During COVID I was in Mexico. At some point I wanted to go horseback riding. I was researching places to go horseback riding and I was not at all surprised to see I would have to make some calls to book.
Fast-forward a few weeks, I become pretty good friends with the owner at the ranch I went to. We grab tacos one night and he shares his concerns: They're not doing so well financially and are worried about whether or not they'll be able to afford feed in a month.
I got involved and we solved that problem and a few more: revamped the website (it looked and felt like it was from 2006), I whipped up a booking/reservation system to get more customers through the door, and exit surveys to make sure everything was perfect (and figure out what went wrong if it wasn't).
Bookings this month are up 490% from 2018 (according to the paper waivers they had) and that's without a single dollar spent in paid marketing. I answer a few emails every day from prospective riders and make sure everyone's happy. I get a percentage of each reservation which is cool, but the coolest part is that I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranch.
Mexicos overall internet presence is literally stuck in the early 2000s.
Most business' official website are a Facebook page.
In a country of 150M people and growing expat presence, there is a TON of opportunities for software businesses to enter the market.
For example: Riviera Maya has no MLS style real estate tracker/listing platform. The entire real estate industry operates on word of mouth, WhatsApp and Facebook messages.
I keep running into this in the US in large cities. Really well regarded restaurants or music venues do everything through FB and insta. I don't have either of those apps, and I don't remember my passwords from a decade ago. Isn't there a service somewhere, where you give someone some pictures of your food, and restaurant, and you get a container and credentials for a webpage that handles reservations, takes pickup or delivery orders, and lets you update the menu? Why do people do this?
Because Facebook is simple. Any one can update it, and it doesn't go down, and it doesn't cost anything.
I've many times seen web presences fail for small organizations, when the only person that understands the web set up leaves. With Facebook, that doesn't happen.
I'm sure there are services such as you describe, and probably many restaurants use them, and it's not obvious. But Facebook is the default.
No, because facebook is free and they are cozy with the mexican government and this allows them to operate in a country without net neutrality. Therefore facebook, whatsapp and instagram are included for free in most if not all cellphone plans and pay per month options.
I've seen that too. Or when the framework chosen goes away. If the person at a small restaurant or non profit who understood the page goes away you can at least find someone to come up to speed. But sometimes it relies on stuff that just isn't there anymore and you have to start over. I'm not in web dev, or whatever its called, but is there some technology in the space that is the equivalent ofba T-shirt and blue jeans, or a charcoal suit, that will be fine for a couple decades with only informational updates?
You have to constantly install updates for it to stay secure, then every second update your theme breaks, you find out it's not updated for the new version and have to redesign the whole page.
I’ve wondered this too. I don’t know any young people (at least nobody my kids’ ages between 17 and 26) who use Facebook. It seems like they might be missing a large part of their target audience.
Others have pointed out the simplicity of it. Just use an existing platform, doesn't take much IT skill at all.
The other answer is that this is where the people are. Why waste time building your own website when only those searching you will visit it? Interacting with the various social media platforms instead gives you far more options on discoverability.
If you must maintain a presence on those platforms anyways, it becomes even less compelling for a small non-tech company to maintain their own infrastructure.
As a Mexican who travels plenty to the US and works for an American company and has worked for another top-tier software company from the US, I believe this statement is false.
E-commerce platforms, “sharing economy” apps, neo-banks, dating apps, real estate platforms, etc. are all used every single day by millions of people.
Mexican living in México, ~95% of the population use Facebook, word of mouth or driving around where you want to find a place to rent. Of course there are many sites that you can use to find a place to rent, but the best deals and more options are available on Facebook.
Facebook doesn't act as the central trust authority. So as an expat, most realtor is telling me to avoid FB and use them because scams. But as a user it's inefficient to talk to 20 Realtors for 20 listings.
I just want something in between that doesn't inflate the actual price by 40%
Facebook marketplace is as trustless as you can get. It's 2010 version of Kijiji/Craigslist with built-in picture upload.
Right now depending on how much effort you want to spend, you can get a place for $2000 usd a month or $600 a month, for relatively similar unit maybe 20min of walk distance apart. Simply because information does not flow freely.
Airbnb fixed the trust issue and dominated rental market in the last few years. But hefty fees + taxes are making them less and less viable for travelers.
I honestly see a big opportunity to just improve the overall experience. Especially considering Riviera Maya is the fasted growing realestate market in Mexico.
If you're serious about working on something like this, email me (check my profile), let's connect.
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> I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranc
You must get business cards made and start distributing them to friends and family whenever you get the chance. Not for marketing - to brag and to be able to be mildly annoying.
It's definitely my favorite fun fact. I'm grow up in the city but I spent a few summer days on a horse growing up. One of my earliest memories was horseback riding with my mom. I must have been no older than 18 months.
Note that you can also use the ranch business cards as 'get out of jail cards' to avoid social chatter when you need to change the subject: You note that the in-law starts taking the discussion towards some uncomfortable topic during thanksgiving dinner. You immediately use the card: "Say, have I given you my business card?" - and then you move on to talk about the ranch. Even if they interrupt you and try to get back to the topic, the topic will be derailed for good. Usable every 6 months by pretending that you forgot that you already gave them your business card...
My 16-year-old remembers a pediatrician's office she hasn't seen since she was 18 months old (we moved across the country). She described it well enough that her dad and I were both convinced. I was shocked.
