Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

Might not be the same thing, but I had/have built (a) project(s) that I began with the dreams of someday monetizing, but later realized, maybe I shouldn't, couldn't figure out how to charge for it, or didn't see a need of why anyone would pay to use it, and thus, ended up just keeping it as a "free platform".

I'm not upset about the decisions I've made for keeping my projects free, as if anything, they have taught me a lot, and I tend to use what I learned from them for future projects. In most cases, I end up turning on an Analytics feature and studying it, in order to understand the behavior of my users, and exactly what they are using it for and why, so that I can harness that into ideas for future projects.

Two projects like this were a blog I run called Confessions of the Professions ( http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com ). This website was created in order to solicit rants and raves from people about their jobs, careers, and their workplace. While I wouldn't call it a complete failure or complete success, as it has been monetized and makes money through ads, I would've loved to figured out a way to bring in revenue and make it a full time job.

The reason I say success and failure: It goes viral for days and weeks at a time, sometimes receiving over 10,000 visitors a day, while other days, it normally gets its average of about 1,000, though it could be worse. Sometimes, I cannot fully recognize the fact that I began with just Googlebot, my mom, and girlfriend as my visitors, and yet I continue to receive hundreds of emails a year with contributions and people thanking me. I even had a teacher from an elementary class full of students using some of the articles for their school project and thanked me so much for creating the website.

Confessions remains an ongoing project.. I'm always writing articles or receiving them from other people and getting them ready for the website, so I'd say I spent a good 2 years passionate about it and into it, hours and hours a day. I've since limited myself to no more than 1 hour per day on it. Occasionally 2 hours if writing an article.

For the other project, MyPost ( https://mypost.io ) is a web page creation platform that allows anyone to create a page with very little knowledge of HTML or CSS in seconds, or they can completely customize their page with HTML and CSS as they see fit. And there is soo much that people can do with it. I created it for a number of different reasons as well, including as an educational tool for people to learn what it was like to code. Social media has catered to the population so much that while everyone "can use social media and the Internet", far fewer can claim to hit the "View Source" button and actually understand all that makes a website what it is.

As for charging for this, I never could figure it out and hoped to one day just put ads on the website, but ended up scratching this idea, as the ads were just too annoying, even for me. I can tolerate some ad popups, but I created the platform to offer people an experience, not an annoyance. It is this project that taught me a lot about databases and a lot about what people want on the Internet, and that is: an easy way to gain exposure. I have plans for a another project that helps people to do that, similar to ProductHunt and Hacker News.

The time I spent on this was about 3 months initially and then another 2 months just making some changes, fixing things, creating samples, etc.

I would love to quit my day job and just work on side projects and monetize them.. as I'm sure many of us would, but I have yet to get to that point completely. I do have a few projects I built completely with monetization in mind, and while there is a free version of those products, I built them as a subscription-based platform. I also have a few other projects in mind that I have no intentions of charging for.... for some projects, it is more about gaining exposure and recognition for me.

Arcade game developer here.

I loved the game concept of ABA's "Defeat Me": http://wonderfl.net/c/9ykQ . SHMUP where each enemy is a copy of you. Round 3 you fight a clone of Round 1, Round 2, mirrored.

but I disagreed with several major design decisions:

1) Rounds were too difficult (a deadline came in very fast, the bullets were nearly the size of the ship) 2) Player movement & weapons changed rapidly (speed & number of shots per spread was a modulo on the level number 3) Losing meant you retried the same level.. at that point in the game, you basically be stuck. I wanted the game to restart.

I improved on the game with pixel-perfect collision, weapon animations and other design decisions like letting the player screen-wrap around the edge but not the clones, regaining time on the deadline when you killed a clone and more.

I even experimented with a co-op, 2 variants of 1 Versus 1 mode and a Replay site before removing them for the core experience.

I made the game because I wanted to play it. Making money was a secondary goal but I'm proud of the game and find it way more fun than most games I've played. How many games do you know that have an AI procedurally determined by your movements?

Revenue earned: 3 * $10 on "pay what you want" from itch.io. 1 from a friend's friend who overhead on a Skype chat that I made a game, 1 from an indie developer at a games meetup and 1 from a friend when I sent them a link.

+ often, stick to the core relentlessly. Carve away crap that doesn't fit no matter how cool it is or fun to make. I spent too much time iterating on mobile interfaces when gamepad controller support was far superior and passed "the bar test" (give to strangers at a bar and watch them cheer other strangers on as they pass the controller around).

Play [1], An old trailer [2]

[1] http://QuantumPilot.me (redirects to itch.io) [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy_GBLM_6Qs

Fileloupe for Mac (https://www.fileloupe.com)

Videoloupe for Mac (https://www.videoloupe.com)

These are both macOS applications that have yet to reach enough in sales to be sustainable. However, I work on them full-time in hopes of reaching sustainability in the near future.

"Why do you think it hasn't been as successful as you thought it would be..."

Exposure and importance. Getting exposure for a macOS application (or any application for that matter) is tough. The lion's share of excitement these days is around mobile applications and web services. Trying to get publishers excited enough to write about a desktop application is challenging...

Importance is something that's taken me a little bit to understand. There might be some "utility" or "nice to have" applications for macOS that make a decent living, but I think if you really want to turn an application into something that has long-term sustainability, then you need to find a way for your application to become essential to a user's workflow. Excel, Lightroom and Final Cut Pro are all essential applications to their respective user's. Fileloupe and Videoloupe are "nice to have" apps in their current versions. People enjoy them, but they aren't essential.

