Ask HN: Share your side project and your motivation
Tell HackerNews what you're building on the side and why you're building it.
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2022 where @codemonkeysh 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 Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE 18 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 13 comments
I'm building https://www.jsonbinpack.org ↗, a novel schema-driven and schema-less binary serialization format with a strong focus on space-efficiency.
JSON BinPack comes from my research at University of Oxford trying to solve the problem of expensive cellular network data transfer in the context of the Internet of Things. The results are pretty good based on the benchmark research I published: https://benchmark.sourcemeta.com ↗.
The idea is that if you build an IoT product that is deployed to remote locations (the middle of the sea, a remote farm, etc) and sends data back to central servers over cellular networks, then JSON BinPack would allow you to potentially save a lot of money.
I published a JS-based proof-of-concept and I'm now working on a production-ready C++ implementation.
Dissertation link: https://www.jviotti.com/assets/dissertation.pdf ↗
https://www.jackfruit.ai ↗ - Automation and organizational tools for professional networking / job finding. Started to build it because I hated applying to jobs over and over again and was always forgetting where and to who I had applied.
What a lot of people don't seem to realize is that getting your dream job might be one to two connections away from you. Getting a referral for an interview at a company makes you 9 times more likely to get the job than someone who just applies. A lot of people think quantity is the answer to applications and interviews, but I believe its actually quality that counts. Our tool creates relations between your applications, contacts, and companies, helping you create relational pipelines and connections to the right opportunities.
The website is still in beta right now, but hoping to get a v2 version with better content and more automation. Right now, the user still has to do a lot of manual entry, which has led to some drop-off. Happy to answer questions or hear feedback!
https://ask.moe ↗ - a non-profit search engine that donate 100% of our profits to charitable organizations chosen by our users.
I decided to pursue this project because it's something that can easily be expanded to include everything (sports, shopping, podcasts, news, videos, coupons, etc) in a natural way, and I managed to find an (imo) awesome domain name. The website has seen long pauses due to difficulties in joining Microsoft Advertising, but I've had better luck with Google, so started working on it again. I'd love to team up with somebody good at marketing, and a developer that's interested in building iOS/Android browsers and Chrome/Firefox extensions since it's very difficult (and sometimes even impossible) to change the default search engine.
https://onlineornot.com ↗ and https://hackernews.onlineornot.com ↗ - it's an incident management service that automatically reports downtime to your status page.
I started with my own uptime monitoring as the data source, but will be adding other providers over time (like pingdom, site24x7, etc)
I built it because I'm tired of status pages that say everything is fine when the entire website doesn't load.
I'm building ntfy [0], an open source push notification service with a dead simple REST API. You can basically push messages to your phone via curl or any script. No sign up, no cost, no API keys.
Motivation is: I always wanted it and it was fun to build. I since learned Kotlin (for the Android client), Swift (for the iOS client), and React (for the web client). It's awesome to learn so many technologies. Fun!
[0] https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy ↗