Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2020 – Show and tell
It seems this question hasn't been asked for some time, so I'd be interested hear what new (and old) ideas have come up.
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2020 where @folli 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 Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 105 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 76 comments
I started WebRender back in the spring to scratch a personal itch. Was lucky enough to get a couple good reference customers early on so it's already bringing in enough to keep the lights on:
https://webrender.io/
Basically, it's a quick and easy way to get SSR up and running for sites that use modern frontend frameworks for their whole site. It seems that every team I work with needs to jump through the same crazy set of hoops and stand up servers just so they can serve pre-rendered pages to search engines.
Our thing solves the problem by sitting in front of your site (using Cloudflare Workers), passing regular traffic through, and showing crawlers a cached, pre-rendered version.
Best (for me), it's designed to fail open, meaning customers are unaffected if my stuff falls over. Thus, letting me have things like weekends and sleep.
I have a revenue of around $2500 for my productized SaaS SEO business with 20% profit margin. I sell SEO, Content and Graphic design service at a fixed rate of $599/month to SME's.
In this amount I provide 4000 words of content, 6 good quality graphics and few quality backlinks. Anything on top of this is a paid add-on.
I have hired a team of SEO Specialists, Content Writers and Graphic Designers. Most of my revenue goes in paying their salaries.
I found few takers(all dentists) of my service from Australia.
The best thing is that I have not even built any website or any FB, Instagram Page and still I am making this money through my old contacts.
I guess with my website launching in next few days, I should be able to sell even more and reach to around 100 customers in next year or two.
I’m building a private analytics suite for websites. It aims to be a more complete toolset than alternatives like Plausible, Fathom or Simple Analytics (great products too BTW). Feeling super lucky as I just launched and already handling millions of page views per month for 200+ customers.
Not yet at $500 MRR but I’m focusing on providing a lot of value in a simple package, and automating as much as possible to reduce daily operations and move fast.
The stack mainly consists of Python, React, Postgres, Clickhouse, and Redis running on Kubernetes (deployment configured via Terraform and Kustomize). Was running on DO + Linode and just moved to AWS.
https://panelbear.com
Happy to answer any questions!
Still working my day development job and now doing about $150k/month in a side project with 10 employees.
- make lists and use them!
- block lunches use them for meetings
- have day job pay your healthcare
- day job work stops on time! no meetings before 9 or after 5
- leverage your “No” to all frivolous time wasters
- focus on day job, side project, family, one hobby for exercise (4-6 hrs/ week)
- get really good at delegating and automating tasks
- hire overseas contractors to do menial, repetitive tasks that can’t be automated
- don’t sell software instead find something “real” that can be enhanced with software
- identify a customer and charge upfront; it’s the only way you’ll learn
It's probably a bit different from the usual HN side-projects, but I sell stickers on the internet. A bunch of print shops went belly up during this spring and I accidentally won an auction for the machinery for a song.
So far I've been selling by word-of-mouth, and in September I started an Etsy store. I'm also building https://egnastickers.se, but that landing page alone made me €100 in sales.
I'm close to €1k in sales for October on Etsy and I'm racing to sell as much as possible before the end of the year when Brexit wipes out more than half my current customer base.