Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024

I got annoyed that my MacBook case would slightly buzz when plugged in, so I worked with a factory to make these grounded Apple adapters: https://www.amazon.com/Grounded-Duckhead-Apple-Mac-Adapter/d...

They've been selling consistently to others annoyed by the problem or who want to ground their MacBook for other reasons.

kube-system · 2 years ago

> Grounds or "earths" your body whenever you use your computer! Earthing is good for your health.

You're really hitting all of the applicable target markets there. Love it.

FriedPickles · 2 years ago

Can't say I personally believe that claim, but there are a fair number of people out there who do. One person even sent formal test results showing that the adapter drastically reduces EMFs coming off the case. Not sure what to make of it but I found it interesting.

cici1970 · 2 years ago

Glad they are selling for you. It's a known issue, so I just went to the Apple store and since my MacBook was brand new, they gave me a three-prong adapter for free.

blopp99 · 2 years ago

Can you share more info about the creation? Did you register a patent? What was the MOQ? Have you sold out? Did you have to comply to any electrical regulation?

Kudos!

deepsummer · 2 years ago

Wonderful idea! I never considered that a grounded power adapter could solve the buzzing issue. But now that I think about it, that's the reason why I don't get the buzz when my MacBook is connected to my monitor.

neurostimulant · 2 years ago

You should made this for other plug types as well and sell it in other countries!

royaltjames · 2 years ago

Amazing! I feel the tinge on my left palm when it's plugged in. Bought.

gadders · 2 years ago

It looks like you've invented British plugs.

aetherspawn · 2 years ago

Note grounding your MacBook is likely to result in you constantly zapping your MacBook with static electricity if you wear rubber sole shoes, which is likely to not be good for the MacBook and may randomly damage the electronics. This may be why they did not put a grounding pin the first place.

I usually discharge my static buildup in the office sink.

kube-system · 2 years ago

The grounding lug exists on the charger body itself because some of Apple's first party plug adapters are grounded.

callalex · 2 years ago

Apple supports grounding as a first-party offering by using their extension cables that plug between the wall and the power brick. So this product isn’t doing something untested and unsupported.

homero · 2 years ago

I know it grounds inside the brick but does the connector have a third pin?

FriedPickles · 2 years ago

The adapter connects the outer metal part of the connector for both USB-C and Magsafe to to ground, thus grounding the metal shell of the MacBook.

type IBackend interface { Ls(path string) ([]os.FileInfo, error) Cat(path string) (io.ReadCloser, error) Mkdir(path string) error Rm(path string) error Mv(from string, to string) error Save(path string, file io.Reader) error Touch(path string) error }

My cofounder and I launched Kbee (https://kbee.app) in 2021 as a way to turn Google Drive Folders into hosted, searchable wikis. We're doing ~$2k/month and run it as a side project

adobrawy · 2 years ago

Sounds very cool. I passed it on to a friendly organization.

This organization is in the Google Workspace ecosystem, but Google doesn't have documentation as accessible as Notion. We could try to implement Notion, but this will scatter the data storage and then there is the problem of archiving if the experiment fails. This looks like a plug-in solution to our problem of having Notion-like lightweight documentation and not scattering data.

Do I understand correctly that you charge a fee per organization regardless of the number of seats? This is important for this organization because it is a non-profit association, so there are many members, the board must provide access to information to all members, some members are minimally active, so per seat licenses seem to be often a blocker due to the large loss on inactive members.

sarora27 · 2 years ago

You are correct that we charge a per org fee regardless of number of seats. For non-profits, we offer a 50% discount on the subscription price. All the nonprof needs to do to get the discount is email me at sai@kbee.app

pestaa · 2 years ago

https://roadmap.kbee.app doesn't load for now. Will check back later! :)

sarora27 · 2 years ago

Ahh yes, this is down. We are still deciding if we want to bring back the public facing roadmap :)

alexanderhall · 2 years ago

Is the Google drive thing only a way to import data - or can the data be stored in Drive but edited in your service?

sarora27 · 2 years ago

All data is stored & edited in Drive. Kbee simply renders it in an easy to search/consume manner

ganarajpr · 2 years ago

Do you have a blog or a write up explaining how you went about doing this ?

sarora27 · 2 years ago

We wrote about our entire journey on IndieHackers. You can find our posts here: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/kbee

gardenhedge · 2 years ago

Where do you find customers for this?

sarora27 · 2 years ago

We went from nothing to paid users & number 2 product of the day on ProductHunt over a period of three months.

I documented our entire journey here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/our-journey-from-idea-to-p...

