5 years. (2011-2016) While working on my first startup (Sauce Labs), I made a robot that plays Angry Birds as a side/art project in the autumn of 2011. The serious part of the project is that you can use the robot for testing mobile apps and devices. I started to sell the robots (still as a side project) on Tindie when that first launched in the summer of 2012. I made a couple of thousand dollars the first few years, but basically broke even profit-wise. I got my first "big" enterprise order of robots in late 2014 and that made me start wondering if I should ramp things up. I formally incorporated (<a href="http://www.tapster.io" rel="nofollow">http://www.tapster.io</a>) in May 2015 and took some seed funding (Indie.vc) to sell the robots full-time. Since incorporating, it's now veeeery close (this summer) to ramen profitable while paying a few salaries.
I made Server Check.in 3.5 years ago (HN announcement thread: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901350" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4901350</a>
), and it's been earning around $2k/year with almost no maintenance. Just a few updates to the Drupal front-end/UI, and the Node.js backend every year (maybe 20 hours total).<p>Costs are incredibly low, as I have ~15 low end box-type servers running as check servers interacting with Drupal via a private API, and one DigitalOcean droplet running prod, with a hot backup droplet. Everything was automated via Ansible early on, and I don't have to touch anything except for patching/updating from time to time.<p>I also have run Hosted Apache Solr for almost double the time, and it actually earns a decent secondary income. Up to about 25 DigitalOcean droplets now, also all managed via Ansible/Jenkins, and it has a few hundred clients (a couple who have been stable clients for over 5 years, and a few very large names that made me realize even a side project can be stable/good enough for 'big companies' to trust them).<p>I haven't advertised either except for mentions here and there and having them in some of my social media profiles, but I've learned so much from running both—and even turned some of that knowledge into a book that gives decent passive income on top!
I have several apps on the iOS app store. I make between $4000AUD - $9000AUD per month.<p>I quit my job 3 years ago to do it, so I guess it isn't really a side project any more. That said, it is a lonely way to make money and I am over it. My career was computers, and I'm pleased I've done the apps, I can achieve anything technical so it isn't a challenge any more and am looking at something more physical, hands on.<p>When I quit my job I was making approx $3 a day from apps, I learned a lot.<p>The great thing is that I can quit and the apps keep making money. It is trivial to keep them updated to the latest iOS version, design standard, or advertising API - I've just put Firebase Analytics and the latest Admob API in them all. Pleased with the iOS10 announcement today, it will not add burden to my apps, nor are they sherlocked like my first app was. My most recent app took me 10 days to make, it is fairly professional, I have one more I want to make it will take a similar amount of time. Every time I get asked a support question I answer it and also post the answer on a support website, this has cut down support enquiries to one every week or two.<p>On to the next thing!
4 months.<p>I built a Slack bot called Standup Jack (<a href="https://standupjack.com" rel="nofollow">https://standupjack.com</a>). It's a ton of work upfront but if you launch early, keep an open dialog with your users, iterate on their feedback and keep your costs low, it's a nice way to earn some side income each month.<p>Udemy is a pretty easy way to start since they do the marketing for you (for a pretty big cut).
I made a course on Udemy on how to make complete web applications without writing code using APEX.<p>Link and free coupons:<p><a href="https://www.udemy.com/create-web-apps-with-apex-5/?couponCode=FREE_FOR_HN" rel="nofollow">https://www.udemy.com/create-web-apps-with-apex-5/?couponCod...</a><p>Expenses:<p>$100 for a nice microphone (not necessary) but didn't want to record a bunch and have it be garbage
$100 for Screenflow (to do video editing).
20 hours time (split across a couple of weekends<p>Profit:<p>I've made $1405 on it so far. It is almost completely passive income.<p>Proof:<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/sexsrzK.png?1" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/sexsrzK.png?1</a><p>If you know any of the topics in the Hot Topics list and can do desktop recording, maybe you should think about teaching others and making some side money while doing it. Best of all, the Udemy community is awesome. They are very supportive of each other.<p><a href="https://teach.udemy.com/course-creation/hot-topic-courses/" rel="nofollow">https://teach.udemy.com/course-creation/hot-topic-courses/</a>
3 Months.<p>I made <a href="https://www.myothernumber.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.myothernumber.com</a> (online temporary sms/mms/voice numbers) about a 1.5 years ago, was making ramen money within 3 months.<p>Now tracking in the 5-figure/year range.<p>It's a very, very crowded market so primary cost is user acquisition, but then again that's exactly why I built it, to better learn (consumer facing UA) and have a platform to experiment with.<p>About to officially launch <a href="http://artistic.af" rel="nofollow">http://artistic.af</a> (neural artistic transfer meets instagram + canvas printing). I expect this one to take a bit longer to scale, but it was just an excuse to learn DNNs.
