motivation, it's easy to endure isolation and keep the day job when you're excited with the product and haven't gotten feedback yet. It gets vastly harder once you start wanting more of a social life again and the numbers so far haven't made it seem like a product worth going full-time on.

Could sell just 5 of them, still have about 30 in stock, so commercial failure, but at least got two things out of it:

1) Bragging rights about having sold something to large aerospace organisation. 2) Finished something from start to finish.

It has since been rewritten in D and is Open Source:

https://github.com/DigitalMars/DMDScript

It turned out, it is hard to convince farmers to ditch their trusty excel sheets and notepads and start typing all those info into computer program. I managed to find few customers, but they haven't stick for longer than one year.

I spent about one year of fulltime work (spread over two years). I always tried to expand the product: I started with vineyard management software, then add the production part and then started coding all the CRM, POS and warehouse management. I hoped to attract more users with more complex solution, but I was wrong.

After three years I am still using it daily (I do own winery), but I am only active user right now and I did give up trying to sell it. I do some occasional development, from time to time when I need something in my farm, but thats it.

More or less, it's a scheduling application that allows a user to set when they're open and allow anyone to book that time for however much the original scheduler valued that slot of their schedule. It's a good base application, but without customers, it's wasted potential and engineering time. Guess I'll add a link: https://kronikl.io

There is an added benefit that I built up a lot of custom Vue components and flask modules which can be added to later projects (braintree painments, address inputs, settings pages, &c.), so I'm not considering it a complete loss.

I've decided to pivot most of my time to a more marketing based approach for the time being and, once customers role in, tailor the solution to their needs.

I think my main problem is that I create solutions that are great for my problems.

Flaming Notes[0] - iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Web game to learn music notation. Total revenue: 10 USD over 2 years.

MelloNote[1] - Android app to sync audio files with text (lyrics, guitar chords, etc). Think 4-track subtitles that can be used by a band. Earnings: 6 USD in 1 year.

Tasktopus[2] - Desktop kanban app (Windows, Mac and Linux). Earnings: 500 USD in 1 year.

See N Tell[3] - A web-based sentence construction game to help 5-10 year-olds to learn words via images from Google Image Search. Earnings: 0

[0]: http://www.adhyet.com/flamingnotes

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adhyet.mel...

[2]: https://gumroad.com/l/ADWm/tasktopus

[3]: https://seentell.me

It's been pretty successful usage wise, but paying users are another matter entirely. Donations and account upgrades keep the lights on, barely covering the hosting costs of the main collocated front-end server, but lack of funds is a constant struggle. I've spent tens of thousands over the years on hardware and hosting costs, and expenses keep going up as coverage expands. As for why, I guess there's just not enough of a reason to upgrade at the moment. Free is hard to beat, I'm my own best competitor.

The site's current design is basic to say the least, and the account creation page does not leave users feeling especially comfortable about the site. Everything about everything needs polish.

Related to that, I'm almost finished with a redesigned and much nicer looking front-end, but that probably won't magically solve all my problems. ;)

* Spent 2 months building it - much longer than I'd thought. The work required to get from a prototype (2 days) to a SaaS product (2 months) was way bigger that I'd thought. So much polish, and so many edge cases to consider when the client goes from "you" to "anyone else". Lesson: building something for other people takes a lot longer than building something for yourself.

* Tried to launch on Hacker News but failed to get any attention. Our blog post on "10 years of Rubysec data analysed" never made it off the "newest" page, despite being pretty solid content (spent two days building a Jupyter Notebook so anyone could replicate our results, etc.). Was a big psychological hit at the time. Lesson: there's lots of randomness in launches - don't rely on them to much.

* Thought GitHub Marketplace would list us and help with distribution, but it's been extremely hard to persuade them to. The jury is still out on this one, but they (understandably) want us to have lots of users before they invest in even assessing the app. Lesson: don't rely on the goodwill of third parties - unless you've got something they want/need, you'll be stumped if they decide they're not interested.

I haven't given up yet, and I still really believe in the product, but it's been a much harder journey than expected! Marketing has been by far the toughest part, and I don't have a solution to it yet.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cat-game-aquarium/id56449037...

I've had this iPad app up and running for about 4 and a half years - I don't think I've broken even yet on the amount I paid an artist for the graphics for the app. I did the coding for it myself.

RobotBridge PDF Conversion as a service (API)

https://market.mashape.com/jefflinwood/robotbridge-pdf-conve...

This service is pretty straightforward, and has users, but doesn't really cover the server costs. On my list of things to do is to switch it from PhantomJS to headless Chrome, and then to migrate the server.

The idea, I think, is sound. I worked on the system for over a year, and there are many interesting ideas. The big problem is that it took way more resources to launch than I could ever do alone. I would need sales, support, sysadmin, developers, designers, etc. Everyone calls it my billion-dollar idea, but I truly couldn't and can't do it alone.

The lesson learned is, think big, but not so big you can't handle the work-load. If you are working every day and falling behind two days, the side project is far too large.

https://github.com/dt1/itemhut

I built it because of a need and it's worked fabulously. It's hands down doubled my monthly affiliate revenue (i.e. to be clear, that's in the 4 figures).

I think where it failed however is that it's really hard to explain and I sure haven't cracked it. I get a few signups a day, few use it at all.

It's not for everyone - but it definitely works for me and it would work for anyone in the same boat (someone who needs to affiliatize hundreds/thousands of outgoing links)

I make ~$50 a month right now with it, which is enough to cover the hosting. I haven't really marketed it much beyond my twitter circle of friends but hopefully others will find it useful.

It took about 3 weekends worth of work to complete and is based on Laravel Spark.

