Been over 2 years since the last time this question was posed and there were a lot of interesting replies the first time around. I'd like to see what people are up to in 2022.
I'm a software developer by trade. I've had essential tremor all my life. Virtually all doctors say, "well, at least it's a benign condition." Right. And it's affected my life in countless ways, none of them good. It's gotten slowly worse over the years. It's not debilitating, but it's frustrating, and it rules out some activities completely. As I type this I randomly touch the touch pad or an unwanted key, and random things happen. :-)
Your software looks amazing for me! Your web site describes my situation exactly. It looks like it's Windows only? Any plans for a Mac version?
Edit: I accidentally posted a truncated version of this earlier (I deleted it), exactly because of my tremor!
I know how hard ET is and I really feel for you. My dad’s ET started getting worse at around 40 and when he reached 65 it got to the point where he couldn’t eat without much difficulty, couldn’t write a simple note, use his phone to text, and many things we take for granted and it stressed him out to the point where he started to isolate; he lost motivation completely. It broke my heart and in 2018 I decided to call and email pretty much every doctor around the world who knew anything about ET and after many emails and phone calls I found a surgeon in South Korea and Florida who agreed to see him. A few months later they performed a non-invasive brain operation that totally cured the ET in his dominant hand (they couldn’t do both). It saved his life.
Your mileage may vary, but I had the same issue and it got fixed after I started lifting and developed more muscle all over my body, especially in the core.
It’s like the nervous system can’t just jerk my hand around if there is more muscle for it to control.
Now my firearm accuracy makes everyone jealous at the range, people are like “wow, you’re such a natural”.
I'm curious. Would some sort of intentionally-activated eye tracking work? Do your eyes have tremors?
Ideally (there's a pun in there, but it's not intentional) we could use our eyes to signal where we want our "focus" to be, but only when we want that signaling to happen. So a simple button held to indicate "track my eyes and focus on where I'm looking when I lift the button" might be useful.
Same here. Mine isn't debilitating (yet, maybe). But there are definitely times it's a real pain, and nobody really seems to understand what it's like to have. And in public it gets annoying because older people will come up to me sometimes and tell me "did you know / do you know if you have Parkinson's" even though it's ET.
> It feels like a conversation that is hard for others to participate in
My dad has Parkinson's and I can relate. My take is: people feel bad for you but society doesn't have canned responses like we do for more common situations like the death of a loved one. This makes people uncomfortable since they don't know what's an appropriate reaction.
Please don't get discouraged though, I didn't even know this existed! The amount of people that will benefit from you bringing this up is >0.
My dad's not interested anymore in computers (more about the cognitive overload than the hand tremors) but this would've helped enormously during the early stages.
I don't think you're right that society doesn't have canned responses for this sort of situation. There's no canned response as brief as "my condolences" or "I'm sorry for your loss", but combine a few vague phrases of the sort "what an awful situation", "it must be horrible to lose control over your body and mind like that" and something about how brave and kind the other person is for helping his grandfather like that, and most people are going to get through the conversation without too much discomfort.
It might sound like I'm being ironic, but even if these phrases are cliched and almost contentless in a strict sense, they're very useful for signalling purposes, and when you're talking to someone whose relative is sick or dead, being able to smoothly signal that you care is actually really good for both parties -- comforting for the recipient and convenient for the sender (in the sense that they can easily make their concern and care for the recipient clear without too much hassle).
This is peak development to me: to write high quality software to solve a problem I care about and make it available for others. If this sold zero copies, it would have all been worth it.
You should consider surrounding yourself with people that can tell the story. It's common to not be able or willing to tell your own story. Others can carry or lift this weight for you, and take it where it needs to go.
Out of curiosity, did you consider creating a browser extension version of your software? As a developer of a dictation extension for Chrome [0] I see that it gets a lot of use for accessibility purposes.
I once experimented with a tremor-compensating extension and some css that hid the “natural” cursor and overlaid a cursor image instead whose position I controlled (using a basic rolling window average to make it steady). This basic test seemed to hold up.
That could potentially open up a whole new market for you…? Just curious if you’ve considered this. Don’t hesitate to reach out by email too if this sounds interesting!
After seeing this on HN at some point, I bought the software for a family member -- as far as I know, they're very happy with it! It's kind of a sore thing to talk about, so I haven't heard it said directly, but last I saw the software was still installed on the machine :)
Not exactly what you're looking for, but to help populate the thread, in the mid 00s I had a big chunk of accidental income that I didn't want to talk about at the time, but can now.
