I'm running a website for people learning Japanese (a dictionary and an SRS/Anki replacement, among other things) and currently making ~$1300/month from Patreon donations, up from ~$590/month the last time this show and tell was posted.
I used Patreon since it was a convenient way to 1) just get some money flowing without having to deal with all of the complexities of integrating a payment processor, e.g. without having to waste what little time I have on things like taxes (Patreon automatically handles the VAT), 2) I don't necessarily run this as I would run an actual business and most of the features are completely free, so it kinda fits Patreon's model of "supporting a creator" instead of your normal SaaS model of completely paywalling everything and giving you only a two weeks' worth of trial use, and 3) most people have already heard of Patreon, so when you're brand new and just starting out it's somewhat less sketchy than asking for people's credit card numbers directly.
In the long-term I'll probably switch to using Stripe or something along those lines (while still keeping the option to use Patreon for those who prefer it), but at this income level it's not really worth my time.
So to answer your question, I think that whether using Patreon is a good way to finance your side projects depends on what those projects are, and on what exactly you goals are.
If you're trying to run a profitable business then what I'm doing is not a good example of what you should do. It might be totally obvious, but the more you give out for free and the more you rely on voluntary Patreon-like donations the less money you'll make. I know of other apps (using a fully paywalled financing model) in this space which have less users than I have and yet they're already hiring other people to work on them, while I can't even pay myself a livable wage to make this a full time job, never mind even thinking about paying someone else to help me out.
Nice. I am exploring something very similar, but for a different language. I am curious if you considered making this a business (as in paid features/subscription based) and if not why not?
> I am exploring something very similar, but for a different language.
Which language if I may ask? I'd like to branch out into other languages too in the future (preferably into something that's easier to parse than Japanese), but since I'm nowhere near done with Japanese at this point it's probably going to take many more years until I do so.
> I am curious if you considered making this a business (as in paid features/subscription based) and if not why not?
I do already have some Patron-only features. For example, normal users get access to two different voices for the audio files, while Patrons get access to four; Patrons get early access to work-in-progress new features, etc.
But inherently I'd like to keep the base product, and in consequence the major essential features, free. It's probably a horrible business decision, but I recognize that not everyone can actually pay, and I want those people to be able to use my site too. I was once poor too, so I know how it is.
Mandarin Chinese. I taught myself the basics (and a bit beyond) quite a while ago, but I am unhappy with either always having to start from scratch with every new tool I try or learn irrelevant things I am not interested in. Before I have seen your site I thought this to be quite a niche use-case, maybe it still is.
Really just want to scratch my own itch, but if I can also add value for others and make this a well-rounded product, even better.
I'm selling access to my collection of 500+ wallpapers I created over ~20 years. It is not $500/month every month, but sometimes I hit that number. Spent $0 on marketing ever (probably not a good thing, actually).
After all these years, it still amazes me some people are ready to pay for pictures :-)
Oh wow I had forgotten about your wallpapers... I loved the blue earth with tiny airplanes so much that I became a paid member back in...2009. And my account still works! Kudos.
Nowadays my monitors are always full of full screen windows so I never get to see the wallpaper.
I started investing in stocks couple of years ago. It is probably not what you wanted to hear but it makes me a lot of money and allowed me to retire in my 30s, as a minimalist. I am a long-term investor(I hold positions at least 1 year) so the time it requires is essentially none.
Besides that I tried to run multiple project in my past but none took off. The problem is that the internet has been monopolized and it is no longer about the idea or being better than competition but it is 100% about money you spend on advertising. That's what killed all my projects. I still do them because I like to code but I don't expect to ever succeed. The goods times for the internet, around 2010s, are long gone.
pity to see this downvoted. Its very hard to monetize anything. Even just with ads, there used to be a number of competitors to google, now it's just google and it's eating away increasingly bigger chunk of the pie. For the past 15 years the VC funding has destroyed anything that might have value (because valuation >> value). Regardless, i still enjoy my own projects and online communities that i have created, but they dont pay much.
Any general pointers? I made a few bucks at the same time everyone else was making money but now I'm at a loss in both senses of the word. And unclear, what does being a minimalist have to do with investing? Do you mean that your income requirements are low compared to others?
Right now energy is hot. I won't give any specific tips, that is what investing is about - you do the picking and choosing and you spend your own money, it is your responsibility. You should look into commodities though. If you feel lost I can recommend TFM's Market Minute on SubscribeStar. For $5 a month you get a daily newsletter. I don't follow it but many people who are not well versed in investing really like it.
