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Requestly
🚀 Most Popular developer tool for frontend developers & QAs to debug web and mobile applications. Redirect URL (Switch Environments), Modify Headers, Mock APIs, Modify Response, Insert Scripts & Record web sessions and share it with your teammates for debugging.
I started building Requestly (https://requestly.io) as a side-project back in 2014 and It took me pretty much every Saturday for 7y to hit ~$2K revenue and to get few companies paying for the product. It was slightly hard to monetize chrome extension due to lack of payments APIs support in chrome ecosystem. I actually went full time in Sep'21 and was fortunate enough to get into YC(W22). Now we are a small team based in India building Requestly.
Requestly is an open-source [1] Chrome & Firefox extension [2] that I started to help me in faster web development by capturing & modifying network requests directly in the browser without using any external tools. It eventually replaced Charles & Fiddler for many companies but now we are building a desktop version[3] too.
On a side note, Side Projects are a long-term game but the good part is you can do multiple along with your job and pick the one getting more traction. For example - I did many other side projects but continued with Requestly for 2 reasons - I was using it myself almost everyday and It was gaining organic traction.
Good luck in finding the project of your calling.
[1]: https://github.com/requestly/requestly
[2]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/requestly-redirect...
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httptoolkit
HTTP Toolkit is a beautiful & open-source tool for debugging, testing and building with HTTP(S) on Windows, Linux & Mac :tada: Open an issue here to give feedback or ask for help.
I run HTTP Toolkit (https://httptoolkit.com) which passed $2k a couple of years back. No longer a side project, as it's made enough money for me to work on it full time for a fair while now, but it certainly started that way, and it's still a one-man show (plus many wonderful open-source contributors).
I suspect that'll be a common theme in answers here though: if you have a side project making $2k a month, in most of the world that's enough for you to go full-time and try to take it further. If you can make $2k/month on something working only part-time, you can definitely make a lot more if you focus on it.
On your questions: HTTP Toolkit is a desktop app (plus a mobile app and other components for integrations) but it's an Electron app that effectively functions as a SaaS (with a freemium subscription model) that just happens to have a component that runs on your computer. And actually getting to $2k wasn't overnight at all - it took a couple of years of slow steady slog. A few inflection points that made a notable difference (releasing rewriting support & Android support particularly) but mostly it was a matter of "just keep pushing", trusting the trajectory would keep going, and steadily grinding upwards. It's great where it is now, but it's hard work - a solo business is not for the faint of heart!
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InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
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Thanks! Even more awesome features and improvements are coming soon (:
We're on Github here btw: https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes
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Soon after the others offered to give royalty as well.
I even got a Chinese company, notorious for selling "clone" of OSHW projects, to support the SW development as well via GitHub sponsor.
I've been working on it for the last four years. I entertained the idea to make and sell the hardware myself. But in the end I learned that's it's not something I'm interested to get into. What I really like is working on the software.
It naturally pivoted into a more community driven project where multiple makers are selling various variations of the HW.
I wrote a retrospective last years [2].
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ExtPay
The JavaScript library for ExtensionPay.com — payments for your browser extensions, no server needed.
I run a service that lets browser extension developers easily take payments in their extensions: https://extensionpay.com
Started making $0.15 a day and has taken a couple years to make decent monthly revenue. One cool thing is that it's also helped others make a lot of money — over $200k so far and growing!
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framelesshelper
Discontinued Project moved to: https://github.com/stdware/qwindowkit Cross-platform window customization framework for Qt Widgets and Qt Quick. Supports Windows, Linux and macOS.
Overall, I love Qt. I started studying QML 2 weeks ago to implement a Kanban view based on the underlined Markdown styled todo items in the text editor, and it's been really great so far. Property bindings, signals & slots, integration with C++, it all makes so much sense, much more than other declarative languages/frameworks (looking at you, React) imo.
Qt has been around for years, the documentation is extensive and the community is large and supportive. With QML I faced many problems, especially half-assed examples/documentation, Qt Creator's intellisense doesn't work well with QML sometimes, etc... But the tradeoff is worth it. I'm getting things done in a much faster pace with QML.