I put Adsense on my blog early on and I'd make maybe $10-20 a day with no shenanigans. I wrote a post recommending a route planner I'd found (pre Google Maps). A month later my income jumped to $100-200 a day and it turned out to be due to the route planner post being #1 or #2 for the route planner's name! I assume people were clicking on my blog post, then clicking on to the real site via the ad. This state of affairs lasted for several months until the algo improved and put the real site on top for good. I can't remember the exact total but I had a good $20-40k out of it and it paid for my wedding.
I follow you on twitter. It seems you've been super successful over the years with side gigs. You're an inspiration to me for when it comes to newsletters.
I sell an excel add-in that integrates with some popular trading software. It makes life easier for traders. It has a couple thousand users paying around $10 a month. That's about as specific as I want to get.
It required a little domain specific knowledge to create, and a recognized name among trading forums to initially market. Otherwise it's super simple and I'm continually surprised that there are no real competitors.
That is the exact niche type of side project that I dream about. Though, with "a couple thousand users paying around $10 a month" that is hardly a side project anymore, given the annual revenue north of $200K.
I had spent years building a reputation in various forums, chat rooms, etc. I had released some free software that a bunch of people used. So it wasn't hard to get users when I released a paid product.
I'm not sure this side project could be achieved any other way.
I created an online market for a game that sold in-game items with revenue at its peak of over $300k USD per month. Initially it just used eBay affiliate links, but since I would track the sellers in my database, I reached out to the big wholesalers and encouraged them to go nearly exclusive on my market for a similar cut. It was all built over a few years and it runs mostly on autopilot, all marketing, hosting, and code built by me. Never discussed it on any forum before.
To answer with a little more in depth, yes it was an mmo, but everything was above board - no gold selling or similar shenanigans.
Sometimes the profit margin was above 50% because I could source the product myself - but then it became an issue of what was my time worth and did I feel like quitting my day job which wasn't in any way stressful? I also had to consider the lifetime of an mmo, who could say how long the game would remain popular?
In hindsight, I should have gone all in and captured the whole market vertically, but then again it wouldn't have remained a side-gig that was on autopilot.
I'll probably write about it all some day, I think some people would find it interesting. I had to put a lot of hats on to make it work: developer, designer, marketer, customer support, accountant, security, ops, affiliate manager, ...
So the marketplace you're describing is not RMT then? You're facilitating in-game trades with in-game currencies, and making money some other way? (ads?)
I've been working on a 3d first person creative writing RPG where you're a Tentacle Monster with a magic mechanical typewriter. You learn ritual magic based on what you write and it can export .txt files. It even has printer "support". It's called Tentacle Typer.
My goal is to make people more prolific and creative writers.
It's not released yet, but I've gotten enough wish lists that I'm confident I will make some money when I do. It's also led to some freelance/consulting work that's kept me afloat while I shamble forth.
A little discouraged by some gambits that didn't yield results I wanted has me not talking about it as much as I was last year. Ah well I bet the hype energy will come back. There's a lot cool here.
I think I personally fueled the PSD2HTML craze by launching designslicer.com back in late 2006 and heavily undercut the competition by charging just $70 per 'sliced' page. I had no portfolio, just a dumb typical web2.0 era styled website and a very cheap price. I easily made $5000 with that website in the short 9 month period that it lived, then sold the domain for $1300. Also I noticed that $70 per page became the new price around all competitors after I launched, it was lovely to see.
The old version is actually still in the Wayback Machine [1]
I staked $15k, bought season tickets for my favourite baseball team, wrote an electron app to auto-price and market those tickets under face value.
We ended up going to 6-7 games for free, sat in MUCH better seats than we ever could have afforded to, and had access to playoff tickets at face value. Further, my friends had access to great seats at reasonable prices and I avoided having to buy from resale sites (who I detest). 90% of the process was automated.
The way I think of it is more of taking advantage of an arbitrage (~20% discount on season tickets to face value). Instead of selling all the tickets to earn ~$2k each year, we kept and used the tickets to our benefit.
Generally, the electron app would pull face value prices and availability from [baseballteam].com, current resale prices from hubstub.com (<- changing name) and stick them into a mini database (object store). From there, I could use these snapshots to track sales across the resale site, determine a fair value for my tickets, and estimate the probability of it selling (by comparing ticket availability between days on the resale site).
Next, I had collected a list of email addresses from friends and a few posts on Facebook and Craigslist. The app had a button create/update a Google sheet with games/prices, pull in the emails, and batch email people (in groups of <50) the information along with the games. The manual part was marking the games as sold in the sheet, tracking etransfers and sending tickets, but it was little work.
