Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?

There was a number of similar active threads over the years, some great ideas in them:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7094402" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7094402</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107588" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8107588</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8246255" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8246255</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4639271" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4639271</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5903868" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5903868</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358111" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2358111</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387789" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=387789</a>

I spent all of 2014 building a SaaS for dog daycare&#x2F;kennel owners. The MVP turned out beautiful. Went to a few trade shows towards the end of last year and people went crazy over the software.<p>0 outbound marketing yet, and already have 22 customers at $100&#x2F;month. This year my goal is to scale up to 200 customers.<p>It&#x27;s a really weird market niche where no one has built software for in 10 years. Pretty neat.

&quot;Profitable side-project&quot; might be an unstable equilibrium. If you&#x27;re doing something without scale, it will die when you lose interest. If you&#x27;re doing something with scale, perhaps it should grow into a bootstrapped startup.<p>inquicker.com started as a hobby &#x2F; learning opportunity (2005) and grew into a side project with about $20k&#x2F;yr in recurring revenue from corporate customers (2008).<p>Eventually, it turned into a full-time job (early 2009) and I found a co-founder (late 2009). We hired our first four employees in 2010. In 2011 we signed our 100th customer and hit $1m in recurring revenue. In 2013 we hit $5m in recurring revenue.

I wrote a book and video series on Sublime Text - <a href="https://SublimeTextBook.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;SublimeTextBook.com</a><p>It&#x27;s done about 80k in sales in 3 months - I&#x27;m in the process of writing a blog post about how I did it, what worked and what didn&#x27;t. It&#x27;s not inexpensive, but it pays for itself quickly so people are fine with spending the $45 on the book + videos.<p>Feel free to ask questions here so I have content for the post.

An Android app I made in a few hours makes $500&#x2F;m from ads, and has 1M+ downloads on Google Play. It claims to be a radar detector for your phone, but that&#x27;s not even possible (it&#x27;s actually just completely random).<p>The description says that it is for novelty purposes, but the reviews show people believe it works and it has a placebo effect. Most reviews say things like &quot;I drove past a police station and it went off! 5&#x2F;5&quot;.<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vox.radardetector&amp;hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.vox.radard...</a><p>It&#x27;s funny to see it up in the top 20 of the Transportation category on Play, alongside companies that are heavily VC funded. <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/TRANSPORTATION/collection/topselling_free" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;category&#x2F;TRANSPORTATION&#x2F;c...</a>

A year ago I developed an universal video downloader site <a href="http://savedeo.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;savedeo.com</a>.<p>I didn&#x27;t pay much attention to it at first, but people liked the site and kept coming back. Year later the site generates around $30k a month and the operation costs are around $90 (close to nothing).<p>The site is very lightweight as it doesn&#x27;t really downloads anything. It just extracts direct links to the files.<p>There are a great challenges that I have to deal with (like YouTube blocking IPs, sites changing designs all the time, etc.).

I wrote an Android app based on a blog post of mine which got popular:<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jasmcole.wifisolver" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.jasmcole.w...</a><p><a href="http://jasmcole.com/2014/08/25/helmhurts/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jasmcole.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;08&#x2F;25&#x2F;helmhurts&#x2F;</a><p>It reached the reddit front page for a day, and earned £3,000 during that day. Since then, it&#x27;s averaged ~£150 per month, with only small input from me (minor updates)

I wrote a book[1] a year and a half ago that just recently crossed $42k in total revenue. These days it consistently earns $1.5k&#x2F;mo without much further input from me, other than tweaks to the landing page copy and updates once in awhile when Stripe or Rails changes significantly.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.masteringmodernpayments.com</a><p>Edit: If you&#x27;d like to read a preview, you can do so here: <a href="https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/read" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.masteringmodernpayments.com&#x2F;read</a>

I created a card game that I sell on Amazon. I have it manufactured in China and sell it though Fulfillment by Amazon.<p>Quite a change from my day job working in software but I enjoy the diversity.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PJKCXJC" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;product&#x2F;B00PJKCXJC</a>

