Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2019 – Show and tell
It seems this question hasn't been asked for some time, so I'd be interested hear what new (and old) ideas have come up.
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2019 where @folli convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
I’m almost there. Hopefully that will be the case by 2020. But mine is not a Saas or app. I actually make things as a hobby and sell them in low volume.
A few years ago, I started making word clocks as presents for people. After a while I started teaching a workshop on how to make a simple clock at a local maker space. Now I have a refined design that my wife and I are producing in our basement and starting to sell at low volume: www.finewordclocks.com Making clocks is also a great excuse to buy cool tools. We have a probotix asteroid cnc in the basement. I have a 3yo and 6yo. It’s been fun getting them involved in making things. Most of the presents for their friends’ birthday parties are home made (mostly by me but with the kids’ participation) and are REALLY well received.
https://amazingmarvin.com/ ↗ has been my side project since 2016 (wow!). I will finally quit my job at the end of the year to go full-time on it (co-founder is already full-time). I worried a lot about doing something that had already been done 1000 times (a productivity tool), but now that it's working out I realized there's always room for a better mousetrap! Another surprising learning: it's still possible to have a product that people will pay for in 2019 with a mediocre phone app.
Playing in a band! It's a side project, earns me between $4K and $6K per year, depending how many gigs of course. Last year was huge for me, around $8K, and this year is slow, probably will be about $4K.
I'm just about to upgrade my sound equipment to probably the Electro-Voice Evolve system, which has bluetooth, can be operated by a phone app, sets up easily, and sounds incredible. This is an investment which will make my band more marketable but also set me up to do more paid sound gigs. The day job will always be my main gig but this is a great side project.
i run https://zeromac.com ↗ , a hosting service for Mac VMs. i charge by the hour. the margins aren't as lucrative as a traditional software startup.
i'm considering two new offerings:
1. lower-priced option where the servers would be overcommitted.
2. bringing up a SAN (VMs currently run on local storage) and charging for storage and compute time separately. this would also enable things like spinning up VM based on a custom disk images.
Running https://diskprices.com ↗ and https://battprices.com ↗, I've been consistently making >$500 in Amazon affiliate fees each month for the last couple of years. It's still growing, slowly. I'm working on some improvements to the software to add more metadata about the drives like warranty and advertised performance numbers.
I'll start: I'm still actively working on my Android app, Sun Locator, that helps photographers and outdoorsy people to predict the position of the sun and the shadows caused by mountains and hills. It helped me to learn quite a lot about Android programming, the app ecosphere and costumer support, and it makes a bit of spending money on the side. More info: http://www.sunlocator.com ↗