In 2010-11, I worked on lug-it.com to let people carry stuff in their luggage for others. It leveraged FB's social graph to engender trust. I just wasn't ready to market and grow the user base because my cofounder decided that he was going to be the "vision" guy and I was going to do all the work.

I launched a couple of iOS apps one of which got thousands of downloads in a month but since it was very niche (BLE/iBeacon related), I stopped working on it.

When the standard was released 2.5 years ago I figured that exacting security code against an unevenly documented API was worth paying for, but nobody understood what 2FA was, why SMS is garbage for 2FA, that you could now get devices for a couple bucks that would work on dozens of sites while respecting your privacy, etc.

I spent about a month coding and tried to sell it for a couple months, but I simply didn't have the resources to try to do all the education needed. I put it on the shelf.

But this spring I've gotten a couple inquiries about updating it to Rails 5.0 and 5.1, so I guess the knowledge is getting out there. I did another survey and there are still no drop-in libraries for the languages I'm comfortable in (Ruby, Python, JavaScript, PHP) - either they require a lot of fiddly customization or they're half-finished hobby attempts.

I'm considering updating the gem, automating the license purchasing, taking steps to enforce the dual-license, and seeing how it does.

I am trying to visualise all of world's knowledge with interactive mind maps focused on learning anything in a linear way.

Here is the search engine that searches all of these interactive maps : https://learn-anything.xyz/

Both the search engine and the maps are open source so I am not so sure how and if I can ever make money from this aside from the Patreon page that we have set up for the project.

If anyone has any ideas on how one can monetise this in a good way, I would love to hear it. We don't want to put any sponsored content in there as that would defeat our vision of having most quality resources available for all subjects.

I think the biggest issue is marketing. I tried a few Twitter/Facebook ad campaigns that didn't really pan out, and an HN submission that didn't make the front page. But really I haven't done much to market it, and it just sits there chugging along with few users other than myself while I work on other stuff.

Sure you can market with sweat equity. Forums, Show HN, Product Hunt, etc but to get real money you often have to advertise. And advertising is not cheap.

I do actually have a product in this category but I don't want to post it with a throw away account.

Building the adaptive test system for use on the Internet was a great learning experience that felt a bit like a capstone project for a masters program. The two main challenges for monetizing it: 1. Finding a market beyond the small autism research field. 2. Contracts. Since the test was oriented to autism, many of the potential customers were hospitals and universities with the former requiring liability clauses that were perpetual (such as addressing problems from a drug trial 20 years down the road), and the latter requiring a free license to all background IP so that their research could build on any results without any possibility of infringement. Even with the help of a lawyer I was not able to reach agreements under these circumstances. I am still unsure if it is better to have a set terms of use or leave the door open for negotiation with potential customers.

I am still pleased having spent the time as the amount of personal and professional growth has been great. http://hrs-mat.com

Made $10 over the ~8 years it was up...from one donation. Yey.

I attempted two other web apps which also had dismal results, before my fourth (current) one, which is doing great and getting better.

Since writing that blog post, that particular web app (which is still running BTW) has had a handful of users sign up and is generating around $40-$50 per month. It covers the AWS cost, and lets me buy a beer every month, so I figure I will just let it tick along... :D

Feel free to ping me to reply to this thread if you want any more information, but the (somewhat long) blog post pretty much explains it all.

[0] - https://medium.com/@dsabar/the-zero-dollar-web-app-8886bf4ae...

The site is janky AF because I'm still in the neophyte stages of front-end/css. I do still think it's a good a idea, so I'm planning a revamp of the sales site in time for a big push at the holidays.

Lets people send checks in the mail from their bank account. Also lets you send photos you take as documents in the mail or via fax.

Mostly it was built for fun, to play around with Ionic, and to occupy spare cycles in between client projects. But hoped it would make some money.

So far, just has a few random users.

The main problem is that it's a pain in the ass to get bank accounts verified. You have to wait to confirm test deposits into your bank account, and, by that point, most people churn. Considered adding Plaid to get around that and do instant bank verifications, but it was too expensive to make it worth it from a user perspective.

Recently started thinking it might be fun to make a web version that lets users pay with cryptocurrency.

Its an experience I've seen a lot. You think if you create a great product and advertise a little it will go viral - but in reality getting people to use it in the beginning is the hard part.

Next time I'll try to build the community before the product. Spend more time on marketing and less on coding.

Plus I think selling to developers sucks, esp now so much free and open source stuff around. Non-tech Users are probably better customers.

I actually managed to get some traffic and ad revenue ($100< a month) when I first developed it and got it into the Google web app store and was featured for a little bit. I think there where quite a few bugs that I ignored and I stopped work on it for a long while.

I continue to try and improve on it, but it rarely gets the bulk of my free time.

Its been difficult for me to get _any_ feedback on it, so I bounce back and forth between feeling like its a worthwhile venture or its just a pet project that is useful to nobody but me.

I figured Google would kill FB soon enough, the writing was on the wall: killed Adsense integration, broken stats, halted development, disabled new cnames for a while, disbanded the team, etc.

I liked to think even one big client from FB (cough CNN cough) switching over after Google finally killed the plug would be worth it. They never did. It's been years now and FB still languishes neglected, but it seems that it is fated to die by attrition and nothing more.

[0]: http://feedsnap.com/

I decided to do it after seeing a total lack of decent workout trackers that work well on mobile and provide a web interface.

It's made using React, Redux and I don't expect it to make any money :)

I got a mentor, and we pushed me to try to put out any kind of product for the... 2012? election, so I figured out a neat way to make word clouds of the legislation written by a person; I figured it'd be a decent bad way to find out what topics they're active about. I put it up as an IndieGoGo, and had some fun with friends and family exploring the database, seeing what interesting statistics we could pull out. Made maybe a grand from 3-10 donors.