I&#x27;ve created five years ago <a href="http://www.totalwireframe.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.totalwireframe.com</a>, based on a hunch that it would interest people. It&#x27;s a site where I sell libraries for an obscure&#x2F;niche market.<p>The first year, I sold for $0 of librairies. In 2014, I&#x27;ve made ~$45,000 and it&#x27;s 100% passive income. I&#x27;m not proud to say that I&#x27;ve worked a total of 30 hours on the site last year (it sounds as if I&#x27;m lazy, and I&#x27;m not). Moreover, I&#x27;ve never spent a single dollar on marketing, no matter its form.<p>It works so well that I&#x27;ve taken the decision to leave my daily job to work on the site full time. I (perhaps naively) think that if I make that much money while doing practically nothing, I can surely make a ton more by actually working on it every day for a year. On Feb 1st, I&#x27;m making the jump.<p>It has been tough to get there though. The first year has been a disaster. I nearly abandoned the site. Then, one day, I started to gain traction. To this day, I have no idea why. Then, months after months, the sales went up. It took me weeks and weeks of work to create the libraries I&#x27;m selling today. I also did a lot of variations, based on the feedback I received from my customers. My customers are the best, I think. They like what I do, they give me a lot of feedback. In the course of my business, I also did stupid things I regret immensely, like copy a competitor (but honestly it was not intentional), and I&#x27;m really, really not proud of this.<p>Sales have reached a peak of $7500 for the month of May 2014.<p>The site is based on <a href="http://jekyllrb.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jekyllrb.com&#x2F;</a> and is hosted on <a href="https://www.webfaction.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webfaction.com&#x2F;</a>, on a 9$ per month plan. As the site is static, I just need Nginx. That&#x27;s it. GetDPD allows me to collect payments with both Paypal and Stripe.<p>To let people pay and downlaod, I use <a href="http://getdpd.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;getdpd.com&#x2F;</a>. They are fantastic. I&#x27;ve tried a lot of other options and even though GetDPD looks terrible, it&#x27;s a great product, well worth the tiny monthly cost.<p>I hope my story will let people know that it&#x27;s totally feasible to do a great business as a side project. I honestly wonder EVERY.SINGLE.DAY how come it worked for me, but well,... it worked :-)

I&#x27;m making about $500&#x2F;month (was $800&#x2F;month when bitcoin price was better) by code reviewing altcoins for exploits, undisclosed premines, and other scams that can hide in code. I have an arrangement with an exchange for a monthly fee, and sometimes am paid by others as well.<p>I&#x27;ve successfully stopped 1 full blown exploit (admanteumcoin) where there was code that allowed a block to mine any amount of coins desired, (and had RPC calls modified to hide this).<p>I started out doing it to try to help the altcoin ecosystem, because it&#x27;s pretty interesting, and because it&#x27;s a great way to learn more about cryptocurrencies and all their implementations. My code review directory (that isn&#x27;t actually up to date) is on github: <a href="https://github.com/Earlz/coinreviews" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Earlz&#x2F;coinreviews</a>

10MinuteMail - <a href="http://10minutemail.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;10minutemail.com</a><p>Temporary email. Got lucky with traffic, and run two Google Adsense ads.

Lead generation service for mobile developers: iOS Leads - <a href="http://iosleads.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;iosleads.com</a> &amp; Android Leads - <a href="http://androidleads.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;androidleads.net</a><p>Have an assistant that helps curate freelance&#x2F;contract positions from around the internet and through opportunities I hear about offline. I&#x27;m a mobile developer, so it&#x27;s an effective side business to be working on.<p>Many people have scored new clients and worked on interesting projects through the service. Some people find it&#x27;s not for them. Definitely offer a money-back guarantee if you&#x27;re working on something digital&#x2F;saas. No reason to be taking people&#x27;s money if they&#x27;re not getting value out of your product.<p>Another valuable lesson: we did really well with podcast advertising thanks to Release Notes (<a href="http://releasenotes.tv/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;releasenotes.tv&#x2F;</a>). If you can find a podcast with 10,000 - 20,000 listeners that serves a niche, you should be able to produce a nice return. IMO our landing page is terrible, but it converts quite well.

It would be fascinating to see a complement to this thread, &quot;Side projects that never got any traction&quot;. The tech press has a huge bias toward reporting on &quot;what works&quot; based on projects or companies that succeeded, without ever looking at the many projects and companies that do exactly the same things as the successful ones without ever getting anywhere.<p>I&#x27;ve been very successful in the technology world, including running my own scientific and software consulting company for many years, but as a novelist and poet I&#x27;ve been a complete failure, despite approaching the two in very similar ways. Maybe the markets are simply very different, or maybe it&#x27;s just luck, or something else. So I think it would be interesting to see some side-by-side of projects that took off and projects that didn&#x27;t.<p>There are lots of really interesting things people are posting here, but I bet for every success story there is a story of failure that involves a great many of the same elements, yet somehow never grew beyond the &quot;that was an interesting way to spend my spare time for a while&quot; stage.

Reddit thread on this subject from yesterday: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2rb487/people_who_have_built_sites_for_a_passive_income/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;webdev&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2rb487&#x2F;people_who_h...</a>

I made <a href="http://bankofamericaroutingnumber.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bankofamericaroutingnumber.com</a> It took less than a day and makes about $150&#x2F;month. Not quite the 1k but not bad for minimal work.

I created a soccer app that provides information on betting. It trickled along nicely and then in November it jumped to £3k (~$4.5k) then December it jumped to £7.7k (~$11k) and looks to be on that line still as it is on £2k after 5 days of January!