You started investing a couple of years ago and now you're retired? If that is the case, you would make millions from selling courses and sharing your secrets.
Also, if we're talking about side projects that net $500 a month, I think the monopolization theory is a little dramatic.
>I started investing in stocks couple of years ago. It is probably not what you wanted to hear but it makes me a lot of money and allowed me to retire in my 30s, as a minimalist. I am a long-term investor(I hold positions at least 1 year) so the time it requires is essentially none.
Well that certainly would put you in the timeframe to capitalize on the GME/BBBY/AMC craze. If you did that, well...congrats I guess. But otherwise I'm suspect.
Vanguard. Like VOO or VTWO - and once you have good savings in there, branch out to more divided payers if you'd like them to kick out some spending money. A 4-5% ARR is probable.
This would assume they are capitalized such that 4-5% ARR returns a living wage after capital gains. Most people don't reach this until their mid-50s or early 60s if they're lucky. Sometimes never.
I would not consider years a short period. But anyway I have started with around 50-65k. Don't remember exactly. Around 50k was inheritance. I knew about investing since I was a teenager. I was interested in trading futures because that's what was popular back then during my high school years. But I realized day-trading is just another day job, so I never got into it. And stocks, back then, were expensive(broker fees) and you needed a lot of money(thousands instead of hundreds) which was simply out of the question for a teenager. When I inherited the money, I wanted to tuck it away and preserve it but then I said to myself "F. it", I always thought about investing in stocks one day and there won't be any better time. So I started.And I found out the fees and complication were no longer such an issue like in the past. On the contrary, it was very easy and cheap. Slowly, with couple of thousands to get my feet wet and couple of months later, I invested all of it and my own money on top of it, as I gained confidence. And it was the best decision in my life. Mostly because it inherently provided the best financial, economic and geopolitical education no school could ever give you. And as I have said, I have been living off of my investments already. Since last year(I could have sooner but I had a great job). Sure, not all people inherit money to start with but that can be equalized by time(ie. start sooner with less). Also, it is a waiting game. You need patience. It's not get rich quick type of thing. And you learn along the way. You make mistakes and you learn from them. If you have 1000$, there is nothing stopping you but your fear of letting the money go(not lose, just not have access to it).
My bank is my broker. It's a local(non-US) bank so I cannot recommend it to the worldwide audience. I don't trade though so I don't use modern platforms where you can make a trade with one click. I just simply log into my account and manually place an order. I know that Interactive Brokers are one of the most popular international brokers so maybe give that one a go. And then I guess Lynx would be the second international broker people often mention. In the US, I guess Ameritrade or Schwab...I have no idea, I'm not versed nor qualified in that so you better ask someone else.
I am very lucky that my broker charges me insanely cheap fees - 7.95$ for up to 100 shares and 9.95$ for more than 100 shares per order. Since I usually do tens of thousands of shares per order, this saved me many thousands on fees throughout the years. Usually I think it is 0.02$ per share with most brokers. You can use brokers that use spread to avoid paying any fees but I would strongly discourage from those brokers and just pay the fees(spread is where you want to buy at $1.00 but the broker waits for 0.99$ and takes the fee of $0.01*number of shares and same if you want to sell).
As for sources of information, you have to find your own. I watch yahoo comment sections on stocks I am interested in and I am mostly on stocktwits. Not that you get much out of there(plenty of smoothbrains, like everywhere) but I like to keep myself up-to-date in case something goes down or someone has a good analysis to share(not very often). It simply keeps me engaged.
As for investing advice..I would highly recommend getting Phil Town's Rule #1 book. I haven't finished it after the years but it is VERY good for novice investors. It is written in very plain language, the advice is very defensive(safe investing) and the guy had humble beginnings so he went through the rough himself. He also has YT channel and podcast but that's up to you if you want to follow. But I drew inspiration from him, among others, for sure. Best thing to do is to look for creators and find the ones you resonate with and simply follow those. Each has different approach so you need to find the ones whose philosophy you like. Keep in mind that most of YT scene are people who have no idea about anything and just bullshit their audience. So be careful to not fall for that. It will take you time to filter out these people.
But I must warn you to avoid getting lost in theory. It's mostly just complete bullshit. The entire financial industry, especially investing, is based on making simple things as confusing as possible and selling people the lie that they cannot do it themselves. Investing is really as simple as basic math in elementary school. Heck, even pre-school. Once you start learning you'll see it's all just a bunch of grifters trying to profit on people's ignorance.
