Many of us are working on weekend projects. Some are being built just for fun, while others are being launched with the aim of generating some income.<p>I would like you to share the story of your revenue-generating weekend project, which would be a great inspiration for the rest of us.
My little genius friend & I are working on a side project currently but it is starting to look quite viable.<p>In a nutshell it takes any word or PDF document, strips all the formatting and repopulates a new word document with predefined fonts, layout etc. Sounds simple & basic? That's the point. We're near completion and once we launch it will be a simple service that can have a significant impact on the industry I currently work in.
I don't have a current one to share but back in 2005 I decided to do a 24 hour project in Rails and built a tagged source code site called Code Snippets (it wasn't the first code snippets site but the first with tagging to get any traction). I let it run in the background with just a couple of tweaks here and there for just over 2 years and it was making $1000ish per month from Adsense with zero effort by me. I then sold it for a healthy 5 figures. It's still running at a new URL: <a href="http://snippets.dzone.com/" rel="nofollow">http://snippets.dzone.com/</a>
I just recently realized how many great ideas and projects I've wasted over the years with not riding them to profitability or even releasing them.<p>Now whenever I come up with something that doesn't leave me alone for a couple of days I just go for it, without any expectations.<p>The last one I launched was a very simple iOS App (<a href="http://airlocationapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://airlocationapp.com</a>) which was actually done in less than a weekend, pitched to only a single blog and generated about $700 since launch, which was roughly one month ago.<p>My best selling apps, a suite of remotes for iOS (<a href="http://reemoteapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://reemoteapp.com</a>) actually started off as weekend project just like that but initially hit a bigger niche and now turned into my main project/income.
I'm part of a project that's an art piece management solution for galleries to use for exhibitions. Right now galleries use paper reports to track art pieces between exhibitions, and we want them to use tablets. We currently have a gallery interested in the project.<p>I'm the sole technical force behind the project. Front-end is on Android Honeycomb tablets, back-end uses Erlang for the web server and middle-ware and PostgreSQL for the database. I also work full-time so progress is a bit slow.
I learned to program by creating an ecommerce service for my pet store ("Outlet" at <a href="http://cheekob.com" rel="nofollow">http://cheekob.com</a>) in my spare time. I am now broadening it to help other sellers with a new selling format: automatic markdowns (<a href="http://pricetack.com" rel="nofollow">http://pricetack.com</a>). What really helped me was the awesomely simple, yet powerful Python framework Web2py.
I taught myself Objective-C for fun last summer, then one day decided to release an app. I spent about 3 hours coding then about a day sorting out code signing, artwork, submission etc. As a result of that weekend I've ended up getting a pretty nice side income from advertisements from the free version and straight revenue from the paid version. In fairness, since releasing it I've quite considerably improved the application but its still less than 800 lines of code.<p><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/tooloud-pro/id425137981?mt=8" rel="nofollow">http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/tooloud-pro/id425137981?mt=8</a>
Well I just started on a 28 day experiment... a bit more than a weekend, but fun nonetheless. Myself and some other travelers are building a travel moabile app for a contest. We're documenting the whole process and our steps so we can publish our methods at the end... I'll post the whole thing at <a href="http://LifeByExperimentation.com" rel="nofollow">http://LifeByExperimentation.com</a> when we're done in about 3 weeks.
Made a little utility app for Mac that I needed, about 2 months ago, I was giving it away free with donations but after a lot of emails promising donations for this or that decided to flip the switch and start selling it. Been selling for a week now making $100+ a day!
Im working on a few other projects in hope that combined they can become my main income.
We created one called <a href="http://www.creatorfinder.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.creatorfinder.com/</a> which helps developers showcase their verified portfolio.<p>It also adds a watermark for images created by designers. That helps designers to show verified websites that they have helped design.<p>No plans on making money yet. But we do have a fair number of registrations every day!
I created an app called Scan4Points which uses your barcode scanner to get nutritional information and calculate the WeightWatchers points. Actually my wife had "forced" me to make it. She said it was finally something I made that she could actually use. <a href="http://confered.com/apps/Ryb70" rel="nofollow">http://confered.com/apps/Ryb70</a>