I plan on starting a side project but don't really have a niche yet.
I am interested in knowing what business you run is it a mobile app, website, Saas?
And how long it took you to reach $2k monthly revenue?
Readit NewsReadit NewsI am interested in knowing what business you run is it a mobile app, website, Saas?
And how long it took you to reach $2k monthly revenue?
I made a gross income of around 3K a month last year out of Royalties on the soft for each device sold. It's Apache 2.0 software so people can do whatever they want.
I started making money when I decided to list on the GitHub README the list of manufacturers/makers that where sponsoring the project. (Only one person at that time) Soon after the others offered to give royalty as well.
I even got a Chinese company, notorious for selling "clone" of OSHW projects, to support the SW development as well via GitHub sponsor.
I've been working on it for the last four years. I entertained the idea to make and sell the hardware myself. But in the end I learned that's it's not something I'm interested to get into. What I really like is working on the software.
It naturally pivoted into a more community driven project where multiple makers are selling various variations of the HW.
I wrote a retrospective last years [2].
[1] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro
[2] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro/discussions/289
I guess software is a bit more tangible than a blog post even if both have value.
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> I even got a Chinese company, notorious for selling "clone" of OSHW projects, to support the SW development as well via GitHub sponsor.
I suppose that's RetroScaler?
You can connect Wiimotes to PCs over Bluetooth and use any of those Wii-connector controllers through them, which would make them wireless and solve the finding-a-reliable-adapter problem, but I've never managed to make that kind of set-up sufficiently stable. Always having to screw with re-pairing and such.
In the end, my go-to for BT emulation controllers is usually a PS3/4/5 controller. I haven't tried the XBone but I found the d-pad on the XB and XB360 controllers unusably inaccurate, and the face buttons weirdly slow when trying to play old-school Nintendo-hard games. Playstation controller d-pads are much better, and the face buttons feel quicker to switch between, for whatever reason.
They're rugged, reliable, pair easily via bluetooth without any custom software required (just hold the PS button and menu button together), and have excellent button feel. I grew up on the super Nintendo so I'm picky at times.
Battery life is excellent, reported over Bluetooth (so linux and macos can see it), and the controller central pad acts as a mouse which makes navigating menus great without needing to put the controller down. They go to sleep automatically if you close the lid on a laptop they're paired to, and you can change the LED colour and brightness on the controller.
I've had and used one for quite a while now, and in that time two of my friends have purchased one to replace various alternatives (8bitdo, & another one I can't remember) for either reliability, pairing issues, or both.
To top off this review: I've never owned a PlayStation!
Personally, I use an original Super NES controller + a Timville triple controller adapter[1], but a more modern controller that I like is the 8bitdo SN30 Pro+. I primarily play on a PVM via a MiSTer, so your use case may be quite different.
[0] https://rpubs.com/misteraddons/inputlatency [1] https://www.tindie.com/products/timville/triple-controller-c...
It has: Turbo key function for SNES games, Vibration, Macros, Pressure-sensitive triggers, Multi-system support (there is a switch on the bottom that changes the signal from windows to Mac to Linux mode and so on), And it just werks.
Otherwise personally my daily driver is PS5 DualSense
It sounds like acknowledging the sponsors is "the right thing", good Karma, or simply advertising for them. Not everyone wants to just rip off open source and not give back, they're willing to share the wealth if you make it easy and let people know they're doing it?
I need to set up github sponsors myself. We get the occasional request "how can I contribute money to you guys" and we always say stuff like "just spread the word". I keep telling myself I don't want to feel obligated by money, but I also know that I'd love to make enough to work on open source full time.
great that you got this result, btw
I suspect that'll be a common theme in answers here though: if you have a side project making $2k a month, in most of the world that's enough for you to go full-time and try to take it further. If you can make $2k/month on something working only part-time, you can definitely make a lot more if you focus on it.
On your questions: HTTP Toolkit is a desktop app (plus a mobile app and other components for integrations) but it's an Electron app that effectively functions as a SaaS (with a freemium subscription model) that just happens to have a component that runs on your computer. And actually getting to $2k wasn't overnight at all - it took a couple of years of slow steady slog. A few inflection points that made a notable difference (releasing rewriting support & Android support particularly) but mostly it was a matter of "just keep pushing", trusting the trajectory would keep going, and steadily grinding upwards. It's great where it is now, but it's hard work - a solo business is not for the faint of heart!
