Ask HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell?
Post them here!
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2017 where @hahla 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 ★ 40 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 63 comments
I created a Kickstarter that made $104,000 . It's a map of all subway maps in the world. The project did really well and attracted the attention of ~25 Media Outlets including Wired Magazine, Gizmodo, FastCompany, Tech Insider, Travel & Leisure, Slate, Curbed, Cool Hunting, and lot more.
However, being a frontend developer that loves coding, I feel like I wasted a great opportunity of building a brand around it. The whole map was an attention grabber with the potential of turning it into multiple products for home, kids and even teenagers.
To the day I still receive a lot of requests to talk about it, people keep buying it around the world and is currently being exhibited in a museum in Beijing.
I would love to sell this to a great Marketing team / Visionary that can build a multi-million brand with it.
You can see the project here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1960956629/the-world-metro-map
(Update: Yes all the IP belong to us because it's a modified version of the original and because we draw the whole thing from scratch.)
I have a small set of user generated content sites (all PG, no NSFW junk) that I have run for the last eight years. Net income ranges between $30,000 and $45,000 monthly. 100% ad supported, buyer beware. Overhead (servers, cdn, et al) < $1000/month.
I'm currently a software engineer working for another company while keeping this network alive in my spare time. It could definitely be monetized and run better with 100% attention, but after eight years I just don't have the energy for all the needless pop culture and memeology that needs to flow.
I'm a one man team, and have automated a lot of the flow, but it started as a hobby project and would benefit from some attention to update the code bases.
If you're heavy in the meme scene feel free to ping me at 1throwawayleft@gmail.com. The money will be good for a while longer and if you have the energy for it, you could extend it into perpetuity.
I have a few revenue-generating side projects, most notably StatusGator[1] which monitors status pages.
But the problem I always have with selling side projects is that they are worth a lot more to me in emotional value than they are actually worth monetarily. I've put a lot of heart and soul into StatusGator, not to mention a lot of time, and selling it for what it's worth based on monthly revenue ($1k/month) wouldn't nearly cover that emotional value. And so I hang on to it.
1. https://statusgator.com
I was working on a program to calculate minimised Australian capital gains tax return for buying and selling shares. The core part is written as a set of custom PostgreSQL views and window functions. It is hosted by Django. I’ve built a minimal UI for it. Accountants and investors appreciate the tool, but I don’t have the time and money to take it further. I had estimated potential market in Australia from $100k to $1m revenue per year - not enough to start a startup. If interested in buying source code let me know. It supports stock splits and code changes
CompanyCarpool Carooling app for companies and organizations: http://www.companycarpool.com/ I keep on receiving interest from big companies, but don't manage to convert it into a sell. Not sure I want to sell it, but would be interested in some help and potential partners. The algorithm that finds compatible rides along the whole route is quite advanced (BlaBlaCar does not have it)