I wrote a SaaS app for SEO professionals that helps them find link opportunities for their client&#x27;s websites - <a href="https://www.LinksSpy.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.LinksSpy.com</a> .<p>It currently makes about $1,200&#x2F;mo. I do somewhat detailed income reports over at <a href="http://www.it-engelhardt.de/income-reports" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.it-engelhardt.de&#x2F;income-reports</a>

This is fudging the question, but after many months of nights-and-weekends toiling, I launched <a href="https://www.land-of-nosh.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.land-of-nosh.com</a> out of beta testing <i>today</i> and hope to be making $1,000+&#x2F;month at some point!<p>My wife has always hated the meal planning&#x2F;recipe organization and sharing process and available tools (she&#x27;d used a few different products). After asking lots of friends for recommendations and hearing enough times, &quot;I use X, but I don&#x27;t like it, so if you find something better, let me know.&quot; it seemed like a promising lead for a side project!<p>Worst case: I make no money, and my wife finally has the meal planning tool she&#x27;s always wanted.

I wrote an ebook (&quot;Practice Makes Python&quot;, <a href="http://lerner.co.il/practice-makes-python" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lerner.co.il&#x2F;practice-makes-python</a> ) for people who have learned Python basics, but want to gain fluency. I&#x27;m working on videos for a higher-tier offering, and then will start to market it more seriously.<p>I only launched the book about 1.5 months ago, and I&#x27;m at about $1500 in revenue. I&#x27;m definitely hoping to see greater income with the higher tiers (including video) and greater marketing. I&#x27;m also speaking with some companies about them buying site licenses of the book, which would increase the revenue even more.

I wrote a bunch of ebooks and created a bunch of videos. I sold them from my blog and via Twitter; in fact, although I started in 2010 and have made at least 10 products, to this day, I only have web sites for one ebook and one video series. (Count each video in that series as a separate product and I&#x27;ve probably made at least 20 products.)<p>TBH, the worst part about this is that it&#x27;s so easy, I got pretty lazy about it. This is why I haven&#x27;t answered the &quot;what did you make?&quot; question - I got so lazy about it in 2014 that the side projects brought in about half what they made in 2015. Kinda painful in retrospect.<p>Likewise, if I had web sites for this stuff, if I built email marketing systems, I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;d make more money. I even have a Kindle version of one of my books, and I still haven&#x27;t gotten around to sharing it with my customers. Kind of embarassing, actually.<p>But even then, I&#x27;m well over the $1K&#x2F;month mark. No worries there. All you really need to do is create stuff that people find worthwhile.

I wrote a GPL licensed layout manager (<a href="https://golden-layout.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;golden-layout.com&#x2F;</a>) that also comes with commercial licenses. It&#x27;s been out for three months now and seems to appeal to financial institutions. Revenue is ok, especially since most sales are the more expensive (399 GBP) multi domain license, but a lot of the bigger customers don&#x27;t want to just purchase it through the website, but rather enter into a more bespoke contract which comes with some overhead.

I run <a href="https://www.daysoftheyear.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.daysoftheyear.com</a>, a calendar website which lists all of the weird, funny, odd etc national days, holidays events. Alternative celebrations, like &#x27;Ferris Wheel Day&#x27; on Feb 14th (vs Valentines Day). They&#x27;re all real celebrations researched, described, etc. It was built (and rebuilt several times, and constantly iterated) by me, from scratch, on WordPress, in my spare time over a period of years.<p>The site generates &gt;$1.5k per month at the moment from AdSense alone, without any marketing other than SEO and broadcasting to the social followers we&#x27;ve accumulated. This revenue is secondary to the real and long-term value being generated in the form of large numbers of membership&#x2F;email subscriptions and social followers.

<a href="http://rebrickable.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rebrickable.com</a> - using your existing LEGO collection, find other stuff you can build. Thousands of custom designs with building instructions and parts lists.

Small niches are cool, but you probably can&#x27;t live from ads. Choose a lame subject with lots of users and make a clean and easy to use website.<p>I have a small directory website. It&#x27;s pretty boring stuff, but it is a good source of almost passive income. Never published it. I just created the website and sent the sitemap to Google Webmasters. It&#x27;s 8 months old and I have 400k pageviews&#x2F;month.<p>I have lots of projects in idea stage, I want to execute at least two in 2015. My plan is to reinvest all money from this first side project to create others.

