Ask HN: What is your one-person sideproject that makes over $1k/month?
Improvely (https://www.improvely.com) and W3Counter (https://www.w3counter.com) both started as side projects. Together they bring in almost $40K/month now. They've grown so much that running them has become my main business, so they're not side projects anymore, but I'm still a one-man operation.
I created the first version of W3Counter back when good web stats were something you had to pay for -- before Google Analytics existed. That I did mostly for fun; I loved watching the hit counter of my "resources for web developers" site going up, and wanted to see all the new visits as they came in and what people were looking at. I added a bunch of new features and reports in 2006 and 2008, and updated the design a few times, but it's not changed a whole lot since the beginning. Somewhere on the line to picking up ~80K users organically, I decided to monetize it by offering paid subscriptions for some extra reports and e-mail summaries.
Improvely's basically the result of taking a side project and writing it from scratch a second time to try to build a serious business out of it. I was running a kind of marketing business and needed to track the performance of my ads, but I was poorer back then (in college) and didn't want to pay for any of the existing conversion tracking tools. I built a (horribly named) link tracker called W3ROI that did everything I needed, and paid a web designer to make a sales site for it to see if I could sell it to anyone else on the side. It never made enough to be a primary source of income, but I learned enough from the customers it did pick up, and reading some great stuff on HN, to do better the second time around when I wrote Improvely over the summer of 2012.
I have another side project that might go somewhere. A relative of mine opened a retail store, and I helped out putting together their e-commerce presence and getting a shopping cart hooked up to their physical inventory system. In the process, I built a neat little contact form plugin for that e-commerce platform, with some unique features you don't normally see in contact forms. I threw it up on that platform's plugin directory and it's now actively used by more than 11,000 other stores, delivering thousands of mails a day. It's got hundreds of perfect reviews in the plugin directory, and two companies have approached me about acquiring it. I'm thinking about monetizing it somehow, but haven't had the time.
Thank you for sharing, This is amazing.
Could I ask what is done differently between W3ROI & Improvely?
What do you think was the most significant change in approach that have lead to Improvely's success on the same concept?
Sorry, really want advise as I've worked on stuff that I wanted to have a 2nd go in. Hope to learn as much as I can from successful people like yourself.
Glad to hear you're doing so well. I found your services through your Bootstrap date range picker plugin and they are very impressive. Had no idea you were a one man shop! I have to wonder, do you prefer working alone on these projects?
Does W3Counter make money directly, or does it mainly serve as a referrer to Improvely?
W3Counter has a couple hundred paid subscribers. It's a freemium service. Less than 1% of the users make the optional upgrade to a paid subscription, but that's enough.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8844083
Same post from January 2015 for a reference.
http://www.watermark-image.com a windows image watermarking software. Using the funds to bootstrap http://timeblock.com :)
Just a heads up - your headline on timeblock has a typo. "Corporation" should be "cooperation"
Another typo:
TimeBlock helps Makers and Managers plan and use their time more [effectively] while improving communication and happiness.