If you're thinking about doing this I would recommend doing it by hand for a while to understand the intricacies of the market and pricing dynamics. Only after that can you think about automating some of the stuff. It still may not be worth it because the cost of mistakes is high, development time could be long and honestly it might just be easier to eyeball and keep track of prices and inventory than putting in all that upfront work. In my experience you have to be very confident and experienced to automate something like that with real money at stake.
Scalping is necessary for a lot of events. For instance, a few years back concert sales used to sell a year ahead of time. Who decides they want to go to a concert a year from now? So after a few days they're all sold out to scalpers. Maybe without scalpers they would get sold out by maybe 6 months. But who plans to go to a concert 6 months from now? It's unreasonable. So the alternative is to never get to go to concerts unless you're a fastidious planner.
The other side is even if you want to go to a concert and buy tickets a year ahead of time. What happens if something comes up? You can't resell them. Having the ability to resell your tickets is a huge value to people intending to go to the concert.
You can argue that there should be a better distribution mechanism and I agree, but scalpers are not the problem
Most tickets are "scalped" these days, either by credit card companies, the artist themselves, the venue, etc... A minority of tickets are sold through the normal retail channel these days.
IMO "scalping" is OK and is just selling for what the market will bear. There is demand for something with limited supply (aka scarcity) so prices will go up. I also don't buy that it is unfair to the artist because if their tickets are being "scalped" they could just as easily add more dates to each venue to provide more supply to the market. Some artists do this but many just want to breeze through town in one show.
I was wondering why I had a sudden bit of traffic coming from HN this morning... for anybody interested in the dog treat business I answered some questions about in the original thread (https://coopersdogtreats.com/), I did about 150k in revenue last year and roughly broke even on that. This year I expect to do a bit better and turn a bit of a profit.
That said, I've got manufacturing and fulfillment mostly outsourced, so my day-to-day is really marketing emails, managing FB ad spend and sending product to the warehouse when I run low on inventory. Given that, it's looking like this is going to get relegated back to a side project while I find myself a real job.
While I'd obviously prefer to be making a boatload of cash, it has been really enjoyable so far, and I have learned a ton. The most painful thing has been Apple's privacy changes - before those, I was running FB ads that were effective enough to be immediately profitable from customers' first purchases. Now the cost of acquiring a customer is greater than the profit I make on the first purchase but less than the lifetime profit I make from a customer, so I can still do it profitably but it requires investing cash up front.
Hi! Your comment about managing ad spend on facebook caught my eye. I've worked on AdTech before, especially reducing acquisition cost by using the Conversions API from Facebook. Just wondering if you've already tried that? If not, and you want someone to set it up for you, feel free to email me at support at difflens.com. I have some time and am willing to help out :)
Readit News
It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer.
It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough.
I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It feels like a conversation that is hard for others to participate in.
Do other founders feel this way? I wish I understood it better.
[1] https://steadymouse.com
Your software looks amazing for me! Your web site describes my situation exactly. It looks like it's Windows only? Any plans for a Mac version?
Edit: I accidentally posted a truncated version of this earlier (I deleted it), exactly because of my tremor!
It’s like the nervous system can’t just jerk my hand around if there is more muscle for it to control.
Now my firearm accuracy makes everyone jealous at the range, people are like “wow, you’re such a natural”.
Ideally (there's a pun in there, but it's not intentional) we could use our eyes to signal where we want our "focus" to be, but only when we want that signaling to happen. So a simple button held to indicate "track my eyes and focus on where I'm looking when I lift the button" might be useful.
https://www.steadymouse.com/faq/
My dad has Parkinson's and I can relate. My take is: people feel bad for you but society doesn't have canned responses like we do for more common situations like the death of a loved one. This makes people uncomfortable since they don't know what's an appropriate reaction.
Please don't get discouraged though, I didn't even know this existed! The amount of people that will benefit from you bringing this up is >0.
My dad's not interested anymore in computers (more about the cognitive overload than the hand tremors) but this would've helped enormously during the early stages.
It might sound like I'm being ironic, but even if these phrases are cliched and almost contentless in a strict sense, they're very useful for signalling purposes, and when you're talking to someone whose relative is sick or dead, being able to smoothly signal that you care is actually really good for both parties -- comforting for the recipient and convenient for the sender (in the sense that they can easily make their concern and care for the recipient clear without too much hassle).
This is peak development to me: to write high quality software to solve a problem I care about and make it available for others. If this sold zero copies, it would have all been worth it.
In terms of marketing (if you’re not already doing it), you could write blog posts about different topics around Parkinson’s + tech use.
The use a tool like Surfer SEO to make sure you’ve covered the search term topic cluster well, and then more people will find it via Google.