I built and run <a href="http://bots4.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bots4.net</a>. It&#x27;s made a little over $40k since opening in 2011.<p>bots4 is a freemium text&#x2F;browser-based robot fighting game. It was making $3,000&#x2F;month at one point, but revenue has dropped significantly since then (and it fluctuates a lot based on the activity of whales). Operating cost is $25&#x2F;month for Linode VPS hosting. Here&#x27;s the revenue history as of August 2013:<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/rqcxQgv.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;rqcxQgv.png</a><p>It makes money purely through in-game purchases. Players can buy what are known as &quot;stars&quot; for $10 USD each. Stars let you order items for your bot so that you don&#x27;t have to camp for them. The alternative if you don&#x27;t have stars is to wait for your item to appear, so stars ultimately don&#x27;t enable you to do anything you couldn&#x27;t do without them, but they are a big convenience, especially in late game where certain items appear very infrequently (still only O(hours) though).<p>If you want more info, you can read through my posts here (linked to archived version because it&#x27;s not loading on the original domain):<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140210074542/http://community.bbgamezone.net/revenue-promotion/$100-per-day-with-online-games/25/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20140210074542&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;community....</a>

Create a Job Board, use the latest social routes to drive traffic and build a list.<p>The amount you make from the Job Board post is heavily dependent on the amount social followers (drives traffic and makes purchasing more appealing).<p><a href="https://www.angularjobs.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.angularjobs.com</a> started making ~$1000&#x2F;month in revenue with a highly targeted social reach of ~10k followers.<p>Technical co-founder type? Take what you know about programming and offer recruiting services to the early users of your site. Both companies and developers visit job boards, providing both the clients and talent needed to collect recruitment fees(over 10K in major US cities).<p>My main gig is <a href="http://www.LinkPlugApp.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.LinkPlugApp.com</a> where I play a technical role.<p>LinkPlug is how I drive traffic to the JobBoard from social media accounts like the ones below(click a tweeted link to see an ad for the JobBoard):<p><a href="https://twitter.com/AngularJS_news" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;AngularJS_news</a><p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/groups?groupDashboard=&amp;gid=4896676" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;groups?groupDashboard=&amp;gid=4896676</a><p><a href="https://twitter.com/angularjobs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;angularjobs</a><p>edit: added Twitter account examples.

I wrote a puzzle app for iOS - <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/app/id906543727" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;id906543727</a><p>It&#x27;s free to download and try it out, but then I charge for additional puzzles.<p>I was keen to give a complete version of the app for free (without ads) so that people understand clearly what I&#x27;m offering. This strategy seems to be working with good and returning custom. Not $1k yet but some reason for optimism ;)

Combination Machine Learning, NLP, Neural Networks, stock analyzer. Does automated day trading. Not HFT style stuff. More what a bank pays an analyst to do, type of trading, but smaller scale since it&#x27;s only my personal funds.

I have three side projects that together became my &quot;full-time&quot; job. I&#x27;m able to spend a lot of time with my kids since I can work fewer hours. I&#x27;m tired all the time due to a 4 month old baby, so I&#x27;m not doing a lot of things I should.<p>My method is simple and has only four steps. 1. Write something cool and put it online for free. 2. Wait 4 to 5 years. 3. Gather all the emails asking if they can license it or pay you to adapt it. 4. Then slap on a price&#x2F;marketing page emphasizing what everybody asked for.<p><a href="http://websequencediagrams.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;websequencediagrams.com</a> is my SAAS business. When I was working on 3GPP at RIM we had to spend hours in Visio moving boxes around, and pasting the results into word documents. It was a challenging layout problem. By 2007 I made a python script that did sequence diagrams automatically and put it online. I began to get emails from companies saying they wanted to license it, so I obliged. After I left RIM, I converted it into a freemium product. I have about 400 users paying $9 to $15&#x2F;month.<p><a href="http://zwibbler.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;zwibbler.com</a> gets about 70 visits a day. It&#x27;s a javascript drawing library with full-service from me. Again, it started as a free HTML demo, and I began to get emails requesting me to adapt it for pay. Instead, I created the front page that offers a complete solution for $1500. By answering emails and talking on the phone, I can get 3 or 4 clients a month without even trying. I figure out what they want and reposition the buttons to do it.<p>My favourite is <a href="http://rhymebrain.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rhymebrain.com</a> because I don&#x27;t have to do anything. Google just transfers $1-2K into my account every month for Adsense.

I&#x27;ve built VoilaNorbert (<a href="https://www.voilanorbert.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.voilanorbert.com</a>) with a friend more than a year ago just for our purpose, and got LifeHacker(ed) in September (2014) with more than 20k visitors in one day. We decided to re-write it to include a paid service and we now get around 450 € per month that we split together.<p>Among that, I started selling Prestashop modules on May 14, and now I get around 800&#x2F;1000 € per month from this.<p>Getting money on your side project is (imho) the best feeling in the world. You get notifications (email for Prestashop, SMS that I configured for VoilaNorbert) at every sales, and when you receive them, oh that feels great! :)<p>This lead me to learn something very important : you have to finish what you start. It&#x27;s my big default, I always stop in the middle. Norbert and the modules for Prestashop was an exception, and now they make money!

I made a fully autonomous bot for a 15 year old MMORPG. The bot can completely play the game with very little intervention, and I have about 2,000 people paying $5.75 monthly for it.

