Ask HN: Did your side project become your main source of income in 2013?
Did you leave your day job? How long have you worked on them? Share your story!
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2013 where @spIrr convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 18 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 13 comments
I created a side project this summer based on an open source tool which I use in my day job. My idea was to offer this open source tool as a service.
So I set aside a week to travel down the East Coast. Every day I went to offices and MeetUps and demo'ed the original open source project and my service built on it. Each day was 15 hours, door to door. One time I had to patch a shoe with duct tape.
A week after my return, I'll admit that the service is a failure. The idea is a good one, and everyone wanted to try it, but no one committed themselves to using it, much less paying for it. The trip was still a success! When you show people crazy projects, they show you theirs. The projects I heard about, I had no idea that they existed. Networking was good. Being new places was good.
This is going to be a long one.
I started working on Wall Street shortly after the housing bubble in late 2007 for a very well-known firm. After two years of building various computational models based on esoteric distributions purposed for HFT, I realized that I could do it myself on albeit a smaller scale. I decided to target bitcoin because it is highly volatile and makes for a good asset to hedge against. I'm now making about 20,000 a week just on bitcoin trading with about 100k liquid (80k earned from trading itself, 20k from savings originally.)
I look at jobs as a good way to learn what is profitable, and self-projects to make the real cash. Salaried jobs are never going to give a person the freedom they need. And no programmers are "rockstars", musicians are..
The startup I was working on went under and I was on unemployment looking for a new job. A friend suggested starting a website that would make money from affiliate commissions. The goal was to make some extra money for coffee and to cover my cell phone bill while I looked for a new job. It ended up being a full time job and 3 years later I'm still working on it.
I've gone from §50 per week to §300 pw this year. Still long way to go before I can quit my job, but slowly getting closer to it every month.
No. My side projects are just my main source of expenditures so far :).