I wrote an online multiplayer game called Aberoth: <a href="http://aberoth.com" rel="nofollow">http://aberoth.com</a>. I released the first version to the world in January 2010, but the game did not have many features initially, and there was no way to buy anything. Toward the end of 2012 I felt good enough about the product to start selling memberships.<p>I continued to work on the game on the side over the years, and I released the game on Steam in July 2015: <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/354200/" rel="nofollow">http://store.steampowered.com/app/354200/</a>.<p>It does not make near as much a normal software engineer's full time salary, but it is profitable.
I wrote a digital book, plus art, engine and example code about how to make a JRPG style RPG. (<a href="http://howtomakeanrpg.com/" rel="nofollow">http://howtomakeanrpg.com/</a> <- the current copy is pretty terrible!).<p>I'm still in pre-release but early-access has been available for mailing list subscribers since January. Release should happen "soon".<p>Profit-wise: ~$500 a month (apart from the first month which was ~$5000). If I include my own time, I've roughly covered my costs.<p>It's taken about 3 years (!) to write the book in my spare time, usually an hour each morning. In a lot of ways it wasn't a great side project:<p><pre><code> - Hard to make
- Small market
- Complex
</code></pre>
But it's the first commercial side project I've attempted and I've really enjoyed the experience. Rather than jump straight on to a new project, I'll probably spend time after release experimenting with marketing (google adwords, content marketing etc).<p>(Previously I've written a programming book published via a traditional publisher and my day job is as a game developer.)
Here's a brief list!<p>* Wakeup.io - Simple Phone Wake-up Calls @ <a href="https://wakeup.io" rel="nofollow">https://wakeup.io</a> and it is fully automated and runs itself with actually really good profits. It was built in 2-3 days.<p>* GetProve, Simple Phone Verification @ <a href="https://getprove.com" rel="nofollow">https://getprove.com</a> and it is fully automated and runs itself with again, really good profits. It was built in a week or so.<p>* Teelaunch, Kickstarter/Indiegogo Fulfillment Service (exited/sold) <a href="http://teelaunch.com" rel="nofollow">http://teelaunch.com</a> (the site is different now than it used to be here <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140110204830/https://teelaunch.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20140110204830/https://teelaunch...</a>). As you can see from Wayback Machine, the site was just a landing page when I had it... took me day to put it up!<p>* Standard Signature, Email Signature Automation for Gmail Business @ <a href="https://standardsignature.com/" rel="nofollow">https://standardsignature.com/</a> (built in 48 hours)<p>* Glazed, a Rapid MVP boilerplate for NodeJS @ <a href="http://glazed.io" rel="nofollow">http://glazed.io</a> (built in a week or so, but this was work/thoughts accumulated over like 5+ years of hacking - this landed me paying clients, so I still consider it a side project)<p>* Asynchrosend, a MailChimp competitor (site is down now, but I did have paying clients and successful startups like Notehall.com had used it), built in a week in college!<p>* I have a bunch, at least 20 more on my list TODO still, if you want to build one with me let me know! I really would love to find super talented people, or people that are motivated. It's really hard to find <i>good</i> people if you know what I mean. I am not working on these right now though as I'm solely focused on one big project.<p>I have a bunch more projects I've built, that are also profitable that I can share. Email me and I can share more!<p><i>Update #1</i> - I really wanted to mention the most important thing about this. I read a Max Klein blog post that flipped the switch on me before to get into this hack and ship fast mode; it was something like build small little projects, but build a dozen of them. Once you build and release one quickly, it's addictive. You soon start to release more and more, and you get so creative and confident. You can literally build ANYTHING you want in a matter of days if you truly focus and WANT to.<p><i>Update #2</i> - I added a few more side projects since this topic is fun!
I've worked over a year on <a href="https://www.boxfactura.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.boxfactura.com/</a> which is a special email service for invoices in Mexico.<p>It has been profitable since January after quite some legwork, on the technical side as well as the sales and persuation side.
