I built KTool (https://ktool.io) — it allows you to forward web articles, newsletters and RSS feeds to your Kindle.
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I did a Show HN 4 months ago[1].
The reason I started KTool was to spend less time on computer screens, and more on e-ink Kindle. I was afraid of going blind.
After 4 months improving KTool, it now becomes a tool to help you combat doom-scrolling. Instead of mindlessly scrolling the web, I deliberately send interesting articles to my Kindle.
Why are you afraid of going blind? I haven't heard of anyone going blind from spending too much time on screens, but I have heard of issues like eye strain or headaches developing.
(I still think your product is a good one, but just curious!)
We have been reading these $500/month posts year after year and recently we have been holding back on launching our own as well. Recently we finally decide to just went in after months of working on it. It is called MessageDuck (https://www.messageduck.com) which was built while we were looking for a good solution for SMS data marketing.
We built this after we noticed that there was not much good solution except one which is quite pricey called MailCharts SMS. We are still working on it and we also have a code YC that you can use for 10% off our Pro Plan.
Hopefully, we can reach $500 by 2023 and we can Show and Tell as well.
Even I — and I imagine most people — have thought of similar ideas, but never acted in it.
What I use for a similar purpose is something I hand-rolled myself that does what I want. It isn't as feature rich as yours, and I could never have come up with a polished UI.
Not your typical side project but my book, Junior to Senior, has been averaging over $500/month in sales since it was published back in October of this year.
I've also been growing my newsletter, Beginner.dev, to help reach my target audience for the book and teach them the importance of soft-skills for software engineers.
I also have a job board for junior software engineering roles in the works to add even more value for the book's target audience.
How were you able to write a book, I mean it's a lot of writing. How long did it take you to write the whole thing. Did you use some special program? How did you publish it? How did you plan your lessons or chapters?
> How were you able to write a book, I mean it's a lot of writing
Although I'm not the OP, it can be less daunting if you split your topic into an outline i.e chapters. Then outline each individual chapter. Before you know it you've got a book ;)
Mostly through posting valuable content on the newsletter and sharing it across various channels, as well as comments like this where I can plug the book and newsletter in the right context.
It also helped that the book was published on Holloway.com, and they had their own audience that they have been able to promote their titles.
I think lately there has been this concern from many folks that copycats are taking away some market share from indiehackers. A post was made on indiehackers as well recently related to this. So I feel that people would be hesitant to share. I personally have come across couple of indie hackers who stopped "building in public".
I love threads like this - while I've stopped sharing my numbers in public, I've watched folks blindly copy my uptime monitor's landing pages and then close up shop 2-3 months later when they haven't gotten rich fast.
At this point, being comfortably full-time employed and using that income to let me play all-in-one Founder/Designer/Engineer/Customer Support over the past few years is the moat.
It can be an antagonistic environment for online businesses, a surprise for the starry eyed hacker or entrepreneur who just wants to build cool stuff.
We regularly had competitors running negative SEO campaigns back when that was easier, we had review bombs, DDOS attacks, network incursions, you name it. Building out of the public's eye doesn't really stop that once you are actually operating, your competitors will find you.
When you build in public, you share more than what's on your website. You tend to share tactics you used, even vaguely. It may have taken you months to get there and you're making it easier for others to catch up. Or so some people believe.
I think giving the recipe away is not a worry as 99% won't execute it, or won't do it as well anyway.
I'm running a https://velomapa.pl - website with cycling related stuff (routes, races, photos, and other stuff) in Poland.
It's a super seasonal niche. During the season it brings around $1000/month through various types of ads and donations.
Now, I'm building and growing https://travelermap.net, which hopefully will work nicely all year around. It's also a content site that I'm planning to monetize using ads.
Checkvisaslots.com - recently picked as one of 12 Google's favourite chrome extension for 2022. It got the attention more than I expected, been a big hit.
I've expanded the service to visaholics.com (yet to generate revenue) where visa applicants can share their experiences.
I built Gaintrain (https://gaintrainapp.com/), a meal planning app designed to help users optimize their muscle gain.
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Since its launch in July, we have focused on improving retention and making the app as useful as possible. Currently, we have not actively pursued marketing efforts, but have gained users through searches on app and play stores. Recently, we introduced a paid subscription option and have already surpassed $500 in monthly revenue.
And I still sell access to wallpapers I draw (for last 20+ years), and some people still seem to like them enough to buy an account, and the average income is still around 500$/month.
wow, i remember your work from like 15 years ago. i love it. you brought up the good memories of how the web was truly awesome place to discover art like yours.
>it has been running mostly on autopilot for the last few years and increasingly we don't have the time to dedicate to the maintenance or improvement of it
I don't understand how it was on autopilot yet, at the same time, represented too big of a time sink maintenance wise.
>and the process of selling it off too high friction for the reward.
