Ask HN: What has been your least profitable side/weekend project to date?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2011 where @latch 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 Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 57 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 63 comments
I had half-coded an apartment manager for landlords for e.g. collecting rents, doing maintenance, and the like, prior to realizing a) Paypal fees were untenable for rent collection, b) I wasn't going to get into a regulated industry while part-time, and c) I had no way to sell into the space. So I shot that idea in the head prior to launch. (I still use the domain for an HTTP proxy.)
Then later I started work on WidgetBakery. You know widgets, those lovely little embeddable Javascript/etc code pieces that you create so other people can promote your website for you? I thought it would be cool if you could do that without being able to program, so that e.g. a laundromat or plumber could have their own widgets, thus getting them qualified traffic and improving their SEO. I did not talk to any laundromats or plumbers prior to coding it, naturally. When I finally started talking to people after half-building it, I realized that all of my customers were going to be black hat SEOs in seedy industries (payday loans and the like), and that it was highly likely Big Daddy G would nuke my site from orbit within a matter of weeks or months from launch.
So, that's a few months of dev time and a few thousand dollars of investment (VPSes, designer time, etc) that I won't get back.
Appointment Reminder also has been lagging expectations, but I still have hopes (and better, a plan) for that one. Sadly, immigration issues are a bit of a tax on my time/focus this month. (Severity: Deportation bugs tend to get worked on first, what can I say...)
I have a tendency of not monetizing weekend projects. Perhaps I should?
http://colorblendy.com/ ↗ I did during a SHDH meetup with @limedaring, then couple months later during another weekend I released v2 with colorpickers on the Google Chrome store for free too: http://bit.ly/chrome-colorblendy ↗
Another weekend I dug up an old game I wrote in an afternoon at school in Python called pytron. My roommates and I spent hours playing it—turned out it was quite fun with multiple players. I ported the game in an couple afternoons to JavaScript, called it LineRage: http://bit.ly/linerage-chrome ↗
I still have "monetize this" on the TODO list for both of these. Was thinking of releasing a "pro" version of Colorblendy with CSS parsing and a saving feature. Also a campaign version with a bunch of levels of LineRage for $1.99 or somesuch. Someday.
Mine was http://tripcost.co.uk ↗ - I built it about 4 years ago, back when I thought I could do everything, hence the horrible design and questionable HTML.
It was featured on a fairly well know UK TV show (working lunch on BBC2) which got me loads of hits, so I thought I was made. Of course the traffic dropped off in a couple of days, and in the 4ish years it's been live I've earned a total of $100 in Google Ads.
I learned from it though, now I buy design, I've improved my front end programming skills, and I know that you have to keep working on something to keep the hits coming.
I've also learned that making money from ads is very hard, as you need a serious hit count to make any money.
I hadn't made a website in years so to get back into it I built two client-aide only sites with jquery. I'm a terrible designer so, bear with me :)
- http://www.drinkpacer.com ↗ - select your target level of drunkenness and track your drinking. It keeps you on pace using very estimated math.
- http://www.draw140.com ↗ - this was to be like Paint but for twitter. Unfortunately Unicode rendering differences between clients and platforms makes what you see not usually match what your followers see.
I don't consider either of these a failure though, I learnt a lot.. In the case of Unicode, a lot more than I ever wanted to :)
http://searchco.de/ ↗
Never made a cent off it. Not that I have tried (to be honest). I am still working in it though, so one day perhaps. I find it useful though, so that's the main thing.
http://www.chunews.com/ ↗
Never made a cent of this either, and the hosting costs are quite large for what is essentially a smaller version of TailRank (if you remember that).
Lastly, I made a "My Twitter Butler" clone with a website and the lot back in the Twitter frenzy. Never sold a single copy. I guess I lost $10 for the domain name and 8 hours of my time to implement it. I was hoping to sell one copy and break even on my direct costs.