I found a great article by Walter Chen yesterday about how to he brought his business to $1000 recurring revenue yesterday.<p><a href="http://blog.idonethis.com/how-we-got-to-1-000-in-recurring-revenue/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.idonethis.com&#x2F;how-we-got-to-1-000-in-recurring-r...</a><p>Im working on a similar service using SMS.

I wrote a book called Build a Ruby Gem ( <a href="http://brandonhilkert.com/books/build-a-ruby-gem/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;brandonhilkert.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;build-a-ruby-gem&#x2F;</a>). After release, it&#x27;s required very little work and has totaled about $20k in 9 months since launch.

I made <a href="https://QuickMail.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;QuickMail.io</a> for lead generation (making +$5,000&#x2F;month)<p>This is the quick (1 min video) version of how I did it: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0y28HmcqUo&amp;feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=y0y28HmcqUo&amp;feature=youtu.be</a><p>This is the longer version: <a href="http://blog.quickmail.io/category/journey-to-1k-paying-customers/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.quickmail.io&#x2F;category&#x2F;journey-to-1k-paying-custo...</a>

I launched a side project in 24 hours last month (which I documented here: justinmcgill.net&#x2F;24-hour-product-challenge-twist&#x2F;).<p>It is called LeadFuze (www.leadfuze.com) and it&#x27;s an email prospecting and outreach service that generates leads via email. Good for B2B businesses and startups, or even companies looking to validate ideas.<p>I&#x27;ve managed to hit $1k&#x2F;mo ($1,100) in recurring revenue within 30 days. Going to be a much bigger focus of mine now that it is gaining traction.

I started a little niche webshop in 2011. In 2014, the monthly revenue were around $2500&#x2F;month.<p>It&#x27;s not passive income, but I only use ~ 1 hour a day on it (packaging etc.)

I&#x27;m working on multiple ideas. haven&#x27;t cracked the 1000&#x2F;month yet, but have put together a common repo I use as a starting point for all my projects. It recently got featured on the Google Developers Channel: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_7zdqz01sk&amp;list=PL2fzhe-bAEC1eSoe4j_-tGiv4_lFZ8gpE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=k_7zdqz01sk&amp;list=PL2fzhe-bAE...</a>

<a href="http://fetching.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fetching.io</a> makes well over $1,000 &#x2F; month but we&#x27;re just getting started ;)

How We Earned $10,120 in 30 Days by Sending Horse Poop to People: Amazing Kickstart of a Marketing Experiment<p><a href="http://www.shitexpress.com/blog/how-we-earned-10120-usd-in-30-days-by-sending-horse-poop-to-people-amazing-kickstart-of-a-marketing-experiment" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shitexpress.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-we-earned-10120-usd-in-3...</a>

How are you guys marketing these?<p>I&#x27;m not making anything close to that but I&#x27;ve worked on a side project of mine for months with no gain. At this point I&#x27;m debating if I should just move on. It&#x27;s not revolutionary but but any advice would be beneficial.<p><a href="http://www.psswrd.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psswrd.io</a>

My first real side-project-turned-business is&#x2F;was Bugrocket (<a href="https://bugrocket.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugrocket.com</a>, launched March 2011, bug tracking for small dev teams). Subscription-based and grows very slowly, it mostly hovers around $500&#x2F;month in revenue. The market is just feels really small these days between Trello and GitHub Issues being decent now (in 2011 it was very lacking).<p>Next, my wife and I started CourseCraft (<a href="https://coursecraft.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coursecraft.net</a>, launched December 2012, e-course creator tools + we handle transactions for 5%-9% of sales). Since it&#x27;s transaction-based it&#x27;s a lot less consistent monthly, but growing faster. A typical month is $300-$400 in revenue, but it&#x27;s been a lot higher (and a lot lower) here and there.

I create videos, mainly focused on agile techniques, that I distribute online. Currently all of my videos are on Pluralsight but I&#x27;ve signed deals to start branching out to other distributors with new content in 2015. <a href="http://www.pluralsight.com/author/jeremy-jarrell" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pluralsight.com&#x2F;author&#x2F;jeremy-jarrell</a><p>Currently the videos generate about $3,500&#x2F;month in revenue. There&#x27;s little out of pocket expense for the initial production of each video (stock imagery, reference books, etc) and no ongoing expenses after production is complete.<p>I started out just focusing on topics that I was interested in but didn&#x27;t have a lot of success. Once I started approaching things as a business my return improved dramatically.

Something to think about: Based on the answers here and in the related Reddit thread it seems that information products (e-books, targeted blog posts, link collections) still generate better revenue (either sales or ad revenue) than pure software products as side projects.

