I think that kind of the idea with http://barnacl.es/, it's more about people trying to bootstrap and/or run a lifestyle business, but I'd say that overlaps with the 'side-project that makes money' crowd pretty well.
I have been reading it for the past few months, the traffic is pretty low and it's a bit marketing guide heavy at times, but overall an interesting community IMHO.
is one - for sharing ideas and getting feedback. I've read a few interesting threads and advice and results there. Also, their site design and appearance are interesting (though a side point).
I guess ProductHunt too, though haven't checked that a lot (yet).
I find the entrepreneur subreddit to be pretty terrible, honestly. My biggest problem is that to the less experienced, reading it can give you a false sense of being productive. Many years ago, I was reading it constantly because I was convinced one day I would find the secret to having a successful business.
However, it's overwhelmingly filled with people who have pretty low ambitions. It's mostly projects that are better suited for an etsy store than they are as a stand-alone startup. The ones with more ambition are usually something like "Uber for dogs" or "Facebook for dogs" and lack any real possibility of ever becoming a meaningful product.
I totally agree, but occasionally there are posts that are worthwhile. Some people have done great write ups about how they've scaled their small businesses to a point where they make a living, but like I said... have to weed through a lot of junk to see something good.
My wife is making high 4 figures a month (record was 13k+) selling educational PDFs on a 3rd party website.
Anything is possible if there's a demand and you market to that audience. Differentiating "cool" from real demand is the hard part. That said, she makes me feel completely inadequate with her side project ;)
Money isn't everything. How sustainable your business is, your required level of commitment on an ongoing basis, and how happy you are doing what you do are also very important.
She sells (exclusively) on TeachersPayTeachers.com. Educators create resources and list them online for others to download/buy. Each seller is required to have at least one free resource so somewhere around 5%~10% are free.
The payment structure is basically 70% to the seller, or the seller can pay a flat fee of $60/yr to become a "premium" seller and then keep 85% of sales. What's nice about their platform is that the customers are highly qualified and support is mostly offloaded to their support staff. When a customer makes a direct inquiry (to a seller like my wife) about a product there's a very high chance they will actually convert, so time answering questions is well-spent. If a customer wants a refund they contact TPT directly, so it can be a very hands-off kind of thing. We've discussed selling off-site to recover a piece of the 15% but it hardly seems worthwhile because of their infrastructure and how it allows her to focus on creating new products.
TPT has posted engineering job openings on HN in the past and seems like it'd be a great place to work in NYC if anyone is looking. I don't represent or know them personally but get a strong positive impression from their virtual meetings with sellers and people who I know who work closely with them.
As I understand it they have a bit of cross-pollination with the team at Etsy, which is another interesting marketplace similar to TPT but for arts & crafts products. You might know Etsy from their blog at codeascraft.com, presentations they openly host, or because Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) works there. If not, their blog is worth checking out.
I do 2-4 k a month on adult oriented webcam sites. Running on autopilot updating every 60 sec. Have a normal job and nobody really knows about this side project..... no work required just paying for hosting and domains. My big secret, my family would kill me if they saw the sites.
I run a college wrestling website, http://www.wrestlestats.com. I'm right at about the break-even point with the site through the ads I have on the site, but hopefully it will get better. Trying to find some people willing to donate/invest so I can get my new version of the site completed.
This is pretty cool. One of my favourite websites when I was in high school was MileStat/MileSplit. It was specifically geared towards high school runners in each of the states. I assume it started out specifically at the national level, but they've bought up state specific sites to merge under 1 banner.
I don't know much about wrestling, but perhaps consider taking on the high school level.
I've thought about doing that (actually, my one helper WANTS me to open it up to New Jersey High School, which is where he's from). It would require some decent architecture changes, but the majority of those I'm working on this summer....so maybe in the future.
I run AdsXposed (https://adsxposed.com) on the side. It's a project that scrapes online ads (specifically popups and redirects) and provides intelligence on them. Which publishers they popped on, which countries, to which devices, etc. It brings in pretty reasonable $$$.
We scrape hundreds of thousands of publishers who we know run the popup/redirect ads, with IP's from 100 + countries, spoofing hundreds of different mobile devices / orientations / etc. There's a little more magic to it than just those things, but that's the principle.
We see what popups appear, and then record this info and show it in the tool.
Smart. In that context, I can see the value. If I was going to create an ad campaign or something, I would want to start with a base that I knew was working.
Interesting. I can see how that kind of data is valuable to advertisers. Have you thought about ways to get value from the data about spam ads? The ones that target mobile devices are especially bad these days.
I write retro indie videogames and averaged 1k/mo for the first year and a half after my last release [1]. That dies off pretty quickly if you don't constantly promote though. I have a couple new games launching later this year, one of which is by contract - a 7th guest style puzzle game, and another Action RPG. I've been supplementing my gamedev income with WooCommerce clients, such as [2]. These are purely side projects outside my normal day job as an aerospace engineer.
you took the ponzi scheme and applied it to marketing. That's glorious. I am starting to believe what I once read about the brightest minds of our era being too busy trying to devise new effective ways to make us click on the ads.
You should change your table for free/pro/enterprise so entries about the same thing are in the same row, e.g. "100 emails per contest" should be in the same row as "Unlimited emails per contest".
And the time before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9508528
And the time before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6884552