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When Twitch Prime was originally released one of the major issues was reminding people that their token was available. I built primeminder as a tool to remind people to renew their Twitch Prime subscription via email notifications: https://github.com/gravyboat/primeminder, the plan was to eventually advertise in the body of the emails once the user base was large enough.
The second was a remote job board like weworkremotely called remote-first. This was when weworkremotely was younger and I was pretty dissatisfied with the fact they didn't even support searching for jobs, it was just a messy list that was a pain to search so I thought I could do better to solve this.
Both projects failed.
More than 6 years back, I left my job without any idea of what I'd do. I just couldn't work anymore and leaving was the priority.
After months of doing nothing much, I decided to implement a game (which I came up with in school, and had also created a basic version in college). I had an electronics background, so I did know programming basics and had to write Perl scripts at work. However, I didn't know much of Java (had a course in school) and Android. Somehow, over the course of a year, I made the app.
The main game idea I had in school was simple inspiration from tic-tac-toe. Make squares instead of lines on a 4x4 board. While writing the code, I was ever trying to make it impressive. So, I came up lots of choices - larger board sizes (up to 12x12) for both tic-tac-toe and the square ones, with blocking moves.
To monetize, I added ads. After release, I got about 0.12 dollars or something over few months. I just removed the ads instead of trying to salvage it. I had bought a domain/hosting, so financially, it was a loss.
In hindsight, biggest issue was UI/UX and not knowing how to promote. I'm still proud of the code I implemented for computer moves.
App is no longer on play store (because it stopped working on newer versions), but you can still see screenshots here: https://github.com/learnbyexample/squaretictactoe
I wanted to re-implement in Python later, started it but never finished. May be next year ;)
> So what's a side project [...] that hasn't actually earned you money?
There was a time when I dreamed that my "side project" - Scrawl-canvas[1][2] - would bring me fame and fortune, or maybe a few sponsorships, or a job ...
> Why do you think it hasn't been as successful as you thought it would be?
There's a number of very well established Javascript libraries for the HTML5 canvas element (Konva, Fabric, EaselJS, Two, Three, Pixi, Processing/P5 ... and many others) and, seriously, the world didn't want to know about yet another one.
> What would you do differently if you did it again?
Actually, nothing! The primary goal of my work when I started it was to have a project on GitHub which I could use to help leverage me into the world of professional web development. My library helped me land my first full-time gig, so in that sense it achieved its goals 100%
> How much time/money did you spend building it?
18 months full time before I managed to get a job. Since then, maybe 2-3 days a month (if that) on maintenance and feature development. The upside of having an unpopular JS library is that nobody bothers you with questions about how to do stuff.
For the past 18 months I've spent a lot more time on the project - approaching full-time in some months - rewriting it from scratch, giving it a new focus, etc. The work has helped me come to terms with all the new Javascript shiny, and the ever-evolving Web API standards
> What kind of iterations / improvements did you make to try and salvage it?
I'm not in the business of "salvage" - nowadays I work on the library partly to keep my coding skills sharp (next on the to-do list is learning Rust/WebAssembly to see if I can make the library run a bit faster), but mainly because it's creative and fun[3] and after this year we all need a bit more fun in our lives!
[1] Scrawl-canvas GitHub - https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas
[2] Scrawl-canvas home page - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/
[3] My creative coding collection on Codepen - https://codepen.io/collection/DmgxKv
Although this guide https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand was written for OSS maintainers, it could still give you ideas on how to monetize your project.
Good luck!
In 2006/2007 I built HTMLBucher, a C++ desktop application to slice PSD/image website designs made by designers to HTML.
In these years sites where made with tables, so for slicing a design I had to cut the images and fit then into borderless HTML tables.
I took 2 years to build it, and in this timeframe people started building sematic websites with CSS, and abandoning table-based designs.
I managed to sell 100 copies, for some reason 90% to India.
After some years without selling nothing, I open sourced it: https://github.com/RangelReale/htmlbutcher.
The good thing is that I REALLY learned C++ with this project, and this knowledge was the basis for my current company where I made a digitalsignage
Built a basic plug and play developer portal and API gateway at the beginning of the lockdown.
You can expose your APIs to third party developers by adding your endpoints, choosing the type of authentication and setting rate limits.
The app takes care of provisionimg API tokens and tracking requests. The documentation is auto generated from the swagger file.
GitHub: https://github.com/karthikvellanki/tunnel
Demo: https://shrouded-eyrie-25569.herokuapp.com/
That sounds almost exactly like bors-ng: https://github.com/bors-ng/bors-ng#a-merge-bot-for-github-pu...
There was also homu, which predated bors and also did more or less the exact same thing.
Does your thing have any features that differentiate it from what bors does?
I guess based on https://github.com/yarrick/iodine ? You could also run your own server.
Back in 2010 I have worked in a support department and didn't have much experience with programming. One of my tools back than was Oracle SQL Developer[0] a java application that worked a little slower than I would like to on my new MacBook Pro at that time, so I tried to make my own client for oracle database[1]. I had some sales right after publishing to Apple app store, but the application needed bug fixing and that was reflected in app reviews. Very quickly I've lost an interest working on my app and shut it down. It felt nice to be able to jump start my sales for App store so quickly but the whole experience with Apple ecosystem wasn't pleasant. Close and locked down. I didn't want to invest my time developing apps for it.
0: https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/appdev/sqldevel...
1: https://github.com/letitcrash/nora