Send to Dropbox. Allows you to email attachments to your Dropbox. Makes roughly $2,500 a month currently. More info in this other thread: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8699687" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8699687</a>

I launched Feedback Army on HN in 2008. It&#x27;s consistently paid my part of my Washington, DC rent for years. I gave some details about how I marketed it on its blog and in the side projects book someone put together awhile ago. Sadly, I can&#x27;t find a link to the side projects book or I&#x27;d post it here.<p><a href="http://blog.feedbackarmy.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.feedbackarmy.com&#x2F;</a><p>I owe a lot to Feedback Army. It was the first thing I made where I made money without putting an hourly value on a unit of my time. I learned to think of my business as a system for fulfilling what I promised and collecting money from customers. This side project was a great way to cut my teeth on some business and service fundamentals.

I made a a community built around sharing creative writing, story telling, digital art and artistic expression. It also has a few browser games and a &quot;digital collectibles&quot; aspect to it. I started it about a year and a half ago with a digital-artist friend.<p>It&#x27;s got a standard F2P model for the collectibles aspect: you can get everything for free by playing the games &#x2F; posting in the forums, or you can pay for it. It probably doesn&#x27;t make as much as it could as I refuse to employ &quot;dirty F2P Tricks&quot;, but that&#x27;s a personal choice.<p>Check it out if you care to :)<p><a href="https://www.mycenacave.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mycenacave.com&#x2F;</a>

Mine was not over $1,000&#x2F;mo but I&#x27;m working to get it there.<p><a href="http://undupe.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;undupe.com</a> was something I spun up one day, it gained a little interest and now it runs around $400+ a month(with under 10 users). Not very much, but a nice start.<p>I&#x27;m working on moving this one up a notch past $1,000&#x2F;mo while adding other small products to my portfolio.<p>$1k&#x2F;mo is still a milestone I&#x27;ve been working on reaching. Up until now, I&#x27;ve been an active contract developer.<p>Still have lots of product tests running and seeing what will be next. Eventually, this will turn into a nice portfolio of digital assets and income.

I have two apps in the iOS app store. One launched in 2009 (Filer) and the other in 2010 (FLAC Player). I&#x27;ve been really lucky that both have done so well, especially 5 years on. I maintain them for major iOS releases and hardware changes, but the little time I have I try to work on new stuff and supporting them. My wife helps with support emails now, which has been a huge help.<p>Neither app has any server-side components, so they don&#x27;t cost me anything but squarespace fees for my website and my iOS dev program membership.<p>Edit: Oh yeah, they&#x27;re both paid apps and I don&#x27;t fiddle with the pricing

reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;SideProject is a great place to look for such projects.

Around two years ago now I created a League of Legends champion information&#x2F;countering website: <a href="https://www.championcounter.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.championcounter.com&#x2F;</a><p>Growth was slow but steady, and the site now receives ~1.4M pageviews per month. The money to keep things up and running comes through banner ads - it&#x27;s not a huge amount (have only started hitting just about $1000&#x2F;mo in recent months, and don&#x27;t know how long that&#x27;ll last for), but it&#x27;s still a nice revenue stream to have.

Artwork Archive - <a href="https://www.artworkarchive.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.artworkarchive.com</a><p>It&#x27;s an inventory&#x2F;career management platform for working Artists. Slow but steady growth, mostly word of mouth and recommendations by influencers in the space. Me and one other business partner. We had our first $1k month in our 4th month of operation. We are well over that now and with current growth it should match the income of my full time job in the next year or so.

~$1k+ per month from few side projects.<p>+ pc builder site <a href="http://assembleyourpc.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;assembleyourpc.net</a> (I created ~1.7 years ago, generates revenue from Adsense and few affiliate programs, 2-6 hours of work (per month))<p>+ other niche tools : <a href="http://portchecker.co" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;portchecker.co</a> and <a href="http://signature-maker.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;signature-maker.net</a> (weekend side projects, 0-2 hours of work(per month))

Although we haven&#x27;t hit the $1K&#x2F;mo just yet, we&#x27;re getting close. Perhaps overly ambitiously, we started <a href="https://ceanow.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ceanow.org</a> - we saw a need with the bad advice that was given to startups and wanted to educate the &quot;advice-givers.&quot; Our audience is primarily accountants and lawyers. It&#x27;s a SaaS model in education and there&#x27;s been a lot of interest. The big problem is the time bandwidth.

I created a videotutorial course to teach people how to design and code trading robots - udemy.com&#x2F;build-your-trading-robot.<p>It&#x27;s doing about 1.5k&#x2F;mth. Launched it 2 months ago. Took me 6 months to create it. Still adding content to it though, will probably take about 1 year more before I complete it.<p>The site that hosted the course did most of the marketing for me so I just focused on the product. Startup cost was about $150. Spent it on microphone and digital writing pad.

I created a website for folks learning English as a foreign language: <a href="http://www.phrasemix.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phrasemix.com</a><p>I&#x27;ve been running it for the last 5 years. The first 2 years, it was just a blog that I maintained for free. 3 years ago, I started selling access to audio recordings of the lessons as a subscription.<p>The site generates about $2K per month off of around 300K monthly visitors. It continues to grow but very slowly.

