Ask HN: What has been your most profitable side/weekend project to date?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2011 where @riskish 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 181 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 156 comments
NewsBlur - http://www.newsblur.com ↗ - a visual RSS feed reader with intelligence. I have a few hundred paying users and a few thousands free users. I develop it almost entirely on the train, which I'm on for almost an hour and a half everyday.
It's a ton of work and is profitable in the sense that the hundreds of dollars a month in server costs are just a bit more than covered by the premium users. But otherwise, it did help land me a number of great connections, both in NYC and SF, where I just moved.
I code in the open. NewsBlur is entirely on GitHub: http://github.com/samuelclay ↗. The iPhone app I'm working on is also there, so some folks use it as a way to send me issues, others go so far as to add their own pet features. It's kind of neat to see a community spring up around the code itself.
I started working at what was supposed to be a contract job to fix some computers for a guys business (at the time it was literally just a place that made copies) back in 2007.
I was still in college but me stopping in and telling the guy how much some of these customers having boxes of paper copied could benefit by having them scanned and organized led to me having my own company and employees as a sophomore in College which did just that.
I eventually built a host of sharepoint plugins which sold for a nice exit while I was still in school. I still havent finished school yet, but man did I have some fun with the money lol
An instructional DVD I made on SEO for wedding photographers and their websites (http://photographyseo.com ↗).
Recorded screen casts and mastered it in iDVD. Did a run of 1,000 at Discmakers for about $900. Sold out the initial run (@ $79 per disc) in under 2 years. Now we just one-off them or give them an option of viewing online.
Looking back (or if I do it again), I would probably do it as just an ebook or online videos to avoid shipping hassles.
Regardless, it's been a fairly easy ~$80k.
(BTW, if any HN folk want to see it for research purposes, let me know)
My current hobby is writing simple cardgames in javascript. Currently I have Hearts - http://www.hearts-cardgame.com ↗ , Idiot/Shithead http://www.shithead-cardgame.com ↗ and Crazy Eights http://crazyeights-cardgame.com ↗ .
Am getting my first payout from Google Adsense this month, about 120 $. Which isn't much, but they're pure client side games, require no maintenance or anything so I'll just keep getting a small check every month :)
My most profitable side project is actually my newest - http://bugmuncher.com ↗ - it's been live about a week and I'm already quite profitable. Admittedly it's a very low overhead project (costs around $30 / month to run), but so far it's looking good.
I think the reason it's doing better than anything else I've launched is because its my first one that isn't entirely ad supported. My advice to anyone looking to launch a side project is try to go for something people will pay a monthly fee for as opposed ad revenue.