Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

1

Birdfeeder

I know this is usually not the best strategy for coming up with side projects but for me it's just always about solving my own problem. The downside is that I'm solving the problems mostly fellow nerds have that they usually want to solve themselve instead of paying someone to do it for them. Example: "I always forget about things I bookmarked on Twitter" Result: I built a small project that sends me a weekly email of my newly added Twitter bookmarks (https://getbirdfeeder.com). It doesn't make a lot of money yet but I have some paid subscribers.

#Bookmarks #Productivity #Twitter 4 social mentions

2

Buttondown

I run Buttondown (http://buttondown.email/) full-time now, but did so as a side project from 2017 to earlier this year. My strategy was fairly simple: I wanted to create a better version of a tool (in this case, Tinyletter) that: 1. I already used whose quality I thought was extremely poor,.

#Email Newsletters #Personal Newsletter #NaaS 24 social mentions

3

changedetection.io

There was, but I fixed it :) should be fixed now? https://changedetection.io.

#Website Monitoring #Web Content Management #Data Extraction 50 social mentions

4

Scraping Fish

A web scraping API: https://scrapingfish.com We started with a simple web scraping solution for real estate market that was up and running in just a couple of days. We used it to track prices of apartments in our area aggregated across multiple websites. Then, as we saw value in this, we expanded data scraping to other cities and types of properties and released the product to external users. We had a few paying customers after a couple of months. As we wanted to include more websites to collect data from, we run into significant problems of being blocked. In result, we started investigating how to overcome different mechanisms that websites use to prevent automated traffic from web scrapers. It turns out that one of the the most important factors is to use good quality proxy which provides IP addresses shared with other real users and change them frequently. So, we started building our own proxy infrastructure powered by 4G proxies and implemented an API on top of it. And this is how we created Scraping Fish API for web scraping. Now, we can offer a reliable solution for scraping even the most demanding websites like Instagram or Facebook. Here is the full story of our product on IndieHackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/scraping-fish.

#Data Extraction #Web Scraping #Web Scraping API 29 social mentions

5

Neocities

Https://neocities.org I was looking at my old personal web sites after working on a different startup and really felt sad about how gross social media was getting, and how money focused the web was becoming. I wanted to see creative and interesting personal websites again outside of the context of a museum. So I coded up a prototype and, turns out I wasn't the only one interested in that. HN readers did the first booster of funds we had that got the site started so I like to note that HN did our "seed round" and thanks for that, hope you got a good ROI.

#Website Builder #CMS #Blogging 162 social mentions

6

OnlineOrNot

I run OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com), I spend roughly two hours per workday building features, marketing, or doing customer support. For me, it started by working for a company that was incapable of keeping their graphql service online, so I built an uptime monitoring service for graphql, and eventually generalised it to work for all APIs and web apps. How did I do it? Just consistent effort over a long time.

#Uptime Monitoring #Website Monitoring #Monitoring Tools 56 social mentions

7

Gifmemes

Https://gifmemes.io makes about 200-300 USD a month and the idea was very straightforward. I wanted to make a cool meme, but found out motion tracking the text was difficult.

#App #Meme #Tool 30 social mentions

8

Lunar.fyi

How Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/) became a necessity: New job, more stuff to do, so I got myself a 4K LG Monitor to extend my small Macbook screen. I had set up my home office right on an interior balcony where I had lots of natural light. That meant that the monitor brightness and contrast needed to be constantly adjusted to have the screen visible in sunlight and to not blind me when the clouds/night came. If you ever used an external monitor, you know how cumbersome it is to adjust the brightness constantly using its physical buttons or touch controls. And macOS doesn't provide any way to change the brightness from the Macbook, unless you use something expensive like an Ultrafine or Studio Display. So I started working on an app to automatically adjust the brightness based on the sun position in the sky.

#Mac #Utilities #Productivity 77 social mentions

9

Online Solitaire

I've created an online solitaire platform (https://online-solitaire.com/) that's earning me $10k/m now. It started as a side-project 5 years ago, but I've recently gone full time on it. It actually started as a Mac app 10 years ago and I choose to create a solitaire game because I had made a string of side-project that I didn't earn any money on, so I wanted to see if I could find a project that would actually generate some side-income. I did it by scraping the Mac App Store so I could find apps that had a lot of downloads and bad reviews. I figured that if an app had a lot of downloads, but got bad reviews then I could create something better and there would be an audience for it. The app ended up making enough money that I've kept it as a side-hustle for all these years. I've written about how I picked the app here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-a-simple-solitaire-game-to-10k-mrr-28e352c308.

#Games #Online Games #Card Games 10 social mentions

10

Divjoy

I built something I wanted that I knew I would have paid for if it existed (https://divjoy.com). If I was looking for a side hustle now I'd 100% be playing with GPT-3/ChatGPT and building small tools. There's a good chance your first few experiments won't catch on, but that you'll end up being in the right place at the right time, see an opportunity, and already have the code/knowledge to get an MVP out quickly.

#React #React Tools #Developer Tools 29 social mentions

11

Maker Stations

I run Maker Stations (https://makerstations.io) — the newsletter about workspace tours from creators and makers. Launched in 2021. We’re currently at about 12k monthly sessions and $200 MRR (not much, I know). I love WFH and having my own private space where I can concentrate. Offices are fun in their way, but I always struggled to focus in a noisy, open environment. Ironically, I’d normally listen to white noise while WFH, because I can control the volume! That (and a famous virus thing that made us stuck at our homes) prompted me to look for some desk inspiration. I had a blast browsing home office setups on Reddit, but... I always wanted to learn more about the makers behind them. Pictures weren't enough. That’s how I came up with this idea. Oh, and our design takes its inspiration from early 1990s computer magazines — with their adorable naivety, optimism, warmth, and energy.

#Productivity #Standing Desks #Home 2 social mentions

12

Markwhen

#Events #Markdown Viewer #Productivity 11 social mentions

13

Presentify

I made a mac app called Presentify (https://presentify.compzets.com) just at the right time when covid started and when most were working remotely. I had this idea well before covid because when I was explaining something to others over a call (via screen share) I wished I had something to draw on the screen and highlight a few things to articulate my thoughts better. However, I never invested time to develop an app for this until Covid. This remote work saved me travel time which I decided to utilise to make the app. So, in short, I got the idea from the problem I faced personally. Luckily, I received overwhelming response from Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22938604) and Reddit community and this has encouraged me to invest more time to the app and make it better.

#Digital Drawing And Painting #Productivity #Note Taking 5 social mentions