<a href="https://hopsie.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hopsie.com</a><p>I wrote a site creator for non-profits that allows them to create customized fundraising sites.

I have a few small joke websites that run on a vps. I set most of them up as a kid. www.downloadmoreram.com is around $500 m&#x2F;o on it&#x27;s own.

I created <a href="http://builds.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;builds.io</a> and <a href="http://udid.io/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;udid.io&#x2F;</a> The first one is the store destributing iOS apps removed from AppStore. And the second one is the service to get UDID of iPhone in one tap. Together they generates revenue around $1000 month on subscriptions and AdSense.

<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358778" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2358778</a>

I created an iOS app <a href="http://ideon.co/theconverted/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ideon.co&#x2F;theconverted&#x2F;</a> as a side project. I&#x27;ve had hopes to be able to survive entirely on revenue from my own projects instead of relying on client work. I&#x27;m very far from that goal at this point, but the extra income is nice.

Not $1k, but might be a inspiration anyway: 2 years ago i made some simple LAMP+HTML&#x2F;CSS Videotutorials and put them on YouTube. Production quality isn&#x27;t great but better than 90% that was on YT at the time. Along with that, created a little site with the Videos and some code examples. Videos + site are making me $100&#x2F;month.

I developed a wifi hotspot locator using NYC Open Data. It is deployed on Google App Engine: <a href="http://elemental-shine-793.appspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;elemental-shine-793.appspot.com&#x2F;</a><p>Source Code: <a href="https://github.com/rainmaker7/locator" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rainmaker7&#x2F;locator</a>

<a href="http://bestattendance.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bestattendance.com</a>. Built it over a summer back when I was a high school teacher and had summers off. Not sure I would have been able to do it without a nice 3 month block of time. Doing side projects on weekends and evenings only is pretty tough.

I made <a href="http://park.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;park.io</a> last June<p>I got into this stuff because I am very interested in domains - especially .io domains<p>At first domains were just a fun hobby - to collect for future projects. But then I sold a few and bought a few more and scaled it out.<p>I created park.io to automate things.

I developed a chrome extension in the early days of Google+ (2011) as a side project to help me remove inactive people from my google+ circles and unfollow unfollowers. Circloscope is now a full-fledged Google+ circle management tool which can help you build and grow your audience in Google+.

I sell 6 and 12 month leadership development programs to companies. I make 50% of the sale. At $50&#x2F;mo per employee on the program, I make an extra $1000&#x2F;mo at 40 employees. <a href="http://LIFELeadershipCorporate.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;LIFELeadershipCorporate.com</a>

My site with totally free photos. I made it because no stock photo agency&#x2F;site want my photos.<p>— <a href="http://www.picjumbo.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.picjumbo.com</a><p>Today it has 1mio pageviews&#x2F;month, PREMIUM Membership, Photoshop Plugin, AdSense and some &quot;30-days&quot; ads.<p>And photos are still FREE :)

I wrote a book on Google Authority 2 years back and after steadily growing in sales it gives about 800USD&#x2F;month now:<p><a href="https://gum.co/ppyJ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gum.co&#x2F;ppyJ</a><p>Although I haven&#x27;t spent a single penny on promotion and selling it for less than I should I guess.

I generated $1000&#x2F;month selling pens to writers, moms, artists and creative . The project is called Humble Pen. It is a side project. By partnering up with artists from around the world would hep me promote the brand. It also changed lives. Win-win situation!<p>www.humblepen.com

<a href="http://tailoredwp.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tailoredwp.com&#x2F;</a> Recurring revenue is from hosting services plus some affiliate commissions. It started as a side project, and I think this year will become my main source of income.

I left my full-time job back in February 2013 (coming up on 2 years). I currently split my time between consulting and growing my products (a downloadable and a SaaS). Revenue from my oldest app is still &gt; $1000&#x2F;month. Been a fun ride so far.

Several folks do a few hundred &#x2F; month with a few ad-supported utility mobile apps. That&#x27;s enough for gas and food. To get to ramen profitability, either a good mobile or biz SaaS app. B2C should rarely be depended on for bootstrapping.

I started thumbnailing porn torrents at <a href="http://www.magnetpeep.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.magnetpeep.com</a>, then the Pirate Bay went down (who I used to index the torrents). I need to get back on that project.

We make about $300 in donations a month over at <a href="http://moodpanda.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;moodpanda.com</a> , we don&#x27;t do it for the money, its a good way of opening doors and getting invited to events etc.

I have an online SEO course that hit six-figures in 2014. I wrote a post on it: <a href="http://www.clickminded.com/six-figure-side-project/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clickminded.com&#x2F;six-figure-side-project&#x2F;</a>

I run <a href="http://unfriend.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;unfriend.io</a> - I used to make over 1000e a month with an un-named advertiser who decided to revoke my account without appeal. Now my money comes from donations.