A year.<p>I was spending way too much time on eBay, so I wrote something for myself that would scrape the web pages and use a kill list to filter out the junk. I wanted a better UI to add words to the kill list and realised I could make money via the eBay affiliate program.<p>So I took two months off between contracts and wrote the first version of AuctionSieve - <a href="http://auctionsieve.com" rel="nofollow">http://auctionsieve.com</a><p>There was a D&D forum, the Acaeum where a bunch of people started using it and giving feedback.<p>It was making me money from day 1 but it probably took about a year to repay that 2 months of time investment.<p>It's now been 13 years(!) and it still makes me money - not enough to live off (the payout calculations from eBay have changed several times) but a nice chunk of change. And I only have to occasionally prod it. And add the occasional new feature.
About 9 months ago i created <a href="https://namesmith.io" rel="nofollow">https://namesmith.io</a> , a business and domain name generator. I practically did nothing to boost the search engine ranking but the volume of visitors is growing (very slowly).<p>So far the site can barely cover my vserver cost but that's ok since I can use the server for more than just namesmith. Most of the time some few dollar amounts tickle in but I had some sales of premium domains which gave > 50$ each.<p>I still plan to add some more features, such as URL shortening, but at the time it is not worth it.
A day. Okay, it isn't quite that simple. My sideproject is Breaker 101, an online class for web security. (<a href="https://breaker101.com" rel="nofollow">https://breaker101.com</a>)<p>I launched on HN and sold out (75 seats or so, $1500 each IIRC) that same day. I had designed the syllabus over the previous couple days, but there was no product -- because I honestly thought that only a few people would buy it, and I'd just have to refund them.<p>I built the class over the next few months and that went really well (not perfectly, but definitely well), but subsequent runs never got anywhere near the same success in terms of sales -- just couldn't get it in front of enough people.<p>I recently relaunched it at $150 in more of a self-driven form. It's profitable by all means, but it needs marketing behind it. I've been thinking a lot about selling it to someone that can give it the love it needs, but I'm still on the fence there.
If you define 'profitable' as $100 a month, that's where one of my iOS apps (<a href="http://postcardpanda.com" rel="nofollow">http://postcardpanda.com</a>) is at after 2+ years. I've only recently started putting actual time into it though.<p>If you want the full income report, here is May's: <a href="http://mattsencenbaugh.com/postcard-panda-may-2016-income-report/" rel="nofollow">http://mattsencenbaugh.com/postcard-panda-may-2016-income-re...</a>
I know this goes against accepted wisdom and I cannot yet prove that it works, but I no longer believe I am capable of the "build something small, fast and succeed". Niftylettuce in this thread has shown it an be done, but I have not succeeded in doing so.<p>I am now working on big, highly functional, fully working on launch utilities for DevOps people. Hopefully this will result in building something people want.<p>It seems the startup world is made up primarily of people pumping out easy to build shit.
<a href="https://www.soundviz.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.soundviz.com</a><p>Two and a half years ago I started working on the idea. It took me about a year to get the initial offering done and launched. The first calendar year in business was technically profitable. We ended up reinvesting the profits into new computers as well as paying all of the operational expenses upfront for the following year.<p>This year, it's tracking at roughly 5x of last year's revenue and we've also improved our margins by about 2x.<p>All said and done, we both put about an hour a day into it, five days a week, and one full weekend day a month.
I started a Product Hunt style newsletter that curates the best UI designs every day (<a href="http://uimovement.com" rel="nofollow">http://uimovement.com</a>).<p>It was profitable from sponsorships about 6 months after launch (slightly over $1,000 a month in revenue, costs $300ish a month). I spend about 10 minutes a day on it. I need to spend more time marketing it and updating some of the tech - but I'm too lazy.<p>Also, I'm not sure the 6 months to profit counts, because I worked on 3-4 similar side-projects before launching it for about a year before.
I built a journal-over-email app that has been a profitable side business since day one. Defining "profitable" is necessary, I think - in this case it's covering it's own costs + more. This isn't my full-time gig, so I'm not counting any sort of hourly rate for my own time. The MVP is something I built over a long weekend, and I occasionally work on it while my wife and I watch TV/movies (so the time investment hasn't been too drastic, and the alternative is $0/hr).<p>The app is called Dabble Me (<a href="https://dabble.me" rel="nofollow">https://dabble.me</a>) and you can read about the inspiration and costs to run here: <a href="https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/increase-your-happiness-with-daily-journaling-8109b0700506#.bbzx2grd9" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/increase-your-happ...</a><p>Today (18mos since launch) it's generating around $500/mo in passive income. I played around with a few different pricing models. The first was a "donate whatever you can" for a few pro options (did not generate what I expected), the next was a pretty lenient freemium model (lacked the upgrades), and what seems to be working best is a very stringent freemium model.<p>A big part of Dabble Me and my passion for the project arises from this being a "scratch your own itch" build. I want this service to exist more than anyone else...so I built it and charged others to use it. That seems to be a theme that has a higher success rate than others.