Ultimately, as far as I could get as a one-man team, I couldn't actually take it anywhere solo. Theoretically, one can, with all the tools that are out and about - but I'd run into the motivation / momentum issue. Carrying an entire thing on just your own shoulders doesn't work out very well.

I spent a year-ish building it off-and-on, starting as a side project during the last couple months of regular employment; but I also skipped the country to hitch-hike for three months, and otherwise didn't dedicate myself to it like a real job while I was unemployed and "trying" to make it work.

However, I basically taught myself web-dev / RoR in order to do it, and now I'm a nearly-senior RoR dev, so that all worked out pretty well in the end!

--

About a year ago, I started making a little mindfulness widget. You'd sign up on the website, give it your phone number, and it'd text you mindfulness questions throughout the day.

Currently, I'm working on what's basically dependency management for cosmetic ingredients (cosmetics are made of stuff that's made of stuff and you need a breakdown at that 2nd level), specifically for a friend who's a chemical process engineer and needs more than spreadsheets can deliver. This one I'm doing properly as a side-project, rather than trying to do it "full-time".

--

The big take away from these for me is: Have a team before you try to make it more than a side-project. Doesn't have to be other programmers - it can be you and a "primary customer" - but you need other people to share the emotional burden of keeping momentum.

It got a little attention, but the biggest surge was when I created a text editor inside of it that rendered to a texture, rather than using CSS3D transforms of existing, content-editable text editor components like a few other demos had done. I called the text editor Primrose, but people seemed to respond to that branding better than Psychologists, and nobody seemed interested in a myriad of small components, just a single, integrated solution, so I sunk the text editor into the framework, rebranded everything as just Primrose, and spent a ton of time writing a website and basic documentation.

I've been trying to build a business around VR ever since. First, I tried to sell the framework. Made $10 on one license sale. I tried consulting services. Made about $2000 for a company I had joined that pledged to sponsor my development and do marketing and sales for me. I tried building a WebRTC teleconferencing app, but couldn't get enough focus from the company to push it well. After a year of no movement from the sales team, I'm back to being on my own now and back to trying to figure out my own path.

I think the teleconferencing app idea still has merit, and I have a few other idea that have some potential, but I don't really know anything about marketing and selling SaaS. So I guess that is my next project, to learn.

https://www.primrosevr.com

https://www.handsfreechrome.com/

Barely any users, just around 400 or so.

First launched free around 2012 I think. Then there was a relaunch where we tried to go subscriber-based. At the time, the only online payment options were Paypal (shudder) and Amazon (a mess to configure). The subscription model flopped, so we relaunched free again.

We have a very small set of very rabid fans, but have had difficulty explaining this thing to potential users. Fortunately the Digital Ocean hosting is cheap enough that we can just leave it running on autopilot. (the old AWS hosting was a money pit)

We managed to sign up some doctors and got a few users to consult via the platform but ended up closing down the project eventually, mostly due to lack of traction and avenues for differentiation.

Lessons learned: - Do proper user research before starting to code - 'Better customer service' is not really an advantage unless you know how to spread the word and/or are willing to spend years on your product

I guess doing any advertising at all might generate traffic, but it seems unlikely ad revenue would cover ad spend. For now I just appreciate its being there 'cause I find it useful :)

The system worked well, but I struggled to find users, and it died a sad, lonely, death.

It did get used once however, for my wedding in 2013 :)

1) Credibility.

I am getting well when the world says that cannot be done. Most people don't want to believe this at all. So I get called crazy, a charlatan, etc.

2) Inherent monetization challenges in the problem space.

I am convinced that part of what is wrong with modern medicine is that money gets made off of treatment, not off of positive health outcomes. This is a conflict of interest for healthcare providers who have no motive to actually get you well and lots of motive to give you just enough improvement to keep you willing to keep paying for more.

3) I'm a woman.

This has made it hard for me to network, etc. A lot of men who know what I want to learn either will talk to me to hit on me or won't talk to me because they don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. Trying to make connections has been really hard.

4. I know how to get well, I don't know how to do business.

I know how to accomplish a thing, but I don't know how to accomplish all the stuff that goes into turning that into a money-making venture.

5. I'm very eye catching.

I have a long history of attracting a LOT of attention. I have really struggled with figuring out how to get the attention off of ME and onto MY WORK. It is getting better, but this has really been frustrating.

There are no doubt other issues, but those are a few things off the top of my head.

It's meant to make it easier for journalists and citizen activists to review bills, document dumps, etc (and on the pay side, help law firms read through and review discovery materials). A challenge has been that I'm neither a journalist or a lawyer, just someone who is motivated to help out where I can when I see something that seems screwed up; and wanted to build a tool that would make it easy for people to take 5 minutes and help read / review a bill, etc when they were on the bus or when they had some downtime. The failure mode is obvious in retrospect: I started building it without knowing people directly impacted by the problem I was trying to solve -- it was a good problem to solve in theory; but without a concrete problem to solve it's very hard to land on the right set of solutions.

I still tinker with it (uploading docs that seem interesting, messing with features), but I've mostly moved on to other projects until I find the set of people who are presently feeling the pain.

It searches several APIs like Amazon and BestBuy and and also scrapes product prices from various shopping websites. The results are presented ordered by price.

The Amazon access has been revoked for lack of original content and a few of the scraping rules are now stale, but it wouldn't be too difficult to update those. It still works though!

Initially I planned on sending affiliate traffic to sites to earn a small side income as well as possibly some display advertising.

After getting rejected from the Amazon program, I lost a bit of steam (although I believe I could flesh out the site some more and still be accepted into the program).