We must work with the same people. I work with a guy who would devote dozens/hundreds of hours to this project just for the business card opportunities.
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My wife runs a riding academy and she's been resistant to any kind of online or off-farm marketing, relying instead on word of mouth. She thinks we get a better quality of customer that way and we have little trouble keeping our herd busy.
Of course our business is centered around repeat riders, it would be a very different business to organize trail rides for strangers.
Our barn is much smaller than most (7 horses at the high water) but it has been consistently profitable. A barn with more horses and a large staff could bring in more revenue but costs will be higher too. There is a barn down the road that has nice facilities but has had several managers and has only been viable with the last one. We know another troubled barn with an alcoholic owner who has a large off-farm income that has struggled economically and has a legendarily bad safety culture. (I took 10 rides there before we were in full swing and had 3 'near miss' accidents)
I swear I read the FAQ and the last question was "Are you real? Sometimes. I mean, yes.". I chuckled at that one and it was the end of the page!? Or ir wasn't? OP if you just added it please tell me :) (nah, just partly joking, I'm sincerely confused though)
This is awesome. Only one minor thing about the website. On mobile when i click on "Meet Pam", the logo in the header is white and the background beige, making it unreadable.
Thanks! We get a lot of compliments on the copy. I wanted to reflect that we are indeed a Mexican horse ranch without the site being incredibly boring. There's only so many cool things you can show/say before you realize that horses aren't really all that interesting on the internet.
Not sure if the website is broken, but attempting to book 2 people and clicking a time does nothing on iOS Safari. It might be worth looking at the analytics for device distribution but I presume iOS is the bulk of your traffic, si probably worth optimising it.
I noticed this too. I think it’s because those time slots are not available (if you choose a date a couple months away, you’ll be able to click there time slot). The solution would be to print “No availability” instead of disabled time slot buttons.
Thanks for sharing this! i feel this is a cautionary tale for us HN-minded folks since i see a rather unusual love for the look and feel of the "old internet", and what i like to call the Craigslist style of design. As someone who remembers the internet of the 90s and early 2000s before it was taken over by ads and SEO spam,
i understand the nostalgia, but as a web developer, also know that i need to do right by my clients and build things for them that make their businesses successful. An old outdated website turns away many customers.
Ironically, a badly designed modern website turns me away. (sometimes because the thing literally doesn't work)
I remember trying to book a place and there was some issue with the z-index and I couldn't click to confirm the dates on the pop-up calendar. Made me wonder how much $$$ they could be losing because the % of people willing/know how to delete the offending element must be pretty small.
I agree 100% with what you're saying though. Older websites appear more "complex" to a lot of people. There's good middle grounds though. The new netflix for iOS is really nice, imo. Leans more towards form but still functions very well.
This is one the examples where the exception proves the rule. After introducing my friends and family to a CLI-based booking tool I wrote for them, they have swore off website UI's since. Every other week I get an excited e-mail stating how great the tool is, and how they have also convinced their own friends to give up JavaScript and turn towards Rust.
I did something very similar for Surfing schools. Not yet making any money off it, but I am trying to. Reaching out to other surfing schools, improving the product adding new features.
It's mostly CRUD, and the stack is very boring: Rails/Hotwire/Bootstrap, about 10k lines (we have apps for the staff on the ground, agents and agencies that we partner with, and some other stuff in there). The tricky part of handling the bookings is that on any given day we have a limited number of horses and multiple types of rides: 3 trails at 10AM, 1 trail at 3PM. A few times a month we'll max out the horses and not have availability for a given time. We can burst horsepower if we need to and accommodate bigger groups if we're hitting capacity and suspect load will maintain its current HPH. (that was a stretch; I tried)
We also track what horses have been used and how much so that we're not riding them into the ground — the people on the ground have an app I built in Framework7 to manage everything; they love it and Framework7 is very fun once you get rolling.
We ask for a 20% deposit to "hold [your] horses" and to prevent no-shows; the rest is transacted at the ranch (though we make the option to pay in full available if you email us). Our cancellation policy extremely flexible and though we say 24 hours on the site, we've never not refunded someone.
An absolutely amazing story. I’ve wondered for a while how powerful bringing skilled software engineers (let’s be honest, people don’t give us credit for the amount of actual business skill is required to effectively do this job) into small businesses would work. Most people who don’t work in tech or advertising don’t think so much about tracking everything. It presents a pretty big opportunity for both small business owners and software people.
One of the things I wanted to do was understand who our customer was. They had really no idea. Waivers are all digitalized and ask for the basics: name, date of birth, where you're from, emergency contact. I use a "gender API" to get the gender of the rider the best we can, and from there we have learned a lot about who our typical customer is.
Some fun factoids:
* typical rider is 35-44. Less than 10% of riders are under the age of 24,
* about half of people book when they're in Mexico
* average lead time is 7 days
* about 66% of riders have riding exp; about 33% consider themselves "novice" or "expert" riders
Question is how sustainable is that. If you get bored at some point, who will be able to take it over. RoR is a reasonably safe and stable stack from the PoV of software devs, but the discussion above about facebook makes me wonder if they'll end up in 10 years with a website 'stuck in 2020'.
A long time ago, I made some Flash games. I recently converted some of them away from Flash and released them together as a desktop game for modern computers.
