Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

Re:Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd no... by DanHulton on Thursday June 16, 2022 @10:49AM (#31766706)

Well, I've spoken about this before, and on here no less, but only really in response to posts like this. I don't do any advertising or speak about mine except in interviews, since it's usually indicative of the kind of requirements they're looking for.

I created a SaaS bootstrap for Javascript called Nodewood [1]. It actually started as just a template for me, because there's a lot of setup for each new JS web project that I kept skipping to get to the "fun" stuff, like I'd just hard-coded the user as ID #1 instead of writing user registration/login code. Since then, it's grown to also have form validation, a starter UI, teams support, subscription support with Stripe, an admin panel, a CLI tool, and I'm currently adding a deploy option via Pulumi [2].

I've sold a few licenses, but also it offers me a platform to "scratch my own itches", which then become available to the people who bought a license.

[1] - Nodewood: https://nodewood.com [2] - Pulumi: https://www.pulumi.com/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd no... by CodeSgt on Thursday June 16, 2022 @10:59AM (#31766814)

I've considered purchasing an application boilerplate like nodewood, but can never bring myself to drop a couple hundred dollars on code of unknown quality using methods or conventions I may or may not like.

Do you offer any way to view the source before purchase?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd no... by conductr on Thursday June 16, 2022 @12:44PM (#31768174)

They're tackling that with the 60 day money back guarantee

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd no... by DanHulton on Thursday June 16, 2022 @02:01PM (#31769074)

Yup! I've already happily made a couple refunds because folks thought it worked a different way or didn't end up having time to build their project or whatever. I've improved the documentation since then to help give a better idea of how everything works, as well, so there are fewer surprises.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd no... by SIRHAMY on Friday June 17, 2022 @08:48AM (#31777313)

This is cool! Great to see you've had some success here!

I've built something similar for my favorite tech stack but haven't had any sales yet. I find it useful in my own projects and I've seen other similar projects make some money (like JumpStart Pro for Rails) so thinking it's something around my positioning / offerings rather than full lack of a need.

Some things I think you're doing really well:

* Great sales copy and documentation

* Great aesthetics -> adds to "trust"

* Message bot for feedback

Qs:

* Q1: Did you do any customer research to help determine what features to build?

* Q2: What did you find (if anything) is the biggest reason people choose to use boilerplate rather than rolling their own?

For those interested -> CloudSeeed - SaaS boilerplate for Sveltekit + .NET + Postgres - https://cloudseed.xyz/

[ Parent | on HN ]