I was just about to ask how do you differentiate your product from mitmproxy but on a quick google search I found this thread from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29627819
That said, one point there is outdated: HTTP Toolkit does now fully support websockets too. There's more I'd like to do there, but as far as I'm aware it's equally capable to mitmproxy in that sense today.
Like it a lot. Cheers.
I was wondering what the early days of the journey looked like. - What did the first iteration of this product look like? Was it more or less similar, or substantially different from the spirit of httptoolkit today? - How did you go from (some semblance of a product) to first sale? / acquiring first customer? - did you spend anything on marketing/distribution?
Technically, the first iteration was https://github.com/httptoolkit/mockttp - an HTTP integration testing library for JS. Not a desktop app at all! I'd originally built that for testing uses, but as it matured I realised that with a UI and automated setup tools it'd be useful as a complete product (but Mockttp still powers all the internals today, and you can use it directly to build your own custom intercepting proxies too).
For the first real product, the very first public 'launch' was literally a landing page with some demos of the potential UI and a signup form, just to test interest and check it wasn't a terrible idea. The results looked promising, so that was followed a few months later by a very basic but usable free version (entirely read-only, and only supporting Chrome interception) with the freemium features on top appearing a few months after that. From this stage it was all very much the same spirit as today, just less feature complete.
> How did you go from (some semblance of a product) to first sale? / acquiring first customer?
Once I announced the paid version (a blog post to my tiny set of newsletter signups, plus a little response on HN/Reddit/Product Hunt etc) I got a handful of paying customers (but certainly less than 10) within 24 hours. Nice but not a meaningful income, and from that wild peak it dropped back down to maybe one new customer per week or so afterwards, so it was quite slow going at the start.
However, those paying customers (and the mere fact of offering a paid service generally) resulted in _much_ better feedback. Rather than "this is cool" all of a sudden I had real demands for specific features, from people with concrete use cases and money in their hands. The initial paid features were just made up off the top of my head, and honestly didn't create a particularly compelling paid feature set. It's very hard to really know what people will pay for! That feedback was incredibly unbelievably useful to fix that.
From there, building out the key features people asked for over the following 6 months boosted things very significantly, and started to get things moving for real, and then you get into a virtuous circle, where more users => more feedback => better product => more users => ...
> did you spend anything on marketing/distribution?
I tested advertising at a small scale for a few months, but it didn't really work great. I think largely because it's very very freemium - 99% of users pay nothing - so the acquisition cost for a paying user doesn't make sense, and also honestly I don't have much experience with ads and I'm not sure I'm any good at writing them.
Content marketing meanwhile has worked great, keeps passively returning dividends, and cost nothing. I've tried to fill the blog (https://httptoolkit.com/blog/) exclusively with detailed & high-value original content (detailed breakdowns of a recent HTTP security vulnerability, not "top 10 HTTP libraries for Python") which shares well on social networks for an immediate burst of traffic, and then (in most cases) provides both a long-term SEO boost and constant incoming traffic on related topics that converts into users. That starts slow, but again steadily builds up over years, if you keep working at it. Content marketing + SEO are pretty much the only marketing channels I work on right now.
Under the hood it's just a tiny automated email flow set up via Mailchimp that sends out the download link when you sign up. Nothing fancy, but it's easy and it does the job.
For the web dev case, for example, if you're debugging some interaction that means you can intercept your browser <-> server traffic and your server <-> upstream API traffic all in the same place, and see the full flow, and you can modify server responses or backend API responses in flight, to test out different edge cases.
There's a Chrome dev tools vs HTTP Toolkit comparison page here with a little more detail: https://httptoolkit.com/chrome-devtools-alternative/
Do you mean that improving documentation helped get customers? I have a small side project and I think this is one of its weaker spots, even if it is relatively simple [0]. I noticed "helper popups" are getting used quite extensively.
