Side Projects that Don't Make Bank
I was excited to see a new "Side Projects making $500+" thread crop up on Hacker News this month. Mostly, this was for selfish reasons - last years was the source of great inspiration (and data) for me to finally create a product and led to a bumper holiday sale. It also meant a whole bunch more data that I could incorporate into my product, which I promptly went ahead and did. It now features 270 products from the last 10 years. This issue also features a video of me exploring the projects.
What followed less than a week later though, made for pretty sobering reading - another thread but this time only highlighting those projects that don't make any money at all. The reasons for this vary, but one story in particular stood out about steamdb. This is a very successful site that tracks whats popular on Steam. It's been running for the last decade and gets some serious traffic (6.09M visitors /mo). The main developer has chosen not to adorn the site with advertising with some commenters estimating that they could have been making $50k+/mo from it. No reasons are given for this, but the entire thread serves as a staunch reminder that not every project is going to strike it rich.
As always, if you have any comments on them or suggestions for the future, please feel free to reply to this email and let me know.
Until next time, keep on shipping!
Ian
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