If I were to put some time into it again, I would add many more sites to scrape and integrate with a couple more larger store APIs. Then I would add a "price drop notification" feature to try to get visitors to return to the site.

I spent a couple months building it in evenings and weekends, plus many months thinking about it before that. The only money I spend on it is $7/mo for heroku costs.

I still think it has some untapped potential but I don't have much spare time to think about it right now.

TheOtherMail generates throwaway email addresses so you can try new products and services with no risk. We deliver all emails from your generated accounts to your personal email address so you don't have to remember stupidly long emails.

We spend a few dollars per month to run it, and we haven't made any money yet. Give it a try!

I also spent maybe 1 year prototyping a system meant to analyze the performance of wealth managers. I used financial statements from friends and family to see whether I could produce anything useful. But, the more I got into it, the more I realized it was difficult to produce a compelling automated analysis, even given a complete history of all the manager's transactions. It was too easy to swing the result by subtly changing the assumptions.

I also investigated an all-inclusive management system to help foundations for public high schools manage fund raising, etc. Again, I did a kickstarter-like campaign for it, and found inadequate demand.

I'm good at "releasing". I'm not good at deciding what to build (demand) and I'm not good at the marketing side.

My latest project helps you get more followers and increase user engagement on Instagram. It's a Google Chrome extension called Magis. It's currently bringing in $30 per month with $25 per month in fee's for the payment solution. Yay $5 profit; if you don't count my time.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magis/kahkfpeemmmj...

My previous project helped you validate your idea before you create the actual product. Apparently it was a bad idea because all it really seems to do is piss people off. Anyway, meet FauxBuy.

https://fauxbuy.com

Those are just the last two. I build a lot of stuff that's not profitable.

https://nanote.co

It used to have a payment form but I felt like it wasn't polished enough, so now it just says to email me for a (free) account.

I still use it every day for my own notes, so I suppose it was a success in that regard. I've also got a few friends on it too.

Partly because I suck at marketing my stuff (and am very low-income). I expect it to bring revenue but it has also been a thing for me to hone various programming, design and marketing skills, trying out some new concepts, etc.

Have learned and am still learning a lot from it.

I built the first version of LICK in 2015 because I was frustrated with the (then) state of distributed note taking. And because I wanted Sublime Text-like editing capabilities. I... didn't really have a business plan, but I guess I had hoped to retrofit features into later versions. Being a (not) starving bootstrapping developer filled a fun space in my life, but then life got in the way.

I made the 'new' version to prove a point last year, but it's riddled with bugs and flaws. I still use it religiously to plan my smaller projects, and my shopping. If I had to do it all again, I would have shipped sooner. Duh. Maybe someday, it'll dethrone the mighty Evernote – but until then, it's my glass castle... :)

I never had any intention to add ads, and always wanted to have a clean, hassle free experience for the learner. Even though, I could make a few bucks from it, I'm not interested in it. It does not have any maintenance costs. Just a static web app hosted on github.

Edit - fixed the web address. was typing from phone :)

I wanted to create this app because I listen to music on youtube a lot, and I usually add the videos that I like to a youtube playlist, but I did not find a way to quickly pick videos from multiple playlists/bookmarks (i.e. mixing) and play them. The `quick select` feature does just that.

Nobody seems to think this is a good idea (and they are probably right). So I'm the only user of my own app :)

One of my main problems is that the site is not too useful unless you sign up. You can see what's going on on the site at https://new.amecy.com/main/observe , but it's clearly not as much fun as playing the games yourself.

I built a service called "MeetingBetter" with the notion that you would setup your meetings in whatever system you're already using (Google, Exchange) and you'd also invite start@meetingbetter.com

When it got the invitation it would handle some basics around collecting agenda items, followups (if it was a recurring meeting, etc.) I'd thought of it kind of like Calendly. Anyway, not enough of a pain point and no really good traction channels, so I've abandoned it.

http://intouch.creou.com/ - A mini crm type tool for small businesses. Never really finished this, the home page is pretty much a placeholder. Most of the site works if you sign in though (test account username: test@test.com password: test.123) but it's ugly and not mobile friendly. Functionallity wise it does pretty much everything I had planned for it. (Also this is currently just running on a free azure account, so if more than about 3 of you visit it at the same time it will probably give up and die)

https://gumroad.com/products/sqlconfirm - a SQL unit testing plugin for visual studio. Only put this page up a few days ago, so it's made zero money yet, but maybe this is the one that will take off :-) Haven't made any effort to start marketing it yet because there are a few bugs I wanted to sort out first. Could do with picking up a few users who would give feedback though, so if it looks like something you're interested in, ping me.

So far no revenue because I focus on building features. While DocsApp already launched 8 months ago, I still don`t see any growth in term of active users.

So far only one active user with two sites and few users sign up to test then abandon completely, possibly go to competitor site with much expensive pricing.

Here is what I think did wrong:

1. No marketing effort to reach more users.

2. UX really important.

3. Actively reach out to users to gather feedback.

One thing I discovered, which surprised me, was that it was very easy to convince artists to get involved and upload their stuff (free exposure I guess). Getting regular users/music fans to care was not. I think I made a grand total of ~$40 in ad-revenue over about a year before I shut it down. Lesson: Ad-revenue doesn't work unless you're getting truly massive amounts of traffic.

Next attempt was a homeschool tracker-type application written in Ruby-on-Rails. The thing shuffled along, zombie-style, for 2 years with about a dozen paid subscribers before I conceded that it wasn't going to be successful and shut it down. Lesson: Stay away from the homeschool market. Egads, those folks are cheap (I should have known: we homeschool our son, and I'm cheap).

