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2023-04-18 ◦ Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell | Hacker News

<a href="https://amazing.photos" rel=“nofollow”>https://amazing.photos</a><p>I generate amazing profile photos for users using dream booth and a custom stable diffusion model.<p>Our quality of output is the best that I’ve seen compared to competitors.<p>My secret to much higher quality: I rank images, and then only show the best images.<p>All other competitors that I’ve seen dump all the images to the user. Instead, my process means that the output images are consistently very high quality.

[2] - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26855726" rel=“nofollow”>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26855726</a>

It’s a weekly list of companies that were funded in the last 7 days with founder/ceo contact information.<p>I use a mix of scraping and manual validation to make the list and currently doing cold emails to sell. I’m not truly a developer or a marketer, so learning a lot while attempting to make this work.<p>It seems to be valuable to different types of agencies – recruiting, design, web etc.

All other job sites in this industry were old and quite hard to use and most of the time there were not a lot of New space companies.<p>So since I love Space I decided to build an alternative. To get started, I built a web scraper for more than 50 different space companies, including NASA, Space X, JPL etc. And the traffic grew month after month<p>Now it has become one of the popular job boards in this niche and starts to rank first on google for keywords like “space jobs”! <a href="https://rocketcrew.space/" rel=“nofollow”>https://rocketcrew.space/</a>

Then, after almost 3 years of work, we reached $100k ARR… Then we went from $100k to $200k ARR in less than 3 months!<p>We’ve signed up ~20,000 new users in January so far and I’m projecting $300k ARR in a month! We’re growing ARR 30-50% month over month.<p>I have a team now who are doing a ton of the hard work. I still have to spend time on every part of the business, but I’ve been trying to focus my energy on certain parts that I’m better at.<p>The hardest challenge for me throughout these years has been figuring out if I should persist and work harder on the same path, or switch to something else or pivot. I went through a pre-accelerator program and an accelerator and I had some mentors through them. Some were super helpful and gave me the confidence I needed to keep going.<p>In general, specially if you’re a solo (technical) founder like me, I recommend having mentors that have been through what you’re going through and talking to them at least once a month. It’s too easy to focus on the wrong things and waste the precious early capital and time. I know I would be 2 years ahead if I had sought mentorship early on.<p>I’d be happy to chat if you’re working on a self-service SaaS. Message me on LinkedIn or Twitter: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ardalann/" rel=“nofollow”>https://www.linkedin.com/in/ardalann/</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/ardalanme" rel=“nofollow”>https://twitter.com/ardalanme</a>

<a href="https://www.erdlab.io" rel=“nofollow”>https://www.erdlab.io</a><p>Login as guest directly at <a href="https://app.erdlab.io" rel=“nofollow”>https://app.erdlab.io</a> No registration required to test. No email confirmation needed to register either if you choose to do so.<p>Here is a 1 minute video of ERDLab in action. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VaBRPAtX08">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VaBRPAtX08</a>

Later added an option to follow social feeds (Twitter, mostly) and connected the service to a Telegram bot that brings additional $100/mo. <a href="https://t.me/Feed2Telegram_bot" rel=“nofollow”>https://t.me/Feed2Telegram_bot</a>

2). No name yet but we will probably brand it under the realmhelm product above.

I will do more as the market for such places in my city is not saturated yet.