Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438930
Feel free to update us on your progress if you participated in that thread. I don't talk about my zines (https://kradeelav.itch.io) and artwork to people IRL -- it occupies a very liminal space in my mind and soul where I can mention things a bit too raw or depraved for office spaces. ;) While I don't make zines to make money, per se (going as far to give a free digital copy on my site), there's still evidentially enough people that buy them that it technically counts. Just chiming in: your art looks amazing! I can totally imagine some incredible game cutscenes in this style. Aw thank you! Means a lot to hear that. :) Who knows, it may happen - have a few visual novel game ideas in mind for the far future. Do you only sell them on the website or local consignment shops too? Interesting you ask that; it's only been on itch.io up until now because I was printing incredibly small zine runs (like sub 20-30) off the office printer; but recently have been working with a printer for the next few and have a surplus to which I might send out to various zine ships. Good thinking. ;) I built a system to help people take payments with Google Forms. It was very much an MVP but I lucked into a niche that hadn't been filled, so each week a few people found it and started to use it. I charged 2% of the transaction volume (later lowered to 1.5%) and made about $3k before shutting it down at the end of last year to focus on other things. Interestingly by that point there were much better, cheaper alternatives and the friction of switching was low, but I had a hard time convincing people to stop using it. You would have considered gifting the business to another dev, perhaps in the developing countries. That would involve handing off a lot of customer data, not to mention the technical handoff. Instead I just directed my customers to the other products, which I think were built by solo developers as well. I would have taken it! My partner and I started roasting and selling coffee (https://tinywaffle.co). My day job matches donations 2:1 so I've been funneling in proceeds to max the $10k benefit. It's been fun learning about coffee, marketing, and design. This is highly interesting. Would you share some more details about all this, your setup and how you do it? I'm expecting you to do this in a much lower scale than "regular" coffee roasters, and I'm sure more people might be interested in this. Yep, I use a FreshRoast 540 which is a fluid-bed roaster. It pushes hot air and rotates the beans for an even roast. I roast about 4oz at a time but you can get an extension or get the larger FR to roast about a lb. For context, bag are usually 8, 10 or 12oz. Smoke is mininal with the FR but I'm def getting irritated. I live an apartment so it's been a little tricky with venting. You control two variable, fan speed and temp. With those, you control the temperature curve and it takes about 15 mins each bag from prep to cool down. We sell for $10 a bag but half goes to green beans and packing and we donate $5. Def learning a lot about scale. The typical commercial roaster is 10-15kg. Yep... Those cost about 15k. Next would probably be improving our packaging to make it more attractive. Lots of content on youtube and podcasts. Hit me up if you have more q's! That's really interesting - what kind of equipment do you need for roasting? Is this something you can do from home? Yep, posted info above but it's very easy to do at home. Just the light smoke has been irritating me. Very fun to try new beans. Get a bag of Gesha beans. They retail for like $50 but you can get a lb for 15. Berry after taste for a longgg time.