I'm currently preparing to launch my latest attempt, a productivity (intended to be a B2B SaaS, though could be useful for personal productivity as well) application written mostly in Clojure on the backend and ES6/mithril on the frontend. It's certainly my best work (from a technical standpoint) so far. I wrote it to use myself for a few things... We'll see if anyone else finds it useful. I certainly learned a ton building it.

Expenses:

$10 for the domain

$25 for Google Play Developer Fee

around $20 for few months api backend hosting (Digital Ocean $5/month) then I migrated the code and hosted to free Heroku plan to save cost.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.taskongo

[1] http://www.taskongo.com/

[2] https://help.highrisehq.com/mobile/

I was sending lots of private messages to r/WritingPrompts/ users, and got tons of positive feedback but reddit blocked my account and keep blocking my new accounts.

it is a good product but like lots of developers I failed at marketing and attracting users!

The lesson: Advertising revenue is not a sustainable thing unless you get massive amounts of traffic and have low costs.

the issue with this approach is that the top 1-3 links on google serp gets more traffic than all other links combined. I'm currently at #6-7 with 200 clicks a day and 3% ctr. Not really sure how to climb up beyond that level..

As per doing things differently, I don't think there was another solution to accomplishing the goal given the complexity/demand and in a few months it will be available for the open source community.

It has generated enough to cover the a bunch of domain names, but not much more, and I have many times questioned whether it was worth burning 3 weeks of more-than-full time work one summer vacation I was otherwise supposed to spend with wife and kids.

In a way I'm happy I tried, but I have also learned that making any substantial money requires tons of work.

I guess the topic is kind of narrow, with a quite small audience consisting of (I assume) mostly productivity/ergonomics-geeks ... out of which not everyone scouts around for courses at Udemy.

I was planning to add a few more courses around it and give some discounts for taking course packages etc, but never really found another uninterrupted bunch of weeks like that summer when this course was created.

Ideas and feedback always welcome.

[1] https://www.udemy.com/command-line-productivity/

I wasn't expecting much from it; my goal was to break even on server costs and domain, so ~20$/month. To date it has made $0*

(*technically it did make ~$2 in revenue, but Amazon deactivated that account, I had to sign up for a new one. So my actual received total is $0)

Ultimately it's not a huge deal; I built the project for myself, and it serves me well. I've already discovered 3-4 books I likely would have missed, so I'm super happy to have put in the time!

Lessons learned: When you build a super-niche product mainly for yourself, don't be surprised if it doesn't automatically attract a following. Also, don't set yourself up for disappointment: build stuff because it's fun, not because it's a means to an end.

I've had lots of side projects fail like this one, and I am starting to realize they are all for similar reasons:

1) Too specific of an idea. After I built this, I found that not many people cared about optimizing cashback, or at least not enough to want to invest time in an app or website for tracking it.

2) Poor UI. I'm not great at UI, and I haven't been able to get great results from places like Upwork - I think they do a lot of great design for brochure-type websites, but I've had a hard time finding people good at designing apps. I've also tried to partner with UI people by giving them ownership in the idea, but it always works out the same - they start out excited about the idea, and while I sink a ton of time and money into an idea, they get bored and don't do much.

3) I'm not great at marketing and SEO, and don't have many connections for finding someone good to work with.

I wish I could find a way to find reliable, motivated people to partner with for small app/website ideas, as being able to build things from the software side alone isn't enough.

0. http://www.cashbackoptimizer.com/ 1. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cashback-optimizer/id1198107... 2. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ionicframe...

Of course it was totally vulnerable to 1. Vonage deciding to change their backend or internal API and 2. Vonage deciding to legally destroy it, neither of which happened. At the end of the day I didn't put any marketing into it and decided it was too niche to continue supporting so dropped it from the app store. Took a few months of weekend work to do the first release and then a couple of days a month to maintain it.

It never had a real monetization strategy, so I never made any money from it. But it was fun developing and I learned a few things I could use for my current product https://info-beamer.com. So it's still a win.

If I did it again, I would set aside a lot of time promoting it and focusing on it. Eventually it just took away from my main business and even though I love the idea I stopped thinking about it. Maybe I'll go back one day.

I didn't have a plan to monetize it, but I thought it would become a startup and I'd have users and funding by now. I've worked on it about 5 years so far.

And also planning on throwing in HN Amazon link mentions using the API. Even if making no money, always fun to see what people are talking about on sites like Reddit.

It didn't really cost me anything but my leisure time, though. I'm still working on a second one (but I don't feel quite so motivated to finish it in a timely fashion).

If I cared at all about making money off of it, I'd have to hire someone to market it, and then maybe also hire a second person, so that I never have to interact with a marketing/advertising person directly. Making things is fun. Selling things is horrible torture. I pity those startup founders that have to do both, even if only for a short time.

---

0. https://noty.im

I have no content, thus no SEO, which has dramatically limited traffic.

Paid search is extremely effective to get people on my site, but AdSense doesn't cover the costs.

I spent a lot of time generating Swf files using PHP and learned a lot. The site got a lot of traffic but apparently it didn't target an audience that clicked any ads at all.

It made less than $150 in Adsense in about seven years. I did sell a backlink for $250 and I ended up with around 150,000 font files that were uploaded over all those years... ;) Still need to build a find-and-download-a-font site and attach it to the upload database...

In my opinion the install base is too small and the price point for games is too low for it to be a good business for me. I spent $300 on a watch, everything else was free. I learned a lot and it was fun, so I will continue to update the program.

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

The problem with it is that it is far, far too complicated. I'll iterate through it again when I use it to learn React and simplify everything.