I built <a href="http://serpentinegame.com" rel="nofollow">http://serpentinegame.com</a> in 2008, an online multiplayer boggle game, and it makes a modest amount of money for me from ads and premium memberships. The only costs have been my time, a server on linode, and the domain name. I've had a couple other attempts but nothing has really taken off in the same way.
This isn't me. I found this on reddit and it's a pretty good AMA about Gleam.io. <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/3hpt9z/iama_cofounder_of_gleamio_this_was_our_7th/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/3hpt9z/iama_c...</a>
YouTube video tutorials on niche tech topics.
Upfront investments: $50 for a decent microphone.<p>Spent about 40 hours creating and editing the videos. They have been online now for nearly 11 months and i have a total of ~300k views. That made me nearly $400 from video ads.
1 year.<p>Built up a hobby site slowly over the past two years, at the end of the first year it was making £7,700 a month..<p>It is still active and earning around £2-3k per month with only about 1 hours work a week.<p>Currently looking to sell it on as I have just started on a new project.
I created a WPA(2) password lookup web-based service in April of 2008:<p><a href="https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/Thomson-SpeedTouch" rel="nofollow">https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/Thomson-SpeedTouch</a><p>I just added ads and it's made 50-300 a month (had ~1000 unique visitors a day for the last 8 years).<p>Added <a href="https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/UPC" rel="nofollow">https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/UPC</a> last year for a different brand model<p>And<p><a href="https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/DownloadFundaImages" rel="nofollow">https://www.nickkusters.com/en/Services/DownloadFundaImages</a> for the Dutch real-estate market<p>And a few years ago, I reverse enginered the encryption of the Wordz game and post the new game 20-30 seconds before the new roud starts, and more: <a href="https://www.nickkusters.com/nl/Diensten/WoordJacht/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nickkusters.com/nl/Diensten/WoordJacht/</a><p>This combined is my hobby/fun website. It used to cost €300 a month in server fees; it's now down to €80. Over the lifetime of the site, I probably broke even :) But it's still used daily, generating ad revenue, and if I had put in time to cut down cost, I could have made some money.
Textdropapp.com - web-based plain text editor for Dropbox. It started off as a scratch to my own itch, and I listed it in the Dropbox app directory. I started collecting feature requests and after a year or so I completely rewrote it as a paid app. The rewrite took 3-4 months of nights and weekends. I haven't touched it in 2.5 years but it still generates maybe $30-50 per month, net.
I've been working on <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teamtol.livedota" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teamtol.li...</a> for the past 2 years. About 2 years ago Valve released an API to get data for Dota and other games in their portfolio. It was a good excuse for me to learn Android development which is something I had wanted to do for awhile. About a year in to the project I added some ads which in turn made the app almost instantly profitable. I built the API to be super performant from the start and the whole thing runs on the equivalent of a micro-instance despite needing to serve up a few hundred thousand requests per day.<p>My main goal with the project right now isn't to generate profit though. If you were to account for the cost of my time I'm sure the project would be deeply in debt. I just enjoy working on it and it gives me a good excuse to travel to different Dota events throughout the world and meet awesome people.
<a href="https://rebrickable.com" rel="nofollow">https://rebrickable.com</a> - A LEGO database that shows you which sets you can build from your existing collection, also includes thousands of fan-submitted designs. I built the original site in a few months, but have been steadily expanding it for 5 years now.
5 years of bootstrapping a nutrition & fitness tracking web/mobile app for me.<p>After the first few months it was only making enough income to cover basic hosting costs and not much else, so I ended up getting a job (well, co-founded a different startup with good funding). In the next two years, I was just doing the bare minimum to keep it running, and it grew 80% each year. Start of year 3, other startup failed and I had spare time to invest in the site and it was making maybe 8000/month in revenues, and the decent yearly growth has continued so that now in year 5 I can comfortably live on the business, and have a few employees / contractors to help with support and development.
I'm surprised very few people here (no one?) is selling physical stuff. I have a profitable side project selling stuff online. I found a manufacturer through Alibaba, set up a website and now most of the work is dealing with shipping items.
I build iConvert Icons [see <a href="http://iconverticons.com/online/" rel="nofollow">http://iconverticons.com/online/</a>] six years ago without any intention of making money off of it.<p>Unfortunately about three years into it, it became a full sink (negative time + negative money). I was actually going to sell it off for a couple of grand about that point, at which my wife encouraged me to have a go at making something out of it.<p>It was profitable within a month, and has been ever since. Not enough to pay [my] bills, but it pays for itself and enough left over for some other hobbies.
