Ask HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell?
A similar thread was posted a couple of years ago. If you have any side projects that you've built and that you no longer have time for, I'm sure the HN community would have an interest in hearing about them.
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2016 where @ShaneCurran convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
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Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
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HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
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http://westoncb.com/projects/tiledtext
A new form of text editor designed from the ground up for lower precision input devices (e.g. motion sensors, touch screens). Demo video at the url above.
I had issues using mouse and keyboard and gave up programming for six years until the concept behind this hit me. The actual software is an engine/framework for producing particular text editors (I figured I'd need to extend it to in a similar manner to Emacs, so that I could efficiently do, e.g., command line things too). It could also be configured to edit natural language documents for text editing on e.g. mobile devices and VR.
Editing and navigating documents is done, and there's a system built, but not yet attached to the UI, that is effectively a universal autocomplete: you give it an EBNF grammar for some language and it can list all grammatically valid options (that you could insert) from any point in a document. (I'm thinking of extracting and open sourcing that part. Not sure yet, though.)
I worked on it for a year and half, had an increase in medical bills and had to work more—haven't touched it much for a couple years. The copy on the website is oold.
https://www.freesunglasscompany.com
It's an e-commerce fashion store for sunglasses. It is very similar to a website that sells watches, freewatchcompany. The website is built off the Shopify platform, which is amazing. Products are dropshipped from China, and made easier using an app called Oberlo. I don't put any additional time into the website, though I should.
I advertised using Facebook/Reddit one time and made over $100 revenue in the first 24 hours (end of September), then got busy and haven't touched the site since. The site is pretty much setup and ready to go. You would have to run through the site's products and confirm that the seller on AliExpress is still in business and still has the product, but you can easily use Oberlo to wipe out all inventory and start over with sunglasses that you want to sell.
The sunglasses are all $0 to the customer, but we charge for shipping, which is where the profit comes from. The "free" brings the customer to the door. Typical sale is $10, with profit being between $6.50-$8.00.
Any tips to market the site or make it better are appreciated, as well :)
https://www.browser-details.com
Written in Django, got some HN love a while ago - no signups for a while now but we have over 500 accounts that signed up at some point. About 20 sprang for the "Pro" version at $10/month. We even had a customer pay $50/month for an API version integrated directly into their site.
It's used to have your customers send their browser details directly to your inbox. Just point them at your site such as http://example.browser-details.com (CNAMEs with custom domain possible).
Created to scratch our own itch: previously, most of our customer would be hard-pressed to name their browser version so it was very helpful in development. Uses an external API to map the user agent string to browser make/version.
Interesting trades considered. ;-)
https://www.rackforms.com
Started in 2007, profitable every year since.
Web-based form and application creation software offered both as a stand-alone purchase or fully operational cloud subscription. Currently outputs as PHP or C#, can be extended to just about any other language/platform.
Very loyal users, often generating excellent leads for software consulting projects.
Currently finishing up code for several partnerships including offline forms, workflow integration, and several others. The hope is these partnerships could bring huge wins in existing markets.
Want to sell for a simple reason: every year I tell myself I'll start marketing properly, and every year I ignore that and write code instead.
It's time to place this project in the hands of someone or some organization that can grow it into the powerhouse it can be.
If interested let's chat!
http://founderpact.com
It's not making any revenue so any offer will be considered. It's a tool for helping inexperienced founders avoid common mistakes when starting a business with someone, both legally and in terms of making sure you're on the same page. Did it after getting very burned on a business venture because of this.
Got retweeted by some TechCrunch writer and also got to the frontpage (I think) of ProductHunt a while back. But I never got the time to get the product to where I wanted it to be (pay a $49 fee to get a good legally binding agreement based on the data you provided that you can just download, print and sign, and avoid problems and lawyer fees) nor market it properly (I also think it would be great to partner up with people who organize hackatons etc).
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