I'm not upset about the decisions I've made for keeping my projects free, as if anything, they have taught me a lot, and I tend to use what I learned from them for future projects. In most cases, I end up turning on an Analytics feature and studying it, in order to understand the behavior of my users, and exactly what they are using it for and why, so that I can harness that into ideas for future projects.

Two projects like this were a blog I run called Confessions of the Professions ( http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com ). This website was created in order to solicit rants and raves from people about their jobs, careers, and their workplace. While I wouldn't call it a complete failure or complete success, as it has been monetized and makes money through ads, I would've loved to figured out a way to bring in revenue and make it a full time job.

The reason I say success and failure: It goes viral for days and weeks at a time, sometimes receiving over 10,000 visitors a day, while other days, it normally gets its average of about 1,000, though it could be worse. Sometimes, I cannot fully recognize the fact that I began with just Googlebot, my mom, and girlfriend as my visitors, and yet I continue to receive hundreds of emails a year with contributions and people thanking me. I even had a teacher from an elementary class full of students using some of the articles for their school project and thanked me so much for creating the website.

Confessions remains an ongoing project.. I'm always writing articles or receiving them from other people and getting them ready for the website, so I'd say I spent a good 2 years passionate about it and into it, hours and hours a day. I've since limited myself to no more than 1 hour per day on it. Occasionally 2 hours if writing an article.

For the other project, MyPost ( https://mypost.io ) is a web page creation platform that allows anyone to create a page with very little knowledge of HTML or CSS in seconds, or they can completely customize their page with HTML and CSS as they see fit. And there is soo much that people can do with it. I created it for a number of different reasons as well, including as an educational tool for people to learn what it was like to code. Social media has catered to the population so much that while everyone "can use social media and the Internet", far fewer can claim to hit the "View Source" button and actually understand all that makes a website what it is.

As for charging for this, I never could figure it out and hoped to one day just put ads on the website, but ended up scratching this idea, as the ads were just too annoying, even for me. I can tolerate some ad popups, but I created the platform to offer people an experience, not an annoyance. It is this project that taught me a lot about databases and a lot about what people want on the Internet, and that is: an easy way to gain exposure. I have plans for a another project that helps people to do that, similar to ProductHunt and Hacker News.

The time I spent on this was about 3 months initially and then another 2 months just making some changes, fixing things, creating samples, etc.

I would love to quit my day job and just work on side projects and monetize them.. as I'm sure many of us would, but I have yet to get to that point completely. I do have a few projects I built completely with monetization in mind, and while there is a free version of those products, I built them as a subscription-based platform. I also have a few other projects in mind that I have no intentions of charging for.... for some projects, it is more about gaining exposure and recognition for me.

It's been a couple months, and my $20ish investment (you have to place an order for a sticker before you can sell it) has turned up $43 of profit. So technically it was profitable, but I don't think I've even reached minimum wage for the time I spent on it.

Get us talking about projects that we're working on that need a boost of any kind.

I built it many years ago. Some people use it. Never made a cent from it.

I mostly built it just to get some experience building something using Stripe and was not really intended to make a huge amount of money. But Im not sure if anybody has really used it. Im guessing the novelty of sending people pictures of things from a random number has worn off.

It's a web app that generates summary videos of online articles/content.

I launched it in February and it hasn't made a dime. I was charging ~$3 per generated video, but since it's had zero traction, the videos can now be downloaded for free.

The main feature it's lacking is a way to customize the generated videos. Once I get this implemented I will try promoting it again.

Spent about 3 months building it and over $2k in hosting + licensing.

I haven't iterated or done anything in an attempt to respark interest.

It still works and I have a few customers still (including myself). I really just had a hard time marketing to those that I thought would be my customers (mostly journalists and lawyers).

I've written the beginnings for two games, but didn't flesh out and complete the game mechanics because I haven't wanted to deal with the legal expenses involved in establishing an LLC and trademarking my assets, so I haven't been motivated to complete and release them.

I don't want to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on legal protections and then only make back $50.

http://propertywebbuilder.com/

Everyone says open sourcing it was a mistake but I really don't enjoy marketing. I tried selling it as a closed source SAAS product but hated that. Right now its gaining traction so I'm hoping in a year or so it will be well know enough that I can charge for a premium version.

I launched this about a year ago and while it has made more than zero dollars (some folks have indeed paid for personalized, editable Oh By Codes) it doesn't really make any money.

I am very busy with rsync.net and much more so these past 12 months so I haven't had the time I would like to invest into Oh By. I continue to believe it's a good idea.

[1] https://0x.co

I think it has not found much traction as I have to prime the pump in terms of content. Finding the right audience also would help.

For us techies (and I include myself in this although I do sales and marketing for a living, so I've beat it out of me) it is far too easy and safe to return to what we know...AKA the technology.

Basically after embedding code on your site, you can launch feedback surveys on your page to keep improving product or service. You can also send email surveys to your customers. https://insightstash.com

I was running a career coaching business and this was a stab at automating the training of people for salary negotiations.

Soft launched it a couple months ago so maybe it's too early to say "it won't make money".

It works well (I think), but I haven't gotten around to marketing it yet, so no one really knows it exists.

http://www.gpsheatmap.com/

I think bad SEO and the website not being polished is the issue

Currently thinking of either selling it, or redeveloping it as a wordpress plugin for sports clubs

It solve more or less the same problem as GitLab multi-project pipeline which was recently released.

Never gained enough traction, with competitors across pages of Google search. Was hoping for at least a modest 100's of dollars per month.

I also was banned from adsense, for machine generated content. Regardless, I really like amazon and my product you can't really use adblock, so I put together a website that monitors amazon daily prices.