PS: be wary of any financial magazines/websites. For one, one day they write "sell" the other day, heck even hour, they write "buy". They are NOT reliable source of ANY information. Think about what they are in the first place - they need to cater to all people to get the views and clicks. So they will write whatever the audience wants. And for second, don't listen to any analysts or people giving investing advice for free. If they would be any good, they would not be analysts but rather invest themselves. Same goes for any courses, classes,... whatever. Those who know do, those who don't teach. It's 10000% true in investing. In the end, it is YOUR money and YOU have to make the decision. No one else.
I made a service that lets developers take payments in browser extensions.
I made it to monetize my own extensions but other devs have used it to make over $69k and counting which feels really cool. The API is open source, really easy to use, works across browsers, and doesn't cost anything until someone pays for the extension:
Running https://rosterbird.com on the side for 2 years now. It's oscillating between $800-$900 mrr for the past 3 months.
I originally wanted it to be a passive income project but it has grown in scope before I even realized.
Building and maintaining a B2B SaaS on the side is pretty draining. There's always more features, support requests, etc. Wouldn't recommend unless it takes off immediately or it is within a nice niche or you're planning to take it full time.
I've thought about either selling it (and start any other project) or properly growing it (launch in MS teams, shift capabilites, etc) for many months now.
Well done on getting things to where you got them, it's tough to get anywhere around $1k/MRR!
Some feedback:
Your homepage is focused on all the features of what the software does. I'm super technical and someone that signs up for SaaS all the time (plus angel invests in B2B SaaS companies), and I can't quite understand what you're software really does based on the site copy.
Speak more to the pain-points. I'm someone that is an early adopter and this sounds up my alley, but I'm left confused by what why I would even sign up for your service, and I'm giving it more time and attention to try and figure it out than most.
What is the ideal customer profile? What pain-points are your solution solving for your existing customers? I'm actually just genuinely curious. But also take those answers and make them more clear on the site versus just listing the features.
Thank you for the feedback, it is excellent. This homepage was done by me last month and you are correct. It speaks more of the offerings than exactly what it does or how it works. I'll get on it today.
As to what it does, It's basically a Rostering app for Slack teams to automate turn rotation and assign for who has to perform tasks when.
Users can setup their roster by selecting the interval (Daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly), notification time and select the squad members. RosterBird will automatically assign members per the configuration (factor in off days, absences, etc) and notify the assignee on their turn.
I'm working on additional features that allows the team members to book their convenient slots themselves instead of auto-assigning, that should give a different angle to the app and increase the potential usage, hopefully.
I've just changed into the per-user pricing (From fixed rate) to give better flexibility for organizations of all sizes. Would look into the pricing again in 6 months based on how it performs for now.
Nice. If you don't mind me asking, how do you get customers? Do they find you via the Slack store? Or do you go out selling this? Or do you get people find you via search? Or ads?
I am always tempted to make a slack app. Not this particular idea, likely something else.
I don't mind. It's mostly via Slack app directory, sometimes I get through my links. I specifically wanted to build an idea in a marketplace to solve the discovery problem (as I suck at outbound marketing or any marketing in general).
If you're looking to build in any marketplace, shopify is more strealimed as majority of the shopify's users spends on the apps (and the billing and stuff is integrated) compared to any other marketplace.
I want to come up with such an idea and do the same but I always think "wow my idea is amazing" but then after a few days I realize that it's not really what the market needs. Do you have any tips on how to improve this ideation process?
Io be honest, i'm not much of an expert on this either. I've built several projects and have abandoned midway.
I put down all of my ideas with a title and 2 lines of description on evernote whenever it strikes (mostly when seeing a problem, there could be other solutions that exists for this problem at this point).
And whenever in an unrelated instance I encounter a variation of the problem again, which if I believe could've been solved by that idea that I had, I give it a serious thought into researching for solutions and if none exists, I get to build.
I wouldn't call this an ideal process, it just works for me. The bad side-effect I have come to realise from this process is, I build products for which there doesn't exist a solution, which means either the market isn't there or isn't big enough.
The previous project was the same situation (fileql.com, ended up selling it) and now RosterBird. They stay small for relatively long time as you also have to convince users that they have a problem in the first place.
I started off as just another uptime monitor, and just kept adding features as my customers suggested them. Eventually I took stock of what I had built, and started building it into what it is now.