I am currently making more than $500 a month from this, although I don't necessarily expect that to continue. Games are a crowded market. It was a fun project, though.
He says in the discussion that porting the games from flash took 3 years. I'm aware that sometimes a single bog post can be the result of a lot of work, but that's next level!
Wanted to join the chorus of nostalgic thank yous! I played the original for hours with my buddies on library computers in grade school. Definitely some core memories. Thanks!
What is the tech stack for this? I really want to build small apps like this and have a diversified portfolio but don't know where to start. Are you still earning 3K/month from this and what kind of on-going marketing are you doing?
You might want to play around with the encoding on your videos. On a Windows machine with a i7-8770k (and dedicated GPU) with Firefox latest, the page was spiking up to 100% GPU usage, causing the browsing experience to slow to a crawl. It may be related due to me having a Twitch stream up on a second display.
Probably a Firefox bug, but it's preventing me from looking at this landing page that every one else seems to like :P
Wow this is interesting, you write "read like snapper" on the homepage. I made a screenshot tool for iOS which is actually called Snapper. I have been working on/maintaining it since 2014!
Yes definitely, over the years I've seen a few names with 'snap' as a base. It makes sense. I also tried to get snapper.com some times (although in my niche audience a website is not required at all). For the name, I think read it as ex-napper.
It began in 2016 out of some frustration I was having with consulting clients who would modify their DNS records incorrectly, breaking their email and/or website until I was able to get them back online. It was frustrating digging through emails or old technical documents to find the original values before they had made their changes. I wanted a tool that could automatically backup those records to make reverting easy while at the same time notifying me of any changes so issues could be proactively fixed before their business was impacted.
So with that, ZoneWatcher was born. Depending on your plan, we check multiple times per hour and take a snapshot of each zone's records. When a change happens, we record the change and send you a notification so you can review and have the necessary data to revert if it was in error.
Making close to $500/mo now since a major relaunch / feature update back in December with a decent stream of new users every month. No major marketing done yet other than just word of mouth and the occasional reddit post on /r/msp's vendor threads.
I set up an account with the public DNS provider and it doesn't appear to support multiple entries per record type. For example, time.cloudflare.com has two A records but the UI only shows the one.
Shortly after stable diffusion was released, I realized that an enormous number of non-ML people were suddenly interested in using an ML model.
However, APIs are insanely expensive and not very developer friendly, and running it yourself required pretty fancy hardware. The goal was to make the technology absolutely as accessible as possible.
So I launched https://computerender.com with the simplest API possible - just a URL that points to an image like:
https://api.computerender.com/generate/cupcake-of-the-sky.jp...
I monitor the prices on vast.ai and runpod to find the cheapest GPUs and run the service nearly at cost (as little as $0.0001 per image). No subscriptions, only pay for what you use.
Recently hit 700k images generated, and am excited to continue expanding the service.
> Feels like one of those "feature of a bigger product" things. But I wonder if there'd be a market for a service where you can get ai generated images just via url. "thingy.com/?prompt=weird picture of a cat with frog ears" or whatever and it returns the image.
Rad to see it validated in the wild & a clever approach to optimising your costs.
Yeah! For demo and testing purposes. Feel free to play around/build toy apps with it. There is a small global rate limit for all unauthenticated users though so don't rely on it :)
Out of curiosity, how do you handle traffic surges? Do you just have to manually add more servers? Or did you write a script to auto purchases more servers on vast.ai since there isn't any autoscaling feature there (that I am aware of)
https://extensionpay.com — A really simple way for browser extension developers to take payments in their extensions. I made it to use in my own extensions since it's a pain in the butt to take payments in browser extensions.
It has an open source library that works across all browsers and allows for one-time or subscription payments. Since 2021 developers have made over $125k with ExtensionPay which makes me happy :)
Great way to solve a problem! For those that may be curious. Author said devs using Extension Pay have made $125k in 2021. They charge 5% on transactions which translates to $6250, roughly $520 per month. Perfect candidate for this thread.
i've def thought of using this before, but couldn't quite figure out if i trusted it.
so far, nope!
i appreciate that the site looks clean/barebones, but the logo is _so_ barebones -- just text -- that i thought... oh, this is just unsupported, someone thought of doing it, good idea, but then it didn't make any money, so they bailed, no harm no foul, wonder if someone else will do it b/c it's really needed.
i've had various extensions over the years that i wanted to build out, or pay someone else to build out, but there was no way to recoup my investment.
https://fider.io - an open source alternative to UserVoice. I started this one 6 years ago to learn Go and React. I’ve seen thousands of instances out there being self hosted, so I started a cloud hosting to those who don’t want to manage it themselves.
https://aptakube.com - Desktop Client for Kubernetes. This is very recent, launch was 2 weeks ago, so it’s only starting to get some traction now.
I’m leaving my job to go full time indie hacker now, wish me luck!
Good luck!
How do you make money from an Open Source alternative to UserVoice? Is it only through cloud hosting, or you get paid when they self-host as well?
The DX is a thousand times better than Electron. The ecosystem is not as rich yet, but it’s getting there. The Discord community is very active and passionate about the project as well.
