Ask HN: What is your profitable side project story?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2017 where @laksmanv 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 26 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 32 comments
I've written a bit about how I started as Guy In A Cubicle and eventually transitioned to Dotcom Thousandaire, running S3stat and Twiddla:
http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/guy-on-the-beach-with-a-laptop.html ↗
The short version is moving to Contracting, then Consulting Remotely, then Building Products while doing same, then learning how to Market them. With a good helping of Living Cheaply thrown in to keep the burn rate down.
It's a nice way to go about it, since you never need to worry about running out of money, and you can move at whatever speed you like since there's always a "day job" supplementing the product revenue.
Even better, since the business is built to run in the background while working elsewhere, once you turn off the "working elsewhere" part, you're effectively retired.
I started http://www.manypixels.co ↗ last week as a side project while being a digital nomad in SE Asia.
It is a service that offers unlimited design services for bootstrapped startups (though we actually have one VC funded startup as a client).
This side project generates about $3k weekly revenue currently (though I have only one week worth of data), and about 20% of that is profit currently (though I should be able to increase that closer 30-35% in the next couple of months).
1. Provide weekly personalized one-hour sales coaching for tech founders without a sales background
2. Built a collaboration and communication platform that provides an easier way for my sales team to communicate with potential customers
[1]https://www.sellsomemore.com/coaching ↗
[2]https://www.recapped.io ↗
Stock trading robots, it is a lifestyle business with no customers, no employees and no investors and location independent and can be done from anywhere in the world...
https://2fb.me ↗ sharing tech