2 years. I built ( <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/app/id714882169?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/app/id714882169?mt=8</a> ) three years ago as an idea to test shooting videos at 60fps on the iPhone. At the time there was no iPhone 6 and you couldn't shoot 60fps videos with the default camera app. I did zero advertising of the app, and it's currently bringing in around $100/month.<p>I have a major update that I've been working on for the last 2 months, but other than that it seems to be running all by itself.
Don't have it anymore (sold it in 2013) but <a href="http://myapptemplates.com" rel="nofollow">http://myapptemplates.com</a>. Took it from $0 to $3,000 a month in about 1 year
I made an app to generate .gitignore files, It's as simple as a brick.<p><a href="https://gitignore.xyz/" rel="nofollow">https://gitignore.xyz/</a><p>but it doesn't make any money though.
<a href="https://searchcode.com/" rel="nofollow">https://searchcode.com/</a> is my serious side project. It has been profitable (If you ignore my time) for several months now. However it took 5 years to get there. I am planning on making it unprofitable again soon to allow it to scale up to the load requirements it needs. Most of the profit is though ads and the fact I run it on a shoestring budget (less than $100 a month).<p>If the downloadable version takes off that would really help as well.
I wrote <a href="https://leanpub.com/trellodojo" rel="nofollow">https://leanpub.com/trellodojo</a> in about 4 months to start, and periodically spend several hours a month updating it. It earns ~100 to ~300 a month. I do have some ideas for software and other digital content that I can't seem to get traction on. Reading the rest of this is motivating though. Keep up the good work everybody!
I created searchtempest.com as a hobby project in 2006, starting with zero web knowledge, although a bit of programming experience from electrical engineering. Within about a year and a half it was earning enough to pay my (very modest) rent. By 2009 I quit my day job to focus on it full time. Added autotempest.com around the same time and now have several employees working on the two. (The first hired around 2010 iirc.)
I run mailsac.com and skim a profit. I failed to properly sell to a couple of customers that would have made it fairly profitable (at least two very large companies use it for email testing). It has a decent number of users and signups but I haven't spent the time to figure out if there is more they'd pay a lot for. It took about two years of literally doing nothing to make a profit.
After six years of doing it on the side, I'm now doing it full-time (for a year and a half) and have one employee/apprentice (for the last half year). I provide IT training and consulting.<p>Started out with CFEngine, now offering Git training as well. Companies fly me in for 1-5 days to train their staff. I love getting to see different parts of the US.
<a href="https://www.docsapp.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.docsapp.io/</a><p>I built DocsApp in 1 year and now is ramen profitable.<p>Tech stack:<p>* Play Framework (Scala)<p>* PostgreSQL (RDS)<p>* S3<p>* Docker (cloud.docker.com)<p>* Scaleway<p>* HAProxy
I had done couple of projects before and one of them was somewhat successful. I made around $1.5k from that. Giftcardzilla an aggregator for discounted gift cards. I had to shut it down after Google Penguin update.<p>Currently building AppsUlagam.com (apps world) as a mobile app discovery site for apps with Tamil language content.
Built www.sum-reviews.com over the course of a year (14 months), probably 2-3 man months of full time effort. It's now pretty automated though not enjoying the marketing part as much, that a more mature project requires. Having said that, it's kind of self entertainment / joy.
<a href="http://www.gtheme.io/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gtheme.io/</a><p>I run GTheme.io for 2 years and now ramen profitable. Current site running with minimal management.<p>The site selling premium ghost.org theme.
I have been working on a side project about food dishes, but it does not even have a revenue stream. It is more a labor of love. I have been at it for over a year now.
I recently started doing some competitive programming and going trough advanced algorithms...not really a side project but i'm looking forward to make a Network Monitoring service something that runs in your computer and acts passively to monitor system changes... to protect against malware mostly .
-My current side project isn't even 10% complete but it's on my scope I'm working on a micro virtual file system for important documents...due to the rise of Ransomware and people being lazy I think that making a secure,encrypted virtual filesystem could be a great idea .
Those are my thoughts only
Not currently. Lack of ideas/inspiration/perspiration.<p>It'd be nice to have a few on the side making enough to support hobbies though.
for me it has been <a href="http://allthefreestock.com" rel="nofollow">http://allthefreestock.com</a> , it's not a serious side project and the only revenue has been ads.