I sell handmade sculptures of influential people and famous monuments on Etsy - https://www.etsy.com/shop/jurgenstudio. Revenue is 2-6k USD depending on the season. I hired someone part time who took over production and shipping. it's mostly passive revenue for me apart from growing the business by developing new products when I feel like it. The profit margin is around 50% after all material and labor costs are paid.
This is super cool. Admittedly, I know nothing about creating concrete figures -- I imagine the real artistic work is in creating the mold? Can you share how that is done -- is a sculpture created and then surrounded by the mold material?
1. I hire a 3d designer to create the 3d model I want. For example, I send him a couple of photos of Alan Turing
2. After I am happy with the likeness, I 3d print it. In this phase the 3d model comes to life and it's usually quite different from what we see on the computer as a 3d model. It has something to do with the difference in perspectives in which the designer designs shapes and in which we observe the item when it's produced as a real physical shape. This is very hard to get it right. Then we repeat the steps from 1 until I am happy with the likeness and the facial expression (this can be many iterations)
3. When I have the 3d printed positive, I create a mold using silicone rubber
4. The 2-part mold is then ready to be used for hundreds of castings (I use concrete)
Out of curiosity when you say you hired someone to take over production and shipping, do you mean you outsourced it? Or like that from craigslist is producing them now?
It's a an artistic person I found who is happy to produce copies of sculptures for me to get some side income. I teached her how to do it and gave her all my molds so she can do it from her home.
I love the selection and I'm thinking of buying a couple! Is it possible to have special requests made? Wittgenstein would be a great addition (the tryptic Nietzsche / Freud / Wittgenstein has been what forged my weltanschauung )
I get that question a lot. I do not worry about it. There's plenty of similar fan art selling around and I haven't noticed any actions taken to shut them down. I wouldn't reproduce anything under a trademark (for example, Baby Yoda), and as far as I know, human faces are not trademarkable.
I think it depends on how the work is produced for celebrities. If it’s a mass produced product and not one off artisan creations, OP might run into problems
Making several is not the issue, I believe. You could make several slightly different hand crafted statuettes, it’s the mass production of one likeness that’s the issue as I understand it.
It's intended to immediately differentiate from shops who sell cheap plastic sculptures. My customers appreciate heavy brutalist material I use. I spend zero time optimizing SEO, my product images and descriptions are pretty crappy, so I currently don't have much advice to give in that area! What's your shop?
Honestly no game plan, I just enjoy working on both and plan on iterating for a long long time (10+ years) and just slowly growing. I am literally addicted to working on these apps.
I tweet about these projects extensively on Twitter btw if anyone is curious to see what work went into both of these (https://twitter.com/raroque)
I read about Mogul. It solves some of my problems related to keeping in touch with friends. During Covid, I got into more VC calls with friends to stay in touch. Once Covid lockdowns ended, I wanted a system that would remind me of touch basing with XYZ friend, based on last sync up date.
Over several years, my image as a good friend has tarnished since I didn't keep my side of bargain in enforcing good relationships. With older age, it's bit harder to make new friends. The least I can do is, reinforce older ones.
This comment is so so so relatable. I’ve lost a number of great friendships/relationships in my life because of how much I suck at keeping in touch with folks. I can’t even blame those folks for considering me a bad friend because of this. What does make me sad though is when some of them think I do this on purpose or that I don’t care about them. While I excel at many things, frankly, keeping in touch with family and friends is one of those social skills I’m not so great at. I constantly feel misunderstood on this point, but I get it, no one owes me understanding, especially if they perceive me to be a bad friend. On the bright side, this has made me much slower to judge others when they don’t behave the way I’d prefer. Anyway, I digress . . .
I just wanted to let you know I understand your perspective here.
Although Mogul was originally built for professional networking, I personally use it to maintain personal relationships (it’s amazing to see how impactful it is when you can recall super small details about someone/a convo with a friend).
Do (or did) you struggle with two products in very different areas? I think like most folks here I have ideas for products in very different niches and part of the analysis paralysis for me is deciding which one is "best" to start with.
I got over both the starting paralysis (and then the subsequent doubt paralysis that I picked the wrong one to work on) by doing 2 major things:
1. Making the definition of "project success" being that I learned a ton.
Once I did this (like consciously did it, for example my decision to work on E2EE was a terrible biz decision because nobody asked for it, but I wanted to learn more about cryptography) the decision became easier. I picked the one that had something I wanted to learn in the immediate term. Mogul had more interesting things at the time that I wanted to learn (E2EE, push notifications, CSV uploading, etc...)
2. Choosing to work on these projects over a very long period of time. Once I had the mindset that these were 10+ year projects for me, the approach really stopped mattering to me. As long as I pushed forward, I felt like I was going in the right direction.
Working on 1 feature per app each week vs focusing 1 year on each app stopped mattering because the end result over a 10+ year period would be the same. Both apps would be there, probably have similar features and I would have learned the same things. Just in a different order.
Second one is definitely more specific to me, but I think some of it can be applied when you think about a project/product as a small part of someone's life journey.
Hope that helps!
(edit: I also wanted to say that I have 2 more apps on my roadmap. No idea when I'll start them but I know the I'll do it when the time is right)
I built https://team-today.com in a lock down as a way for my remote team to see when people are on holiday, going to site, or wfh.
Since then it’s grown to include other features like desk booking and PTO approvals. But at it’s all been built around the core concept of seeing when your colleagues are working and where they’re planning on working from.
