Ask HN: Who has turned a side project to full time gig? And at what revenue?
Side projects seem to remain side projects as long as they don’t make a lot of money. But I think just asking about side project is not really useful if you really want to know what’s the chance that a side project could find something bigger.
I’m curious to know who here has had a side project transitioned to a full-time business, and at what revenue numbers, if you’re willing to share, the transition occurred.
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When you say "Full time gig" are you referring to full-time revenue to live on or full-time such as 40 hours a week? I turned my micro SaaS (B2B) company into a full-time gig (After about 12-15 months), it generates around 45K per year of revenue and requires little time to maintain (around 5 hours a month), albeit it took me 750-1,000 hours to build it and another 100-150 hours of customer dev before I could reall dial in the business problem. My other more truly full time gig is a SaaS company (B2B) that generates around 100K and that takes up nearly all of my time (30+ hours a week). They both started as ideas, then on-to side-projects, and finally to full-time gigs. It did take some time and I had to keep coding away until I say enough traction to really know it would evolve though. Does that answer your question?
Hey, This is a really good site for your question. https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses
As a follow up question: I'm pretty curious as to if you are working on a sideproject should you create a business and than products for that business or just label it as products. For instance Microsoft has Bing, Azure, and other products.
I'm currently in the process of deciding whether to sell my most recent side-project($400 recurring profit in 1.5 months), transfer it to a friend from business school and keep a large percent of profits, or to hire some part time digital assistants to run the support. Its a tough decision but I realized that the weekly support emails and upkeep was keeping me form developing my other ideas.
https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/wjRD/solo-founders-with-profitable-businesses-collected-stories.html
Check Indie hackers https://www.indiehackers.com/