[0]: https://aihelperbot.com/guide
It probably did, but no that's not what I mean, sorry :-). By "rewriting support" I mean adding features that allowed you to rewrite arbitrary network traffic, rather than just viewing it (as in the very first PoC).
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35559469
For system-wide setup, you'll just need to configure that manually - setting your system proxy and trusting the CA certificate. The settings you need are on the Intercept page, in the 'Anything' section. For portable browsers, you may also be able to configure proxy & CA settings within the browser itself, which might be more convenient, depending on your setup.
In a perfect world, I'd kill for a tool where I could define a script (something similar to a Playwright test) and it'd automatically run and record everything, so I could redo the video much more frequently and accurately. I think you probably can do that for a normal web app already (?) but the challenge here is that HTTP Toolkit is launching other apps that also pop up over the top, and so I need to record them all together.
If you're looking for inspiration around this sort of thing, the Android demo video is different and also worth looking at: https://httptoolkit.com/android/
Even with root, certificate pinning can cause problems (as the sibling comment points out) but you can usually defeat that fairly easily: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/frida-certificate-pinning/.
For non-Android, HTTP Toolkit can't set it up for you automatically, but you can absolutely intercept _anything_ manually if you can configure it with your own HTTP proxy setting (fairly common) and add a trusted CA certificate (less common).
So far we’ve hosted 12 dinners over the past year. Growing from out first meal with 13 friends to as many as 80 guests for this months meal. Our mailing list has over 400 people on it and we’ve sold out every event since our 4th. Sometimes we end up hosting multiple nights.
It’s not a very scalable business as it exists today. For now is just a passion project that makes a few bucks, allows us meet interesting people, and provides the opportunity to discover new foods and restaurants.
I would definitely be interested in something like this coming to our area.
What I will say is that I think the timing was right. My co-host and I lived in Manhattan pre-pandemic and regularly took advantage of the restaurant variety there. Our dinners are hosted on Long Island and our theory is that people who move from Manhattan to Long Island over the last 20 years started to expect higher quality food and a larger variety of ethnic options. Over the past decade or so the variety and quality of Long Island restaurants has greatly improved from what was here 25 years ago when I was growing up.
Post pandemic we saw an appetite (pun intended) for people to just get out of the house, be around other people, and have an experience. Quite a few people who come to the dinners say that they keep coming back because their partner/family aren't adventurous eaters so they never get to try new foods or typically wouldn't order some of the things we put on the menu. We aren't going for a fear factor vibe, but we do try to get people out of their comfort zone. We have a large number of solo guests who enjoy meeting new people and sharing a like-minded experience. Initially the group skewed heavily towards males in their 30's, which was our friends. Today its a very diverse group of people.
What an unique side project, I'm very impressed.
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https://www.outcoldsolutions.com
Now I also started macOS development for the last 2 years, and making around 2k a month.
https://loshadki.app
We don’t offer anything crazy on the support side. 2 business days reply. It is not sas, so nothing crazy to monitor from our side.
Also, we have insurances, a lot of resellers, we are technical partners with a lot of companies, have 7 years experience of business behind us.
It all came with time, and we build our confidence.
Enterprise customers seem very lucrative and in rare cases can be, if you are working with a small department or individual with autonomy.
If you find yourself being asked to make a sales presentation to an IT steering committee, run away.
This helps hockey stick revenue but is also the #1 customer complaint since logs will always grow (no cap).
Just curious how you hit millions in revenue with a 2-person company.
I'm sure lots would love to hear more about your story (e.g. perfect write-up for IndieHackers.com)
Also we provide very unique solutions, like transforming, redirecting logs with annotations applied to your pods/deployments/namespaces. Also can pickup logs from volumes without any additional deployments.
So some customers see benefits from us, some don’t.
I am building a Zillow for Europe [1]. The real estate market in Europe is a big mess and for the past 10 years not much has happend so far in proptech because it was easy to rent/sell properties. Now things are changing and I see a lot more supply coming on the platform. So far rented out 40 apartments doing around 3k in profit a month. We focus primarily on overseas/expats right now
Another project I started with a good friend from Google is Webtastic AI [2] it's a lead gen platform that indexes large amounts of data and I am using simple ML models to clean it up and make sense out of it. It does around 1.9k a month now but we just launched 2 weeks ago so that looks promising. Thanks to google cloud we got 100k credits which makes it a bit more feasible because the startup costs are extremely high.