Great job!
How did you convince users to trust an unknown site to store their personal data?
This is one the things holding me back from implementing my side project ideas. I personally know that I won’t misuse users data but how do I really convince users.
We integrate into MS and Google which holds personal information such as names but we do make an effort to reduce the amount of personal information we hold.
The real difficulty is getting government or financial institutions to buy in, they have LONG approvals processes and require proof that certain security practices are being adhered to (ISO27001 helps but is costly).
Ding, ding, ding! This is correct. I was just ranting to my wife about this. Haha.
I always wonder, “How are these random companies able to convince folks to just give them personal data like that?” And of course, I already know the answer: Practically speaking, most folks don’t give a damn about their data! That’s unfortunate. (Well, not so unfortunate for the companies collecting all of it and their data brokers!)
React, Java, AWS. Took us about 6 weeks to build the initial MVP, each feature we add took a similar amount of time to implement, we typically iterate over things three times. We build something, make it better, then make it perfect. So far so good.
I built KTool (https://ktool.io) — it allows you to forward web articles, newsletters and RSS feeds to your Kindle.
---
I did a Show HN 4 months ago[1].
The reason I started KTool was to spend less time on computer screens, and more on e-ink Kindle. I was afraid of going blind.
After 4 months improving KTool, it now becomes a tool to help you combat doom-scrolling. Instead of mindlessly scrolling the web, I deliberately send interesting articles to my Kindle.
Created Video Hub App (that will be 5 years old next month). I sell it for $5 and $3.50 of each purchase goes to the cost-effective charity Against Malaria Foundation (See GiveWell.org for details).
It was averaging around 100 purchases per month, though it's lower over the last year as I've not had time to release new updates (moving to another state is challenging).
Thanks to the sale of this software I've donated an additional $16,000 to my favorite charity (I give 10% of my income there regularly - see Giving What We Can).
https://videohubapp.com/ - Think of it like YouTube for videos on your computer. Browse, search, and organize your videos
https://getblast.io/ - it is an end-to-end data platform: data ingestion + dbt-like transformations + data quality checks + data catalog, all through a single interface. It is making ~$4k/month currently.
Around the beginning of 2022, I was having a conversation with a few friends that are working at small mobile gaming companies, and they were having a lot of trouble building their data pipelines, especially because of the infrastructure part. I took on the challenge to start hosting some Airflow instances for them to get a bit more familiar with their problems, and over time some patterns started to emerge:
- they were writing custom scripts for mundane tasks.
- they had to write Python code, even though all they needed was scheduling a few SQL tasks.
- they needed some basic transformation abilities, but didn't have the budget to pay dbt-cloud $50/month (the minimum plan is $100 these days, I believe).
- they were losing track of where their data is going through and where it is coming from.
A friend of mine and I have started building some abstractions on top of Airflow to help these businesses: no need to write any Python, automatically deploying their changes to their instances after a git push, building data quality checks, materializing their assets based on their SQL "SELECT" queries, etc. Over time, we have gathered these features into a shared UI, and moved some of these companies piece by piece.
We keep improving the platform, and we are onboarding new companies for the past 2 months throughout our closed beta period. There are still many rough edges that we are trying to cover, but in the end, it was a great feeling when people were actually using the prouct quite often in spite of all these problems. We are pretty excited about where this can go.
If anyone is interested in taking part in the beta program, the first 6 months is free during the beta period. Feel free to fill out the form on the website and I'll reach out personally.
Not sure if this is a snarky comment or not, but we are not building Snowflake, instead we are building the layer that goes on top of it. There are many businesses out there that have their data scattered across different platforms / tools / technologies, and our goal is to provide them visibility into their data, and let them get to the insights as quickly as possible without focusing on the infra.
Our vision here is to bring the same set of abilities to the business even if some of their data lives in Snowflake, some in BigQuery, some in S3 and some in an Excel sheet somewhere. We are working to get to a point where working with all of these will become an easy task, without sacrificing governance, quality, speed or cost.
I don't do any active work on it any longer for the past 2 years or so, other than the small bug fixes/when Twitter changes the archive format. Bracing for a shutdown to the API soon anyway.
Back in college (2016-2020), I used to work part-time for my university’s IT department. Most of my time was spent doing software development, but when I wasn’t busy working on a project, I helped work the help desk ticket queue.
Believe it or not, our ticket queue did not have an auto refresh feature - and manually refreshing my dashboard webpage drove me crazy. As a die-hard macOS user, I’ve always used Safari as my primary browser, but unfortunately no auto-refresh web extensions were available on the App Store at the time. So I learned how to package web extensions for Safari and sell them on the App Store.
Fast-forward to today, and I now have a collection of Web Extensions that net me ~$750 a month. Feel free to check out Simple Refresh for Safari here:
I never did any paid advertising. At this point it's roughly 80% organic algorithmic platform trafic and 20% word-of-mouth. The latter includes outside user-driven platforms, like MiniReview and TapTap.
I used to do guerilla marketting a bunch, mostly on Reddit, certainly a lot before and around release. I got some ok youtuber and streamer coverage around this time. Ended up releasing on Steam with 10k wishlists, which was enough to provide an initial visibility boost.
