Ask HN: What's your successful or moderately successful side project?
Ideally “success” defined as extra income, but I’d also love to hear about projects that you have that are successful in other ways If you feel like a blog post: https://maxrozen.com/lessons-from-my-third-year-running-a-sa... In short, started the 200th uptime monitor while working full time, added a bunch of features, did some marketing, added status pages and cron monitoring, and eventually, consistent effort paid off. I might even let it employ me one day, but I enjoy my full time job at the moment. My online writing and projects mostly serve as introduction funnels to cool people, which later leads to consulting gigs, job offers, etc. For that purpose I'm really fond of my little tutorial at https://andrew-quinn.me/fzf. It got really big here on HN about a year ago and kind of sold me on the idea that, hey, I'm actually not bad at this writing thing when I want to be. My sideline makes about $12k a year, costs around $200 to run, and has been running for 15 years. It's a room booking system for schools. I reckon I need to put in 2-3 weeks of work a year. I haven't figured out yet if I am a rubbish businessman or an excellent sideliner :-) Would really love to check that out if you could share a link :) I built a web app for a bike valet service at a local hospital. Hundreds of people use it each day to make their bike commute to work easier! The app lets them scan in/scan out with their employee badge and assigns them a parking space and sends an email to them. Then they can just leave and the valet attendant puts their bike in the right spot. As they're leaving work they can tap a link in the email that texts the valet attendant that they're on their way so their bike can be pulled to the front and ready for them. I originally got paid for it but now do maintenance/small updates for free or trade to have them do maintenance work on my bicycle. I've developed a mobile-friendly version of a classic French academic dictionary, addressing the major usability issues of the original http://atilf.atilf.fr/tlf.htm and the company's subsequent, yet only slightly improved, version https://cnrtl.fr/definition/laid . My version has been thriving for several years, reaching an impressive SEO peak of 30k visits per month. This is a significant achievement considering the hundreds of hours invested in web scraping and data processing, while the website itself only took around 20 hours to build. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to maintain it recently due to time constraints, causing a gradual decline in traffic. Nevertheless, the site remains free for everyone to use. For those interested in the tech stack, it's a combination of React, Racket, and Rust. Check it out at: https://www.le-tresor-de-la-langue.fr I welcome any feedback and suggestions! Hey, thank you for this. I routinely use the cnrtl.fr website, but will use your version henceforth. Very well made! One suggestion is letting the search match conjugated verbs, plurals, feminine words and other variations. I don’t know how feasible it would be to implement this, though. I live from All About Berlin since a few years. It was and still is a labour of love, but now it also pays the bills. A few subprojects like my citizens' office appointment finder and my form fillers also qualify. I really enjoyed working on those, and they got me a lot of goodwill from some city employees. I remember i have found this site by doing some research on Google, regarding enterprise creation in DE Really nice website ! Can you tell us how you got the idea, when you started, are you enterprise or solo ? How do you manage taxes ? Are you german ? These were the questions i was asking myself when i discovered your site I started 7 years ago as a side project. It was always as a solo business. It runs like a regular business so I pay VAT and income tax. I'm not German - I'm not even a permanent resident yet. I know about most of those things from direct experience as an immigrant. How do you make money with it? LangCSS https://langcss.com Only one paid customer RN but I am adding features to make it more worthwhile, before I start promoting it proper. I didn't expect much but I was pleasantly surprised with the output and its ability to refine based on my simple and limited instructions. Nice job! If you're looking to bump up sales, I'd definitely suggest working on the landing page design. Right now it doesn't instill a lot of confidence in the quality of the output of the tool. Though I do like that the CTA is diving right into the demo without requiring a login. Also I'd work on the page copy. It is overly casual for a $30/mo offering. Things like "decent code editor" while truthful don't sell the product very well. But good job on launching something. Thanks. This is early! A few on HN have mentioned issues with the design but I have heard no specific feedback. Is it just some artistic thing “you know when you see it” or can it be put into words? There is also award winning design vs. design that may be average/common but works as intended (gets sales, helps the user get things done etc.). I am more focused on the latter for now. Any feedback is welcome. I have some ideas on how to improve it but want to see what others think. Quick feedback: - The logo looks uninspiring. Try to use one of those free logo makers. Later on if things are picking up you can always get a professional to create one for you. - The layout isn't balanced. The alignment of elements makes the page look weird, e.g. the header is aligned to the left but the buttons underneath are center aligned. - Font sizes and colors. Improve the contrast ratio and make them a bit bigger. Don't underline text if they are not links. - Headers don't need a fullstop, e.g. 'Features.' - Color scheme looks washed out. Get one of those free (or paid) Tailwind templates. Like this one: Thanks for taking the time! The conflict for me here is I don't want to use a template and look like everyone else. On the other hand I do want it to look good. I'll consider your points. In Safari 17 on macOS you have a 1460x1460 unserved image just above your Features section. Thanks for the heads up I built a side hustle called https://fracternal.com,
It’s like the tinder for finding fractional executives online. Right now in beta I’ve got about 6 paying customers and a few hundred solid candida orofiles. I do the background work for clients but I’m going to add a feature that will make it much more self serve (swiping profiles) vs me sending them. All the profiles are selected using AI I made a few courses on Udemy and wrote a book, over a few years net about 20k, super cool! Relative to how much time went into it I probably didn’t actually make that much money but I had a great time and it feels fantastic to make some money on my own initiative I have a fantasy of writing a technical book but not sure I could really put in the required effort Not super successful yet but I've been working on https://nativi.sh on nights/weekends. It's a tool to help make your writing more fluent when you're working in a non-native language. We have a fair amount of users who've worked it into their daily professional and personal writing, which I'm pretty stoked about. I've pretty much only worked on B2B stuff professionally so it's fun making something that an individual gets utility/happiness out of. my joint project with my friend - free hosting http://web1.0hosting.net/
hosting is exceptional in that you can work with your site even from MS DOS started out as scratching my own itch of finding sec filings & went down a rabbithole, https://shareseer.com/ Its my platform to build and experiment. I have a couple of hundred users I really like music, sound, acoustics, and human experience design so I started my own AV and event tech side business: https://eventworksav.com It’s a lot different than software development :O