A problem that is common both in Qt and other cross-platform frameworks is that you end up writing some custom code for each operating system to make the look and feel more native. But I think it's getting better with awesome open-source projects taking care of beautiful native window decorations[1].
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> What did the first iteration of this product look like? Was it more or less similar, or substantially different from the spirit of httptoolkit today?
Technically, the first iteration was https://github.com/httptoolkit/mockttp - an HTTP integration testing library for JS. Not a desktop app at all. I'd originally built that for testing uses, but as it matured I realised that with a UI and automated setup tools it'd be useful as a complete product (but Mockttp still powers all the internals today, and you can use it directly to build your own custom intercepting proxies too).
For the first real product, the very first public 'launch' was literally a landing page with some demos of the potential UI and a signup form, just to test interest and check it wasn't a terrible idea. The results looked promising, so that was followed a few months later by a very basic but usable free version (entirely read-only, and only supporting Chrome interception) with the freemium features on top appearing a few months after that.
> How did you go from (some semblance of a product) to first sale? / acquiring first customer?
Once I announced the paid version (a blog post to my tiny set of newsletter signups, plus a little response on HN/Reddit/Product Hunt etc) I got a handful of paying customers (but certainly less than 10) within 24 hours. Nice but not a meaningful income, and from that wild peak it dropped back down to maybe one new customer per week or so afterwards, so it was quite slow going at the start.
However, those paying customers (and the mere fact of offering a paid service generally) resulted in _much_ better feedback. Rather than "this is cool" all of a sudden I had real demands for specific features, from people with concrete use cases and money in their hands. The initial paid features were just made up off the top of my head, and honestly didn't create a particularly compelling paid feature set. It's very hard to really know what people will pay for! That feedback was incredibly unbelievably useful to fix that.
From there, building out the key features people asked for over the following 6 months boosted things very significantly, and started to get things moving for real, and then you get into a virtuous circle, where more users => more feedback => better product => more users => ...
> did you spend anything on marketing/distribution?
I tested advertising at a small scale for a few months, but it didn't really work great. I think largely because it's very very freemium - 99% of users pay nothing - so the acquisition cost for a paying user doesn't make sense, and also honestly I don't have much experience with ads and I'm not sure I'm any good at writing them.
Content marketing meanwhile has worked great, keeps passively returning dividends, and cost nothing. I've tried to fill the blog (https://httptoolkit.com/blog/) exclusively with detailed & high-value original content (detailed breakdowns of a recent HTTP security vulnerability, not "top 10 HTTP libraries for Python") which shares well on social networks for an immediate burst of traffic, and then (in most cases) provides both a long-term SEO boost and constant incoming traffic on related topics that converts into users. That starts slow, but again steadily builds up over years, if you keep working at it. Content marketing + SEO are pretty much the only marketing channels I work on right now.
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WorkOS
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.
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I've never tried it. Maybe you should give it a try. If it doesn't work, please create a ticket at https://github.com/ProxymanApp/Proxyman/issues
I'm happy to support you.
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I'm building Pirsch Analytics [0], a privacy-friendly web analytics tool. I think it took the two of us ~1.5 years to get to $2000 MRR. Currently we're setting just above $4000 MRR.
It started as an experiment for my personal website and I was in the same position as you're right now. We were already working on a Notion like app to take notes, but didn't make any money and probably went into the wrong direction. As my prototype seemed to work quite well, we decided to turn it into a product.
My initial goal was to do server-side analytics without the downsides of parsing access logs, but of course we now also have a "regular" JS snippet integration.
You can learn more about our journey here [1] and on our blog [2]. Let me know if you have any questions!
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Open source GPS tracking platform - Traccar (https://www.traccar.org/). I think picking a small B2B niche is the best way to become successful. You're not going to be super rich, but you can have a good stable lifestyle business.
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https://github.com/outline/website has the source