Soon before releasing on mobile, I participated in the Humble Stand with Ukraine Bundle, where I distributed 200k+ free keys for charity. Marketing value wasn't what was on my mind at the time, but I know quite a lot of people who picked up the bundle tried out the game, thought "neat but I'd prefer to play this on mobile", and then helped to drive a lot of initial traffic and get picked up by the algo.
I also got featured a bunch in both Google's an Apple's curated game collections.
I got pretty into Stable Diffusion soon after it came out. Like a lot of users, I tinkered around with different ways to run it, going the usual route of running on my weak local machine, then going on to runpod, then implementing my own custom solution.
What I came up with worked pretty well for me, so I created a site that allows users to upload custom models and run Stable Diffusion “in the cloud”.
I launched in early December and it ended up being more successful than I expected. I just got to $700 MRR, which I’m definitely happy about after years of side projects making exactly $0.
Unless you're wanting people to save the images on the landing page, please optimize the images. WebP and only as big as they need to be rendered.
If I go to a service designed around images and it's taking 5 seconds on a SOLID fiber connection to fully download, it doesn't give me confidence that I'm going to get a fast experience in the rest of your site (even if it's not directly related).
It’s a great point. I had been using BunnyCDN to optimize the images/serve as webp, but there are a few on the model preview page that I definitely need to shrink further.
While we're both here, it's not exactly clear to me what that whole thing means and does. Arguably i'm not too clued up in SD models and what they are and why would I want them. Might be a good idea to explain this or if explanation exists make it more prominent to hook ignorant people like me. :-)
Great point. I might need an entirely separate landing page for the artist/general audience vs the prosumer type landing page that currently exists.
(If you’re interested, the gist is that custom models allow for completely distinct “styles” as well as unique characters. For example, if you wanted to generate art in the style of Monet, you could train a custom model in that style)
I sell cheap but high-quality Anki decks for language learning: https://deckmill.com
Created using a mix of automation (TTS, machine translation, etc.) and human reviews.
Built it with a friend, making around $500 a month, very stable over the last couple of years. Spend 1 or 2 hours a month on it, mostly customer support.
I just downloaded your sample deck for Spanish. One of the sentences is:
Front: I'm not happy.
Back: No soy feliz.
This doesn't seem correct to me.
I'm not happy (right now) => No estoy feliz.
No soy feliz means something like "I'm not a happy person".
EDIT: I should have mentioned that I'm not a native Spanish speaker. It turns out I'm wrong here, and that either estoy or soy would work in this case.
Native Spanish speaker here (ES-MX, specifically, if it matters). I think this is one of the cases where a solid general rule breaks down in the specifics.
You are correct about the difference between "ser" (to be, permanently/over an indeterminate time) and "estar" (to be in a particular state right now). But "No soy feliz" sounds perfectly idiomatic to me, even for a relatively transient state of sadness. ("No estoy feliz" doesn't sound wrong to me either, but feels just slightly less natural than "No soy feliz" even in a context like "No soy feliz ahorita", with an explicit "right now").
As a note: "No estoy contento" (Also "I am not happy", or maybe "I am not in a good mood") is definitely "estoy", rather than "soy". No clue why "No soy feliz" does feel idiomatic.
You are correct, but I'd say this one is fundamentally ambiguous (I'm Portuguese myself, where this also applies), as it is a one-to-two mapping here. Without further context you can't really choose one or the other, so we just left it as is :).
I've always found it most painful trying to figuring out when to use verbs that translate to other verbs depending on context. It's just personal experience of course, so not sure if it really matters that much between all languages or types of learning.
Maybe a hint which one is intended in this case would be useful/possible or a hint that it could be ambiguous/other translation possible? I've built a couple of tiny tools for myself to learn languages and I've always run into the same issue with ambiguous translations. I usually ended up with adding some personal reminder or sometimes just (1)/(2) to resolve it, but I never found a consistent resolution for it.
One feedback can you have tooltips/labels for the "Available Languages" section. Personally speaking my limited familiarity with flags makes it tough to find out how many languages are available.
Cool product. One bit of feedback: after downloading a deck, the page redirects away to "how to use our decks". This is confusing and not intuitive - my workflow was that I wanted to download the Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced deck for one language and I had to navigate back to that language 3 times.
I read through the entire site and was convinced there was no price, but when I came back to reply I found that there is an element at the top of the homepage (next to "No subscriptions. No frills.") that says "Get access to all our decks for just €15.99."
I completely missed it because the price was in the text in refular font and it wasn't on the Download page or anywhere else on the site. There's no Buy page, so the impression I was left with is that you have a sneaky onboarding that reveals the price after a sign-up... or something similarly shady. Not a very good initial impression.
All the mainstream 'successful' apps uses advertising on other social media networks + Apple and Google Ads. They quickly ask / require money to be paid when you join to cover the acquisition costs as part of the on-boarding flow.
Assuming it's a capital repayment mortgage, you're neglecting that you are erasing debt, only the interest payment is really a cost here.
But yeah I think it makes sense to exclude it anyway, needs/wants might change and you no longer have the room(s) available to let or whatever, and it wouldn't really be a useful comparison of your 'side project' earnings to compare a year as a landlord with one not, it's a different thing.
Insurance ($97/mo) + Mortgage ($3,400/mo) + Property taxes ($444/mo) + trash, water ($100/mo) = $4k/mo. My mortgage is new and is only paying down principle ~$120/mo. This means I pay about $900/mo for my room, except I have had an average of $1k/mo in home repairs since I bought the house.
