Ask HN: Share your ideas for a side project
Hi HN, I would like to implement a service or a info product that can bring a couple of $ a month to donate to a charity, but I am out of ideas. Do you have anything in mind that you don't have time to work on yourself? Thank you.
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2022 where @poushkar convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
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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.
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CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 13 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 12 comments
I'm working on a non-profit search engine (https://ask.moe) where the plan is to donate 80% of the profits to charities chosen by our users. Google have approved my AdSense account but for some reason then they disable the ads whenever I turn on revenue share (but they're fine with showing ads if I turn it off.. I don't quite understand the logic behind this behavior).
The plan is to provide a general-purpose search engine powered by Google, and then build our own category-specific search engines which will yield much better results thanks to filters.
It's currently written in Vue.js but I'm planning to rewrite it in React/Next.js + TailwindCSS. I would love to team up with people on HN if anybody is interested.
Maybe building a consumer app for iOS/Android - you can pick a pretty standard idea or look through the list of popular apps and implement something similar with IAP. You won't make a living doing this without serious investment in marketing, sales and product but you can probably bring in a little bit of $ per month. I guess I would question the efficiency of this based on your hourly rate and how long you'd spend building this versus just donating money or time directly to charity.
You could also help a charity build an app they need and save them thousands of dollars.
Or build a website that matches charities with benevolent developers. Oh wait that exists:
https://www.donatecode.com
I want an Android app that does this: samples my location data at a regular interval (that I define) and posts it to an URL (that I also define). I run a lot and would prefer to track my own runs vs having my data live on RunKeeeper or wherever.
Building our family's Farmhouse into got a farm 2 table homestead where houseless* women are supplied various resources opportunities around health and career management. $ would daily rates.