Posted by cvbox 7 days ago
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
2024 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373343
2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38467691
2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421
2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
2019 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863
2018 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306
2017 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804
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
Most are older, still functional but rarely updated. A few of the newer ones include:
https://daylightgoals.com - Time in daylight tracker, using Apple Watch/HealthKit as the data source.
https://airlauncher.app - App launcher for visionOS - was much bigger last year before Apple added the ability to organize your apps.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ibuzz/id304684758?ls=1&mt=8 - iBuzz - I built this app in a day 15 years ago, it still makes about $100/mo from ads and removing ads. Just a simple buzzer soundboard app.
Did you find the tooling and documentation from Apple sufficient?
Also, as someone who likes to go to conferences and meet and connect with people, I found it hard connecting to 50 people at a conference on Linkedin and then reaching back out to them. So I build LinkedMemo[2] which is a CRM on "top" of Linkedin. You scan a profile, the profile is automatically saved and enriched in the CRM with a quick note.
[1]: https://drawcharts.xyz [2]: https://linkedmemo.com
Still holding off on the show HN post for now; have a few more features and QoL things I’d like to add first.
It’s been an enormously gratifying project and I hear from users all around the world who have feature requests for their specific use cases. Easily the most fun I’ve had working on a project.
May I ask which channels / approaches benefited you the most in terms of reaching your first paying customers?
Almost all of my customers so far have been directly from the central Anki plugin directory. I made sure to use lots of SEO friendly terms / buzzwords in the title so that when people ctrl+f for AI or ChatGPT, they find mine.
My next steps I think are to better incentivize leaving reviews so that it ranks higher on the add-on list, and then launch it on various language learning subreddits. There’s a whole cottage industry of Anki influencers on YouTube as well (absurd, I know), so that’s another channel eventually.
All I wanted was to build a good product which our users feel like using. Help them with exceptional customer service and build a team and a company worth waking up to.
Disk Prices on eBay - https://unli.xyz/diskprices/
Digital Film Stock - https://unli.xyz/digitalfilmstock/
Both are very similar... just a lot of regex (200+ expressions) to parse eBay item titles and descriptions
Revenue from courses, apps, community, books...
Still not able to pay myself anything though
I started making this game several years ago, sporadically, abandoning it for month-long periods, but after posting it here a few times in Show NH I got the encouragement I needed to publish it to itch.io, then to Steam.
This month it crossed the $500/month mark by far, but it was a long road to get it to a state where it can actually be an interesting enough game to make money.