I’m still doing it on the side, but I did get some help from others over the years. Mainly some friends put some $ and got 2 other great partners helping me also on the side. One is in the property management business which is very helpful. He came first as a customer.
Can you elaborate how there is no need for hardware changes?
Are you connecting through the earpiece somehow?
Some time ago I hacked our flat intercom. I needed to have a text message delivered when the intercom rang (we use it to open door to the building), I had to tap to it with an arduino.
Cool. Always great to hear what people tried to do with these intercoms. I played with Arduino myself a lot for similar reasons. Thanks for sharing.
It’s simple actually. We program all the units to call our cloud phone numbers. These numbers are shared among all US customers, so service is cheap to run. Also we got a patent in how we process these calls.
We then process, record, forward, these calls to their destinations. And also we send text message updates for certain events.
How does it work without internet? "zero hardware upgrades, or internet required."
And for the tip, please make a better presentation video what the product and benefits are, with a voice over. You can get one from freelancer sites as low as 20$
I described it above for previous comment but basically we program all the units to call our phone numbers. And then we process these calls in the cloud, record, forward, log, etc.. interface between intercom and us is phone line.
Monetization is ads (AdMetricsPro) and an iOS app. Seasonal popularity but it probably averages around $500/month. I would love to replace the ad engine with something less invasive (e.g. sponsors), but don't have the time or expertise.
I launched it last January and it's been steady. I like working and learning new stuff through it, while it makes some money. Income fluctuates but overall I'm happy!
I make https://bedrock.mxstbr.com, selling a full-stack Next.js & GraphQL boilerplate for building SaaS products, which comes with:
* A complete TypeScript toolchain with end-to-end typesafety from the database to the client
* User authentication
* Subscription payments
* Teams
* Invitations
It's also completely unstyled, which is somewhat unusual in this space. I've found that most of the time, people would just delete all the styling anyway, so instead, the frontend only contains the minimal code necessary to make the functionality work.
I originally launched it in February last year, and it's still going strong now!
Hi, big fan of Rebass, Theme UI..although sometimes Theme UI with Next.js doesn't work right out of the box, are you still the maintainer of these libraries?
And how did you get the word out for your boilerplate product, just on Twitter? Do you have any tips on how to find a niche where a good, well maintained boilerplate is missing and how to make it profitable?
Thanks
Thanks for the nice words! I stopped maintaining ThemeUI when I left Gatsby in 2021.
In terms of getting the word out, it's really all based on my personal audience. I haven't found a repeatable marketing channel outside of just… tweeting about it, which is also visible in declining sales as I saturate that channel.
It kind of depends on what one means by 'making $500/month'. I operate damninteresting.com, and we receive a bit over $1600/month in donations. But a lot of that is used to pay authors for new submissions, pay editors, pay podcast narrators, pay residuals, pay for subscriptions to archives, pay for hosting fees, etc. As the founder my personal per-month profit is in the neighborhood of $600/month.
Running https://text-generator.io which is a cheaper alternative to OpenAI text generation, with a few improvements like it also researches links and understands linked images via analysing any image content, also you can generate a set number of sentences or stop based on hitting low probability words (enables auto complete).
Graphics cards cost do cost around 500 a month though right now which makes ml pretty tight margins... Hoping to sell it more to people wanting to self host in future for that reason
Nice one, this looks great. The kids are old enough to work the remote here now so I was looking into how we block certain channels, my surprise when you can’t. Well not without totally gimping your YouTube account on the TV.
My main project was a side project 4-5 years ago. Now it pays as well as I would have salary+stock in FFANG at Principal+ levels. https://www.outcoldsolutions.com
My current side project is Mac apps at https://loshadki.app making about $1,200 a month.
https://wolftickets.ai/ , right now 1600ish MRR, started as a way to really dig into machine learning on a problem I found super interesting. Has evolved into me learning more and more about making products. Lots of work to do still!
I’ve released my game Flipon https://flipon.net end of 2020 and while it’s not a huge success, it’s still quite a consistent flow of income (300-500€).
Doesn’t require much maintenance, maybe some new content soon.
Yep, mainly focused on two sports soccer and rugby league (#1 sport in my country) which both have a culture of 3, 2, 1 voting system used in my app. I emailed the presidents or coaching staff of hundreds of clubs introducing the product.
Link to the website: https://jpdb.io/
Still only a side-project, and will probably stay that way for a long time still.
Here's some info about the tech stack I'm using: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693959