Ask HN: Do you have a profitable side project? How long did it take to achieve?

Here's a brief list!

* Wakeup.io - Simple Phone Wake-up Calls @ https://wakeup.io ↗ and it is fully automated and runs itself with actually really good profits. It was built in 2-3 days.

* GetProve, Simple Phone Verification @ https://getprove.com ↗ and it is fully automated and runs itself with again, really good profits. It was built in a week or so.

* Teelaunch, Kickstarter/Indiegogo Fulfillment Service (exited/sold) http://teelaunch.com ↗ (the site is different now than it used to be here https://web.archive.org/web/20140110204830/https://teelaunch.com/ ↗). As you can see from Wayback Machine, the site was just a landing page when I had it... took me day to put it up!

* Standard Signature, Email Signature Automation for Gmail Business @ https://standardsignature.com/ ↗ (built in 48 hours)

* Glazed, a Rapid MVP boilerplate for NodeJS @ http://glazed.io ↗ (built in a week or so, but this was work/thoughts accumulated over like 5+ years of hacking - this landed me paying clients, so I still consider it a side project)

* Asynchrosend, a MailChimp competitor (site is down now, but I did have paying clients and successful startups like Notehall.com had used it), built in a week in college!

* I have a bunch, at least 20 more on my list TODO still, if you want to build one with me let me know! I really would love to find super talented people, or people that are motivated. It's really hard to find good people if you know what I mean. I am not working on these right now though as I'm solely focused on one big project.

I have a bunch more projects I've built, that are also profitable that I can share. Email me and I can share more!

Update #1 - I really wanted to mention the most important thing about this. I read a Max Klein blog post that flipped the switch on me before to get into this hack and ship fast mode; it was something like build small little projects, but build a dozen of them. Once you build and release one quickly, it's addictive. You soon start to release more and more, and you get so creative and confident. You can literally build ANYTHING you want in a matter of days if you truly focus and WANT to.

Update #2 - I added a few more side projects since this topic is fun!

I built a journal-over-email app that has been a profitable side business since day one. Defining "profitable" is necessary, I think - in this case it's covering it's own costs + more. This isn't my full-time gig, so I'm not counting any sort of hourly rate for my own time. The MVP is something I built over a long weekend, and I occasionally work on it while my wife and I watch TV/movies (so the time investment hasn't been too drastic, and the alternative is $0/hr).

The app is called Dabble Me (https://dabble.me ↗) and you can read about the inspiration and costs to run here: https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/increase-your-happiness-with-daily-journaling-8109b0700506#.bbzx2grd9 ↗

Today (18mos since launch) it's generating around $500/mo in passive income. I played around with a few different pricing models. The first was a "donate whatever you can" for a few pro options (did not generate what I expected), the next was a pretty lenient freemium model (lacked the upgrades), and what seems to be working best is a very stringent freemium model.

A big part of Dabble Me and my passion for the project arises from this being a "scratch your own itch" build. I want this service to exist more than anyone else...so I built it and charged others to use it. That seems to be a theme that has a higher success rate than others.

I created a WPA(2) password lookup web-based service in April of 2008:

https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/Thomson-SpeedTouch ↗

I just added ads and it's made 50-300 a month (had ~1000 unique visitors a day for the last 8 years).

Added https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/UPC ↗ last year for a different brand model

And

https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/DownloadFundaImages ↗ for the Dutch real-estate market

And a few years ago, I reverse enginered the encryption of the Wordz game and post the new game 20-30 seconds before the new roud starts, and more: https://www.nickkusters.com/nl/Diensten/WoordJacht/ ↗

This combined is my hobby/fun website. It used to cost €300 a month in server fees; it's now down to €80. Over the lifetime of the site, I probably broke even :) But it's still used daily, generating ad revenue, and if I had put in time to cut down cost, I could have made some money.

I made Server Check.in 3.5 years ago (HN announcement thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901350 ↗ ), and it's been earning around $2k/year with almost no maintenance. Just a few updates to the Drupal front-end/UI, and the Node.js backend every year (maybe 20 hours total).

Costs are incredibly low, as I have ~15 low end box-type servers running as check servers interacting with Drupal via a private API, and one DigitalOcean droplet running prod, with a hot backup droplet. Everything was automated via Ansible early on, and I don't have to touch anything except for patching/updating from time to time.

I also have run Hosted Apache Solr for almost double the time, and it actually earns a decent secondary income. Up to about 25 DigitalOcean droplets now, also all managed via Ansible/Jenkins, and it has a few hundred clients (a couple who have been stable clients for over 5 years, and a few very large names that made me realize even a side project can be stable/good enough for 'big companies' to trust them).

I haven't advertised either except for mentions here and there and having them in some of my social media profiles, but I've learned so much from running both—and even turned some of that knowledge into a book that gives decent passive income on top!

I made a course on Udemy on how to make complete web applications without writing code using APEX.

Link and free coupons:

https://www.udemy.com/create-web-apps-with-apex-5/?couponCode=FREE_FOR_HN ↗

Expenses:

$100 for a nice microphone (not necessary) but didn't want to record a bunch and have it be garbage $100 for Screenflow (to do video editing). 20 hours time (split across a couple of weekends

Profit:

I've made $1405 on it so far. It is almost completely passive income.

Proof:

http://i.imgur.com/sexsrzK.png?1 ↗

If you know any of the topics in the Hot Topics list and can do desktop recording, maybe you should think about teaching others and making some side money while doing it. Best of all, the Udemy community is awesome. They are very supportive of each other.

https://teach.udemy.com/course-creation/hot-topic-courses/ ↗