Have you tried some services that get shared here to sell/buy SaaS companies/products?
Hit its effort vs scale limit and we’ve got more pressing things to spend time on. We could grow it but the result isn’t worth the effort compared to cost benefit of other endeavors we’ve got on the go (big tech jobs) and more recent time needs (young families).
Learnt a bunch across so many dimensions and set us up for ongoing success with that knowledge, but this specific thing has no future and selling it appeared too hard.
It was on autopilot for sure but that baked in an assumption that customers self solved, and had no new needs. We felt bad that we were delivering a decaying service to users in silence, users could use an alternative and get better service for their $ (in theory) and we would stop taking $ for what we see as delivering a subpar result.
Understood. Have you looked at brokerage firms to sell your company?
I haven't used them and I'm not affiliated with them, but:
- https://microconf.com/quietlight they appear to be a brokerage partner for MicroConf, which is a conference for those who follow the self-funded/bootstrapped route such as yourself.
I don't know if it's all said and done, after all, we're 31 December, but putting this here just in case. I don't like to see a service that provided value go to the waste bin, though I don't want to overstep either.
Yep we talked to FE and they were great, but most selling processes require doco, finances, code review, walkthroughs, hand holding, explanations etc. “write down all the shit you’ve just known or learnt in the last 8 years” to make some multiple of revenue (not necessarily >1), with no guarantee of the sale closing and having to repeat.
Too. Hard. That plus the complexity of other things in our lives to deal with means that some $ just to see through a sale isn’t worth it.
The software is the thing we built and a testbed which we cut our teeth on, and learnt so much, took that knowledge and folded into other newer projects an incredible platform for learning and iteration, but we’ve moved on to bigger and better already so don’t too feel bad about turning it off (it was our first baby tho..).
I see. If continuing to operate it is out of the question and selling it is too much of a hassle, have you considered open sourcing the code to give it a chance for a second life, instead of letting it die on a hard drive somewhere?
I was laid off recently and would move to buy this, maybe seller financing. I've tried and failed many times to build something. If you change your mind let me know I'll take care of your legacy. myemailum14 gmail
Disposable email for quality assurance and dev teams. A long term side project (10+ years). Started with Node.js and mongodb. Grew to golang and Postgres, with several custom micro services.
A few years ago we set up https://pepchecker.com.
It's a relatively simple API/Dashboard to search for politically exposed people and monitor sanctions. We rolled it out a separate product, because we kept rebuilding it for various financial systems.
Put it together while I was learning about Options Trading and
manual backtesting was very tedious. It made me better understand
options, develop and validate strategies and now also enables users
to iterate quickly on trading system development on SPX, BTCUSD and ETHUSD options.
Taxes pave roads, build hospitals and schools, keep shipping lanes free of pirates, and provide weather-monitoring radar and satellite systems.
Taxes keep famine, war, and pestilence at bay.
Also, not paying your taxes is an easy way to ruin your life, and paying your taxes is an easy way to improve it, assuming you live in a country with a competent government.
I can't tell you how much I love not having to hike down to the river for water, or not having to smell heaps of garbage at neighbors houses because we have trucks pick it up roadside.
No one ever tries to hijack my car either, mostly due to tax-funded stable, secure society.
Taxes make life great, even if we don't spend them optimally.
edit: you only need open a history book to find out how miserable life was before
What does the 0.1% have to do with people making $500/month on side projects? How much extra do YOU pay in taxes? Can you post your donations to the IRS?
Taxes also pay rich politicans like Rick Scott to defraud medicare.
Taxes pay for different political parties to push their agendas both left and right.
This is government not by the consent of the governed, the governemnt does not represent me at all, but I pay my taxes becuse men with guns will ultimately come and put me in jail by force if I do not.
American military might is arguably the sole reason we live in a stable, peaceful world.
Yes, terrible things happen, but the alternative might be even more terrible. I think of this often. Vietnam was a terrible war, maybe a senseless one, but then again, maybe the war on communism was right -- after all, no ex-communist state is a paradise of civil liberty today, and none of them are even particularly prosperous. With no counter to Russia or China, we could be living in a communist world.
How far into Europe would Russia march if America could not write the check for Ukraine?
What would Europe look like had America not funded the victors in the world wars? What would Asia look like had Japan not been castrated?
I would like to live in a world of global peace, liberty, and cooperative prosperity, but if I can't have that, American hegemony is preferable to some other hegemony, at least so far as we know or can infer.
If men with guns didn't force you to pay taxes, would we have interstate highways or weather satellites or top-notch hospitals, public schools, sewer systems, or a covid vaccine?
In fact, I pay taxes so they can buy guns for the men who make you pay taxes. In return, I get to live in this beautiful, modern, prosperous, scientifically breathtaking world.
It is imperfect, I admit, but it is much better than anything else we have had historically. So much better that it's hard to even understand.