I get most of my hits on facebook feed. Regardless I don't make as much money as I would like, but it gives me something to do when my regular job is annoying me. Plus I got some nodejs programming experience and database construction experience as well. So all is not lost.

Http://www.bestoftheinternets.com/Deals I might be looking for a growth hacker...

I don't really thing you should do a side project with the anticipation of making money.

My focus on side projects is doing R&D and building skills or tools that will pay off in my paid work. From that perspective I don't really consider anything I have done to be a "loss."

I do open source but only to demonstrate something I plan to sell later or to establish ownership of IP.

Spending money on R&D is a great investment since you can deduct on taxes and get an automatic 30% return. That is much higher and guaranteed return compared to "investing" in stock market.

Videoloupe for Mac (https://www.videoloupe.com)

These are both macOS applications that have yet to reach enough in sales to be sustainable. However, I work on them full-time in hopes of reaching sustainability in the near future.

"Why do you think it hasn't been as successful as you thought it would be..."

Exposure and importance. Getting exposure for a macOS application (or any application for that matter) is tough. The lion's share of excitement these days is around mobile applications and web services. Trying to get publishers excited enough to write about a desktop application is challenging...

Importance is something that's taken me a little bit to understand. There might be some "utility" or "nice to have" applications for macOS that make a decent living, but I think if you really want to turn an application into something that has long-term sustainability, then you need to find a way for your application to become essential to a user's workflow. Excel, Lightroom and Final Cut Pro are all essential applications to their respective user's. Fileloupe and Videoloupe are "nice to have" apps in their current versions. People enjoy them, but they aren't essential.

With the exception of maybe a few outliers, I'm not convinced that you can make a living selling macOS apps for $10 and hope to make up revenue on volume. I think you need to get into a higher price range and if you want to sell a more expensive product to someone, then it has to fall under the "essential" category and not the "nice to have". That's my goal with Fileloupe 2.0 and Videoloupe 2.0, but there's a ton of development to do.

(Oh, and I'd forgot how much more work went into making a macOS application versus an iOS application. To say that my original time estimates were off is a laughable under-statement.)

"How much time/money did you spend building it..."

Development on Fileloupe started in the spring of 2014 and version 1.0 shipped in the summer of 2015. Development on Videoloupe started in the summer of 2016 and 1.0 shipped in the spring of 2017. Living expenses have been cut drastically over the years so that I can continue to do this full time. (Hint: Living in Thailand is a lot cheaper than living in San Francisco or Vancouver...) Sadly, I don't belong to any special "comma club" so there's an end-date to this dream if profitability cannot be reached.

"What kind of iterations / improvements did you make to try and salvage it"

I learned a ton building version 1.0 of each product. Arguably, I learned more than I should of and likely would have been better off starting with a bit more of a plan and clearer vision for each app. Regardless, I now have a much better idea of what each app should be and I'm hard at working on version 2.0 for each.

It was a price comparison website that allowed you to quickly find the best priced dog food (unit price -- like $ per 1 pound weight) and it could be filtered by dog food ratings (you could compare expensive 5-star quality ingredient foods while ignoring any of the cheap 1-star ingredient foods). There is an independent website that reviews dog food based solely on ingredients, created by a veterinarian that I used for assigning SKUs to quality cohorts. I felt that most of the reviews on e-tailer website were heavily opinionated, based on anecdotes -- not data, and many were brand-sensitive ("I only buy so and so brand because all other brands suck").

The site was fully built, had some decent SEO, it integrated with 12 e-tailers, I registered and tagged all of the products for many affiliate marketing systems, I bought several hundred dollars worth of AdWords campaigns and iterated about 6 times. The scraper and display website took a few months. I spent a few days cleaning obviously erroneous data. It took a day's worth of time to sign up for all of the affiliate programs (effort staggered over a few weeks). I built a few scripts to automate the browser to search the affiliate websites for the correct affiliate links (some programs were much more customized than just adding a site-wide tag). I ran it for over a year and there was only one conversion that was paid by the affiliates, but it was too small for them to cut a check.

The idea, after the website was built and running, got some interest from a former CEO (now VC) and from a wealthy friend of the family, but I never followed up with either. I felt like all of the hard work of the product was done and the majority of work remaining would need to be marketing and generating inbound links.

I'm still convinced that there is a need for more price comparison websites that are unit-price indexed. Amazon doesn't have search by unit price and only occasionally has unit price. Things that come in packages of varying size (like dog food, batteries, household detergents and liquids) are hard to compare for value. I found two other sites with this idea, one was shut down and the other was focused entirely on supplimenting Amazon.

One problem I had is that the fine print on most of the affiliate programs prevented me from competing on many of the necessary AdWords search term keywords that I would have needed to advertise to get any real traffic. Basically, I felt my web interface was superior to both the e-tailers for finding the right product, but I couldn't compete for that AdWord traffic because my competition with them would drive up their marketing costs.

converthero.com -- would sell this for $10-15k. It's a opt-in popup maker.

> Why do you think it hasn't been as successful as you thought it would be?

Marketing is hard.

I built it for a niche that is not very tech-savvy, and largely couldn't be targeted by SEO, because my partner was going to handle sales. The partner faded away almost immediately and there hasn't been any real revenue to speak of. It pays for itself.

It was built for my own business as the original customer, and that business still uses it, but nobody else does. At our peak we had maybe 4 paying customers, but our onboarding wasn't great either (we were brand new) and they didn't all see the value in it.

Anyway, I think with more sales and better onboarding we'd have had a good MRR and not much churn.

Heroku has more than doubled their monthly fee since it started. It used to be profitable with one customer, now it is breakeven, +/- a few dollars. I think I'll move it soon to a $5 VM and it should make about $60/month at that point.