[1] https://homestra.com/ [2] https://webtastic.ai/
For apartments:
* Searching by floor (or below or above floor)
* Searching by presence/absence of elevator
For all property types:
* Searching by rented / unrented status (evicting tenants for your own use is hard)
* Searching by build phase, if you're interested in new-build properties
* Searching by build year (some people prefer Altbaus, some consider them the work of the devil)
* Searching by heating type (underfloor vs radiator)
* Searching by rooms, not bedrooms. In Germany, a 1-room flat is a Studio Apartment and doesn't have a bedroom.
* Display of and searching by fees when buying (typically this is searching for "no estate agent fee")
* Display of and searching by Warm & Cold rent when renting
* Ability to search by state & city (at a bare minimum, and note that state affects how much property tax has to be paid when purchasing)
I think most countries are going to have a lot of little quirks like this, and it's going to be a hard sell to get people to switch over until you've got a lot of these in place for each country. I know that I've used international sites like this in the past and ultimately abandoned them because they either made it too difficult to find what I wanted, or there just weren't enough properties on there.
Thanks for your feedback, really appreciated!
As a European, I (at least) don't understand what this means - and therefore don't understand your offering, your USP?
What does/will Homestra offer, and how will it be different from e.g. Immobilienscout?
It's hidden on mobile because I didn't have the time yet to optimise it!
Google maps was crazy expensive I went with Mapbox[1] for now which seems to have enough features and is less expensive.
[1] https://mapbox.com/
after applying a filter i get a 404 (only fitler was bedroom size): https://homestra.com/houses-for-sale/?amount-of-bedrooms=2
On the note of filtering, why do you not have upper bounds on bedrooms/bathrooms? it seems like filtering for a 2 bedroom isn't possible because "2+" would give me a ton i am not interested in
Ill add the elevator filter, thanks for your input!
About $10k/mo gross revenue and takes a few hours of work a week (unless there’s a downtime event that needs fixing). A lot of upfront work to build some of these systems though.
Got to $2k/mo in the first month of doing this. I don’t recommend working (as a solo operator) with clients who have budgets less than $5-10k/mo. Too much overhead for too little return in that case.
In what little spare time I have left after my day job and looking after two small kids, I put more automation in place to improve reliability for my clients and reduce my own ops time requirement.
I get leads for this by referral from people I’ve done good work for in the past. But it’s the kind of thing you could bootstrap by direct outbound sales, publishing authority-building content to the right business audience, going to conferences/trade shows, or building a referral network from other service provides.
1. Dedicated operational IT admin: Dealing with repetitive tasks+requests, like managing customer’s Microsoft environment and on-site infrastructure.. Owning physical and AD infra doesn’t sound like a part-time job.
For e.g; a/v and physical IT asks; like conference room operation maintenance and support, Desktop workstation triage (have you tried turning the monitor on?). The dreaded “can you set up the printer?”…
And what if the customer sets me up as their site’s dedicated AD domain admin? Resulting in repetitive requests for user/access management CRUD operations. And/or micromanagement of tedious things like email and mailing lists…
Or
2. Dedicated software developer, website or business workflows.
Building a website and getting micromanaged or overburdened. (“can you change the logo to blue?” “Can you redesign the whole home page?”)
Or, get pulled deep into providing a business-critical software workflow or application. Fielding sales/exec requests, interpreting their business requirements, and then building AND delivering (for e.g a customer management system) is not a part time job…
How do you operate to keep the scope limited? What steps help buffer yourself from a slippery slope of full-time services?
I have a small side gig building "controllers." By controllers I mean devices that are typically arduino controlled and use peripherals in the arduino ecosystem. They span a very wide range, but are typically very feature-limited. e.g., I have a client who is converting massage chairs to be pay-per-use.
As you noted, it's not easy to keep a service-based business from growing to take over all your time. I manage it by keeping the feature set clearly specified and working on fixed price.