The real value I am capturing is my personal housing _might_ be cheaper than if I rented myself.
I am sure in 10 years, I will be in a good spot, but not today.
I made collaborative painting apps, https://hellopaint.io and https://malmal.io (there might be some slight NSFW content). In the best months I made 800€+ in ad revenue from malmal but currently it's a lot less. I think there's potential to make a lot more though, although I'd like to stop showing ads and switch to some more predictable income model. I do have a patreon but it only brings in ~100€ per month. I could promote it more though.
Python concurrency has a super bad wrap (the gil) and I'm trying to help out even change opinions (e.g. work with it rather than throw it all out).
I write short focused how-to ebooks that on the different Python concurrency APIs in stdlib. Content marketing leads to email marketing to one-off sales. Doing about $2K/mo. Might expand into third party libs this year.
Congratulations for your side project! Probably quite similar to you, I'm also a PhD guy that uses Python for quite some time, and I've been lately interested in starting a side project like yours (courses, tutorials, books, etc.).
I see that you are mostly focused in processes/threads/etc., which is quite an interesting niche (for me, I teach those things in a Operating Systems class). It seems rather risky to pursue a niche as it may be too small! Do you have any tips, like why did you decide to focus on multiprocessing/multithreading? Also, any other Python niches that you think are valuable to focus (for courses, ebooks and tutorials like you do)?
I'm really interested in establishing myself an an online "educator", but I still do not know which kind of topics I should aim to. If I focus on introductory topics there's too much competition. If I focus on a too small niche, I may have no "spectators". Any tips would be greatly welcomed! :)
I chose the niche because 1) it was small, 2) underserved, and 3) because it was misunderstood.
It was a risk, sure, but it is a side project - a place for risks. No overthinking required. Plan, work, review.
I believe you could do the same thing for many modules in the python standard lib or most popular third party libraries. Python docs everywhere are not helpful and newer dev's think it's their fault. Help them. Serve.
Consider: "would o’reilly write a book on the module/lib?" If not, you can stake out a monopoly. If so, then there's probably already cashflow there and you can join them.
Hmm. I think of my self as a collaborator not an educator, if that helps. A peer that has a few more years (decades) in pointing some stuff out with working code examples.
Just wanted to say thanks for your work on SuperFastPython - it helped me out a bunch at work recently (new to Python concurrency) - and also for your previous work at MachineLearningMastery (helped me out with a university project a few years back).
You're very welcome, I'm happy to hear that! Thank you for the kind words and support. Message/email me any time if you ever have any questions, I'm eager to help.
Good SEO for the tutorials which rank well in the SERPs. Competition was mostly blog spam compared to my hand-crafted human (me) written stuff. Took ~6 months to escape the sandbox.
Then massive "complete guide" posts on major topics like "multiprocessing" "threading" and "asyncio" that rank well in the SERPs and did okay to well on /r/python.
I’ve mentioned before on HN how I make around ~$7k from my Lunar app nowadays [0] but controlling monitors is a larger niche and the app was developed and perfected over the course of 5 years.
This time I’d like to show you the progress of my last year’s project, https://lowtechguys.com.
You can see trends in red because December is a slow month for app sales, not sure why exactly.
But even with just 4 small macOS apps I manage to make ~1k/month with close to zero maintenance.
I have a lot more ideas for small non expensive apps that could add to the revenue but less and less time for them.
Right now I have to rebuild an old wooden house and finally move out of my rented apartment. I’m grateful to have a source of income on the side that can support me this year so I can pause tech while I do field work.
I have an idea for rcmd -- if possible, it would be great to be able to assign a right-cmd-key to <whatever Safari tab is running mail.google.com> -- or open one if none is. Likewise for calendar.google.com and probably others. I'd pay an extra few dollars for that feature, as I'm forever opening <yet another mail.google.com tab> because my tab hygiene is lacking.
I read your piece on window switching -- would AppleScript work? This works:
tell application "Safari"
tell item 4 of windows
set the current tab to item 3 of the tabs
set the index to 1
end tell
activate
end tell
Hey that’s a useful feature indeed, and it can already be added by the user with rcmd’s Window Actions which support AppleScript. I actually have done that myself already for Firefox.
I could maybe try to implement the main part of the “find and switch to the tab if it exists” so that users can simply assign the URL.
Okay, I've worked it out and it works perfectly with no requirement for window actions. I created an AppleScript:
tell application "Safari"
repeat with w in windows
set mt to (tabs of w whose URL contains "https://mail.google.com/")
if mt ≠ {} then exit repeat
end repeat
if mt = {} then
if not (exists window 1) then
make new document with properties {URL:"https://mail.google.com"}
else
set mt to make new tab in window 1 with properties {URL:"https://mail.google.com"}
set the current tab of window 1 to mt
end if
else
set mt to item 1 of mt
set the current tab of w to mt
set the index of w to 1
end if
activate -- needed if not activated otherwise
end tell
Then:
1. I export the script as an app. In the dialog I set it to stay open.
2. I run the app.
3. I use the standard rcmd method to assign M to that application.
4. I quit the app.
5. I export the script as an app again. In the dialog I *do not* set it to stay open.
And done! Now I rcmd-M and if there is a mail.google.com tab, Safari switches to it and jumps to the front. If there is not a mail.google.com tab, the frontmost window gets a new tab set to mail.google.com. I haven't tested yet what happens if there is no window. It should create one with mail.google.com. I'll test that in a minute and if it doesn't work I'll correct it and update here.