I made some mistakes:

1) trusting my partner to make sales. I already knew they weren't a workaholic.

2) No vesting cliffs or anything. We just have 50/50 and that's it, so I was not interested in working on it solo and paying out half the money, nor starting a fight for full control. I wouldn't lose much to rename it and take it elsewhere, but I wouldn't feel right about it. Anyway he quit selling within a month (about 15-30 hours invested iirc) and so we were dead in the water. I'm close with him and so I left it at that to avoid damaging our personal relationship.

3) I used long-codes, which is a nono for mass-texting. We had some dropped texts, or we think we did (it's very hard to diagnose). Shortcodes were very expensive at the time; I don't know what the options look like now. You can probably pay for access to someone else's shortcode. We don't notice any issues with the remaining customer, which has a list of a couple hundred folks.

I haven't touched the code for over 3 years and it still runs. That's pretty impressive, probably my most solid system. Also some kudos to heroku for not breaking it somehow in that time.

I've never shipped any personal project since then, although I'm getting close on one now. I continued to make the mistake of picking bad co-founders, so for this one I'm solo. I don't expect to get rich, as I have no marketing plan and I find most marketing distasteful. So maybe I'll get lucky, or maybe I'll expose myself to some strangers on here or somewhere when it's ready to sell.

That said, I can try to distill out a few key points:

(in no particular order )

1. Doing this as a "side project" while the founders still work day jobs. I think doing that is fine, but it limits how fast you can move and how aggressive you can be.

2. And (1) goes hand in hand with this one, which is "not being focused enough". I should have emphasized a "what is the single most important thing we can do now to generate revenue" approach from the beginning. Instead, we worked on this "grand vision" which is pretty cool, but took forever to get close to having a shippable product.

3. Early on I was thinking mostly about on-premises deployments, with the idea of rolling the code into a SaaS version as "next step". In hindsight, that was probably exactly backwards. Going SaaS, and going "down market" in terms of customer size would have made it easier, I believe, to get initial traction. IoW, as Mark Suster put it[1] "hunt deer, not elephants".

4. Not taking my health seriously enough. As some of you may recall, I had a heart attack[2] near the end of 2014. And while I lived and was able to get back in the saddle, that whole ordeal happened at a really bad time from a company perspective and cost us basically the entire following year, as I recovered both physically and mentally. In hindsight, I was pushing myself way too hard, and not doing the things I should have been doing w/r/t diet, exercise, etc.

On the flip side, we have done some things right. Probably the most notable is keeping the burn rate extraordinarily low. We spend a small enough amount of money that I can fund our current activity level out of my pocket nearly indefinitely. Which is a big part of why we're not out of business despite having no revenue. And now things are starting to look up, as we have one really solid prospect in the pipeline and are deep into the transition to a SaaS delivery model for the "old" products, and have a really cool new SaaS offering stirring as well.

The interesting point for us will be if we can sign even 3 or 4 relatively small deals and get some real traction established. Then we can decide if we want to go pursue outside money or not, or if we want to just keep doing the organic growth thing.

[0]: https://www.fogbeam.com

[1]: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/most-startups-should-be-deer...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8550315

I loved the game concept of ABA's "Defeat Me": http://wonderfl.net/c/9ykQ . SHMUP where each enemy is a copy of you. Round 3 you fight a clone of Round 1, Round 2, mirrored.

but I disagreed with several major design decisions:

1) Rounds were too difficult (a deadline came in very fast, the bullets were nearly the size of the ship) 2) Player movement & weapons changed rapidly (speed & number of shots per spread was a modulo on the level number 3) Losing meant you retried the same level.. at that point in the game, you basically be stuck. I wanted the game to restart.

I improved on the game with pixel-perfect collision, weapon animations and other design decisions like letting the player screen-wrap around the edge but not the clones, regaining time on the deadline when you killed a clone and more.

I even experimented with a co-op, 2 variants of 1 Versus 1 mode and a Replay site before removing them for the core experience.

I made the game because I wanted to play it. Making money was a secondary goal but I'm proud of the game and find it way more fun than most games I've played. How many games do you know that have an AI procedurally determined by your movements?

Revenue earned: 3 * $10 on "pay what you want" from itch.io. 1 from a friend's friend who overhead on a Skype chat that I made a game, 1 from an indie developer at a games meetup and 1 from a friend when I sent them a link.

+ < $100 from iOS sales (I switched from the iOS app to Desktop (Win/Mac/Linux with Eletron packager) for a better experience and more fun coding.

I think it's cool that $10 was the amount chosen by 3 people who didn't know each other as a valuation for the game. However it's disappointing that all 3 were people who knew me.

I sent out ~100 emails to game reviewers with download links and got 1 brief article but no revenue.

Why: Discovering games is hard. Marketing to people who would like this kind of puzzle-y arcade game is difficult to reach without looking like a spammer or spending $.

Differently: Not try so many weird experiments with gameplay and focus on the core relentlessly + Playtest more.

Iterations: 2 prototypes from TigJam. 2 more iOS versions then another re-write for an App Store launch. 2 Javascript versions (the latter being launched) + 1 seperate version for multiplayer.

Time: Hundreds of hours. Maybe a thousand? A lot of this was done earlier on when I was less experienced with programming + design. I playtested a lot

Lessons for Game Developers: Playtest often, stick to the core relentlessly. Carve away crap that doesn't fit no matter how cool it is or fun to make. I spent too much time iterating on mobile interfaces when gamepad controller support was far superior and passed "the bar test" (give to strangers at a bar and watch them cheer other strangers on as they pass the controller around).

Play [1], An old trailer [2]

[1] http://QuantumPilot.me (redirects to itch.io) [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy_GBLM_6Qs