Want to add a feature we didn't discuss? That's another charge. My niche is taking on very small projects that are too small to move the needle for a full-blown engineering services company (I've worked for two) and I always work fixed-price, so I need to be very aggressive about scope creep.
Project scope keeps growing? Either tell the client that it will be a while until I have time to complete it, or, more frequently, that they will need to find someone else. This is pretty easy to say because as mentioned above I'm clear about only taking on small projects.
I've had people who basically want me to be their engineering department. That's a hard "no:" I simply don't have the time.
Used to do this as an agency principal and it involved a lot of time spent managing clients and projects and subcontractors. Drove myself crazy and took a couple years off after nearly burning out.
I look for projects where the software solves a single targeted business problem and can quickly get to “done”. Then the client is happy to pay for ongoing maintenance/ops, so any additional effort I put into the software is around reducing my ongoing workload.
For ongoing things I do fixed rate or usage based pricing.
For custom one-off stuff, consultancy, and build-out of systems I charge a day rate.
Follow on work came from other people at that first client company who knew my work and went on to work at other companies.
I earn about $2000 a month from ads on the landing page (organic SEO), but very soon plan to add a subscription for pro features (while people could still compile it from source and get the full experience without paying, if they wish).
I started the project 8 years ago to create a slick looking note-taking app for myself on Linux. Then I open-sourced and published it, and it just took off and got popular (more than 1.2 Million downloads).
Took around 2 years to get a high rank on Google. Then it was just a matter of putting ads (which I don't like but my income relies on) and ever since it's been quite stable.
We're on Github here btw: https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes
In the early 00's when I was debating if I should pursue software dev (again) I wrote a couple of Win32 native apps in C and absolutely loved writing them. One of the apps was a workout timer which I submitted to Freewarefiles.com. It peaked around 48K downloads. Unfortunately freewarefiles is no more so I can't show off my one and only "successful" native app.
Sometimes I feel I want to delve back into native apps instead of web based.
Awesome story! Come back to the light (literally) side.
Qt has been around for years, the documentation is extensive and the community is large and supportive. With QML I faced many problems, especially half-assed examples/documentation, Qt Creator's intellisense doesn't work well with QML sometimes, etc... But the tradeoff is worth it. I'm getting things done in a much faster pace with QML.
A problem that is common both in Qt and other cross-platform frameworks is that you end up writing some custom code for each operating system to make the look and feel more native. But I think it's getting better with awesome open-source projects taking care of beautiful native window decorations[1].
[1] https://github.com/wangwenx190/framelesshelper
This looks incredible I’m definitely going to use it
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Don't create competition for yourself. They can go on having no idea how lucrative your little side project is and you can go on reaping the benefits. As soon as you tell someone with more resources that your little side idea is actually turning over large sums of money, you better believe their wheels will be spinning on how to get a piece of it. It's so easy to avoid this, you just have to not run your mouth.
Sometimes competition ain't as easy to attract as you might think
One simple reason to post: For every potential competitor reading about your project, there are thousands of potential customers.
If you’re happy with your existing cash flow this point seems less relevant; the better choice would then be to protect your competitive advantage and stay hidden, right?
The idea is not the hard part. The hard part is building the software, building the customer base, building the automation processes, and doing all the business-things associated with it.
I’ll grant that if you say “Hey, this thing is actually a marketable product” that you’re reducing the cost of a potential competitor, but really there is so much work to do. Even if you can get a lot of it COTS, there’s still a lot of effort to be put in.
I’d actually love to read a thread about people making 2k per month on a stolen sass idea.
These threads attract unique businesses, with a twist. (Almost) None have groundbreaking, earth shattering ideas. They usually have an interesting story to them. It attracts people like me, who just love to immerse myself in such conversations, stories and experiences. Maybe potential customers, if not me, could be someone I talk to.
Secrecy isn't a strong competitive advantage after you're in the market.
Every once in awhile, there are threads and comments here on HN about the various people who have had their UI, content, data or concepts stolen as well.
Unless you’re a full-time hobbyist or boast a mature project, please be cautious.
If your idea is so fragile that anybody else with a similar idea can knock you out of the market, it's probably not very good.
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