Everything I do is free for everyone but for the past few years I’ve been running an entirely optional membership program that starts at $1/month.

I’m (probably naively) a big believer in kindness and I keep refusing to monetize what I do in any other way.

I love to be able to focus on the design and not the practicalities of selling a hardware product!

https://minichord.com/

Revenue is very spiky. Some months ~$10k, some ~$100.

Inspired by this Patrick McKenzie thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7135833

Certified mail is weirdly powerful leverage. I decided to productize that.

Sportsbook API (https://sportsbookapi.com/) - A single API to get odds data from a number of US Sportsbooks

Odds Assist Pro (http://pro.oddsassist.com/) - An odds scanner tool that shows both current odds and things like arbitrage, plus ev, middles. This actually started as just a UI for me to quickly do sanity checks on the API data and eventually grew into a full site. The site is on a subdomain of a site my business partner had built long before we met, so it's kind of positioned as the plus version of that site.

API revenue is really stable and has been pretty consistent slow growth. Pro's revenue is all over the place since it's almost all referrals and promos with big spikes around major sporting events. Probably averages at least $500/mo if you look at the entire year.

I run a newsletter called Tech Talks Weekly[1] where my subscribers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts[2].

I originally built it for myself because I was subscribed to too many conference channels on YouTube and things started getting messy, so I wrote a script to fetch the new talks automatically. Eventually, I turned it into a newsletter.

I currently have over 7,500 subscribers with email open rate consistently between 32%-35%, although I plan to trim the list soon to get into the 40-50% range.

I recently started offering sponsorship options[3] and made $500 in Nov and $700 in Dec so far.

[1] https://techtalksweekly.io/

[2] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/what-is-tech-talks-weekly

[3] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/sponsor

This was a simple Wordpress site, but then eventually I rebuilt the whole thing with Nextjs and tailwind because Wordpress was just too damn slow. In the process, I ended up building a custom CMS, which I'm now working on a white label version that I could sell in the future.

I'm hosting the whole thing on a VPS that costs about $30/month and have videos on cloudflare R2 for about $15/month.

[obviously NSFW] - https://blowjobit.com