I have rcmd installed and working, and I wrote this AppleScript:
tell application "Safari"
repeat with w in windows
set mt to (tabs of w whose URL contains "https://mail.google.com/")
if mt ≠ {} then exit repeat
end repeat
if mt ≠ {} then
set mt to item 1 of mt
set the current tab of w to mt
set the index of w to 1
end if
-- activate -- needed if not activated otherwise
end tell
How do I set up window actions in rcmd? I don't see that in the page on your site.
Hammerspoon is needed because App Store apps are sandboxed and can't focus specific windows, can't run arbitrary scripts and AppleScripts.
What that gives you is the ability to map Right Option+letter to specific windows or tabs of the currently focused app.
So in your case you could dorcmd-s for Safari then ralt-m for mail tab, ralt-h for HN tab and so on, and it can also open those tabs/windows if they aren't already open.
And you also get a visual switcher to see what your options are in case you tend to forget these shortcuts.
Ah, okay. Did you know that AppleScripts can be saved as "apps"? I'm happily launching the mail tab in safari by pressing rcmd-m without Hammerspoon or anything other than stock RCMD. That gives me everything I was looking for. It would be nice to be able to assign ralt-<letter> to launch different apps -- e.g. rcmd-m does gmail in Safari, ralt-m opens Messages. and rcmd+ralt-m could do something else entirely.
I've used Windows at times, but I don't miss window switching beyond the above use cases.
The solution I posted works for most use cases, but apparently Safari can have zombie windows with no tabs. I quit and restarted, and updated the script to handle the situation where there are no windows, but I need to wait until there are zombie tabs again to double-check that my fix for that works. Once that's done I'll post again.
Oh, that's interesting. Okay, I'm pulling the trigger. I used to write AppleScript in a previous life, so I think I can handle that part. (we'll see if I'm right...)
I generate amazing profile photos for users using dream booth and a custom stable diffusion model.
Our quality of output is the best that I’ve seen compared to competitors.
My secret to much higher quality: I rank images, and then only show the best images.
All other competitors that I’ve seen dump all the images to the user. Instead, my process means that the output images are consistently very high quality.
In 2018 I started making a browser interface you could put in an iframe to let you create web scraping scripts from any device. The web scraping part is still a WIP, but the remote browser interface became a product in its own right that pays for everything else. I fleshed it out during the pandemic and responded to customer requests to improve things like streaming and audio. I grew it well beyond Ramen possible without ever spending a dollar on advertising or marketing. Now that the feature set is pretty stable I want to focus on marketing for this year. Sales are up 224% since last year but I think I can do much better: I still never snagged those big government or huge enterprise customers that I really want. I just think that would be cool.
If you don’t know what remote browser isolation is, it’s basically a security product to keep browser. Content executing on a remote computer away from your local device and Netwerk but turns out people use it for a lot more than that: an embedded multiplayer browser for live streaming educational lessons; a human in the loop intervention console to investigate and unstick stalled web automation tasks; as well as the more traditional security or reverse proxy use cases. A large part of my nontraditional marketing came through my source available GitHub version, which is now languishing well behind the paid pro version in terms of features and quality: https://GitHub.com/dosyago/BrowserBox
https://toolwallhq.com - Digital organizer for your physical tools. I used to have a hard time keeping my shop organized, so I jumped in and came up with a solution that has worked for me so far and perhaps might help you.
The idea is you use the digital artboard to visualize your tools on the wall and then buy the holders to mount it on your workshop wall.
There seems to be a growing overlap between programming and woodworking for whatever reason. I could go on about the similarities, but after hours of staring at the screen, we sometimes want to make things with our hands and woodworking helps me do that. If you're looking to get started, I can't recommend visiting a local makerspace enough.
Very nice! I must admit that at first I thought it's a tool wall designer SAAS (and that $60 for ability to add a drill holder to a plan is pretty steep), it took me a bit of scrolling and reading to understand you are actually selling a physical tool wall elements :).
Also, the subtitle "Use the world's first and only digital artboard to organize your physical tools." - I'd probably put the physical tool wall elements first, and maybe only mention a digital planner next. Or maybe have an image on top?
Those are very good suggestions, thank you! I sell more of the physical holders than the digital ones anyway, so perhaps the artboard and digital files aren't as helpful as I thought they were.
Fast-forward a few weeks, I become pretty good friends with the owner at the ranch I went to. We grab tacos one night and he shares his concerns: They're not doing so well financially and are worried about whether or not they'll be able to afford feed in a month.
I got involved and we solved that problem and a few more: revamped the website (it looked and felt like it was from 2006), I whipped up a booking/reservation system to get more customers through the door, and exit surveys to make sure everything was perfect (and figure out what went wrong if it wasn't).
Bookings this month are up 490% from 2018 (according to the paper waivers they had) and that's without a single dollar spent in paid marketing. I answer a few emails every day from prospective riders and make sure everyone's happy. I get a percentage of each reservation which is cool, but the coolest part is that I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranch.
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