Ask HN: Side project you're working on?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2018 where @startupflix 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 Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 37 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 77 comments
iPerf but for Ethernet/MPLS/layer 2. This is at the more serious end of the scale and something I've been working on for a while now. I use it to test a link or device speed at different frame sizes, check that different Ether-types are parsed correctly, CoS values match into the correct QoS queue etc:
https://github.com/jwbensley/Etherate ↗
At the less serious end of the scale an Arduino powered, life sized cardboard cut out of me with an SD-CARD full of my daily sayings, and a GPS battery backed clock. Like most people here, I like to tinker with hardware/electronics as a change from coding. My friend on the other side of the world is turning 30 soon, I can't be there, so I'm making and posting him a life size me which plays recordings of me (that are time of day relevant!) when you walk past. Not much on the GH page yet, I'll try and get some more up-to-date code and designs uploaded at the weekend:
https://github.com/jwbensley/Life-Sized-James ↗
I had a second episode of extremely high blood pressure in 2017. It's a long story, but I ended up being hospitalized in a cardiac surveillance unit. A big part of my cardiac issue was that I had allowed my overall fitness to drop quite dramatically.
So, I'm working on a fitness goal app. Essentially, I track my blood pressure/heart rate along with my diet, exercise, etc. And, I'm working on finding correlations, with my end goal being that my app will help me optimize my workouts and diet to help me achieve whatever my particular fitness goal is. In this case, my goal is blood pressure related, but soon, it will be long distance running related.
Having allowed myself to get so far out of shape when I know hypertension is a problem causes me to seriously doubt whether I'm intelligent enough to pull this off.
However, my end goal isn't to build an amazing product, rather it's that if I build it, I'll be motivated to beta test it to hell. When I was being wheeled in for my angiogram, I promised myself that if I ever need another one, they'd wheel me in in marathon shape.
My wife is a dog breeder in Canada. She was starting to get worried about her dependence on Kijiji as the only site to advertise her puppy litters. Kijiji is a de facto monopoly due to network effects and they have slowly been increasing the fee they charge to post. In addition all other alternative sites are terrible - filled with pet scams.
I built CanadaPups.com as an alternative. Free to post. Started a couple of years ago. Growing slowly but consistently. I pretty much spend my nights afterwork fighting pet scams. I wanted to hire a web designer but she prefers the site to look "hand-made" for a softer feel… ok dog brown color it is then :). Any constructive feedback is welcome! Trying to grow it.
https://canadapups.com ↗
hey there,
Show HN will come soon (the next days).
I have finished my side project (SaaS/PaaS) called triggerFS.
triggerFS is a distributed, realtime message passing and trigger system. triggerFS enables you to build distributed systems and do high-speed realtime messaging in a service-oriented fashion. What really powers triggerFS is the gigantic amount of plugins you can use to do any kind of task.
Check out https://github.com/triggerfsio/packages ↗ for an overview, features, use cases and more.
I am about to launch the next days after I have finished writing the documentation. I am super excited and hopefully will get the attention of the HN folks when doing my Show HN.
I’ve just started selling art-piece wordclocks:
https://www.finewordclocks.com ↗
Making wordclocks has been a hobby of mine. For a few years I’ve been developing various designs, fabricating them at a local hacker space, and giving them as gifts.
People keep asking if I would sell them. So I finally made a high end design and put together a simple web store.
My first production design is a limited run of 100. I recently sold my first one.
I just bought my own cnc router (still in the crate). The plan is to set up low run production in my basement rather than the time-sink of a hacker space. Plus a good excuse to get the kids interested in creating stuff when we have cool tools in the basement.