Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2017 where @jiblyyyy 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 160 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 130 comments
My books on LeanPub: https://leanpub.com/u/raganwald ↗
I had been approached many times by tech publishers to write books from scratch, but I never found the process and economics attractive.
Then I spotted LeanPub--quite possibly on HN--and I thought, "Hmmm, there is nearly zero barrier to entry." They accepted Markdown, and I already had my entire blog in Markdown on GitHub.
So I published a collection of essays (https://leanpub.com/shippingsoftware ↗), and launched it with a "Show HN" style post, making the book free. LeanPub allows people to pay more if they want, and an amazing number of people paid more, I made $2,000 in one day just from being on the front page of HN.
I've written a few other books since then, but I firmly believe that writing is a side project, not my profession, so I make a lot less than other authors who really put their backs into it.
But I'm happy, and my readers are happy, and I get a little money every month from people I like.
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A few observations that may be valuable for other side-projects, whether media or software:
Some of my biggest wins were the books I didn't write. LeanPub has a feature where you can cobble together a book title and a cover image, and it creates a landing page that collects emails from interested readers.
Several times, I have created landing pages for books I was interested in writing and when I promoted the landing pages... Crickets. I didn't write those books.
Another thing that worked for me is that when I decided to write the original JavaScript Allongé (https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix ↗), I was going to write my first long-form book from scratch. My previous books were collections of essays with additional linking and filler material.
I resolved to write a trial book first, so I wrote CoffeeScript Ristretto. I had a rough idea that the market for a CoffeeScript book was about 10% of the market for a JavaScript book, so I didn't have big expectations for revenue, but I figured I could gain experience writing the book and a lot of valuable feedback.
The secret was, when I then published JavaScript Allongé, it was basically the same book, just in JavaScript. The big differences had to do with the differences between CoffeeScript and javaScript, obviously, but most of the chapters were identical.
I found this process was a really big win, when JavaScript Allongé first hit, it was already refined by all the feedback I got from CoffeeScript Ristretto. If I was doing a software side project, I might take the same approach: Start in a smaller market where I can refine the software and business, then repurpose into the target market.
JM2C, YMMCV, &c.
I was afraid of posting this because it will seem like an advert. But its not. However, I do apologize if it violates an unwritten HN rule.
I help developers market themselves effectively. Its not a huge product, but has a fair amount of demand. Feels good to help people move forward in their carreers. Even helped one land a job that got him a visa. Not crazy profitable, though. I charge less than $500 for something that can easily go for ten times more. But money is not everything and it brings me joy to see people move up in life. Currently only work with 2 people per month due tk time constraints. So it does less than $1k a month. Pays for hobbies.
Its a side project that was born out of people on twitter wanting to hire my shop (Yelluw) do it for them. But didnt make sense for them to hire a whole shop to do something so small.
I started two projects last year and now make ~$100/month in profit. Costs are almost nothing.
https://autoplaylists.simon.codes ↗: iTunes-style smart playlists for Google Music.
https://gchat.simon.codes ↗: autoreplies for Google Chat/Hangouts. Particularly useful for people with multiple accounts that forward email.
https://simon.codes/2017/01/09/side-project-income-2016-0-to-100.html ↗ has more details on why I chose these and how I got started.
Easy A - https://easy-a.net/ ↗
The website provides a semester simulator that can (accurately) predict student grades, workload, etc for a given course / semester.
It also provides a breakdown of the grade distributions, work load (in hours), difficulty, etc. For every course, professor, and combination there, for universities on the site.
Profitable is relative, I spent around 100 hours tossing the website together and make maybe $100+ a month with a freemium model. I have roughly 2500 active users (not all paying), with zero put into advertising. There is probably potential to grow this, but thus far prying money from students is painful.
I don't make as much money as I would like, I think it's partly because I need some help on the growth hacking side. (I'm looking for some one that might be interested in growth hacking)
But I created http://Bestoftheinternets.com/Deals ↗ which using the amazon API looks for significant price changes in products to help consumers find deals on amazon products.
Revenue slowly coming along, but for me as a programmer I got a reason to teach myself some server side nodejs. Eventually I would like to roll it over to angular 2 so I can get some angular 2 experience and hopefully make some money!