TickChek.com is a side-project I launched in collaboration with my university&#x27;s wildlife laboratory to offer tick testing for Lyme and other diseases. We&#x27;ve grossed over $4k in out best months this last year.

I built <a href="http://www.ranksignals.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ranksignals.com</a> SEO tools.<p>It&#x27;s a SaaS app and a Chrome Extension. It has tens of thousands of monthly active users and makes $x,xxx per month.

Inspired by this thread i just created this site (took me couple of hours today), monetizing by Amazon associate program. :<p><a href="http://www.watchaisle.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.watchaisle.com</a><p>Will complete it by next weekend.

I built a niche website about Cockapoo dogs monetised with an ebook <a href="http://www.cockapoo.me" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cockapoo.me</a><p>Why?<p>200,000 searches per month on goggle UK + moz keyword difficulty of 31% = opportunity

I launched my first &quot;real&quot; SaaS this year, <a href="https://embedkit.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;embedkit.com</a> - and got just 1 enterprise customer to net 1k revenue a month.

I publish Hackerpreneur Magazine. It&#x27;s a free app in the Apple newsstand and revenue is from subscriptions (in app purchases).<p><a href="http://hck.co/mag" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hck.co&#x2F;mag</a>

Have a website that allows folks to create custom logos and backgrounds for their google search engine. People can type anything they want, choose a logo and choose a background.<p>www.lyfts.com

I have some shitty Udemy courses that net me just over that much:<p><a href="https://www.udemy.com/u/andrewvega/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.udemy.com&#x2F;u&#x2F;andrewvega&#x2F;</a>

I made ShotBuf iOS app (<a href="http://shotbuf.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shotbuf.com</a>) and earned $100 on sales in 2014 :) It&#x27;s kind of fail story))

I developed a service that does SSL installation for you on Heroku: <a href="https://www.expeditedssl.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.expeditedssl.com</a>

I haven&#x27;t seen too much profit yet, but <a href="http://www.linkwallet.ca" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkwallet.ca</a> pulls in a little bit.

I sell drugs.<p>It&#x27;s a lot harder than you might think.<p>My clients give pretty reliable recurring revenue, so much so that it&#x27;s gone from a side project to a full time gig for me.

<a href="https://www.linktexting.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linktexting.com</a> text to download forms for mobile apps!

<a href="http://tweet-a-lot.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tweet-a-lot.com</a> - #tweet-a-lot is a great way to start your own contest to encourage twitter users to post with your hashtag. The service uses gamification to reward behaviour that helps you promote your brand to the most followers.

I started a personal project last year that&#x27;s currently pulling $350,000-$400,000 profit a month.<p>Currently I&#x27;m working on scaling very hard.<p>It was a good year, and it feels good that 15 years of insanely hard learning have paid off... It feels surreal, like I&#x27;m dreaming and I&#x27;m going to wake up.

Amazing thread - 2015 sure looks like a hit already.

Some of these posted ideas are actually pretty good.

A local community website, earning from local ads.

I&#x27;m bringing home about $2,500 a month on my side project. This year I plan on doubling it. The issue is that this is really starting to becoming another full-time job.

commenting for reference later

It&#x27;s been a few years, but at one time I averaged $3,500.00 per month, with two months at $5,000.00, from two AdSense units on just one single, quite lengthy but well-researched and well-written essay on legal music downloading.<p>I am, today, skeptical that it&#x27;s worth anyone&#x27;s while to try to make money from ads published alongside one&#x27;s articles. At one time that was widely accepted as the very best way to make money online, but no more.<p>I&#x27;m getting ready to do a KickStarter project so I can devote myself full time to this:<p><a href="http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.warplife.com&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;computer&#x2F;</a><p>So far I have some remote employers and clients, and some employers in a few large US cities. After I have lots more remote employers, as well as some in a few other countries, I&#x27;ll do the kickstarter.<p>Someone managed to make fifty-six grand from a KickStarter in which he said &quot;I&#x27;m making potato salad&quot;. Not that he was going to sell it commercially, or had come up with a killer potato salad recipe. I mean like he was fixing his lunch for the day.<p>Just a couple days ago, I read that three times as much money is raised from crowdfunding than from VC.<p>Consider that with crowdfunding, you don&#x27;t lose any equity. You also don&#x27;t have the problem with a bad VC giving you bad advice, or even demanding you do stupid things.<p>There are some VCs who are very, very good. Despite having to fork over lots of equity, the good VCs are very worthwhile, but IMHO a bad VC is far worse than not getting funding at all.

Not sure if this counts, but in 2013 I made ~17k off of freelancing &amp; consulting in my free-time.<p>I also operate some &quot;for fun sites&quot;, which are all small projects for example a video-game discount aggregator (just scapes sites for discounts) all together ~$200&#x2F;mo.