There has been a few posts recently on HN where people tell us about their success with side projects/small products that actually make them a decent living. It's inspiring to say the least.
What's most attractive to me is the claim that the creators now spend little to no time on maintaining or fixing the products, and it just sits there and makes money. Is this actually a realistic representation? If I just think about the projects that I maintain(ed), there's almost always something to do, something to fix, some library or tech that's been deprecated/patched etc etc. The idea of just creating a product (let alone a few) that just "works" nowadays and requires minimum attention is pretty mind-blowing.
Does anyone have any advice/books/resources on creating such products?
You need to distinguish between what _can_ be done and what _needs_ to be done. Let go of perfection and only do the necessary, then you can realize maintainance with very little time investment.
This obviously does not work if you feel like all your code's libraries must always be on the newest version because simply keeping several projects' code running with the latest thing is quite a bit of work.
I have a profitable project that is still running on PHP 5 on Ubuntu 14 and it seems that now I finally will have to upgrade things, but it will be a single upgrade now after many years that may take 1 day instead of 20 separate little ones that may have cost 1/2 day each if I always had kept up to date.
> You need to distinguish between what _can_ be done and what _needs_ to be done.
I think part of making this distinction comes down to whether the creator thinks the product will ever be 'done'. A lot of products are run with the assumption (implicit or explicit) that they'll keep getting updated as long as they remain viable as a business. Either approach is a valid but they're both choices. Though you may have to choose right from the start, as for some products only one of the two is viable.
I made a fortune off two web sites that sat there and basically did their thing. I essentially did about an hour's work a week for 5 years and took home about $150,000 a year.
The first was a mortgage web site. I bought a domain for $6000 that matched a top mortgage search term. The front page of the site scraped the latest mortgage rates, and the rest of the site was well-written mortgage advice written by me and First Wife. The site just had a form you filled out to speak to a mortgage advisor. When it launched in like 2007 I got about $400 for each time the form was completed. (It was less after the Great Recession)
The other site was a private TV torrent tracker that closed in 2013 due to legal pressures. Barely touched the code in 7 years. It made a total of over $13m.
> The other site was a private TV torrent tracker that closed in 2013 due to legal pressures. Barely touched the code in 7 years. It made a total of over $13m.
I was under the impression that most private trackers run without a profit, at least the reputable ones. Are you telling me PTP/BTN/HDB sysops are loaded?
I would guess so. It might be harder to take payments now than it was then, though, which would add friction and lower your revenues. I bet hosting is cheaper now, though.
Back then we took credit cards with PayPal and PayPal were on our side. We had our own personal account manager because we were moving so much money. PayPal had a login for the site and they would go in every few weeks and make sure we weren't doing anything too shady. What would happen is that every couple of months our competitors would claim we were actually selling child porn, and PayPal would be forced to immediately close our account while they investigated. I guess this is a good technique to close down any small business reliant on a merchant account.
We never intended to make money at first. We just wanted to cover the hosting bills and asked for donations. It's just that by offering upload credit as an incentive to donate, we created a market. And the donations far outweighed the costs over the long run. The total was probably more than $13m because I only queried the SQL data and I'm not sure we logged the donations at first.
Also, we were a very niche TV tracker, so we wouldn't have anywhere near the user base some of those other sites have.
The site made $13m. I stated in my comment above that I was only making about $150,000. Which I frittered away on bullshit toys. I had no savings at all.
That is impressive. How much time do you think you spent on non-coding activities? I imagine that running a torrent tracker probably took a good chunk of your time.
Really? Practically zero. We would just promote users to be staff and let them get on with it. When we had enough complaints against a staff member (they would all become Hitler eventually), then we would fire them and upgrade another member.
Cool, I used to run a service where I break into peoples' homes, take everything I can carry and sell them on. With this business, I was able to make $35 million in 2014. Non-taxable income, obviously.
Yes, our site was ethically wrong, but I'll add that the studio holding the copyright to most of the items on our site used our site to download their own material and it was brought up in board meetings. The studio staff would occasionally send me PMs on the tracker when we got something that was pre-release and ask us to take it down until it had aired on TV.
After we closed down the studio borrowed the name of our site and set up their own legal streaming service, finally.
If you want a deeper point, here it is: are all "microstartups" sleazy, almost illegal scams that generally make the world a worse place? Based on this thread, it seems so.
I mean, even a full time (40 hour work week) job is 24 % of your time.
If this person spends 10 % of their time just on maintenance and bug fixes, I'd assume they spend just as much on marketing, customer service, etc, meaning they "work" for 20 % of their time -- which is almost a full time job at that point.
10 % of their work time is not a very well defined amount of time, though. If this is their only occupation, then it's 100 % of their work time. If they have a different primary occupation, then 10 % of that depends entirely on how much they spend on that!
I'd say it's kind of possible when you use a solid framework and a homogeneous tech stack. For example, I run a few relatively big projects (millions of page-views per month), and I've achieved some solid automation through Ansible - both provisioning and deployments. The primary tech is Ruby on Rails + Postgres, and it's relatively easy to maintain current. As long as I keep all the projects up to date, things are under control. For example, bumping Ruby's version (or Rails) on one of the projects has an almost one-time cost, as long as I do that at the same time for all projects and document it.
I’m a solo dev running a few large, profitable websites, and the one running Rails has simply not been feasible to update recently with all the breakage it brings. Especially Webpacker is a major pain and I regret going down that path. Active storage has been another (lesser) pain point.
I’ve made a living online from a bunch of different things, and there’s always something in the world that changes in a way that forces you to change your thing as well. Sometimes quickly, when an API changes, sometimes more slowly as you get more competition for example.
And even if not, you’ll still always think about your project to figure out how to get the next 5% of extra revenue from it, and stress about whether you’re doing things as well as you could.
I don’t recall ever having something where I could just kick back and relax.
You're not 100% wrong - there is always stuff to manage, but there's a big difference between a full-time job and a side project that you spend a couple of weeks maintaining.
What's most attractive to me is the claim that the creators now spend little to no time on maintaining or fixing the products, and it just sits there and makes money. Is this actually a realistic representation? If I just think about the projects that I maintain(ed), there's almost always something to do, something to fix, some library or tech that's been deprecated/patched etc etc. The idea of just creating a product (let alone a few) that just "works" nowadays and requires minimum attention is pretty mind-blowing.
Does anyone have any advice/books/resources on creating such products?