Ask HN: Side project of more that $2k monthly revenue what's your project?

Pre-Covid I had a set of Twitter accounts+newsletters that would inform you of local in-person tech events in your area making almost $5k/month in almost-mailbox money.

I ran @ATXTechEvents, @DFWTechEvents, and 50+ others covering most cities in the US with 100k+ people. I started by simply sucking in Meetup data and tweeting about meetups 10 days, 5 days, and 24 hours in advance and then sent out a pre-cap email each Monday morning covering the next 8 days.

At its peak, I had 50k+ email subs, was getting 4.5M impressions/month, and had 200k+ followers with a number of cities in the 10-12k range.

For revenue (models detailed below):

- I initially built it on the side as my former startup was closing shop (fall 2015) and I had some free time and made $0 for the first year as I was just building numbers and dealing with the data.

- About 14 months in, I made my first $99, it was awesome and mind blowing.

- Within 30 days, I was regularly getting a sale of $99-$299.

- By the end of that second year, I was getting a sale a week or ~$500-700/month.

- I went from $500/month to $500/week in about 6 months or 2.5 years total. I hired a PA in there to run support.

- From there, it steadily ticked up bit by bit until I launched my recruiter revenue stream in late 2018. I probably underpriced that.

- By the late 2019, I never had a month under ~$3500 and steadily ticked up to $5k

It got dicey a couple times when my then-employer (joined them when the idea was a year in) wanted some white glove support. Luckily, I'd hired a PA by that point and she handled it entirely.

My revenue model was three fold:

- There were three ads in each newsletter, generating never had individual attendee data but I could tell them about all the events covering topic X (language, framework, etc) in a given month along with attendance trends and who the organizers were. I sold these reports for $500/month.

On the flip side, to provide value to organizers so they helped spread the word:

- I promoted their events - for free with zero effort from them - and found that a couple public nudges reduced their no-show rates.

- They were more likely to get sponsors (granted, mostly recruiters but some legit tech companies).

- Since I had data on nearly every group+meetup venue in their area, when they started growing, I could refer them to larger venues that already host tech meetups their size.

- I was making enough cash, I would sponsor the occasional larger meetup myself. Since I was promoting the crap out of them and on a first name basis with organizers, I usually got a good deal for those.

Alas, covid killed all of it. It hit just before SXSW and leading up to the Apr/May conference season so my revenue disappeared overnight.

I paused everything for March 2020 and restarted in April covering exclusively online events instead. I got SO much hate mail saying "blood is on your hands!" Oddly, 100% of the messages were from women. It was so bad my PA quit.

I paused it again and tried to restart in October 2020 but then Twitter suspended most of the accounts, then Meetup started charging for API access and wouldn't let me buy a key.

I built mmm.page [1] originally for personal websites, or "internet canvases."

They're meant to be pages for very easy combinations of text, mixed media, embeds, etc. — let more people create fun/interesting places on the internet. [2]

I started working on mmm.page in Feb 2021, and launched it that May on Hacker News [3], then it hit $2k/mo last year, and has been growing steadily since. There are roughly 30,000+ users at the moment. Revenue has been trickier for this project because it's a SaaS aimed at consumers, who are more price sensitive — but the flip-side is I love working with all the people who use the platforms. Just today, someone shared this moodboard that captured exactly how I've been thinking about it mmm.page [4]. Some other fun examples here [5]. I'm planning a second launch in May. Hopefully some good news to share there.

One note: it's a website, and most people edit it on desktop, but a surprising # of users convert /after/ trying it on mobile. I also found the conversion rate increased significantly after I made the homepage itself editable — thereby demo'ing the product without a login. Just a small note.

Anyway, feel free to reply or DM on Twitter if you have questions — especially re: solo bootstrapping "fun" consumer products that are trying to also become self-sustainable.

[1] https://mmm.page ↗

[2] https://twitter.com/xhfloz/status/1631746024120221698 ↗

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424 ↗

[4] https://diemichi.mmm.page/moodboard ↗

[5] https://showcase.mmm.page ↗

I started building Requestly (https://requestly.io ↗) as a side-project back in 2014 and It took me pretty much every Saturday for 7y to hit ~$2K revenue and to get few companies paying for the product. It was slightly hard to monetize chrome extension due to lack of payments APIs support in chrome ecosystem. I actually went full time in Sep'21 and was fortunate enough to get into YC(W22). Now we are a small team based in India building Requestly.

Requestly is an open-source [1] Chrome & Firefox extension [2] that I started to help me in faster web development by capturing & modifying network requests directly in the browser without using any external tools. It eventually replaced Charles & Fiddler for many companies but now we are building a desktop version[3] too.

On a side note, Side Projects are a long-term game but the good part is you can do multiple along with your job and pick the one getting more traction. For example - I did many other side projects but continued with Requestly for 2 reasons - I was using it myself almost everyday and It was gaining organic traction.

Good luck in finding the project of your calling.

[1]: https://github.com/requestly/requestly ↗

[2]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/requestly-redirect-url-mo/mdnleldcmiljblolnjhpnblkcekpdkpa ↗

[3]: https://requestly.io/desktop ↗

I've been building Zigpoll [1] over the past 4-5 years as a solo project. It's a micro survey platform (Saas) that can live on any website and can be triggered at key moments during your customer journey. I found a niche in post-purchase surveys for Shopify which helped get me over the 2K mark and build a meaningful customer feedback loop I could iterate on to find a tighter product market fit (very meta for a survey platform I know). This took about three years to hit and it helped greatly to be on an app store since it's a full service marketing channel which 1. is my weakest skillset and 2. you want all the leverage you can get if it's a part time project.

The post purchase survey angle is growing steadily but the platform was built to be flexible so I'm looking for other use-cases to focus on what competitors don't currently service for a phase 2.

Also recently it's been a great way to experiment with OpenAI and see what all the buzz is about. So far the ChatGPT API has been very impressive at spotting trends in user-provided data to share with our customers. Honestly this feature alone makes me consider focusing on it full time; but it would be a bit of a leap financially given current circumstances.

TLDR: I recommend building something, keeping your head on a swivel, getting feedback (being on an app store or marketplace makes this easier) and adjusting as rapidly as possible if you want to get paid and have a shot at bootstrapping bigger.

[1] https://www.zigpoll.com ↗

I run HTTP Toolkit (https://httptoolkit.com ↗) which passed $2k a couple of years back. No longer a side project, as it's made enough money for me to work on it full time for a fair while now, but it certainly started that way, and it's still a one-man show (plus many wonderful open-source contributors).

I suspect that'll be a common theme in answers here though: if you have a side project making $2k a month, in most of the world that's enough for you to go full-time and try to take it further. If you can make $2k/month on something working only part-time, you can definitely make a lot more if you focus on it.

On your questions: HTTP Toolkit is a desktop app (plus a mobile app and other components for integrations) but it's an Electron app that effectively functions as a SaaS (with a freemium subscription model) that just happens to have a component that runs on your computer. And actually getting to $2k wasn't overnight at all - it took a couple of years of slow steady slog. A few inflection points that made a notable difference (releasing rewriting support & Android support particularly) but mostly it was a matter of "just keep pushing", trusting the trajectory would keep going, and steadily grinding upwards. It's great where it is now, but it's hard work - a solo business is not for the faint of heart!