ROUNDTABLES ★ 6 upvotes 2015

Ask HN: Do you have a side project to sell?

The Founder's Submission

Direct narrative and submission text authored by @helen842000 on Hacker News:

A lot of the auction sites out there don't have great listings or are selling highly profitable businesses.

I'd be interested to hear about any smaller projects, sites or apps that you are no longer actively maintaining. I've recently finished up a project and have some spare time to start something new.

I know a lot of people here often don't have time to maintain projects once they move onto bigger things. Maybe you have a specific price in mind or perhaps you'd rather see it go to someone to someone who will carry it on.

I'm particularly interested in apps that produce printable products or digital downloads.

Retrospective Overview & Key Insights

Distilled analysis of the business dynamics, operational challenges, and strategic takeaways:

An open Ask HN community consultation from 2015 where @helen842000 convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.

Core Principles for Independent Builders:
1
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
2
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
3
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.

Community Discussions & Critical Reviews

High-signal perspectives, counter-arguments, and peer founder insights debated on Hacker News (5 total discussions):

FO @foxpc Peer Contributor

I usually do sites and get tired of them and have little knowledge about marketing them.

Currently, looking at selling ampoll.com. I probably just want too much but I'd rather just not sell if the selling price would make me feel shame towards myself :)

DN @dnohr Peer Contributor

GuessTheAge.net, it's a guessing portal for people who want to know their "real" age by letting people guessing it anonymous. It's build with PHP, MySQL, jQuery & Bootstrap. Domain, unique design, source is ready for a new owner.

WI @willholloway Peer Contributor

streamjoy.tv, its a streaming movie search engine, gets data from amazon, imdb ratings, itunes, used to be able to get netflix data.

HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 6 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 5 comments
TOPICS & TECH STACK: