Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

I started [name redacted] to design, manufacture and sell cool, tough products that I like to use and carry daily. Average monthly income is $2K–3K. This is thanks to repeat buyers as much as first-timers. Although some months are slow with no more than 15 orders, the bigger months when a Kickstarter campaign pays out a lump sum (followed by an influx of orders from being new on the KS page) help raise the average. Sales also pick up before Christmas, and whenever I run a promotion. Occasional wholesale partnerships with online retailers (in Japan, USA) also bring in a lump sum payout. 70% orders are from the USA. For shipping I use Australia Post (terrible) and NextSmartShip China (superb).

I should mention that the first couple products I designed did not work at all. Hardly anyone placed orders and I didn't recover my investment... at a time when I didn't have money to 'waste' (I had quit my PhD in the USA and moved to Australia, I was broke so first had to get a full-time job). But of course the experience wasn't a waste, it taught me couple things I really needed to know for this journey. Things only picked up when I discovered Kickstarter. The hit product that changed things (now sold out and discontinued) was a bolt action tactical pen priced at AUD45 (USD~30) and made of reinforced polymer instead of metal. The metal ones at the time cost 3X–7X my price, were heavy, plain-looking, sharp and slippery for tactical use as a glass-breaker. Additionally, I provide the kind of customer service I wish I could get : First, I provide lifetime guarantees on all my products (there are only two products in stock now but I had a dozen; planning more in future). Second, if there's any issue — even if your cousin sneezes on your pen and you therefore want a different one — I'll ship a free pen. The rare issue has been a package getting lost in transit, I try to fix that quickly by shipping a second package and then providing a refund for the disappointing experience. I don't ask for returns and it's a hassle anyway, so nobody has ever returned a product. Only one person asked for a refund in six years which I provided in about ten seconds. Among loads of positive feedback and sometimes multi-page emails that I'm very grateful for, customers also sometimes email me to say their pens were stolen after they showed it off to curious coworkers or something — when I hear this, I send them free replacement pens because it makes me happy to flip their memory of the incident from negative to positive.

I'm making a physical product with my wife: an illustrated narrative puzzle magazine. It's similar to escape games, but it's more story driven and easy to do in short sessions and at your own pace. It started with my wife making the first magazine pretty much by herself. Since then we've made more magazines together and the business is slowly growing.

We're selling them mainly on our custom lightweight online store. It's done with minimal JS and Node as backend, Stripe as payment provider. We have a Meta pixel to help us track our advertising conversion, but we've disabled cookies, they just felt somehow dirty... It's nice to have power over these things when running your own business. As a next step for the website I'm thinking of including a templating language in the workflow, now I'm still doing edits with search and replace, sometimes missing things... but I do enjoy the simplicity.

The actual business has two main challenges: First is discoverability. It's a pretty unique product, an adventure escape game in a magazine. It doesn't sell well in physical game shops since it doesn't look like a game. We sell well in conventions where we get to explain what the product is, but we also want some weekends for ourselves! Meta ads for our online shop are working surprisingly well though.

The second and bigger challenge is shipping. Our flat is filled with boxes, and the time I spend sorting magazines, enveloping them, printing address labels, carrying them to the post office... it's really not worth my hourly rate as an engineer (Nor my wife's, but I do it since my schedule is more flexible, and I've automated some parts of the process with a string of incredibly user hostile shell scripts). And the shipping costs are downputting to many, we're quite cornered here in Finland. We are slowly gaining some distribution partners in Europe, but we should also be looking into better shipping options, like perhaps some kind of shipping warehouse exist? Our volume is slowly getting big enough so that it might be feasible. I've only done some cursory googling on this but don't exactly know what I'm even looking for, and there's only so many hours in a day.

A lot of work, small margins (ads+printing+misc takes a big slice), but around $500 profit per month. Feels absolutely fantastic to have an actual concrete business we own!

https://cluehound.com ↗

https://FreeSolitaire.win ↗ brings around $500/mo in advertising revenue. It’s a Klondike Solitaire PWA (progressive web application).

I started making it in 2016 and I’ve been slowly iterating on it over time. It has stayed minimal & lightweight, on purpose. No framework, no cruft, no obtrusive ads.

Fun fact: because it’s so lightweight, it was included in 2020 in Moya (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nu.bi.moya ↗), a popular messaging app in South Africa that is “data-free” for users (it does reverse-billing). Now ~40% of players are South Africans!

Discussed on HN from to time, for instance:

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42026575 ↗ (38 days ago, 19 points)

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41971887 ↗ (43 days ago, 25 points) “Quick side-note. Thank you for freesolitaire.win. It's such a beautiful implementation of solitaire. Works so well as a PWA, I can enjoy it even without proper internet connection, it's simple, does the basics, but does it perfectly. There's nothing to add to it, but more importantly... nothing to take out.” (!)

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34483398 ↗ (2023, 4 points)

Feedback always welcome, and happy to answer any question!

In 2023, I started selling solid wood rolling trays designed by my little sister and I on Etsy (The Stoned Craftsmen).

Almost immediately I was making $1200-2000 per month. Some months can be big months (especially around Thanksgiving/Christmas) where I'm getting $75-200 a day in sales, but some months can be dogs (July and August this year were literally $0 months - the only 2 on record - I think an algorithm changed on Etsy and we got punished or something). When the sales were growing, the work was fun, when they plateaued then dipped, it made it hard to feel energized to do the work.

The first year I spent a lot of time optimizing everything on the manufacturing side. Better tool paths, less tool changes, better speeds to not break everything, better use of materials, better use of disposables. I tried optimizing my Etsy store, but I couldn't get anything to increase sales, and moving to my own Shopify was a waste of $40/mo for 6 months because driving my own paid traffic from social media (which has rules against paraphernalia) was hard, so eventually I dropped that and stuck with Etsy and tried to wholesale to dispensaries and headshops around me, but my wholesale price is too high, and I don't want to offshore my manufacturing to get my price low enough.

I had grand plans on growing the brand. I was in talk with major brands in the space for collaboration, but our wholesale price point was too high, and 1 celebrity brand said the gap was too large, the other never got back in touch after sending them our wholesale sheet.

So I think I'm just going to have a nice side biz as a niche maker of solid wood rolling trays.

I've build BlueRetro [1] an universal Bluetooth controller adapter for nearly all pre-USB gaming console.

I guess I could update from my previous post in a similar thread. [2]

Long story short, my open source firmware is used by product makers and they make a voluntary contribution often base on how many unit they sell. It is also widely used by Chinese company on AliExpress.

I got one of those Chinese company to sponsor me a significant amount on GitHub sponsor since August 2022. I guess they forgot about it, still going ever since!

I still make 1000 USD a month from the various HW makers.

One new thing I made this year after 5 year of doing this hobby, is that I finally manufactured and sold one adapter base on this code myself for the OG Xbox console. [3]

Factoring all the expenses I made 7K for a batch of 300. I plan to do a 2nd batch next year, which should yield double that since I will only incur raw materials & shipping expenses.

It took me 48 hour of manual labor to assemble them and ship them. So it's doesn't make much sense TBH, but it's a good experience. Made me appreciate my desk job.

[1] https://github.com/darthcloud/BlueRetro ↗

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35568543 ↗

[3] https://blueretro.com ↗