TheCapeGreek · 2 years ago

I came upon KBee 'organically' last year. I came from a Notion org to a Google Doc org and I hate Docs and the siloed nature of it. General Drive search is a mess when you're searching for knowledge and not files. Suggested KBee to bring some of the discovery back in to the org.

hsuduebc2 · 2 years ago

I'm curious too.

hackerbeat · 2 years ago

Cool tool, but way too expensive.

goenning · 2 years ago

During my previous job, when we were migrating to Kubernetes I couldn’t really find a GUI app that I liked, and most importantly, that could connect to multiple clusters simultaneously. We had 6 clusters and having to switch context constantly was annoying

I ended up building one [1] to use myself, shared with a few people and they loved it. I asked if they’d pay for it and to my surprise, a lot of people said yes. I’ve put up a website and a “pre-order” button with a regressive monthly discount. Sales were going up month after month, and a few months later I decided to quit my job to go all in on it.

Today, I’m averaging on ~€5k/mo from this app, but I’m still doing some part time freelancing, as well as building other products that are not as successful, but are making >€1000/mo

The latest one is open source, privacy friendly analytics for apps [2] that I’m still very actively working on. This is my current “side project” as the previous side project became my main job :)

There’s also an open source upvote site [3] that I started 6 years ago, but haven’t had much time to work on it lately, still generating $$ monthly

[1] https://aptakube.com [2] https://aptabase.com [3] https://fider.io

isaackrasmussen · 2 years ago

Thumbs up for "Not another Electron app"! And multiplatform.

Coming from a very unreliable Lens, I'm looking forward to try out your app. Its already so speedy!!

Awesome! Glad to hear you liked it :)

silisili · 2 years ago

This is awesome. Not using k8s in my current role, but when I was, that would have made my life a whole lot easier.

ilamparithi · 2 years ago

Sounds great. How do you handle the licenses for the desktop app? Custom solution or is there a library for it?

It’s a custom solution, zero regrets building it. Gives me total control over how it’s done and didn’t take me that long to implement

monroewalker · 2 years ago

Looks really well done! What did you build it with?

The app is built with Tauri

whyleyc · 2 years ago

Clicky:

2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482433

2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152

2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095

2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167

matt3210 · 2 years ago

You sir.... are a paragon among men.

rozenmd · 2 years ago

I'm coming up on three years of running OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com) in 3ish weeks.

In short, I wrote about React from my own perspective for a year (despite thousands out there doing the same thing), made money, and got inspired to do the same thing with an uptime monitoring tool (200th alternative to pingdom when I released it).

I turned a tool I used for convincing contracting clients to not cheap out on hosting into a proper product, 2 hours a day at a time, and kept adding features since.

Here's how I got my first 10 customers: https://onlineornot.com/how-to-get-your-first-ten-customers

mickael-kerjean · 2 years ago

Filestash [1] was born from the infamous top comment of the Dropbox launch [2] as it got me wondered if we could make a Dropbox like UI that is based on this interface:

Once I had it working with FTP, I made it work for every possible file transfer protocol: S3, SFTP, NFS, SMB, WebDAV, Dropbox, Google Drive, ..... As of today it is closer to a full time mac donald employee than 500$ per month with revenue coming from making customisation via plugins for people who need some extras like layering your SAML or OIDC authentication on top of a FTP server or any other storage, custom access / authorisation layer on top your FTP, etc...

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Share6323 · 2 years ago

how long did it take you until this point ?

I prefer not to calculate but in the range of 20 to 40h a week from 2017 but a big part of that time doesn't go in creating code but talking with people, supporting them, write stuff, improving other bits and bolt.

cperciva · 2 years ago

FreeBSD on EC2: Last year between my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cperciva), private "consulting", and a GitHub Sponsors donation from AWS, I received $20k to support my open source work. It's not a lot compared to my day job (Tarsnap) but money helps to free up time to keep everything working.

johnwheeler · 2 years ago

Really admire what you’ve built with Tarsnap. Seems like a very durable business with a great reputation

ninefoxgambit · 2 years ago

I launched https://www.builtatlightspeed.com/ in early 2023.

I’ve been involved in the Jamstack, static site generator, template ecosystem for many years. Built At Lightspeed is a template marketplace focused on ssgs and “modern frameworks”

Sales have been entirely from Affiliate sales, mostly via the Lemon Squeezy affiliate program. Its doing about $400usd/month. I recently launched sponsors and the initial interest has been good.

Tailwind and Nextjs are the most popular categories and best sellers. Tailwind (like Bootstrap before it) has a vibrant commercial template ecosystem. I’m seeing a huge uptick in interest in “full stack” boilerplates that have hefty price tags of $100-$400 and I plan to focus on this area more. No code templates for Framer have also exploded.

The site itself relies on Algolia to drive the faceted search results and filters and overall I’ve been happy with it. It’s a bit expensive and the older release of its react hooks library had a lot of edge cases with nextjs, but it’s been improving.

This year I will continue to refine and curate the results, focusing more on content quality and classification the extending the inventory. I recently bumped it from 4000 results to 20000 as an experiment, and this was just by easing back some of the quality filters.

Lord_Zero · 2 years ago

Some links 404 like https://www.builtatlightspeed.com/theme/tailus-ui-astrolus-p...