With the exception of maybe a few outliers, I'm not convinced that you can make a living selling macOS apps for $10 and hope to make up revenue on volume. I think you need to get into a higher price range and if you want to sell a more expensive product to someone, then it has to fall under the "essential" category and not the "nice to have". That's my goal with Fileloupe 2.0 and Videoloupe 2.0, but there's a ton of development to do.

(Oh, and I'd forgot how much more work went into making a macOS application versus an iOS application. To say that my original time estimates were off is a laughable under-statement.)

"How much time/money did you spend building it..."

Development on Fileloupe started in the spring of 2014 and version 1.0 shipped in the summer of 2015. Development on Videoloupe started in the summer of 2016 and 1.0 shipped in the spring of 2017. Living expenses have been cut drastically over the years so that I can continue to do this full time. (Hint: Living in Thailand is a lot cheaper than living in San Francisco or Vancouver...) Sadly, I don't belong to any special "comma club" so there's an end-date to this dream if profitability cannot be reached.

"What kind of iterations / improvements did you make to try and salvage it"

I learned a ton building version 1.0 of each product. Arguably, I learned more than I should of and likely would have been better off starting with a bit more of a plan and clearer vision for each app. Regardless, I now have a much better idea of what each app should be and I'm hard at working on version 2.0 for each.

We haven't made any money at Fogbeam Labs[0] yet. I could talk a lot about the reasons why, and why I'm still crazy optimistic, but it might take a while to write it all up. Maybe I'll do a blog post one day. I think it's all too long for an HN comment.

That said, I can try to distill out a few key points:

(in no particular order )

1. Doing this as a "side project" while the founders still work day jobs. I think doing that is fine, but it limits how fast you can move and how aggressive you can be.

2. And (1) goes hand in hand with this one, which is "not being focused enough". I should have emphasized a "what is the single most important thing we can do now to generate revenue" approach from the beginning. Instead, we worked on this "grand vision" which is pretty cool, but took forever to get close to having a shippable product.

3. Early on I was thinking mostly about on-premises deployments, with the idea of rolling the code into a SaaS version as "next step". In hindsight, that was probably exactly backwards. Going SaaS, and going "down market" in terms of customer size would have made it easier, I believe, to get initial traction. IoW, as Mark Suster put it[1] "hunt deer, not elephants".

4. Not taking my health seriously enough. As some of you may recall, I had a heart attack[2] near the end of 2014. And while I lived and was able to get back in the saddle, that whole ordeal happened at a really bad time from a company perspective and cost us basically the entire following year, as I recovered both physically and mentally. In hindsight, I was pushing myself way too hard, and not doing the things I should have been doing w/r/t diet, exercise, etc.

On the flip side, we have done some things right. Probably the most notable is keeping the burn rate extraordinarily low. We spend a small enough amount of money that I can fund our current activity level out of my pocket nearly indefinitely. Which is a big part of why we're not out of business despite having no revenue. And now things are starting to look up, as we have one really solid prospect in the pipeline and are deep into the transition to a SaaS delivery model for the "old" products, and have a really cool new SaaS offering stirring as well.

The interesting point for us will be if we can sign even 3 or 4 relatively small deals and get some real traction established. Then we can decide if we want to go pursue outside money or not, or if we want to just keep doing the organic growth thing.

[0]: https://www.fogbeam.com

[1]: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/most-startups-should-be-deer-hunters-7fdecf58f4f6?gi=e6ce05a92130

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8550315

I built a SMS marketing web-app. It's basically a contact-management and mass messenger, nothing fancy. Heroku/django/twilio/stripe stack. People can sign up for your list, and you send them deals or events or whatever as regularly as you feel like.

I built it for a niche that is not very tech-savvy, and largely couldn't be targeted by SEO, because my partner was going to handle sales. The partner faded away almost immediately and there hasn't been any real revenue to speak of. It pays for itself.

It was built for my own business as the original customer, and that business still uses it, but nobody else does. At our peak we had maybe 4 paying customers, but our onboarding wasn't great either (we were brand new) and they didn't all see the value in it.

Anyway, I think with more sales and better onboarding we'd have had a good MRR and not much churn.

Heroku has more than doubled their monthly fee since it started. It used to be profitable with one customer, now it is breakeven, +/- a few dollars. I think I'll move it soon to a $5 VM and it should make about $60/month at that point.

I made some mistakes:

1) trusting my partner to make sales. I already knew they weren't a workaholic.

2) No vesting cliffs or anything. We just have 50/50 and that's it, so I was not interested in working on it solo and paying out half the money, nor starting a fight for full control. I wouldn't lose much to rename it and take it elsewhere, but I wouldn't feel right about it. Anyway he quit selling within a month (about 15-30 hours invested iirc) and so we were dead in the water. I'm close with him and so I left it at that to avoid damaging our personal relationship.

3) I used long-codes, which is a nono for mass-texting. We had some dropped texts, or we think we did (it's very hard to diagnose). Shortcodes were very expensive at the time; I don't know what the options look like now. You can probably pay for access to someone else's shortcode. We don't notice any issues with the remaining customer, which has a list of a couple hundred folks.

I haven't touched the code for over 3 years and it still runs. That's pretty impressive, probably my most solid system. Also some kudos to heroku for not breaking it somehow in that time.

I've never shipped any personal project since then, although I'm getting close on one now. I continued to make the mistake of picking bad co-founders, so for this one I'm solo. I don't expect to get rich, as I have no marketing plan and I find most marketing distasteful. So maybe I'll get lucky, or maybe I'll expose myself to some strangers on here or somewhere when it's ready to sell.