Ask HN: Those with money-making side projects,how did you come up with the idea?

• neocities

  287 1,280 9.4 JavaScript

  Neocities.org - the web site. The entire thing. Yep, we're completely open source.

  

https://neocities.org

I was looking at my old personal web sites after working on a different startup and really felt sad about how gross social media was getting, and how money focused the web was becoming. I wanted to see creative and interesting personal websites again outside of the context of a museum.

So I coded up a prototype and, turns out I wasn't the only one interested in that.

HN readers did the first booster of funds we had that got the site started so I like to note that HN did our "seed round" and thanks for that, hope you got a good ROI.

• huba-v1

  2 121 0.0 Python

  Pairs Trading using Statistical Arbitrage

and backtesters are related and that made me interested trying out trading algos.

Learned about StatArb from Ernie Chan's books, created my own version (now open source at https://github.com/tibkiss/huba-v1)

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• Lunar

  192 4,323 8.9 Swift

  Intelligent adaptive brightness for your external monitors

How Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/) became a necessity:

New job, more stuff to do, so I got myself a 4K LG Monitor to extend my small Macbook screen.

I had set up my home office right on an interior balcony where I had lots of natural light.

That meant that the monitor brightness and contrast needed to be constantly adjusted to have the screen visible in sunlight and to not blind me when the clouds/night came.

If you ever used an external monitor, you know how cumbersome it is to adjust the brightness constantly using its physical buttons or touch controls. And macOS doesn't provide any way to change the brightness from the Macbook, unless you use something expensive like an Ultrafine or Studio Display.

So I started working on an app to automatically adjust the brightness based on the sun position in the sky.

• check-if-email-exists

  14 4,140 8.7 Rust

  Check if an email address exists without sending any email, written in Rust. Comes with a ⚙️ HTTP backend.

  

I started with open-source.

I initially created https://github.com/reacherhq/check-if-email-exists, after some years it got to ~50 stars and nice overall feedback, that's when I thought of a SaaS wrapper on top of it.

So a possible path is "idea -> open-source -> monetize". I find the first arrow to be easier to execute than a direct idea to monetization leap.

• site

  12 601 9.5 MDX

  The new frontend/backend code for https://xeiaso.net

I originally started putting ads on my blog after people started being an asshole about my articles on Hacker News, originally scoped to only readers from Hacker News. That combined with Patreon pays for all my hosting costs (even the CDN on fly.io and my random AWS infrastructure) and all the video games I play (about $280 US per month of income). It's gotten to the point where it's a tax burden, but I think it's worth it. I've never had a side project make an actual profit before and I'm excited to keep writing as a way to hone my skills and get experience with even more fun technology.

My recent post on embedding Rust into Go programs with WebAssembly (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33713717) made me about $20 of ad impressions on the day of its release, pretty impressive given how many of you people must run ad blockers!

It'd be cool to make my blog generate more income and eventually take over as my full time job, but I'm pretty happy with the fact that it's a side project that I can peck at when I want to. A lot of energy that would be spent doing various random Discord/IRC bots that go nowhere ends up being thrust into the blog instead. I also love being able to integrate various cursed things (like a Dhall script that takes my salary history data to spit out LaTeX for my resume: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/dhall/latex/resume.dhal...) and then write up how I did it and why. It makes coming up with ideas for the blog a lot easier!

I have plans to make a "Why I think WASI is cool" style post with interactive terminals that run WebAssembly programs in the browser, but I'm still trying to figure out how to graft xterm.js into my custom build setup with Deno. I have an untested but should theoretically work implementation here though in case anyone has any tips: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/src/frontend/wasiterm.t...

Filing my taxes is a huge pain now lol.

• markwhen

  35 3,337 5.4 HTML

  Make a cascading timeline from markdown-like text. Supports simple American/European date styles, ISO8601, images, links, locations, and more.

  

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