I once experimented with a tremor-compensating extension and some css that hid the “natural” cursor and overlaid a cursor image instead whose position I controlled (using a basic rolling window average to make it steady). This basic test seemed to hold up.
That could potentially open up a whole new market for you…? Just curious if you’ve considered this. Don’t hesitate to reach out by email too if this sounds interesting!
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dictation-for-gmai...
If you don’t mind me asking, what do you find hard to talk about?
Deleted Comment
I put Adsense on my blog early on and I'd make maybe $10-20 a day with no shenanigans. I wrote a post recommending a route planner I'd found (pre Google Maps). A month later my income jumped to $100-200 a day and it turned out to be due to the route planner post being #1 or #2 for the route planner's name! I assume people were clicking on my blog post, then clicking on to the real site via the ad. This state of affairs lasted for several months until the algo improved and put the real site on top for good. I can't remember the exact total but I had a good $20-40k out of it and it paid for my wedding.
It required a little domain specific knowledge to create, and a recognized name among trading forums to initially market. Otherwise it's super simple and I'm continually surprised that there are no real competitors.
Basically allows to edit Salesforce data directly in excel. I bet they've got thousands of users.
I'm not sure this side project could be achieved any other way.
Sometimes the profit margin was above 50% because I could source the product myself - but then it became an issue of what was my time worth and did I feel like quitting my day job which wasn't in any way stressful? I also had to consider the lifetime of an mmo, who could say how long the game would remain popular?
In hindsight, I should have gone all in and captured the whole market vertically, but then again it wouldn't have remained a side-gig that was on autopilot.
I'll probably write about it all some day, I think some people would find it interesting. I had to put a lot of hats on to make it work: developer, designer, marketer, customer support, accountant, security, ops, affiliate manager, ...
So the marketplace you're describing is not RMT then? You're facilitating in-game trades with in-game currencies, and making money some other way? (ads?)
My goal is to make people more prolific and creative writers.
It's not released yet, but I've gotten enough wish lists that I'm confident I will make some money when I do. It's also led to some freelance/consulting work that's kept me afloat while I shamble forth.
https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1469737611824713739 <- My feed is mostly my progress.
A little discouraged by some gambits that didn't yield results I wanted has me not talking about it as much as I was last year. Ah well I bet the hype energy will come back. There's a lot cool here.
The old version is actually still in the Wayback Machine [1]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20061214053323/http://designslic...
We ended up going to 6-7 games for free, sat in MUCH better seats than we ever could have afforded to, and had access to playoff tickets at face value. Further, my friends had access to great seats at reasonable prices and I avoided having to buy from resale sites (who I detest). 90% of the process was automated.
As opposed to a "money making business".
(Still very cool though).
The way I think of it is more of taking advantage of an arbitrage (~20% discount on season tickets to face value). Instead of selling all the tickets to earn ~$2k each year, we kept and used the tickets to our benefit.
Could you elaborate on this a little? I think I can imagine, but am curious to hear a bit more about how this worked!
Generally, the electron app would pull face value prices and availability from [baseballteam].com, current resale prices from hubstub.com (<- changing name) and stick them into a mini database (object store). From there, I could use these snapshots to track sales across the resale site, determine a fair value for my tickets, and estimate the probability of it selling (by comparing ticket availability between days on the resale site).
Next, I had collected a list of email addresses from friends and a few posts on Facebook and Craigslist. The app had a button create/update a Google sheet with games/prices, pull in the emails, and batch email people (in groups of <50) the information along with the games. The manual part was marking the games as sold in the sheet, tracking etransfers and sending tickets, but it was little work.
That's nothing something to be proud of.
You say your friends detest resale sites but it sounds like you just became one yourself unless I'm misunderstanding what was happening here.
The other side is even if you want to go to a concert and buy tickets a year ahead of time. What happens if something comes up? You can't resell them. Having the ability to resell your tickets is a huge value to people intending to go to the concert.
You can argue that there should be a better distribution mechanism and I agree, but scalpers are not the problem
Borderline perhaps.
That said, I've got manufacturing and fulfillment mostly outsourced, so my day-to-day is really marketing emails, managing FB ad spend and sending product to the warehouse when I run low on inventory. Given that, it's looking like this is going to get relegated back to a side project while I find myself a real job.
While I'd obviously prefer to be making a boatload of cash, it has been really enjoyable so far, and I have learned a ton. The most painful thing has been Apple's privacy changes - before those, I was running FB ads that were effective enough to be immediately profitable from customers' first purchases. Now the cost of acquiring a customer is greater than the profit I make on the first purchase but less than the lifetime profit I make from a customer, so I can still do it profitably but it requires investing cash up front.