Not long ago our president was in a wheelchair and our nation starved; Americans no longer starve nor does polio cripple them. Would those things be true without federal taxes?
It seems likely that less taxes would only harm us. There is still room to improve what we spend on but...
You are brainwashed by the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex into thinking that the USA has some sort of moral imperative to be the world police, were the only duty of the government is to serve the people which it is currenly not doing and instead serving the interests of the elite and corporations.
I don't care about Ukraine/Tiwan/Vietnam, and the government should not either, it aint our problem. We can literally nuke Russia or China or DPRK if they try to invade or nuke us.
We should put troops on the border to defend it, but that would also deprive USA agribusiness of cheap labor [illegals] or noncitizens whatever the Biden speach police wants you to call them these days.
What we need to care about is income inequality, healthcare, and that most people are either overweight or obese. This is the real national security threat that noone can talk about.
Making systemic interventions into healthcare to prevent chronic illnes from overweight + obesity would give a ROI that is....insane. But we don't want to do that and instead give money to arms manufacturers to then give them to Ukraine, which is stupid.
We literally have people who are overdosing from drugs in the street, and the gov does not care about them. Instead it ostensibly cares about people on the other side of the world to boost some geopolitical agenda.
What we need to do is get rid of income taxes and git rid of the military.
"It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world": it was George Washington's Farewell Address to us. The inaugural pledge of Thomas Jefferson was no less clear: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations-entangling alliances with none."
> I don't care about Ukraine/Tiwan/Vietnam, and the government should not either, it aint our problem. We can literally nuke Russia or China or DPRK if they try to invade or nuke us.
Whilst Ukraine may not be the USAs problem they are literally decimating Russias armed forces with American table scrapes effectively.
It’s likely one of the best return on investments that the USA has ever gotten on an investment into a war they aren’t involved in.
Literally don’t care, it’s not our problem to be the world police. Where is my free healthcare/college/6mo of parental leave?
Oh wait, we gave a bunch of weapons to Ukraine so they could fight Putin when they were stupid enough to give up their nukes in the 90s with the Russian bear on their doorstep. Some weapons makers also made a lot of money, but you don’t hear democrats talking about that (I’m looking at you Maria Cantwell lol).
We’ve basically been gaslit into believing this is a moral imperative to support giving $$$ to Ukraine and many other countries. This is illogical it should be America First!
> We’ve basically been gaslit into believing this is a moral imperative to support giving $$$ to Ukraine and many other countries. This is illogical it should be America First!
Decimating Russias armed forces whilst not losing a single active duty American soldier is literally America first.
It's the first war that America has been involved in, in a long time that is easily morally justifiable and has a clear good side and bad side.
I'm one of the creators of Sleeve, a "now playing" desktop accessory for the Mac https://replay.software/sleeve. We charge a one time fee for the app, and average around $700/mo. We've been working on it entirely in our spare time for the last couple of years.
That’s pretty cool.
It’s nice to see that people are willing to pay for simple but effective utility apps on MacOS.
I feel like that type of paid app is almost completely gone from Linux and Windows.
I’ve switched to MacOS last year and have been tinkering away on a few things to improve my own workflow as well as dip my toes into native Mac programming with swift.
I would never have thought about polishing it up and trying to sell it had I developed it for Linux, but seeing stuff like this makes me want to give it a shot even if it’s just to see the whole process through.
A website I made to test other websites for valid configurations. Sort of like chrome lighthouse on steroids with the ability to automatically monitor and alert if some configuration changes.
Marketing is not my strong suit and is one of my 2023 goals to improve on. I have not noticed the competition in this space to be fierce. Maybe when I become better at marketing I will notice.
I have not found a direct competitor yet because ValidBot monitors more things and different things, that others don’t.
I built nitrohire.co, a reference checking tool for hiring managers and also did a Show HN recently [1].
The revenues are a few $100s currently though I have not been doing a lot of marketing for it yet since the beta launch resulted in a lot of feedback that I am trying to evaluate and address.
Also, if someone is interested in hiring/recruitment/professional networking space, would love to connect! Email in profile
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I did a Show HN 4 months ago[1].
The reason I started KTool was to spend less time on computer screens, and more on e-ink Kindle. I was afraid of going blind.
After 4 months improving KTool, it now becomes a tool to help you combat doom-scrolling. Instead of mindlessly scrolling the web, I deliberately send interesting articles to my Kindle.
Recently, I added newsletter & RSS support, it's 100% automated now.
My favorite source of content is Hacker News RSS[2], Stratechery[3], Indie Hacker Newsletters[4] and a few other Substack newsletters.
I can enjoy reading HN latest stories or my fav authors' latest pieces on my Kindle without spending hours browsing on my computer.
I just reached $580 MRR today (Dec 31st)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32637996
[2]: https://hnrss.github.io
[3]: https://stratechery.com
[4]: https://www.indiehackers.com/newsletter